You mean the Roman Emperor telling everyone they should be happy with less money, less food, less water, less everything ?
The Roman Emperor who got the position because he was his father's favorite nephew ? The Marcus Aurelius who got a special exception on at least 2 laws just for him personally from the Senate for his first job on special request from his father ? Whose first job was qaestor ("minister of finance" - sort of) ?
That Marcus Aurelius ?
Actions speak louder than words, and given the fact that this guy was an emperor (and is thus rather unlikely to have written those books himself) ... probably were a PR campaign. A very successful one, but mostly nothing more than a PR campaign.
Granted these are all cases of other people acting in a corrupt manner to provide him with advantages in life no-one else had. It doesn't necessarily reflect on his character ... however ... especially his succession ...
You are trying to point out Aurelius' corruption by critizising the way he became emperor, which I find a bit weak. Is there evidence that he actually mis-used his power when he already held that power? Also, how did he compare to other emperors of his time? The things you mentioned could easily have been culturally accepted.
Everything he ever did is one big billboard screaming he doesn't believe in stoicism.
First, Of the things mentioned in my own post, which focus on the start of his reign. His rise to power. Do you seriously believe he had no hand in that ? He must have fought, in many ways, to get the position of emperor. He pursued power, and not by working hard in any stoic sense (stoicism accepts only actual "hand" labour as labour, and worthy of reward. Things like holding senate/government/management positions, no matter how well executed, no matter how punctual you are, aren't ever very stoic at all). That, by itself, is very very very very un-stoic of him.
Second argument is his reign. He was an emperor advocating stoicism, known for ... being extremely generous when it came to "bread and circuses". His power was built on what is close to the opposite of what his books advocate.
And third argument is the end of his reign, his kid (and his family, but that would take us too far), and his succession. Clearly the behavior of his kid was an indication of how his household functioned. His kid, Commodus, was described as an extremely self-obsessed neurotic drunk ... It is not physically possible to become either self-obsessed or drunk in a stoic household.
Your counter argument is a man whose nepotism ended the the reign of the Good Emperors and put a raving megalomaniac in charge?
I'm trying not to be snarky, but it feels like his experiment with Commodus is a massive example of how power does corrupt. Perhaps you were thinking of Cincinnatus?
Famous quote of Giulio Andreotti, an old Italian politician.
"Il potere logora chi non ce l'ha"
("Power wears out those who don't have it")
Note: the literal translation is "to wear out", but the phrase "il potere logora" has the equivalent meaning of "the power corrupts", in the sense that it wears out the moral compass.
I used the translation I found in the linked wikipedia article and also the most frequently cited form in the wild.
Furthermore 'degrades' can also imply that it demeans a person, strips one's dignity, while recent history shows that Italy is a country where being corrupt does not necessarily make you lose respect and honour (i.e honour != rightfulness).
uhm well actually, in italian, it means that the power, with all the responsibilities that come with its exercise, is supposed to wear or erode those who must exercise it: but it is actually the opposite, it wears out those who want the power and cannot have it and maybe even those who have to suffer from it.
You can inspect the element and delete it to gain full access to the article. Lots of sites like to put a noscript div up that obscures the article, but the full text is underneath. No ajax trickery here.
Not that this study isn't interesting, but Lord Acton was really talking about how powerful people corrupt us.
'''
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science....
'''
What is he getting at? We'd hang Mary and forgive Elizabeth for the same crimes, so we're corrupted by the powerful. I think the the leading presidential candidates of both major U.S. parties shows this to be true.
I don't think that interpretation jibes with the text:
Assertion:
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases."
Rationale:
"Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
He then goes on to rail against people that hold power:
"Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
Without the idea that power tends to corrupt those in power, there would be no reason to presume that they did wrong by default or to say that people who exercise influence and authority are bad men.
In some ways it's mutual. Power tends to remove societal curbs on bad behavior. The natural result in aggregate is an increase in bad behavior. The cause though is both on those who allow and indeed even consent to the removal of those curbs. (See the current Trump campaign.) And the individual who fails to resist the temptation of consequence free action.
There's probably some of that in there too, but the context is history, so when I read 'great men', for instance, there is an implied 'great men of history' in there. I think Acton was saying our view of events and actions naturally lean towards making excuses and we need to be aware of that.
You probably have a point there, but I think the corruption of authority on the rest of us is certainly a major theme.
> Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority
That implies great men have influence and/or authority to exercise. You may read it as 'great men of history', but if to you that set of people includes those who accomplished a lot without authority of influence (at the time, otherwise it would not be possible to be exercised), then the set of what you and Lord Acton consider 'great men of history' likely have different conditions for inclusion. A simple example of this is probably Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose genius was largely unrecognized until very late in his life, and his notebooks were later studied for his many results. A man of great influence after his death.
That's not to say your interpretation isn't useful, or possibly even correct, just that I think this isn't a piece of supporting evidence for it.
> just that I think this isn't a piece of supporting evidence for it
The context is a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. Acton read some work of Creighton's and thought Creighton wasn't critical enough of certain popes. The context is exactly about why the bishop was too uncritical when looking back on the powerful men of history.
It wasn't a narrative of a pope and how he turned to the dark side after he started wearing white robes.
And I'm sure Acton wasn't referring to men like Ramanujan in his quote, though he may indeed have been a great man in other dimensions.
