2018-03-19 RRG Notes
- We can refer to morality as a force
- But what kind of force is it?
- We can think of morality like gravity, and assess it by the same inverse-square rule
- The closer you are to wretchedness, the more morally reprehensible your refusal to help becomes
- We can use this inverse-square rule to calculate how far away you must be from a beggar in order for your moral right to money to be outweighed by theirs
- Calculations performed with this rule line up remarkably well with people's actual moral actions
- When you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you will be blamed for it
- Even if you make the problem only slightly better, you'll still be blamed for not solving the problem entirely
- Examples:
- New York City decided to track those who were and were not selected for its Homebase program as experimental and control groups
- Austin: BBH Labs outfitted homeless people with wireless hotspots and paid them to move around, providing wifi coverage
- I actually agree that outfitting homeless people with wi-fi backpacks and turning them into living hotspots is problematic, insofar as it says a lot about the sort of people who would do that
- It tells me that BBH Labs doesn't see people as people, with needs and dignity, it sees them as "human resources", whose very existence is, and ought to be, predicated on their ability to provide economically valuable services
- Sure, they helped, but way in which they helped tells me quite a lot about what sort of people they are - they are the sort of people who would say that homeless people should starve if they're not willing to sacrifice their dignity
- These people probably believe in Maslow's hierarchy and thing that these homeless people don't care about dignity and self actualization because their basic needs are not being met
- And of course, rationalists love these people because honestly, rationalists are utilitarians at heart, and so they're perfectly okay using "maffs" to make hard tradeoffs without willing to consider what it says about their level of consideration for their fellowman
- Uber: surge pricing gets more drivers onto the road, which then assures more people get rides
- I've had this discussion with so many people over the problem of price-gouging during hurricanes, etc.
- The core problem here is that it's making this equivalence between "ability to pay" and "deserving of goods and services", which is just the is-ought fallacy
- Rich people can afford surge pricing, so they, in a sense, deserve Uber rides, whereas the poor have to take the bus
- Reducing the pay gap (e.g. paying women 80% of the salary of men) still saves money, and makes women better off, even if they're not 100% as well off as men
- This such an obvious solution to discrimination that the fact that discrimination persists in the face of this arbitrage pressure means that there's something else going on
- Also, this assumes that surge pricing actually does get more water on the road, and it's not consumed as a windfall profit by existing drivers
- PETA offered to pay poor Detroit residents' unpaid water bills, if they'd give up eating meat
- See above, re: BBH labs and human hotspots - this tells me that PETA are the sort of people who prioritize ideology over basic human needs; i.e. assholes
- They could have just donated the money to pay for the water bills and launched an PR blitz over it, but no, they had to go and restrict one basic need (food) for another (water)
- People will routinely spend massive amounts of money on themselves when said money could have been given to less fortunate people
- The analogy used here is Peter Singer's drowning-child analogy, which others have already writte counterarguments to
- If you see a single drowning child, once, then yes, you are morally obligated to stop and help
- But if you see a child drowning in the same spot, in the same manner every day on your way to work, then at some point it's no longer on you to save the child
- We should live in a world where noticing and partially alleviating a problem doesn't make you responsible for the entire problem
- The problem with this article is that very few of these examples are problematic because the parties were responsible for partially alleviating the problem
- The problem is that they partially alleviated the problem (arguably) in a manner that further degraded the already low level of human dignity of the people they were trying to help
- If Peter Thiel organized a fighting tournament, where he gathered up the assorted homeless off San Francisco's streets, paid them 10 grand each to participate, took care of their injuries, and had a million dollar grand prize, would that arguably make people better off? Yes. Would we want to encourage that? Of course not!
- Most "Buddhist" ethics is advertising
- "Buddhist" is in quotes because the modern leftist conception of Buddhist ethics bears no relation to actual historical Buddhist ethics
- Consensus Buddhist ethics is repackaged leftish morality
- So what is "Buddhist ethics" for?
- Buddhist ethics is about signalling that you're a good/ethical/moral person
- It's like calling yourself a "god-fearing Christian" in parts of the South
- Buddhist ethics used be a costly signal, but now it's lost much of its signalling value
- Costly Signalling
- Religion is a costly signal that you're an ethical person
- Aside: Glaceau SmartWater
- The point of SmartWater isn't that it's better or more pure than any other water
- The point of it is that it costs more
- The fact that you can afford to drink SmartWater signals something about you
- The Dalai Lama is an obviously ethical person, and endorses Buddhism, so Buddhism must be an ethical religion
- How do you know that the Dalai Lama is an obviously ethical person
- What has he done that's especially saintly
- How about holding his people together, and advocating for a nonviolent solution to the invasion of Tibet? Any other leader would have started an insurgency, or called for armed intervention, but the Dalai Lama's commitment to nonviolence was so strong that he refused offers by India to intervene against China on his behalf, and continues to call for good-faith negotiations with a regime that has done nothing but treat him poorly
- Seriously, I have to believe that Chalmers is being deliberately obtuse here. He knows exactly why the Dalai Lama is considered ethical
- By quoting the Dalai Lama, or, even better, saying something and attributing it to the Dalai Lama, you can make your statements carry more ethical weight
- Signalling tribal commitment
- The Baby Boomers split America into monist and dualist tribes
- Each of these tribes required its members to believe a wide variety of beliefs and agree on a wide range of preferences
- However, actually checking all those beliefs and preferences is almost impossible
- Instead each tribe adopted "badges" - easily verified signals that could stand in for belief sets
- Badges are only effective if they're policed
- Much of what happens at both monist and dualist cultural events is "badge-checking" - if you sport the badge, but then admit to having some of the beliefs or preferences of the other tribe, you are deemed an impostor and thrown out
- I think Chalmers is massively overstating how much people actually care about their tribal identity
- Honestly, and maybe this is because I've grown up in the Midwest, I've found that people don't actually care that much - you'll get some good natured ribbing, but unless you deliberately take offense at statements, it's pretty easy to live and let-live
- Signalling moral piety
- One of the main reasons Christians go to church is to signal their moralness
- Really? The fact that the church is the main community institution in small-town America has nothing to do with it?
