This is something I've remarked upon before, with respect to "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "the suicide hijackers were cowards" (statements that are sheerly silly).
I think the terrorists et al. probably do hate our freedom -- e.g., our freedom to watch DVDs of people having sex. This fact may not be particularly useful in keeping from being attacked again (I for one am not willing to give up the right to watch DVDs of people having sex).
On the other hand, I agree that "the suicide hijackers were cowards" is sheerly silly, and I think it's pretty stupid that Bill Maher lost his job for saying the same.
Not capitalism - neo-colonialims, or American imperialism, or Corporate Welfare & the Military Industrial complex or whatever you want to call it. During the Cold War, part of the CIA's containment strategy invovled the Americans toppling any government which didn't do what they said - democractically elected or otherwise - and replacing them with leaders of convenience.
This is what put Iraq into Saddam's hands; this is how Iran got turned into a Theocracy.
They're angry at the US for subversively undermining their governments, for their own political ends, or to provide contracts to Haliburton - you notice that right now it's mainly Western Companies profitting off of the Iraq oil? Usually the same companies that are profitting off of the war itself. However, these legitimate grievances against the US are hard to explain to somebody without an understanding of history. There's a general sense that the US is to blame - and though their actions might have been justified by the Soviet Threat, it doesn't change the fact that they were the agents - but most of them are too damned stupid to understand what this means.
So they settle for "The US is powerful, and non-muslim - ALLAH ACKBAR, DERP DERP!"
the terrorists et al. probably do hate our freedom -- e.g., our freedom to watch DVDs of people having sex. This fact may not be particularly useful in keeping from being attacked again (I for one am not willing to give up the right to watch DVDs of people having sex).
A witchhunt tells us a lot about those doing it but little about those who are the target of it.
Eliezer: I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ultimate end of intelligence - I'm not sure it's the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions.Perhaps under optimal conditions you're able to compensate for the lack of buying power of n dollars, where this is the amount that can buy everything that's for sale, i.e., everything that everyone else combined can generate.
Good post. I don't think that #18,
"Create value so that you can capture it, but don't feel obligated to capture all the value you create. If you capture all your value, your transactions benefit only yourself, and others have no motive to participate. If you have negotiating leverage, use it to drive a good bargain for yourself, but not a hateful one - someday you'll be on the other side of the table."
is a real capitalist value. I think that the capitalist value is to strike the best deal that you can, no matter what. In game theoretic terms, t...
What Aaron Brown said.
Anyone who wants to make blasphemy a crime is probably guilty of "hating freedom".
The post wasn't narrow enough to make a point. Elizier stated: "I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ultimate end of intelligence - I'm not sure it's the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions." Are we talking pre or post a nanotech OS running the solar system? In the latter case most of these "values" would become irrelevant. However given the world we have today, I can confidently say that capitalism is pretty awesome. There is massive evidence to back up my claim.
It smells like Eliezer is tr...
"Maximise profits by competing on the margins of price and quality" is a useful moral rule just like "keep promises". We can deviate from these rules when we have excellent knowledge of local conditions, but the less local knowledge we have of the consequences of our actions, the more closely we should follow them.
"It smells like Eliezer is trying to refute a strawman."
PK: Elizier isn't really refuting anything, he's just saying that personally he's not sure this is the best system, without going into too much detail as to why he thinks that.
PK, I thought Eliezer's post made at least one point pretty well: If you disagree with some position held by otherwise credible people, try to understand it from their perspective by presenting it as favourably as you can. His worked example of capitalism might be helpful to people who are otherwise inclined to think that unrestrained capitalism is obviously bad and that those who advocate it do so only because they want to advance their own interests at the expense of others less fortunate.
I agree that he's probably violating his own advice when he implies that capitalism amounts to treating "finance as ... an ultimate end".
Capitalism IS a win-win, at least it would be in the absence of coercion (And coercion is not part of capitalism). And government is the main source of coercion in the modern world. I am of two minds as to whether eliminating government would reduce coercion overall - that is, I do not find "Machinery of Freedom" really convincing.
One you missed: free trade is the only known means of creating a positive-sum game with no need for mutual benevolence. This means it can act as a connective between people with wildly diverging values, providing neither is in a position to wield superior force. Capitalism and trade is a universal meta-cultural microkernel. Pebble-sorters and humans could trade.