We are both seeing the same evidence as pointing to a (slightly) different conclusion, and even each others interpretations of our reasoning about that original evidence is seen as supporting our own conclusions. I'm not sure how to get out of this as I suspect it will get far too off-topic before it gets on-topic, if it ever does, other than to note that I think this is generally an indication that we aren't really in disagreement, just arguing over a mistaken perception of the other's position.
To define someone as bad you must also define good - and if you are defining the terms, they are meaningless.
From the perspective of the "bad men", they are serving good - be that the good they see in themselves or whatever cause it is they act in. Stalin genuinely believed he was acting in the interests of the Soviet people. Pol Pot was liberating his countrymen.
I would argue that the GP's interpretation is correct - we willingly ignore our own moral compasses when we examine the behaviour of the powerful, as to admit that those that hold power over you are "evil" is to admit your own weakness in not actively opposing that power - so power does indeed corrupt those who behold it, as much as those who hold it - if not moreso, as the "bad men" act in "enlightened self interest" and do no wrong in their own eyes - but you do do wrong by knowingly averting your eyes.
This is more about what Acton was saying, so we're looking at good and bad from his perspective. I don't think we need to invoke moral relativity as we already have a frame of reference. He seems to have clearly indicted men of power unless there's text that I have omitted stating otherwise.
The two are intermixed. The only reason powerful people are powerful is because we acquiesce to their demands. Our acquiescence in turn influences our moral judgements; or alternatively, one measure of power is the ability to cause people to inhibit their moral judgements that could cause them to resist.
‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’
Depends on how you think of power: a privilege or great responsibility?
Power corrupts those who think they deserve it.
"Two of my cousins and I entered the apartment of the Prophet (ﷺ). One of them said: Messenger of Allah, appoint us rulers of some lands that the Almighty and Glorious God has entrusted to thy care. The other also said something similar. He said: We do not appoint to this position one who asks for it nor anyone who is covetous for the same."
"If a dog dies hungry on the banks of the River Euphrates, Umar will be responsible for dereliction of duty." Umar Ibn al Khattab
It's a vicious cycle. In a world where corruption is rewarded, you are chastised explicitly or implicitly for passing up the opportunity to get ahead by participating in systemic abuse of power. I can't find the precise research that illuminated how identifying a cheater (who is perceived either as part of the community, or an outsider), can influence the rest of the class to cheat at tests or not. But this infographic[1] identifies peer pressure as the #1 reason for cheating in college, and seems to back it up with survey and research evidence.
Having power is a requirement of being corrupt, by the definition. If you didn't have power, you wouldn't have the leverage to corrupt the system in the first place.
>Corruption: dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery
I know this isn't a popular idea, but I think people need to be more empathetic to those who have been entrusted with power.
I despise corruption, but I think we do ourselves a disservice when we focus all our attention on the officials who are being corrupted while allowing armies of policy experts to influence official's opinions while funding their campaigns.
The question shouldn't be "Does power really corrupt?", the question should be, "Does power become a magnet for special interests hell bent on corrupting it?"
That's a good point. People tend to be empathetic to those who they feel like they represent them, so they'll be more likely to forgive corruption as they'll chalk it up to the landscape in which the official has to operate.
How do you get people to focus on the landscape of corruption rather than politicians? Politicians are easier to blame because they have a name and a face. How do you train people to target landscape?
ADDED: How do you get people to focus on the elements of conflict of interest in larger systems rather than people?
You see these types of quotes all the time, but I've started to question their wisdom. Is it really hard to imagine that the most qualified ruler might happen to recognized themselves as the most qualified ruler and therefore want the position?
Maybe I'm just being optimistic that a quest for peak social optimization doesn't necessarily lead to a dictatorship...
No it's not that hard to imagine. But when I look at politicians, on either side of the Atlantic, that's not what I see.
I see a lot of hard working MPs lost in the system, doing as the party machines tell them. They're more subservient than powerful. I see the stars and office holders following a much more Machiavellian approach.
A good question is whether that's mainly down to the types of people getting involved, or the party machines that have developed.
It compels them to be subservient—or rebellious, which is the same thing with a bit flipped—but neither of those is empathy. I'm not sure empathy is possible except among equals.
I think people need to be empathetic to those who have been entrusted with power, but I also think most people in power didn't get there by trustworthy means.
There's something to be said for making things sacred. How power is arrived at, the people who hold it, how it is managed moving forward, and how that power changes (nay, MUST change) over time.
It's not so much that power corrupts. Power is just a multiplier.
The problem is more that the kind of people who are most likely to end up in positions of power are those who are going to abuse that power and don't care about their responsibility (or have never learned it).
