Wei Dai's Shortform

Wei Dai

This is a special post for quick takes by Wei Dai. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Are humans fundamentally good or evil? (By "evil" I mean something like "willing to inflict large amounts of harm/suffering on others in pursuit of one's own interests/goals (in a way that can't be plausibly justified as justice or the like)" and by "good" I mean "most people won't do that because they terminally care about others".) People say "power corrupts", but why isn't "power reveals" equally or more true? Looking at some relevant history (people thinking Mao Zedong was sincerely idealistic in his youth, early Chinese Communist Party looked genuine about wanting to learn democracy and freedom from the West, subsequent massive abuses of power by Mao/CCP lasting to today), it's hard to escape the conclusion that altruism is merely a mask that evolution made humans wear in a context-dependent way, to be discarded when opportune (e.g., when one has secured enough power that altruism is no longer very useful).

After writing the above, I was reminded of @Matthew Barnett's AI alignment shouldn’t be conflated with AI moral achievement, which is perhaps the closest previous discussion around here. (Also related are my previous writings about "human safety" although they still used the "power corrupts" framing.) Comparing my current message to his, he talks about "selfishness" and explicitly disclaims, "most humans are not evil" (why did he say this?), and focuses on everyday (e.g. consumer) behavior instead of what "power reveals".

At the time, I replied to him, "I think I’m less worried than you about “selfishness” in particular and more worried about moral/philosophical/strategic errors in general." I guess I wasn't as worried because it seemed like humans are altruistic enough, and their selfish everyday desires limited enough that as they got richer and more powerful, their altruistic values would have more and more influence. In the few months since then, I've became more worried, perhaps due to learning more about Chinese history and politics...

Just because it was not among the organizing principles of any of the literate societies before Jesus does not mean it is not part of the human mental architecture.

7Vanessa Kosoy3y

My model is that the concept of "morality" is a fiction which has 4 generators that are real: * People have empathy, which means they intrinsically care about other people (and sufficiently person-like entities), but, mostly about those in their social vicinity. Also, different people have different strength of empathy, a minority might have virtually none. * Superrational cooperation is something that people understand intuitively to some degree. Obviously, a minority of people understand it on System 2 level as well. * There is something virtue-ethics-like which I find in my own preferences, along the lines of "some things I would prefer not to do, not because of their consequences, but because I don't want to be the kind of person who would do that". However, I expect different people to differ in this regard. * The cultural standards of morality, which it might be selfishly beneficial to go along with, including lying to yourself that you're doing it for non-selfish reasons. Which, as you say, becomes irrelevant once you secure enough power. This is a sort of self-deception which people are intuitively skilled at.

6cousin_it3y

Yeah, that seems to agree with my pessimistic view - that we are selfish animals, except we have culture, and some cultures accidentally contain altruism. So the answer to your question "are humans fundamentally good or evil?" is "humans are fundamentally evil, and only accidentally sometimes good".

Wei Dai's Shortform

10

Ω 6

Wei Dai's Shortform

10

Ω 6