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@QiaochuYuan I think this can be fixed by including this very reasoning -- considering that your actions, in addition to helping locally, might be incentivizing, hence partially causing, more suffering in the long run; and adjusting accordingly.
@paul__is__here not if the borderline's emotions are intense enough lmao. i think there's clearly some of this going on in whatever ethics is, but at some point you have to admit it gets epicyclic and the real considerations are not about suffering as such
@QiaochuYuan explains a lot https://t.co/H0RAx6NQNi
@QiaochuYuan Any examples of an ethical situation independent of experience? Do you assume suffering will never be measurable? If so I can see why you’d be worried about people leveraging their claimed suffering to indefinitely manipulate.
@QiaochuYuan consider the case in which you have an unexpected pregnancy with a bpd partner. You are not responsible for their emotional regulation, but you both find yourselves with a duty to the child not incomparable to the duty paramedics owe the victims of a car crash they have come to
@QiaochuYuan your terms are acceptable! 1. BPD is one of the few personality disorders for which a majority-success-rate intervention (DBT) exists. 2. i grew up w/ 2 immediate family members who had it, and can tell you honestly from exp their attempts at blackmail are clumsy and ineffective.
I've always found it strange that these kinds of ethical positions are adjacent to spiritual-woo-bhagavad-gita-creation-destruction where 'suffering' is reconciled via a larger system pov. E.g. we don't think of our cells as engaged in constant warfare and death It's less Tom Bombabil "I don't care about the Ring" and more Suraman "Only I can wield the Ring 'goodly' "
@QiaochuYuan You must be capable of taking responsibility for the harm you do cause, intentionally or not, even if that makes you vulnerable to manipulation. Being manipulated might be embarrassing, but becoming Ebeneezer Scrooge is much more embarrassing ❤️🩹 Sending prayers for ya
@QiaochuYuan Imagine an alien species of Altruism Bunnies, that evolved to exploit Effective Altruism. They experience the most excruciating pain if they can't multiply exponentially. Are EA's obligated to keep feeding them?
@QiaochuYuan My foundation of ethics is learning. Pain and suffering aren't inherently bad. The bad part is loss: debilitating trauma, loss of life, loss of opportunity. Pain and suffering are, on balance, good when the learning experience outweighs the loss.
@QiaochuYuan "simply ignore the BPDs" is also not as straightforward as it might seem. rhymes with: https://t.co/bfI76GSqVv
"ignore the haters" is a more complex directive than people without haters realize because it's not always obvious in advance who's a hater and who's not deciding to ignore some subset of people requires introducing filters working with filters can change you