Power corrupts those who are in power to wield influence, eventually in attempts to please all those they serve they find themselves without any ideals or direction of their own. And I agree with some1else that people are rewarded for this behavior but the chances of that changing are pretty slim so I guess the real solution is not be weak/unempathetic people.
has anyone ever thought about ai being in power? Maybe being unemotional and lacking emotional intelligence might be a possible solution where humans fail once again...
tempting Deux Ex-esque scenario. but - this machine would be #1 hacking target of all nefarious people, agencies, NSA and whatnot for reason or another. and all programs, systems and architectures have fault.
maybe a mixed system - AI would decide certain topic, and human assembly/public vote in important matters would confirm/reject the solution. this way AI could evolve and have a proven track, and we wouldn't lose all control.
it feels scary to give all control to something that could fail fast and in epic scale, Skynet-style (I know, I played one too many games in my life and it shows)
The Culture books pretty much define the best case scenario for an AI run society - the main control on the godlike-AIs (the Minds) running everything being the opinions of their fellow Minds. Get it wrong, e.g. by fiddling with the minds of meat beasties, and you get ostracized - which is about the most severe punishment the Culture has:
It's a theme in many science-fiction tales, with various results. See Asimov's works, the introduction eventually of the zeroth law. Ostensibly the machines weren't in charge, but much decision making was pushed to them. Similar to EPICAC (later generations) in Vonnegut's Player Piano, though with a very different result. In his work the machine made decisions based on measured statistics and rules put in place by people (to comedic and tragic effects).
And what does it mean to have an AI in charge? First, we don't have any sort of AGI. So any AI is going to be something along the lines of a Watson or AlphaGo. Machine learning + logic + heuristics (the latter two potentially generated by the first).
What level of authority will it be given? Will it be queried for input like any other Cabinet member? "Department of Heuristics, Secretary Watson".
Will it directly guide things? At what point will people be comfortable with this? To what extent will it's authority be permitted to go? This may only appeal to authoritarian-endorsing personality types. In Player Piano, the computer largely guided employment (or employability), but a screw up in a person's CV resulted in their attaining a position they excelled in, and later lost when the CV was corrected (they did not earn their BS because they didn't pass a gym class, consequently they couldn't have earned their Masters or PhD, no longer with the educational background they were unqualified for the post they held).
It'll likely be as mindless a drone at this as actual HR offices are (my mother, a ChemE, was barred from a program management position, no actual engineering work, because she didn't have a civil engineering degree, it was a numbers, dollars and personnel, jox, the degree was irrelevant given her experience).
More likely, these non-general AIs will continue to do what they've done for years but in more areas. They'll inform decision makers, become sufficiently comprehensive to properly correlate numerous variables and detect patterns that we mere mortals cannot see. Many businesses have used some form of this, see optimization and logistics algorithms, for decades, technically centuries but there's been more data and more computational power the last few decades. Now machine learning just automates this sort of statistical and logistical analysis.
"SORRY, YOU NEED TO ENABLE JAVASCRIPT TO VISIT THIS WEBSITE." it tells me. I do. I see flat, plain text with some images. WTF. Don't be those web devs, guys!
Probably, but we don't spend enough time thinking about what kind of person it is who seeks that power in the first place. Maybe there was nothing to corrupt in the first place.
"Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior, the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals. Although the effects of social class varied somewhat across the kinds of prosocial behavior, countries, and measures of social class, under no condition did we find the negative effect that would have been expected on the basis of previous results reported in the psychological literature. Possible explanations for this divergence and implications are discussed."
I hope you won't get mad if we freeze you until the world cycles back around to the idea of making rulers effective at their jobs.
I don't think we'll have long to wait. The Net is over turning many formerly reasonable ideas by holding up a mirror to us. Will Rogers said: It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. <opinion> The Net is the end of egalitarianism, forever until perhaps genomics is truly cracked.
It's going to an interesting ride! I hope we wind up closer to the Diamond Age than Snow Crash though.
I did hear of that idea Mr Sn9 (let's bring back Dickensian mannerisms!)
Sully of Slashdot claims to have met Mr Stephenson at a book signing.
Quote forthwith:
According to Neal, Diamond Age and Snow Crash are not in the same universe at all. He stated further that any similarity is just due to the coincidence of the both novels having the same author.
Anyway. It was a good idea even if it was incorrect. Mayhap another shining hypothesis slain by ugly facts.
To clarify: I was implying to Gwern that Snow Crash would be a dismal universe to live in because the world was clearly in some kind of stagnation or slump caused by the (I don't have a good way to express this with words properly) backwash of globalization.
If the Diamond Age is an evolution from Snow Crash then it is a much better world to live in. My original impression is strongly of a more fragmented world yet also one with more stability and wealth as compared with Snow Crash, which is a slow motion train wreck.
Ironically I believe we truly do live in the world of Snow Crash. We've stagnated badly over the last few decades and we're just about waking up to the consequences of it now.
It won't surprise you to learn I'm in favour of an aristocratic approach to tackle the problem like the Vickies.
Provides compelling case that all politicians tend toward dictatorship with the difference in how fully these tendencies are realized just being in the size of the coalition they have to appease, reward, or bully. With stereotypical absolute dictators this easy to see. On the other end of the spectrum, it is more shrouded. American democracy is theoretically based on a maximum sized coalition equaling roughly the entire population. In practice, the leaders are beholden to and have to influence a much smaller coalition to wield power. Something like the current Sanders/Clinton popular vote vs inner circle super delegate issue demonstrates this pretty well. Fascinating read.
But people with more power are the ones that have to make the hard choices. And hard choices are hard, true by definition.
If one never has to burden any thing on one's shoulder, probably that one is the burden of someone else. It's like this: we civil people can't stand killing and shooting, that's why we outsource it to the government and praise the army for their service.
These kind of studies address bell curves which by definition always has outliers so your statement is correct but statistically may be an outlier. You can always say "it depends" in other words.
