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Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

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Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#141

Post by derefr »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #19
hueving wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who criticize tone police are technically right that the content of an argument is what should matter, but that smacks of ignorance of how humans engage in conversation. If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", there is approximately a 0% chance I'm going to take them seriously and I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care…

How many pro-choice people do you think are persuaded by Symmetrically, how many pro-life people do you think are persuaded by the people screaming "woman-hater/sexist/misogynist" outside of Planned Parenthood? If you can't explain your argument in a calm, rational manner, You overestimate the efficacy of explaining in a calm, rational manner. As a university teacher with > 10 years experience, I can tell you with ex…

> and year in, year out, a large number of students ignore my calm, well-argued and perfectly rational advice

I would point out that they probably remember your advice, it's just not "connected" to the part of their brains that does the driving under stress of deadline.

I find you can make a lot of true predictions by extending the "system 1/system 2 thinking" model into a complete disjunction: that everyone is, internally, one person who listens and talks and learns social mores; and then another person who acts and reacts and learns by doing; and that—other than sharing a body—these two internal people have nothing in common and you should assume that any lesson that's been imparted "through" one of them has absolutely not been imparted to the other.

I.e., if you tell someone something, they'll be able to tell you what you said, and it will affect what side of a debate they engage in in the future, but it won't affect their behavior in the slightest, except insofar as they verbally precommit to doing something in a way that then forces doing-them to do it.

And, if you get someone to, say, play a video-game simulation of some complex system that imparts a particular lesson about that system into them, then they'll still verbally argue on the "wrong" side regarding how that system works, until someone essentially forces them to sit down and have their "social mind" go over the experience their "doing mind" just had, explaining it to themselves to convince themselves. (Some people probably do this "narrating themselves observing their doing mind" by default to some degree; these people are probably measurably better at some meta-skill like learning or teaching.)

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#142

Post by MaysonL »

hueving wrote: post #10
chrisseaton wrote: post #8

This is very interesting! But I've seen a lot of push back against this kind of thinking in some political groups. For example saying that you should follow norms of niceness when promoting a cause - people call that tone policing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing You could say you should criticise the people who are tone policing rather than the people who are worked up about a cause that personally effec…

People who criticize tone police are technically right that the content of an argument is what should matter, but that smacks of ignorance of how humans engage in conversation. If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", there is approximately a 0% chance I'm going to take them seriously and I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care…

People outside of Planned Parenthood screaming "murderer" aren't try to convince, they're trying to intimidate.

Howard Dean's scream wasn't. The scream was no louder than the audience: it was merely isolated by a directional mike.

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#143

Post by solveit »

zero_shift wrote: post #140
kineticdial wrote: post #7

I feel weirdly (perhaps irrationally) about the effective altruism people including 80,000 hours. I just can't shake the cult-y vibes they give off. Am I alone in this?

My bigger issue is the slight whiff of... dare I say it? Privilege? Look, don’t get me wrong. Publicising good causes and helping people direct their charity can do no harm. I won’t criticise that. But instructing your readers to do economics PhDs, or join an investment bank, or take an internship at a thinktank, is assuming they enjoy some enormous opportunities. Most people cannot do those things, not even if they…

They are aware of this, but focus on that small portion of the population anyway because the people that can go work at an investment bank provide a ridiculously disproportionate bang for their buck.

Tangentially, I think you're underestimating what a typical Oxford grad can do. Most of them absolutely can do one of those things, especially if they decide to before they graduate.

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#144

Post by solveit »

matt4077 wrote: post #65
kineticdial wrote: post #7

I feel weirdly (perhaps irrationally) about the effective altruism people including 80,000 hours. I just can't shake the cult-y vibes they give off. Am I alone in this?

I'm pretty sure that it's the movement is a net positive for the world, because it attracts a different crowd (younger, STEM, etc) than altruistic endeavours traditionally do. The basic drive to empirically evaluate one's actions is also sound, had been simmering in the "traditional" community for quite a while, and would have become more relevant in some way or another (eventually). If you look the output of GiveWel…

> And there is another group that wants to focus on animal suffering in the wild. Tadpoles, this group says, die in the billions each year, and the difference of their nervous system from humans' is just a question of degree.

