Context: Post #10 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. 

This one, more so than any other one in this sequence, is something I do not think is good advice for everyone, and I do not expect to generalize that well to broader populations. If I had been writing this with the broader LessWrong audience in mind I would have written something pretty different, but I feel like for the sake of transparency I should include all the memos on Lightcone principles I have written, and this one in particular would feel like a bad one to omit. 

In "What We Look for in Founders" Paul Graham says:

4. Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. 

The world is full of bad rules, and full of people trying to enforce them. Not only that, it's commonplace to combine those rules with memes and social pressure to get you to internalize those rules as your own moral compass.

A key tension I repeatedly notice in myself as I am interfacing with institutions like zoning boards, or university professors asking me to do my homework, or not too infrequently Effective Altruists asking me to be vegan, is that together with the request to not do something, comes a request to also adopt a whole stance of "good people do not do this kind of thing".

Moral argument, of course, is important and real. And social institutions rely on shared norms and ethical codes. But nevertheless, almost all rules such invoked are not worthy of the guilt they produce when internalized. Their structure and claim is often easily exposed as flimsy, their existence is often well-explained by an attempt at rent-seeking or other forms of power-preservation – or simply a reinforced historical accident or signaling competition – but not genuine moral inquiry or some other kind of functional search over the space of social rules.

A name I considered for today's principle is "have courage". The kind of courage Neville displayed when he tried to prevent Harry and his friends from going to the forbidden third floor against Dumbledore's warnings, and the kind Harry and his friends displayed when they barged right past him anyways. "Courage" as such, is having the strength of will to break the rules that deserve to be broken. 

But I ultimately didn't like "courage", and preferred Paul Graham's "naughtiness"^[1]. Courage implies a fear to be overcome, or the presence of some resistance, when I do think the right attitude is often to miss a mood completely, and to take active joy in violating bad rules. The right attitude towards requests to avoid blasphemy is not hand-wringing and a summoning of courage every time you speak of something adjacent to god, it is simply to never bother thinking of this consideration, unless you are talking directly to someone who might care and the social consequences of the speech act become practically relevant.

Of course some moral rules are important, and some appeals to guilt are valid. As far as I can tell, there is no simple rule to distinguish the good appeals from the bad ones.

However, it is IMO possible to identify certain subsets of moral appeals as invalid and broken. Ozy Brennan identifies one such subset in "The Life Goals of Dead People":

Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this:

• I don’t want to make anyone mad.
• I don’t want to hurt anyone.
• I want to take up less space.
• I want to need fewer things.
• I don’t want my body to have needs.
• I don’t want to be a burden.
• I don’t want to fail.
• I don’t want to make mistakes.
• I don’t want to break the rules.
• I don’t want people to laugh at me.
• I want to be convenient.
• I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.
• I want to stop having feelings.

These are what I call the life goals of dead people, because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.

Corpses don’t need anything, not even to breathe. Corpses don’t hurt anyone or anger people or fail or make mistakes or break rules. Corpses don’t have feelings, and therefore can’t possibly have feelings that are inappropriate or annoying. Once funeral arrangements have been made, corpses rot peacefully without burdening anyone.

Compare with some other goals:

• I want to write a great novel.
• I want to be a good parent to my kids.
• I want to help people.
• I want to get a raise.
• I want to learn linear algebra.
• I want to watch every superhero movie ever filmed.
• I don’t want to die of cancer.
• I don’t want the world to be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration.
• I don’t want my cat to be stuck in this burning building! AAAAA! GET HER OUT OF THERE

All of these are goals that dead people are noticeably bad at. Robert Jordan aside, corpses very rarely write fiction. Their mathematical skills are subpar and, as parents, they tend to be lacking. Their best strategy for not dying of cancer is having already died of something else. And there is no one less suited than a corpse for time-sensitive emergency situations. 

Lightcone is not an organization for people who would rather be corpses. In the pursuit of our goals, we need the courage to make choices that will violate a large number of moral guidelines other people hold. Only corpses are this certain kind of pure.

Of course, while naughtiness such defined strikes me as a prerequisite to moral greatness, it also appears pre-requisite for most forms of moral damnation. Corpses don't cause atrocities. While I am confident that in order to live a life well-lived you need to take delight in breaking some rules, taking delight in breaking the wrong rules sets you up for a life of great harm. 

Indeed, the very next paragraph in the Paul Graham essay I cite above says:

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications. 

Noticing the skulls is left as an exercise to the reader.

1. ^{^}

   And also felt like the word "courage" deserved to be reserved for something else in kind that I might end up writing about more at a later point in time