Intuitively, this feels very right with my experience being on both sides of the fence. I would need to do a study on one aspect of this in particular that gut-wise is the core of this IMO: The way people treat you shapes your personality and how you treat others in the future. To me this is more to the heart of the issue. For example, when I was poor, people treated me like I was not really wanted or that I was expected to go the extra mile to please. I tended to feel less important with less confidence and didn't feel I was special in any sense, which in some sense made me more selfless to a degree. On the flip side, having money, the service industry kisses your ass and women treat you like you're the hot item on Black Friday. This inflates your ego and you expect that treatment after awhile, becoming more picky and discerning of everything, moving in the direction of being a selfish asshole. This is the same reason IMO why beautiful women tend to be perceived as rude or the "B" word as they see most men as just a commodity as they are inundated with unwanted attention.
This is a huge problem in our society in so many ways.
Three examples I've personally noticed.
1. While working at typical working class jobs, if you happen to talk about geek/intellectual stuff e.g. with coworkers - middle class people typically do NOT like that. It really grinds their gears. Even passing references to do with current events.
You can talk about sports or something else you're supposed to be interested in. This is allowed.
You can explain this a dozen different ways but I am convinced it shows something nasty in their character. Don't get me wrong, these are good people but they have this weakness.
2. Not so much attractive women per se as socialites, they have a real problem when they lose their looks. I think the more social you are the worse it gets. Broadly speaking women gradually become less attractive to the opposite sex over time and they are painfully aware of this. Some women are so invested in their appearance that when it goes they undergo terrific emotional turmoil that men probably can't understand (imagine going senile in front of your competitors!) and it produces a mother lode of neurosis. On the other hand women who accept themselves warts and all are easier to get along with.
3. Some people are plain or even ugly. This makes them invisible to many people on a bunch of levels. It can't be a great feeling.
The general point is that all kinds of people should keep an open mind about others. Obviously our bodies are a vehicle and it is what our minds are that really matters. There is also a huge diversity of minds, and that is fine too.
I don't know if you've ever had a meet-up with people from an online forum before who you've previously talked to for years, but contrariwise to internet opinion people are never what you expect. Without the online community you'd probably have never talked to those people in a thousand years. That's why I didn't like Facebook. It was a return to the old badness.
Those are some great points, especially about how women's identities change as I've seen that from some of my relatives. But just to be slightly different, I view this as an observation of human nature in general rather than it necessarily being bad or good, although it does seem unfair. I doubt this will ever change unless we somehow genetically modify people to be more empathetic but could be jenga for something else.
Evolution makes blithely shortsighted errors. We're about as intelligent as we are required to be in order to survive.
We're stuck at local maxima at every level from the personal to the political and that is a problem.
That is why using artificial aids like books for recording memories and genetic splicing is the right thing to do. Biology should not be accepted as Physics. It is alright to cheat and interfere.
I will now sound like I'm contradicting myself but I'm not.
Evolution has accomplished results with brute force that we do not comprehend. Some of those results appear stupid to us but there exist secret underlying patterns that are not available to our minds. Our instincts contain heaps of responses that we often regard as stupid e.g. blushing, jealousy but they are likely adaptions that helped us survive so we will require an understanding of their function.
This is the great truth of conservatism and complex systems. Things are the way they are because reasons. That the proponents of this view can't explain themselves articulately is not relevant. The reasons are real. You are not your frontal cortex. That's just the Speaker in the house of parliament.
That's why jenga is a problem. Jenga gives us the FDA. Jenga eventually produces a caste system. The great project is to somehow open a third door nobody has noticed. Let me know if you figure it out!
Uncoincidentally I like Patri Friedman's idea of constructing seasteads. I don't want to sound like I'm allergic to work but real change is hard work! It is like everything interesting happens at edges of things.
That makes sense. There are plenty of evolutionary cruft we have though such as an appendix we don't need or the odd way the recurrent laryngeal nerve ended up. It does hint at room for improvement, however impossibly difficult that may be to predict what improvements are good.
To play the devil's advocate: What's wrong with being more selective? I don't think anything is.
What's problematic is how people go about it. Our society doesn't teach us how to be selective with grace and manners. So when people realize they have power in a situation they freak out a bit and might over react in being excessively picky or rude to others.
The problems with class warfare are similar to those of racial discrimination.
The problem is not that there is no basis for using a filter but that assuming everybody is identical within a class (or subset, which has a 1:1 mapping to the notion of class) is a logical error.
It is not about morality so much as logic. Suppose I find Italians to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Well evidently there exist Italians who are honest with good intentions. That some of set of Italians genuinely do belong to a mafia is not indicative of the larger group, even if it were so that a majority of Italians were mafiosos.
Of course real life is complicated, people have to resort to satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing) and worse yet harmful behavior patterns aren't limited to any subset of the group. Notoriously there exist robin hoods and bad cops. Choosing not to go down the wrong street is reasonable under satisficing but rejecting job candidates for having the wrong names is.
All of this is to say that discrimination in of itself is not illogical but discriminating indiscriminately IS.
The problem here is our lack of understanding of statistics. Yes, there probably are differences in averages on things like criminality, intelligence, lazyness and so on between groups like male/female, ethnicity, gay or straight and so on.
But, besides the fact that the difference might not be in the direction you think it goes, in all these cares, inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability.
That means: it doesn't matter in practice. Whether men ow women are on average more intelligent, those 1-3 average IQ points are so irrelevant compared to the 15-30 points 5 random people in a room would generally differ from each other that it is barely of academic interest and certainly useless to use to judge a random men or women you meet.