It may not sound like much of a quibble, but there really is a difference between regarding capitalism as a virtue-in-itself powerful enough that we ought to be doing it - that any future in which, say, money fades and people go back to ad-hoc barter, is therefore sad regardless of whether standards of living have otherwise gone up or down - versus regarding capitalism as a powerful tool suited to current conditions.
Think of the virtues of rationality. I'd be therefore sad if no one ever had cause to resort to them again, post-nanotech, regardless of whether standards of living had gone up or down.
This firmly identifies me as a member of the Bayesian Conspiracy rather than the Capitalist Conspiracy.
Post-nanotech, the nanotech practices the virtues of rationality or it fails to achieve its goals.
Sarkozy's quote should be placed in a context of his typical statements. What he's probably referring to are high CEO wages, lack of "socially responsible" practices, etc. Sure, taken by itself, it's a great quote, but it's most emphatically NOT directed to evil capitalists mingling with the state, which he encourages.
I have yet to see a satisfactory definition of fun applicable to minds (or agents or optimization processes) very different from mammalian (or vertebrate) minds. And I suspect I will not be seeing one any time soon.
"..people refusing to contemplate the real values of the opposition as the opposition sees it..."
Popular news and punditry seems saturated with this refusal, to the point that I desire to characterize the media's real values in a wholly unbecoming and unfairly generalized manner. It would be a nice evolution of society if we introduced a 'rationality' class into the public school curriculum. Or perhaps developed a 'Bayes Scouts' with merit badges.
haha - damn - you beat me to it: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-March/042369.html
"""Make things that people want, or do things that people want done, in exchange for money or other valuta. This is a great and noble and worthwhile endeavor, and anyone who looks down on it reveals their own shallowness."""
Yes it is a noble and worthwhile endeavour. Unfortunately (as I noted some time ago) there are in general two ways that firms can make profits: by making something people want, or by rent-seeking. The former is usually beneficial: it increases the sum of human happiness and welfare. The latter is usually h...
Ian C: Where on earth do you live that people keep what they earn and there's no public charity?
Richard: Humans are pretty cool, I'm down.
Ok, maybe my last post was a bit harsh(it's tricky to express oneself over the Internet). I will elaborate further. Eliezer said:
"So here are the traditional values of capitalism as seen by those who regard it as noble - the sort of Way spoken of by Paul Graham, or P. T. Barnum (who did not say "There's a sucker born every minute"), or Warren Buffett:"
I don't know much about the latter two but I have read Paul Graham extensively. It sounds like a strawman to me when Eliezer says:
"I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ul...
Thanks for the thoughtful post Eliezer.
A recent economic novel on this topic is The Price of Everything by Russell Roberts. It's about how our economy is a self-organizing system, which works pretty well without a single central authority. And, it's an enjoyable read.
A few more sources for the economic thought behind this are:
Hayek, Friedrich A., "The Use of Knowledge in Society" available online. "What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?..." I suspect readers of this blog would find this ...
If you can summon up just one moment of empathy with those awful, awful people, you will realize that Osama bin Laden would be far more likely to say, "I hate pornography" than "I hate freedom". Which makes him not much different from a Western politician, in that sense.
Eliezer: I simply KNOW numerous people for whom the phrases "Real value systems - are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users," and "They will sound noble at least to the people who believe them." are simply untrue. In such people, there is often a DIRECT conflict between "generating warm fuzzies" and "not being mocked", as they consider the generation of warm fuzzies to be sufficient grounds for mockery. Do you want me to call them and get THEM to post on the comments thread?
Seriously Eliezer. You have NO IDEA how the main bulk of the finance industry thinks about life. I have been there, you have not, and you are mistaken about this. Hitler and Stalin did get warm fuzzies from their ideology, so that creates a lot of confusion. One CAN be a bastard AND like warm fuzzies. That doesn't mean that every bastard does so. It's pretty clear that the Marquis de Sade was NOT after warm fuzzies. Much more normal, neither is Genghis Khan or the typical "most popular girl in school".
Not all people are constructed so that the word-concept 'noble' is linked to notions of desirability and value. Such people will reject the idea that their chosen ideological positions appear 'noble' to them, or were selected because of their properties of 'nobility'.