- The leftist-hippie-monist tribe rejected Christianity, so they needed a replacement for the church to signal moralness
- Until about the '80s, consensus American Buddhism had little to say about ethics
- Ethics were added on to give consensus American Buddhism a moral signalling function
- Nobody buys into Buddhism for its actual ethical content
- They adopt it because it's a signal for a certain value system
- "Buddhist ethics" provides an extra layer of justification for mainstream secular ethics
- Signalling class
- The American class system
- Taboo topic
- Social class is not economic class
- While the two are correlated, there are "working class" people making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year
- There are also "upper-middle-class" people making 30,000 a year
- While I've personally witnessed the existence of the former, I have my doubts about the existence of the latter. A teacher making $30,000 a year won't get invited to an upper-middle-class party unless they're married to someone making a lot more
- The middle class is a series of progressively smaller social clubs
- Lower middle class: need to have the right general attitudes, chief among them the desire to be respectable
- Middle-middle class: need to have the correct set of leftish or rightish opinions
- Okay, but then aren't the working class people making more six-figure incomes actually middle-middle class then? You'll be hard-pressed to find a plumber, electrician or roughneck who has an "incorrect" opinion, from the perspective of the right-ish opinion set
- Upper-middle class: need to be able to figure out the correct opinion on a new topic - this used to be what a liberal arts education was for
- So what would be the conservative counterpart to this? As far as I can tell, the humanities haven't been a good home for political conservatives for almost a century, so it's unlikely that conservative Baby Boomers would have received their upper-middle class cultural education in a liberal arts course
- The upper-middle class is selective, and selects for people who would make valuable allies
- Everyone wants to move up, so people devise ways of signalling these qualities even if they don't have them
- This leads to an arms race
- As tests become more easily gamed, they move down and become barrier preventing the lower-middle class from joining the middle-middle class
- Eventually all middle-class people figure out the tests, and they lose their value entirely
- Many upper-middle-class signals are derived from Protestant Christianity
- The role of Buddhist ethics is to allow people from outside this background to signal that they too are upper class
- Prior to 1980, being a Buddhist carried a social costs, and required one to invest effort to find texts and teachers
- However, as Buddhism has become more widespread, the cost to becoming a Buddhist has declined, now making Buddhism more of a middle-middle class virtue rather than an upper-middle class virtue
- Signalling openness
- Openness to new experience is considered a virtue
- While Buddhism is a low-openness religion in Asia, its unfamiliarity in the West makes it a signal of high openness
- However as Buddhism gained wider adoption in the US, its alien elements and complex concepts were replaced with simpler Western replacements
- This rendered Buddhism emotionally safe, but a poor signal of openness
- Buddhism: badge of blandness
- At one point Buddhism was a bold choice and was a signal that you could make and defend unconventional choices - an upper-middle class virtue
- But today, Buddhism is an utterly bland religion, and, as such is a better signal of middle-middle class conformity
- Signalling agreeableness
- When dealing with a non-hostile agent, agreeableness is a good thing
- Consensus Buddhism is a strong signal of agreeableness
- Moreover, consensus Buddhist practices are a good way of developing agreeableness
- Buddhism is for losers
- At this point, saying that you're a Buddhist signals that you're a loser
- Signals that you're ineffectual as a person
- We can do better
- Let's have more than one kind of Buddhism, and free Buddhism from its role as a signal of class
- More generally, let's have signals that generate positive externalities, rather than negative ones
- Some of what Chalmers says is good… but there's just so much pretentiousness around it that it's hard to swallow
- There's also the fact that he sees sees everything in the world through his prism of "two competing countercultures", which he broadly identifies as the religious right and the hippie left
- If you accept his conceit, then much of everything else he says follows logically - the problem is that he doesn't back up his conceit with evidence
- Moreover, how common is Buddhism, really? Even in liberal enclaves, it doesn't seem like Buddhism is especially common
- It really feels like Chalmers is generalizing from extremely narrow experiences and stereotypes to a diagnosis of what is wrong with American society
- Why don't more attempts at persuasion ask you to care less about a particular issue?
- People only have a finite amount of time, money and energy anyway - asking them to care more about something is implicitly asking them to care less about everything else
- Asking people to care less allows you to be more deliberate about the tradeoffs you're asking people to make
- Being constantly asked to care more is exhausting
- Why don't we see more calls to care less
- Brains can create deliberate connections easily, but find it difficult to erase connections deliberately
- It's much easier to learn a skill than it is to forget it
- It's not obvious how one should care less
- This might be more cultural
- You can care less about something by putting fewer resources into it… and then deliberately not feeling guilty about that
- It threatens identity
- People tend to make the things they care about part of their identity, so being asked to care less makes it seem like you're being asked to give up part of your identity
- It's less memetically fit - messages to care more are more viral and spread better than messages about caring less
- It's dangerous - maybe by telling people to care less about a particular thing, you'll cause them to care less in general
- We already do tell people to care less - Religions, such as Buddhism, advocate reliquishing earthly cares