This thing is true for many differences between groups often discriminated against. Scientist are thus inclined not to research these differences: if they exist they are rarely helpful for policy (too small) but often their reporting results in people misbehaving even more due to their misunderstanding the impact (or rather lack thereof).
It is true that inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability.
However I strongly disagree that it does not matter in practice. In practice people are not randomly assigned rooms to be in. They certainly do not meet other people randomly. The result is group identity becomes ever more strongly associated and tribes form. Stereotypes are developed and so on.
For example; it does not surprise me that tiny eastern European countries have coders working for Google but much larger and closer minority populations do not. EE workers are natively nowhere close to Google HQ and they don't even share a common language and culture. These are high barriers.
That there exist a larger number of people with the hypothetical potential to code for Google (which surely exist because of intra group variability) within that minority American population is not relevant. Those people do not want to code for Google i.e. exchange their labour in this area for money. The eastern european coders from (really) tiny states on the other hand have a strong desire to work in those domains that computer corporations select for in their workers.
Even though there are many differences between a typical coder in the United States and a typical Eastern European coder, their shared 'tribe' of basically being geeks trumps everything else. That ought to be GOOD news for those who want to avoid discrimination based on the superficial differences but somehow it does not seem to be taken as this. That's politics.
Obviously scientists are under social pressure not to examine such visible differences. This is because they are failures at being scientists. I do not say that lightly. These are atrocious failures of omission. If society only receives measurements it looks for, then why bother doing any research at all? We already know the answers! It is certainly cheaper to confirm society's biases, whether we're in Victorian times or in the present. It's like being a fat man avoiding the weighing scales.
I understand your point about the gen.pop taking complex research with many confounding variables and reducing the results to a simplistic and inaccurate story. That worries me as well, not just in cases of racial discrimination, but as a general error. That said I cannot agree it makes no difference for public policy (because of the non-random sorting I mentioned earlier). Public policy ought to be based on reality, if the map does not conform to the territory problems will occur. Any system that produces inaccurate information and then has to depend on the false outputs will constantly be tripping itself up.
As a last point, although gen.pop can do dumb things sometimes, that is no reason to feed them platitudes. They do however have bullshit detectors which go off when what the media describes to them isn't what they see in their realities. They are capable of complex thought and thought evolution over time and I fail to see how deliberately misleading them can lead to a greater good without dysfunction. Frankly I think a decline in economic prosperity has a lot more to do with inter-group dynamics going bad, with propaganda causing it to be worse, but as a second order affect.
I agree that IQ is far from the deciding factor in most individual cases. 3-5 points really isn't that much. You could get that many points by taking a ten minute walk and a shower! The issue though is that just as gravity does not affect you and I on the microscale we are at, with enough mass/size things start happening that really do impact on us. I don't know if you've ever walked from a room with average people to a room with people who are totally into the thing you're into, but the difference is very palatable to me. I much prefer the second room over the first, even if that first room had a slightly higher IQ. Why? Because I can now get something done! In fact we all can. That almost comes as a relief.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThe Roman Emperor who got the position because he was his father's favorite nephew ? The Marcus Aurelius who got a special exception on at least 2 laws just for him personally from the Senate for his first job on special request from his father ? Whose first job was qaestor ("minister of finance" - sort of) ?
That Marcus Aurelius ?
Actions speak louder than words, and given the fact that this guy was an emperor (and is thus rather unlikely to have written those books himself) ... probably were a PR campaign. A very successful one, but mostly nothing more than a PR campaign.
Granted these are all cases of other people acting in a corrupt manner to provide him with advantages in life no-one else had. It doesn't necessarily reflect on his character ... however ... especially his succession ...
First, Of the things mentioned in my own post, which focus on the start of his reign. His rise to power. Do you seriously believe he had no hand in that ? He must have fought, in many ways, to get the position of emperor. He pursued power, and not by working hard in any stoic sense (stoicism accepts only actual "hand" labour as labour, and worthy of reward. Things like holding senate/government/management positions, no matter how well executed, no matter how punctual you are, aren't ever very stoic at all). That, by itself, is very very very very un-stoic of him.
Second argument is his reign. He was an emperor advocating stoicism, known for ... being extremely generous when it came to "bread and circuses". His power was built on what is close to the opposite of what his books advocate.
And third argument is the end of his reign, his kid (and his family, but that would take us too far), and his succession. Clearly the behavior of his kid was an indication of how his household functioned. His kid, Commodus, was described as an extremely self-obsessed neurotic drunk ... It is not physically possible to become either self-obsessed or drunk in a stoic household.
I'm trying not to be snarky, but it feels like his experiment with Commodus is a massive example of how power does corrupt. Perhaps you were thinking of Cincinnatus?
Kind of a corollary
"Il potere logora chi non ce l'ha"
("Power wears out those who don't have it")
Note: the literal translation is "to wear out", but the phrase "il potere logora" has the equivalent meaning of "the power corrupts", in the sense that it wears out the moral compass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Andreotti
Furthermore 'degrades' can also imply that it demeans a person, strips one's dignity, while recent history shows that Italy is a country where being corrupt does not necessarily make you lose respect and honour (i.e honour != rightfulness).
It's an ironic quote from Andreotti.
"Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website."