'Virtuous' would be a better choice of words, but it renders the statement near-tautological. As it should, because the concept that ought to be expressed here is tautological: any consistent system of values will, upon evaluating itself, perceive itself to be the perfect manifestation of virtue.
Bin Ladin would be FAR more likely to say "people who use pornography should be killed and then tortured forever" than a Western politician, even if the latter endorses an ideology that says the same thing.
People who write about their ideologies are a VERY select sub-set of those who associate with those ideologies. The Paul Graham's and Warren Buffets of the world do like capitalism and think it benefits everyone. So do I relative to most plausible alternatives. That doesn't mean that the people who actually work in the day-to-day jobs as traders etc think that they are doing anything productive or care whether they are.
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/just_this_once_lets_stay_up_all is MUCH more common, and IS what they really believe in.
Michael, I hadn't intended the generalizations here to cover all capitalists, or all "value systems" in the sense of minds with motivations - just those people who would regard themselves as having a morality in the first place.
Do those to whom you refer have actual anti-moral moral systems, or are they just doing whatever? If there are people out there with actual antimoralities - not just "virtue of selfishness" Randian types who are actually around as decent in their private lives as the average - but people who do actual evil deeds with elaborate philosophies around them... Well, I don't think I'd want to meet them, and I don't think I'd want them to post here, and I don't think I'd want anyone to mention my name to them, but I confess myself actually quite intrigued as to what goes on inside their minds.
Isn't part of the point of capitalism that people don't have to want it to produce valuable outcomes for society as a whole for it to do so? That people don't have to be willing to sacrifice for those valuable outcomes (although they might have to restrain themselves if they want to be successful), and that society doesn't need to burn through a limited supply of altruistic people to remaining functioning if it uses capitalism to run itself?
The "virtue of selfishness" Randian types actually mean a lot like what you posted, Eliezer. Ayn Rand just sounded really really angry when she wrote it, and used "selfishness" as a technical term where someone else might have said "enlightened self-interest." If you have not seen it, she wrote an essay about virtues that reads a lot like the virtues of rationality, except she tended to package it with her version of the "if you do not live up to nature's demands, you die" essay. And then the angrier parts about how partial success is still death by degrees, and anyone against those values was a mystic of meat or muscle, a below-human creature richly deserving of its inevitable doom. (Or am I mentally combining several of her essays in the book of that title?)
With respect to "warm fuzzies": I interpreted that broadly. Believers in the importance of manly honor and martial virtue would never call their sense of righteousness "warm fuzzies," but they still have that warm glow of "I believe this, therefore I know The Good."
@Caledonian
How can you ask this question "What is actual evil?"? You must know. Perhaps not definitively, but surely well enough, that we others would recognize it and agree.
What is the function of this false barrier that is no barrier?
May I suggest that the asking of this question is an example of the answer, (whilst I accept, that evil done, does not have to be intended)?
you will realize that Osama bin Laden would be far more likely to say, "I hate pornography" than "I hate freedom"
There's a difference between hating freedom and saying you hate freedom. There's also a difference between hating freedom and hating our freedom; the latter phrasing rules out Bin Laden misredefining the word to suit his own purposes. And thirdly it's possible to hate freedom and hate pornography more than freedom.
I, too, am down with the mammals. I don't mind seeing whole galaxies transformed into clouds of superintelligent matter and energy and dedicated to mammalian happiness and mammalian preference.
I've raised this before when Eliezer made the point, and I'll raise it again:
There most certainly is truth to "Suicide bombers are cowardly". Someone who chooses to believe a sweet, comforting lie, and go to the grave rather than face the possibility of having to deal with being wrong, is cowardly, or the term has no meaning. They might have been less cowardly with respect to their lives, but they were absolutely more cowardly with respect to their intellectual integrity. And FWIW, American soldiers who meet all of that are just as cowardly.
Mo...
Or to put it another way, I think I understand why good people might pretend to be evil, and why evil people might claim to be good is obvious enough; but I'm not sure I really do understand why evil people would admit to being evil.
Rand's objectivism and capitalism are criticized by people who reflexively see 'selfish' and equate that with greed and all the problems with capitalism. But those critics are delusional or they just don't understand human nature and our built-in modules fo...
If sufficiently intelligent and with a need to convince themselves that they are moral, it seems to me that cancer cells could come up with a similar list of virtues.
If sufficiently intelligent and with a need to convince themselves that they are moral, it seems to me that cancer cells could come up with a similar list of virtues.