I don't want to redirect all of human effort to reducing animal suffering, but I would sleep a lot better if I were sure these people are wrong.

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#145

Post by zero_shift »

solveit wrote: post #143
zero_shift wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bigger issue is the slight whiff of... dare I say it? Privilege? Look, don’t get me wrong. Publicising good causes and helping people direct their charity can do no harm. I won’t criticise that. But instructing your readers to do economics PhDs, or join an investment bank, or take an internship at a thinktank, is assuming they enjoy some enormous opportunities. Most people cannot do those things, not even if they…

They are aware of this, but focus on that small portion of the population anyway because the people that can go work at an investment bank provide a ridiculously disproportionate bang for their buck. Tangentially, I think you're underestimating what a typical Oxford grad can do. Most of them absolutely can do one of those things, especially if they decide to before they graduate.

I went to Cambridge. No way could I have afforded an unpaid internship at a thinktank after I graduated.

Possibly I could do it now, but even if I obtained that golden policy job - how would I survive in London? Housing here is more expensive than even San Francisco.

My degree has opened many opportunities - sure. But I can't pay my rent with it.

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#146

Post by StavrosK »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #134
mcguire wrote: post #114

There are a couple of other issues that could be added to this list. Credit One of the sayings that I know to be (mostly) absolutely true is, "there is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." I have a (much more successful, and respected) friend to whom it is something of a mantra. On the other side, seeking credit has a lot of pitfalls. The obvious one is taking credit for someone…

I agree, humans are probably the single hardest among multicellular life to entirely wipe out. Not because we're hardier than cockroaches, or hibernate when it's cold. There's just so many of us, and every last one of us would be hellbent on survival. At this point in our technology and understanding, I bet there could be survivors of extinction level events equaling the K-T extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. P…

> survivors of any event can jerry-rig surviving wind turbines, nuclear power, geothermal, or hydro

Excepting nuclear, where do you think the energy for those things comes from?

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#147

Post by Viliam1234 »

hueving wrote: post #10
chrisseaton wrote: post #8

This is very interesting! But I've seen a lot of push back against this kind of thinking in some political groups. For example saying that you should follow norms of niceness when promoting a cause - people call that tone policing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing You could say you should criticise the people who are tone policing rather than the people who are worked up about a cause that personally effec…

People who criticize tone police are technically right that the content of an argument is what should matter, but that smacks of ignorance of how humans engage in conversation. If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", there is approximately a 0% chance I'm going to take them seriously and I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care…

> If someone is screaming at me and ending every sentence with, "you fucking moron!", ... I'm going to assume emotional outbursts will be sent in return to any responses I care to make.

This is a good reason not just to avoiding debates with screaming people, but also to ignore them.

People are sometimes wrong. Happens to the best of us. Other people give us feedback. The screaming person who responds to feedback by more screaming... is more likely to be wrong.

In theory, one could first spend a lot of time debating patiently and politely with as many people as possible, weigh the arguments, and determine what is most likely to be true. And then, start screaming at people, to spread the message quickly to many people. But in practice, people who are screaming now were most likely also screaming yesterday.

Re: Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them

#149

Post by taeric »

taeric wrote: post #110
lbriner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority are not wrong by definition but the fallacy is that you cannot assume that the majority are right. As far as knowledge is concerned, was Newton right for a period until we learned about quantum mechanics or was he always wrong? Was he always right but only within limits that he couldn't know in advance? Apologies for the philosophy but this is the real complexity of an article about avoiding harm by doin…

I don't know if I would agree that the majority can't be wrong by definition. I just find it an odd and strong claim. I suspect I misunderstand the point. What is the claim "the majority are wrong/don't have the solution" meant to support? If I just emphasized on the "wrong" instead of "don't have the solution", apologies. For Newton, he was always wrong based on his equations abilities to predict everything. He was…

Not sure anyone is still following here. For a fun example of an entire field being wrong, look into the history of the causes of ulcers.
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