But I'm not going to give it away!
''' I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which . . . the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, . . . but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.... '''
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html
What is he getting at? We'd hang Mary and forgive Elizabeth for the same crimes, so we're corrupted by the powerful. I think the the leading presidential candidates of both major U.S. parties shows this to be true.
Assertion:
"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases."
Rationale:
"Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers' lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
He then goes on to rail against people that hold power:
"Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
Without the idea that power tends to corrupt those in power, there would be no reason to presume that they did wrong by default or to say that people who exercise influence and authority are bad men.
You probably have a point there, but I think the corruption of authority on the rest of us is certainly a major theme.
That implies great men have influence and/or authority to exercise. You may read it as 'great men of history', but if to you that set of people includes those who accomplished a lot without authority of influence (at the time, otherwise it would not be possible to be exercised), then the set of what you and Lord Acton consider 'great men of history' likely have different conditions for inclusion. A simple example of this is probably Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose genius was largely unrecognized until very late in his life, and his notebooks were later studied for his many results. A man of great influence after his death.
That's not to say your interpretation isn't useful, or possibly even correct, just that I think this isn't a piece of supporting evidence for it.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
The context is a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. Acton read some work of Creighton's and thought Creighton wasn't critical enough of certain popes. The context is exactly about why the bishop was too uncritical when looking back on the powerful men of history.
It wasn't a narrative of a pope and how he turned to the dark side after he started wearing white robes.
And I'm sure Acton wasn't referring to men like Ramanujan in his quote, though he may indeed have been a great man in other dimensions.
From the perspective of the "bad men", they are serving good - be that the good they see in themselves or whatever cause it is they act in. Stalin genuinely believed he was acting in the interests of the Soviet people. Pol Pot was liberating his countrymen.
I would argue that the GP's interpretation is correct - we willingly ignore our own moral compasses when we examine the behaviour of the powerful, as to admit that those that hold power over you are "evil" is to admit your own weakness in not actively opposing that power - so power does indeed corrupt those who behold it, as much as those who hold it - if not moreso, as the "bad men" act in "enlightened self interest" and do no wrong in their own eyes - but you do do wrong by knowingly averting your eyes.
-- Foucault
"Two of my cousins and I entered the apartment of the Prophet (ﷺ). One of them said: Messenger of Allah, appoint us rulers of some lands that the Almighty and Glorious God has entrusted to thy care. The other also said something similar. He said: We do not appoint to this position one who asks for it nor anyone who is covetous for the same."
"If a dog dies hungry on the banks of the River Euphrates, Umar will be responsible for dereliction of duty." Umar Ibn al Khattab
can you explain what it means? English is not my first language and I'm having difficulty getting the meaning out of this sentence.
More or less saying everything is the responsibility of the ruler, no matter how small the task, I think.
In this case, it's Umar letting the dog die of hunger instead of keeping the dog well fed.
1: http://www.bestcollegereviews.org/cheating/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqGrz-Y_Lc
>Corruption: dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery
I despise corruption, but I think we do ourselves a disservice when we focus all our attention on the officials who are being corrupted while allowing armies of policy experts to influence official's opinions while funding their campaigns.
The question shouldn't be "Does power really corrupt?", the question should be, "Does power become a magnet for special interests hell bent on corrupting it?"
Thats almost the definition of power, and it's also what corrupts people.
How do you get people to focus on the landscape of corruption rather than politicians? Politicians are easier to blame because they have a name and a face. How do you train people to target landscape?
ADDED: How do you get people to focus on the elements of conflict of interest in larger systems rather than people?
Those who want power shouldn't have it, those who enjoy it do so for the wrong reasons.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic that a quest for peak social optimization doesn't necessarily lead to a dictatorship...
I see a lot of hard working MPs lost in the system, doing as the party machines tell them. They're more subservient than powerful. I see the stars and office holders following a much more Machiavellian approach.
A good question is whether that's mainly down to the types of people getting involved, or the party machines that have developed.
There's something to be said for making things sacred. How power is arrived at, the people who hold it, how it is managed moving forward, and how that power changes (nay, MUST change) over time.
The problem is more that the kind of people who are most likely to end up in positions of power are those who are going to abuse that power and don't care about their responsibility (or have never learned it).
Democracy selects politicians on their ability to persuade voters. Feudalism and dictatorship select those who are the most violent and self-serving.
All are examples of a very niche kind of competence, which has nothing to do with intelligent strategic planning.
For a great speech on why power corrupts, by a powerful person, see this:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html
maybe a mixed system - AI would decide certain topic, and human assembly/public vote in important matters would confirm/reject the solution. this way AI could evolve and have a proven track, and we wouldn't lose all control.
it feels scary to give all control to something that could fail fast and in epic scale, Skynet-style (I know, I played one too many games in my life and it shows)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCU_Grey_Area
And what does it mean to have an AI in charge? First, we don't have any sort of AGI. So any AI is going to be something along the lines of a Watson or AlphaGo. Machine learning + logic + heuristics (the latter two potentially generated by the first).
What level of authority will it be given? Will it be queried for input like any other Cabinet member? "Department of Heuristics, Secretary Watson".
