From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 17:25:19 MDT
k_aegis@mindspring.com wrote:
>
> In some philosophical frameworks, particularly Taoism, arrogance is viewed as an element of personality that clouds understanding and creates blocks to greater understanding of oneself and others. Both rigidity and arrogance reflect the needs of the human ego. Sublimating one's ego results in a clearing away of that cloudiness and a freeing of the intellect.
Yes, this works just as well if you regard arrogance and rigidity as
false-to-fact, fairly independent, non-usefully-cognitive emotions that
cloud the intellect.
> Whether or not one accepts Taoist analysis, this also relates to your earlier statements regarding evolving away from emotions. Shifting away from philosophy into psychology, we find that arrogance represents an emotional response, listed alongside fear, envy, affection, and all the other emotions. If you have truly committed to evolving past emotional responses and frameworks, you may have to relinquish this particular folly at some point.
But we (LDC and I) both have, or at least we're trying to - that's
exactly our point. Yes, Lee Daniel Crocker is smarter than 95% of the
list, and I'm a Specialist, but that doesn't matter. What difference
does the bell curve we find ourselves in make, or where we find
ourselves in it? It matters nothing to our actual selves; the curve may
shift however it pleases, and we will remain the same. We know enough
cognitive science to define ourselves in terms of the stuff we're made
of, and not by reference to other people or our place in the social
matrix. And - I'm not sure I can speak for anyone but myself on this,
but it remains true - I've spent enough time dreaming of entities that
are far enough Beyond to make all of humanity look like a single point
in the Hamiltonian space of intelligence that all humility and arrogance
becomes irrelevant.
Subtract both arrogance and humility, and what's left is an offhand
estimate of one's percentile that could move an order of magnitude in
either direction without us caring much. Saying "I'm smarter than
everyone on this mailing list" isn't intrinsically arrogant - it may be
a bit sloppy (what do you mean by "smarter"?), but it's only arrogant if
you're careless enough to invoke the emotion of arrogance.
--
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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