Let's talk about optimality theory. And also ethics.

[maradydd]

Lately I have much been enjoying the blog Slate Star Codex, which treads in sparkling prose much of the same rationality, ethics, cognitive science, &c ground that Less Wrong has gotten bad about stomping into dittoheady mud lately. By which I mean it's actually good and stuff. One recent post sparked off some recollections from, of all things,

Comments

[rjgrady]

I'm skeptical of Haidt's premises. While I think it's true that our morality stems in part from our evolutionary heritage, I think part of it directly counters it. I think much of our morality actually derives from the capacity for rationality. It is not clear rationality is a clear evolutionary advantage. However, if something appears to be rational, it's difficult to escape the consequences implied by that idea.

[moof]

I suspect part of it comes back to the old canard of the comparison of who's more "good": a person who thinks only good thoughts, or someone who thinks tons of evil thoughts but only acts on the "good" ones.

Personally, I find "evil" to usually be annoying, distasteful, inefficient overall, and banal. Regardless - without perfect knowledge of past, present, and future (not to mention infinite processing capacity) it's impossible to get everything right all the time. Choosing what metrics and scales to use are also a fun topic in and of themselves. But hey, I'm a sperg - my impetuses (impetices?) are notably different from the general populace anyway.

[maradydd]

Low-content reply right now because I am tired and will get to real content after I have slept: oh hey, other people use the label "sperg" for themselves too, neat! I have become pretty fond of it in the last year. Someone called thequux a sperglord and I was like "that is awesome, henceforth let's be the Sperglords of Brussels."

[whswhs]

I think that impetus, like apparatus, may belong to that peculiar Latin declension whose nominative singular and plural are the same.

[moof]

According to wiktionary, m fourth declension, and nom plural is impetūs.

[morbid_curious]

While I don't work in security and I've never been in that kind of specialist role, some people's risk-oblviousness scares me. It definitely helps to be able to frame vulnerabilities - in code or elsewhere - in the context of your company's liability, so that management types can understand the business priority in fixing them. Thankfully fellow software engineers are more likely to go "good catch!" and work to fix it, but not all.

I spend one night a week rehearsing socially negative scenarios with some of my friends, where we pretend to be a bunch of criminals in a near-future setting who get paid to do a variety of highly illegal and often morally questionable things. But then, that's a tabletop Shadowrun game for you. That experience has been immensely useful for a number of socially positive, real-life projects I've worked on that required unconventional decision making and contingency planning, though.

[maradydd]

I have found myself missing gaming more and more lately. Not sure what to do about that, alas. Shadowrun was a favourite back in high school. I hear there have been a couple new additions since then.

Vampire LARP was not only a crash course in unconventional decision-making and contingency planning, it was also an experimental platform for learning how to interact with people. That's probably a post in and of itself.

[morbid_curious]

Vampire the Masquerade taught me a lot about acting and character-based improvisation. (And, incidentally, about not letting in-game and IRL tensions bleed into each other like some people seemed to.) LARPing in general taught me a lot about scenario design. I'm told from higher up the food chain that trying to explain a LARP to Red Cross Emergency Response bosses was Interesting, but I gather that the responders got something good out of training with us. They now have a pool of makeup- and prosthetic-friendly volunteers they can call on for future exercises, too.

[jsl32]

The Mormons are a useful topic for analysis here.

[maradydd]

Mind expanding on that? I do not know a whole lot about Mormons apart from having dated one in high school.

[jsl32]

wow, i totally forgot i commented on this!

Mormons culturally are really good at diverting, redirecting and subverting a lot of antisocial and power-seeking impulses in ways that both produce and maintain multigenerationally a functional community structure.

However, part of that is that it's embedded within the culture to be good appearance seeking. It is even explicitly stated by individual Mormons. They are a culture that said 'It's fine to be open about the fact that we just want to look good, we can worry about whether it's actually good some other time' and set up their institutions accordingly.

This is not working out over the long-term, but it held up for multiple generations and several revisions of the religion tangled up with the culture.

[maradydd]

This may be a high-latency conversation, but I'd like to dig into this a little more.

It's clearly counterfactual to say that people aren't in some way good- or at least neutral-appearance-seeking; certainly no one wants to be hated, for instance. (Which is part of why it can be awfully difficult to be Mormon if you're, for instance, trans; for a friend of mine who grew up Mormon in Utah and is now in the Bay Area, it certainly was.) This means that it's foolish to try to build a culture that doesn't acknowledge that good-appearance-seeking impulses exist. It's interesting to hear that Mormonism confronts that directly; I'm going to have to look into this, especially if people are writing in detail about the ways in which it's not working out over the long term. How did it break down?

[kirinqueen]

That is my understanding of the latest theory in phonology as well--but I haven't studied/used it in some years, either.