Will it directly guide things? At what point will people be comfortable with this? To what extent will it's authority be permitted to go? This may only appeal to authoritarian-endorsing personality types. In Player Piano, the computer largely guided employment (or employability), but a screw up in a person's CV resulted in their attaining a position they excelled in, and later lost when the CV was corrected (they did not earn their BS because they didn't pass a gym class, consequently they couldn't have earned their Masters or PhD, no longer with the educational background they were unqualified for the post they held).
It'll likely be as mindless a drone at this as actual HR offices are (my mother, a ChemE, was barred from a program management position, no actual engineering work, because she didn't have a civil engineering degree, it was a numbers, dollars and personnel, jox, the degree was irrelevant given her experience).
More likely, these non-general AIs will continue to do what they've done for years but in more areas. They'll inform decision makers, become sufficiently comprehensive to properly correlate numerous variables and detect patterns that we mere mortals cannot see. Many businesses have used some form of this, see optimization and logistics algorithms, for decades, technically centuries but there's been more data and more computational power the last few decades. Now machine learning just automates this sort of statistical and logistical analysis.
"Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior, the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effects of social class on prosociality: Higher class individuals were more likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a higher percentage of their family income to charity (32,090 ≥ N ≥ 3,957; Studies 1–3), were more likely to volunteer (37,136 ≥N ≥ 3,964; Studies 4–6), were more helpful (N = 3,902; Study 7), and were more trusting and trustworthy in an economic game when interacting with a stranger (N = 1,421; Study 8) than lower social class individuals. Although the effects of social class varied somewhat across the kinds of prosocial behavior, countries, and measures of social class, under no condition did we find the negative effect that would have been expected on the basis of previous results reported in the psychological literature. Possible explanations for this divergence and implications are discussed."
I hope you won't get mad if we freeze you until the world cycles back around to the idea of making rulers effective at their jobs.
I don't think we'll have long to wait. The Net is over turning many formerly reasonable ideas by holding up a mirror to us. Will Rogers said: It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. <opinion> The Net is the end of egalitarianism, forever until perhaps genomics is truly cracked.
It's going to an interesting ride! I hope we wind up closer to the Diamond Age than Snow Crash though.
Sully of Slashdot claims to have met Mr Stephenson at a book signing.
Quote forthwith:
According to Neal, Diamond Age and Snow Crash are not in the same universe at all. He stated further that any similarity is just due to the coincidence of the both novels having the same author.
Anyway. It was a good idea even if it was incorrect. Mayhap another shining hypothesis slain by ugly facts.
To clarify: I was implying to Gwern that Snow Crash would be a dismal universe to live in because the world was clearly in some kind of stagnation or slump caused by the (I don't have a good way to express this with words properly) backwash of globalization.
If the Diamond Age is an evolution from Snow Crash then it is a much better world to live in. My original impression is strongly of a more fragmented world yet also one with more stability and wealth as compared with Snow Crash, which is a slow motion train wreck.
Ironically I believe we truly do live in the world of Snow Crash. We've stagnated badly over the last few decades and we're just about waking up to the consequences of it now.
It won't surprise you to learn I'm in favour of an aristocratic approach to tackle the problem like the Vickies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11724637
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Provides compelling case that all politicians tend toward dictatorship with the difference in how fully these tendencies are realized just being in the size of the coalition they have to appease, reward, or bully. With stereotypical absolute dictators this easy to see. On the other end of the spectrum, it is more shrouded. American democracy is theoretically based on a maximum sized coalition equaling roughly the entire population. In practice, the leaders are beholden to and have to influence a much smaller coalition to wield power. Something like the current Sanders/Clinton popular vote vs inner circle super delegate issue demonstrates this pretty well. Fascinating read.
If one never has to burden any thing on one's shoulder, probably that one is the burden of someone else. It's like this: we civil people can't stand killing and shooting, that's why we outsource it to the government and praise the army for their service.
Is it hypocritical? I don't know anymore.
Three examples I've personally noticed.
1. While working at typical working class jobs, if you happen to talk about geek/intellectual stuff e.g. with coworkers - middle class people typically do NOT like that. It really grinds their gears. Even passing references to do with current events.
You can talk about sports or something else you're supposed to be interested in. This is allowed.
You can explain this a dozen different ways but I am convinced it shows something nasty in their character. Don't get me wrong, these are good people but they have this weakness.
2. Not so much attractive women per se as socialites, they have a real problem when they lose their looks. I think the more social you are the worse it gets. Broadly speaking women gradually become less attractive to the opposite sex over time and they are painfully aware of this. Some women are so invested in their appearance that when it goes they undergo terrific emotional turmoil that men probably can't understand (imagine going senile in front of your competitors!) and it produces a mother lode of neurosis. On the other hand women who accept themselves warts and all are easier to get along with.
3. Some people are plain or even ugly. This makes them invisible to many people on a bunch of levels. It can't be a great feeling.
The general point is that all kinds of people should keep an open mind about others. Obviously our bodies are a vehicle and it is what our minds are that really matters. There is also a huge diversity of minds, and that is fine too.
I don't know if you've ever had a meet-up with people from an online forum before who you've previously talked to for years, but contrariwise to internet opinion people are never what you expect. Without the online community you'd probably have never talked to those people in a thousand years. That's why I didn't like Facebook. It was a return to the old badness.
Evolution makes blithely shortsighted errors. We're about as intelligent as we are required to be in order to survive.
We're stuck at local maxima at every level from the personal to the political and that is a problem.
