Yeah, I think it's anti-natural for such an entity to exist, and that's a crux for religion-according-to-Alex.

Fantastic. I would love to figure out of this is true. 

It's also a crux for my worldview too. A Double Crux!

I can grant that some pathological liars didn't pick it up culturally, and kind of just have fucked up genetics. But I still prefer to view them as a person who would ultimately actually prefer truth but took a wrong turn at some point, than as someone who is just fundamentally in their core a pathological liar. I think, with the technologies available today, me viewing them as a mistake theorist does not lead to substantially different actions from me viewing them as a conflict theorist, except perhaps that I might be more attuned to the suffering they're going through for having such a deeply entrenched false belief about the best way to live their life.

This is sus.

In an effort to assert that everyone is basically good, we've found ourselves asserting that people who are very psychologically different than us, who were born that way, are fundamentally mistaken, at a genetic level?

I at least want to be open to the possibility of the sociopath who straightforwardly likes being a sociopath—it works for them, they sincerely don't want to be different, they think it would be worse to be neurotypical. Maybe, by their own, coherent lights, they're just right about that.

(In much the same way that many asexuals look at the insanity of sexual desire and think "why would I want to be like that?!", while the normally-sexed people would absolutely not choose delete their sex-drive.)
 

Thank you!

Yeah, I should probably write these up. I called this "action-oriented operationalization" (in contrast to prediction-oriented operationalization) and at least part of the credit goes to John Salvatier for developing it.

But just as a question of are they a good person with bad parts clumped on top or are they just a bunch of good and bad parts and they could probably become a different person. You seem to be a bit essentialist about, "No, there's a good person there and they just have some issues," whereas I'm like, "Here's a person and here's some of their properties. We would like to change which person they are because this person utterly sucks."

Mistake versus conflict theory are both valid self-fulfilling prophecies one could use to model someone, and I think I'm less being an essentialist about people being intrinsically good, and more insisting on mistake theory being a self-fulfilling prophecy that wins more, in that I think it gets you strictly more degrees of freedom in how you can interact with them. 

I strongly agree with the bolded part, and have often been in the position of advocating for this "spiritual stance".

But I feel like this answer is kind of dodging the question of "which frame is actually a more accurate model of reality?" I get that they're frames, and you can use multiple frames to describe the same phenomenon. 

But the "people are basically good underneath their trauma" and the stronger form "all people are basically good underneath their trauma" do make specific predictions about how those people would behave under various circumstances. 

Specifically, I'm tracking at least three models:

• Almost everyone is traumatized, to various degrees. that trauma inhibits their ability to reason freely about the world, and causes them to respond to various stimuli with long-ago-learned not-very-calibrated flailing responses. Their psychology is mostly made of a stack of more-or-less reflective behavioral patterns and habits which developed under the constraints of the existing psychological ecosystem of behaviors and patterns. but underneath all of that is an forgotten, but ever present Buddha-nature of universal love for all beings.

vs.

• Almost everyone is traumatized, to various degrees. that trauma inhibits their ability to reason freely about the world, and causes them to respond to various stimuli with long-ago-learned not-very-calibrated flailing responses. Their psychology is mostly made of a stack of more-or-less reflective behavioral patterns and habits which developed under the constraints of the existing psychological ecosystem of behaviors and patterns. but underneath all of that is an forgotten, but if that trauma is cleared that mind is a basically-rational optimizer for one's personal and genetic interests.

vs.

• Almost everyone is traumatized, to various degrees. that trauma inhibits their ability to reason freely about the world, and causes them to respond to various stimuli with long-ago-learned not-very-calibrated flailing responses. Their psychology is mostly made of a stack of more-or-less reflective behavioral patterns and habits which developed under the constraints of the existing psychological ecosystem of behaviors and patterns. but underneath all of that is an forgotten, but underneath that is a pretty random cluge of evolutionary adaptions.

Obviously, reality will be more complicated than any of these three simplifications, and is probably a mix of all of them to various degrees. 

But I think it is strategically important to have a model of 1) what the underlying motivational stack for most humans is like and 2) how much variation is there in underlying motivations, between humans. 

I also think they tend to be pretty unkind to themselves and miserable in a particular way,

This is not my understanding of the psychology of most literal clinical sociopaths. It is my read of, say Stalin.

Okay. Yeah, I think there are more datapoints in steel-Islam, for how to navigate the fact that even though cancers might be mistakes, you sometimes maybe still need to kill them anyway.

In reference to some of my other comments here, I would be much more sympathetic to this take if the historical situation was that Mohamed led wars of self defense against aggressors. But he lead wars of conquest in the name of Islam, which continued for another century after his death.

As Jesus says, "by your fruits you will know them." 

@Ben Pace, this should have a note that says "spoilers for unsong", and spoiler tags over the offending sentences?

I think it would be more like "here's the correct way to interpret these stories, in contrast to these other interpretations that a majority of people currently used to interpret them".

So like, there's already a whole cottage industry of interpretations of religious texts. Jordan Peterson, for instance, gives a bunch of "psychological" readings of the meaning of the bible, which got attention recently. (And notably, he has a broadly pluralistic take on religion). 

But there are lots and lots of rabbis and ministers and so on promoting their own interpretations or promoting interpretations, many of which are hundreds of years old. There's a vast body of scholarship regarding what these texts mean and how to interpret them.

Alex, it sounds like you hope to add one more interpretation to the mix, with firmer mathematical rigor. 

Do you think that that one will be taken up by some large fraction of Christians, Muslims, Jews, or Buddhists? Is there some group that will see the formalizations and recognize them as self-evidently the truth that their personal religious tradition was pointing at?

 

But also, I am annoyed again.

FYI @Ben Pace, as a reader, I resonate with your annoyance in this conversation.

For me, I agree with many of Alex's denotational claims, but feel like he's also slipping in a bunch of connotation that I think is mostly wrong, but because he's agreeing with the denotation for any particular point you bring up, it feels slippery, or like I'm having one pulled over on me. 

It has a motte-and-bailey feel to it. Like Alex will tell me that "oh of course Heaven and Hell are not literal places under the earth and in the sky, that's obviously dumb." But, when he goes to talk with religious people, who might think that, or something not quite as wrong as that, but still something I think is pretty wrong, he'll talk about heaven and hell, without clarifying what hem means, and it will seem like they're agreeing, but the communitive property of agreement between you and Alex and Alex and the religious person doesn't actually hold.

Like, it reads to me like Alex keeps trying to say "you and I Ben, we basically agree", and as an onlooker, I don't think you actually agree, on a bunch of important but so-far-inexplicit points.

[Ironically, if Alex does succeed in his quest of getting formal descriptions of all this religious stuff, that might solve this problem. Or at least solve it with religious people who also happen to be mathematicians.]

I don't know if that description matches your experience, this is just my take as an onlooker.