From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 10:51:23 MDT
Dan Fabulich wrote:
>
> However, this rebuttal misses the point. If Crocker's Rules are as good
> as Crocker and Yudkowsky argue, then EVERYBODY ought to be following
> Crocker's Rules.
This would be a good thing, but I doesn't mean I see an overriding moral
obligation to follow them.
> What would this mean, practically speaking? That if I
> get offended by an impolite speaker, this my problem, and not the
> speaker's.
No; that's already implied just by a personal acceptance of Crocker's Rules.
> Yudkowsky has further argued that not everyone has the mental discipline
> to follow Crocker's Rules. If so, it would then seem that anybody *not*
> following Crocker's Rules is either lacking in discipline or mental
> prowess/capacity; anybody short on mental discipline is clearly either
> lazy or stupid. (Some causal explanation for exactly WHY they're lazy or
> stupid won't help here.)
Okay, major league non-sequitur here. If I regarded everyone who hasn't
mastered every single mental discipline I have as being "either lazy or
stupid", it would scythe out the entire list, and I would guess that at
least 20% of the list would scythe out me, or 95% if you count my
Specialist blindspots as lack of discipline. In fact, I would scythe
myself out, because there are mental disciplines I can perceive but am
still struggling to master - non-use of the self-symbol or the formation
of limited personalities, for example.
I am not using "mental discipline" in the sense of, say, willpower; I am
using it in the sense of a discipline, just like bridge-building or
mathematics, which happens to have internal subject matter.
> Even if you don't believe this argument, it's hard to imagine an argument
> for Crocker's Rules which wouldn't apply universally, and so when dealing
> with somebody who doesn't follow Crocker's Rules, a follower must accept
> the claim that the non-follower is doing something wrong, whether morally,
> ethically, practically, etc. Thus, on some level or other, non-followers
> are acting incorrectly, if Crocker's Rules are actually a good idea.
Once again, non sequitur. By this argument, you're doing something
wrong if you're not a lightning calculator or an Olympic swimmer. Every
program that isn't completely and absolutely debugged is a cauldron of iniquity.
All of us are doing something wrong, simply because we're not
superintelligences. And this is in fact correct. But not following
Crocker's Rules isn't a significant, or morally despicable, wrong.
There isn't some action that they can and should be taking, but aren't;
just some facility that every sentient creature should ideally possess
starting from birth, but which in this mortal world requires great
effort to develop.
> With that in mind, we now might ask: What are you being polite for?
To decrease social friction; to not crash the other protocol.
> "So that the lazy/stupid people don't get upset at you," it might be
> argued. That makes practical sense, but only on the assumption that most
> people are lazy/stupid. Being polite to a person whom you regard as your
> inferior is much much harder than being polite to a person whom you regard
> as your peer.
Sez you. Three non-sequiturs; first, anyone declaring Crocker's Rules
can probably override the built-in politeness selectors as easily as
Miss Manners is polite to people she quietly regards as idiots; second,
not declaring Crocker's Rules, despite the fact that it's not
best-of-all-possible-worlds good, doesn't contain the conditions that
would trigger off the complex emotional adaptation that leads to
regarding someone as "inferior"; third, if it did, anyone who declares
Crocker's Rules should be good enough to repress, suppress, counter,
disable, or unbind the emotion.
> I'd argue that the following claim: "following Crocker's Rules is better
> than not following Crocker's Rules," leads us to conclude that most other
> people are not our intellectual/moral peers, which, on a practical level,
> annihilates the possibility of civility between persons.
Again, why doesn't this work for "Being an Extropian is better than not
being an Extropian"? Or "Knowing how to program a computer is better
than not knowing how to program a computer?" Or "Correctly multiplying
two thirty-digit numbers is better than not correctly multiplying two
thirty-digit numbers?" Or "Scoring a 1410 on the SAT is better than
scoring a 1400 on the SAT?"
> Nonetheless, I think I have shown how Crocker's Rules ARE opposed to
> politeness,
Of course they are - just not violently, coercively,
do-it-our-way-whether-you-like-it-or-not opposed.
> and how we cannot realistically both have our cake and eat it, too.
Is being generous in what you accept and strict about what you emit -
the very definition of politeness - also "having your cake and eating it too"?
I mean, let's think about it - your proposition is that greater
tolerance necessarily implies viewing the rest of the world as inferior,
and that reacting angrily to what others say is the only way to view
them as peers.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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