That is why using artificial aids like books for recording memories and genetic splicing is the right thing to do. Biology should not be accepted as Physics. It is alright to cheat and interfere.
I will now sound like I'm contradicting myself but I'm not.
Evolution has accomplished results with brute force that we do not comprehend. Some of those results appear stupid to us but there exist secret underlying patterns that are not available to our minds. Our instincts contain heaps of responses that we often regard as stupid e.g. blushing, jealousy but they are likely adaptions that helped us survive so we will require an understanding of their function.
This is the great truth of conservatism and complex systems. Things are the way they are because reasons. That the proponents of this view can't explain themselves articulately is not relevant. The reasons are real. You are not your frontal cortex. That's just the Speaker in the house of parliament.
That's why jenga is a problem. Jenga gives us the FDA. Jenga eventually produces a caste system. The great project is to somehow open a third door nobody has noticed. Let me know if you figure it out!
Uncoincidentally I like Patri Friedman's idea of constructing seasteads. I don't want to sound like I'm allergic to work but real change is hard work! It is like everything interesting happens at edges of things.
What's problematic is how people go about it. Our society doesn't teach us how to be selective with grace and manners. So when people realize they have power in a situation they freak out a bit and might over react in being excessively picky or rude to others.
The problem is not that there is no basis for using a filter but that assuming everybody is identical within a class (or subset, which has a 1:1 mapping to the notion of class) is a logical error.
It is not about morality so much as logic. Suppose I find Italians to be corrupt and untrustworthy. Well evidently there exist Italians who are honest with good intentions. That some of set of Italians genuinely do belong to a mafia is not indicative of the larger group, even if it were so that a majority of Italians were mafiosos.
Of course real life is complicated, people have to resort to satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing) and worse yet harmful behavior patterns aren't limited to any subset of the group. Notoriously there exist robin hoods and bad cops. Choosing not to go down the wrong street is reasonable under satisficing but rejecting job candidates for having the wrong names is.
All of this is to say that discrimination in of itself is not illogical but discriminating indiscriminately IS.
But, besides the fact that the difference might not be in the direction you think it goes, in all these cares, inter-group variability is tiny compared to intra group variability.
That means: it doesn't matter in practice. Whether men ow women are on average more intelligent, those 1-3 average IQ points are so irrelevant compared to the 15-30 points 5 random people in a room would generally differ from each other that it is barely of academic interest and certainly useless to use to judge a random men or women you meet.
This thing is true for many differences between groups often discriminated against. Scientist are thus inclined not to research these differences: if they exist they are rarely helpful for policy (too small) but often their reporting results in people misbehaving even more due to their misunderstanding the impact (or rather lack thereof).
However I strongly disagree that it does not matter in practice. In practice people are not randomly assigned rooms to be in. They certainly do not meet other people randomly. The result is group identity becomes ever more strongly associated and tribes form. Stereotypes are developed and so on.
For example; it does not surprise me that tiny eastern European countries have coders working for Google but much larger and closer minority populations do not. EE workers are natively nowhere close to Google HQ and they don't even share a common language and culture. These are high barriers.
That there exist a larger number of people with the hypothetical potential to code for Google (which surely exist because of intra group variability) within that minority American population is not relevant. Those people do not want to code for Google i.e. exchange their labour in this area for money. The eastern european coders from (really) tiny states on the other hand have a strong desire to work in those domains that computer corporations select for in their workers.
Even though there are many differences between a typical coder in the United States and a typical Eastern European coder, their shared 'tribe' of basically being geeks trumps everything else. That ought to be GOOD news for those who want to avoid discrimination based on the superficial differences but somehow it does not seem to be taken as this. That's politics.
Obviously scientists are under social pressure not to examine such visible differences. This is because they are failures at being scientists. I do not say that lightly. These are atrocious failures of omission. If society only receives measurements it looks for, then why bother doing any research at all? We already know the answers! It is certainly cheaper to confirm society's biases, whether we're in Victorian times or in the present. It's like being a fat man avoiding the weighing scales.
I understand your point about the gen.pop taking complex research with many confounding variables and reducing the results to a simplistic and inaccurate story. That worries me as well, not just in cases of racial discrimination, but as a general error. That said I cannot agree it makes no difference for public policy (because of the non-random sorting I mentioned earlier). Public policy ought to be based on reality, if the map does not conform to the territory problems will occur. Any system that produces inaccurate information and then has to depend on the false outputs will constantly be tripping itself up.
As a last point, although gen.pop can do dumb things sometimes, that is no reason to feed them platitudes. They do however have bullshit detectors which go off when what the media describes to them isn't what they see in their realities. They are capable of complex thought and thought evolution over time and I fail to see how deliberately misleading them can lead to a greater good without dysfunction. Frankly I think a decline in economic prosperity has a lot more to do with inter-group dynamics going bad, with propaganda causing it to be worse, but as a second order affect.
I agree that IQ is far from the deciding factor in most individual cases. 3-5 points really isn't that much. You could get that many points by taking a ten minute walk and a shower! The issue though is that just as gravity does not affect you and I on the microscale we are at, with enough mass/size things start happening that really do impact on us. I don't know if you've ever walked from a room with average people to a room with people who are totally into the thing you're into, but the difference is very palatable to me. I much prefer the second room over the first, even if that first room had a slightly higher IQ. Why? Because I can now get something done! In fact we all can. That almost comes as a relief.