There was, once upon a time, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calling Ford a "traitor to his class" because he offered more than the prevailing wages of the time. Sounds made up to me. A lot of stupid people think he did it so his workers could afford his cars. That's asinine. The marginal amount of money they'd send back to him directly would be negligible. The real reason was that he had a high turnover rate and it was costing him too much to keep training new employees. His retained more people after he raised wages.
Not related too much to the topic, but this post made me realize that the Russian word val'uta (currency) is cognate with value. I'd heard the word for most of my life, but I never made the connection.
The tenets of the Way of capitalism are sensible and admirable (not, in my opinion, the most sensible and admirable by far, but even so), but for many human beings it's difficult to keep such a diverse moral philosophy in your head - the result being that for some, even some that rise to the top, everything collapses to "make money at all costs".
Would that other systems get the same favorable treatment that Elizar advocates for capitalism. How about looking at the virtues of Communisms from the inside, as Elizar would have it. Anybody feel motivated to do more than a superficial hack job? How about Socialism? Monarchy? Plutocracy?
Speaking as someone who has no problem with capitalism, I'd say that people's reaction to it have a lot more to do with the people who promote it. Sort of like most people who don't care much for Heinlein turn out to have an appreciation of his writing, but absolutely detest the fanboy adulators who surround his remains.
EY: Is this "capitalist moral system" merely rationalizing greed, regardless of how coherent it is?
Also, in markets where these values actually harm profit-maximization, would the "true capitalist" throw them aside?
It worries me that I am not at all sure how to write the analogue of this list from the perspective of a devout mormon without something along the lines of "premarital sex is bad because I despise all that is good and joyful in life, bwahaha"
I mean, I think it might have something to do with the solidity of families, but there's still some steps I'm not seeing (ie fully sex-positive families in scandinavia seem to do just fine)
I have had the privilege of seeing a healthy, functional, devout Mormon extended family in joyful motion. There is something thrillingly aesthetic about the pattern they all fit into together, and it's so pretty that I can see how someone would understand it to be a moral rather than an aesthetic pleasure to enact or observe the script. They match, they fit.
All the other Mormon families I know (including those related to this one by marriage) have flaws in their execution or are hampered from the get-go by intrusive circumstance, and the one I'm talking about might be imperfect too, beneath the surface - but insofar as they perform their dance happily and in sync, it has a loveliness to it.
I think at least a chunk of this can be explained away by different levels of focus on sex as a Major Life Thing, a sine qua non for excellent living. There are all kinds of folks, and some of them aren't going to share your opinion on the importance of sex positivity, just like some of them aren't going to share my opinion on the importance of eschewing cake mix.
Orson Scott Card, from whose works my username sort of comes, is a devout Mormon who seems to work a non-religious explanation of why premarital sex is bad into a lot of his stories (often phrased as "like all intelligent people, XX and XY understood that..."). The explanation is completely different each time, and it's never where the conclusion really comes from, of course. Card can speculate as to why God commanded something, but he doesn't need the rationalization in order to believe in the commandment.
Orson Scott Card's arguments (the ones I remember) include:
Breaking taboos means you're either a "wolf," who disregards social conventions whenever it suits you, or a "sheep" who can't restrain your own impulses. Both of these are bad.
Your parents are probably lying to you about sex in some way, which means you might have some dangerous misconceptions. Don't do it until you can be sure of the consequences.
Unless you've had a long courtship and are now married, there's probably an undetected power imbalance in your relationship, which means any premarital sex is actually rape.
Unless you've had a long courtship and are now married, how do y
I think that one of the most valuable things I got out of my legal education is that I learned conservative (fiscal and social) political and legal theories from people who believe it themselves, not from people who were treating it as a caricature or a strawman. (And liberal ones too, but that's not so uncommon an experience. I identify as a "liberaltarian" myself.)
I live in the nonprofitiverse, where "capitalist" is usually a slur. (With some notable exceptions.) It's pretty hard to get people to listen to you once you've said the word "capitalist"--but if you bring up some of these points without naming them many of even the least sympathetic to "capitalism" would agree. (Similarly, I've seen Tea Partier signs that could have come straight from liberal talking points.)
