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A hallmark of humanity is seeing goodness in others.
I generally think of humanity as being and acting in <good, virtuous> ways. I believe this without direct evidence. I've never been in someone else's head, and likely never will be. [1]
The main proxy I have is what I read. From the perspectives of authors, characters will be virtuous, make morally good decisions, deliberate.
I often find that I (and the decisions I make) don't feel as virtuous.
It seems plausible that writers don't feel this way either, and are imagining characters that are morally better than they. Maybe its all a shell game.
This might sound bad. I don't think it is.
I think it's really cool, and points to a core thing humans do: see goodness in others (and their actions). We see it in the worst of people. We see it in decisions we don't understand.
When we talk about human values, this seems under-looked [2] . We have joy, exploration, relationships, etc.. maybe this is under-looked because it's a little meta, or circular?
If I was forced to specify one value to a super intelligent optimizer, to make sure that human values / humanity carried on into the future ...
I think this would be a pretty good contender.
Insofar as anything in this space is under-looked (classic "universal claim" caveat)
You could imagine stripping away interfaces between people -- e.g. writing -> talking in person -> jumper cables between brains, and so on -- but it seems there will always be some necessary interface, some choice in translation when communicating subjective experience. ↩︎
Insofar as anything in this space is under-looked (classic "universal claim" caveat) ↩︎
I think this would be better with specific examples.
Characters in books often get in extraordinary situations -- that's what makes the books interesting. Are you complaining that you don't find yourself in extraordinary situations? That should be expected.
Or do you have in mind some virtuous actions done in everyday life, that characters in books do and you don't? For example, you never help other people, frequently shoplift...?
This is a good comment, thanks! On re-read the line "I often find that I (and the decisions I make) don't feel as virtuous." is weak and probably should be removed.
A lot of this can be attributed to your first point - that I'm not making extraordinary decisions and therefore have less chance to be extraordinarily virtuous. Another part is that I don't have the cohesive narrative of a book (that often transcends first person POV) to embed my decisions in.
This tangent into my experience sidetracked from the actual chain of thought I was having, which is ~
Right now, you could take $1000 and sent them to an effective charity. That could be extraordinary (in the sense of: the vast majority of people would never do that) and virtuous!
So that is another way how things work differently in books and in real life -- you wouldn't get the emotional satisfaction of observing your impact. A book can also "cheat" by telling you about the impact even if the protagonist does not observe it.
I guess intelligence ruins this, too. You can do a virtuous thing by buying a homeless guy a lunch. But if you are smart, you will immediately realize that this doesn't remove the source of his problems, and tomorrow he will probably starve again. But feeding him every day would be too expensive. Again, in a book, it would be likely that you only need to feed the starving person once; then they get to the goal of their quest, or find a job, or something; that is, a one-time intervention solves the problem.