I find it a lot easier to read about economic systems I don't agree with than social systems I don't agree with--I may think someone proposing an economic policy I find wrongheaded is wrong, but not immoral. Whereas there are many social policies I find not just wrong but abhorrent, enough that I have a hard time taking their proponents seriously.
I must say, I find it really helps matters that the particular nonprofit we find most eating our lives was founded by not just a libertarian, but an Objectivist. It seems to explode people's heads nicely.
I am well aware that this is an old article now, but I was reading it and found that the positions mentioned in this article are close to my own. Not exact, but close. I personally cannot conceive of a more virtuous way to distribute the goods produced by society, than by the personal vote of each individual member deciding upon the value of each other in material goods, weighted in infinite recursion by society's determination of those people making the decision in the exact same way.
Nothing about this is greedy, or heartless. It merely relies on people...
I think of capitalism more as the idea that, even when everybody is selfish, it still works out surprisingly well. You could come up with a set of values that would do the most good in a capitalist system composed mostly of selfish people, and call them capitalist values, but I don't think that's really the point.
I don't think there's some capitalist value that it's intrinsically moral to grab all the money you can get. There is instead a capitalist belief that if you do try to grab all the money you can get, you will have to help more people than you hurt...
These base points of capitalism I agree with, but alas there are a thousand fallacies out there which corrupt some of them. Notably in historic time: every economic bubble bursting into crisis since ever. This is not fault of capitalism, this is a fault of human civilization being a rather poor medium to implement capitalism in.
So, given the global crisis and every crisis before it such as the Tulip bubble in the first half of the 1600's, is it a simple solution is to implement some additional rules in the vein of meta-consequentialism?
In countries that are lawful and just, it is the privilege and responsibility of a citizen to pay their low taxes. That said, a good billionaire wouldn't ask to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Since when is this a traditional part of capitalism? Apart from the definitional problems with "a good billionaire", who is it who says that a billionaire who pays 40m in tax and wants to pay less is somehow immoral?
Followup to: Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
"The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism."
-- Nicolas Sarkozy
During the current crisis, I've more than once heard someone remarking that financial-firm CEOs who take huge bonuses during the good years and then run away when their black-swan bets blow up, are only exercising the usual capitalist values of "grab all the money you can get".
I think that a fair amount of the enmity in the world, to say nothing of confusion on the Internet, stems from people refusing to contemplate the real values of the opposition as the opposition sees it. This is something I've remarked upon before, with respect to "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "the suicide hijackers were cowards" (statements that are sheerly silly).
Real value systems - as opposed to pretend demoniacal value systems - are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users, not to be easily mocked. They will sound noble at least to the people who believe them.
Whether anyone actually lives up to that value system, or should, and whether the results are what they are claimed to be; if there are hidden gotchas in the warm fuzzy parts - sure, you can have that debate. But first you should be clear about how your opposition sees itself - a view which has not been carefully optimized to make your side feel good about its opposition. Otherwise you're not engaging the real issues.
So here are the traditional values of capitalism as seen by those who regard it as noble - the sort of Way spoken of by Paul Graham, or P. T. Barnum (who did not say "There's a sucker born every minute"), or Warren Buffett:
There was, once upon a time, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal calling Ford a "traitor to his class" because he offered more than the prevailing wages of the time. Coal miners trying to form a union, once upon a time, were fired upon by rifles. But I also think that Graham or Barnum or Buffett would regard those folk as the inheritors of mere kings.
"No true Scotsman" fallacy? Maybe, but let's at least be clear what the Scots say about it.
For myself, I would have to say that I'm an apostate from this moral synthesis - I grew up in this city and remember it fondly, but I no longer live there. I regard finance as more of a useful tool than an ultimate end of intelligence - I'm not sure it's the maximum possible fun we could all be having under optimal conditions. I'm more sympathetic than this to people who lose their jobs, because I know that retraining, or changing careers, isn't always easy and fun. I don't think the universe is set up to reward hard work; and I think that it is entirely possible for money to corrupt a person.
But I also admire any virtue clearly stated and synthesized into a moral system. We need more of those. Anyone who thinks that capitalism is just about grabbing the banana, is underestimating the number of decent and intelligent people who have put serious thought into the subject.
Those of other Ways may not agree with all these statements - but if you aspire to sanity in debate, you should at least be able to read them without your brain shutting down.
PS: Julian Morrison adds: Trade can act as a connective between people with diverging values.