[ExI] Heroism without self-sacrifice

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

I actually have no problem with the idea that self-sacrifice reveals 
heroism; it shows the importance to them of whatever they are 
pursuing.  The implication that heroism *requires* self-sacrifice 
implies that there is no other way to show dedication, however.

After all, the point of heroism is not to reveal virtue, but to 
protect that which is worth protecting.

My own conceptualization of heroism is touched on somewhat in:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/superhero-bias.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/01/something-to-pr.html

**

Superhero Bias

Followup to:  The Halo Effect

Suppose there's a heavily armed sociopath, a kidnapper with hostages, 
who has just rejected all requests for negotiation and announced his 
intent to start killing.  In real life, the good guys don't usually 
kick down the door when the bad guy has hostages.  But sometimes - 
very rarely, but sometimes - life imitates Hollywood to the extent of 
genuine good guys needing to smash through a door.

Imagine, in two widely separated realities, two heroes who charge into 
the room, first to confront the villain.

In one reality, the hero is strong enough to throw cars, can fire 
power blasts out of his nostrils, has X-ray hearing, and his skin 
doesn't just deflect bullets but annihilates them on contact.  The 
villain has ensconced himself in an elementary school and taken over 
two hundred children hostage; their parents are waiting outside, weeping.

In another reality, the hero is a New York police officer, and the 
hostages are three prostitutes the villain collected off the street.

Consider this question very carefully:  Who is the greater hero?  And 
who is more likely to get their own comic book?

The halo effect is that perceptions of all positive traits are 
correlated.  Profiles rated higher on scales of attractiveness, are 
also rated higher on scales of talent, kindness, honesty, and 
intelligence.

And so comic-book characters who seem strong and invulnerable, both 
positive traits, also seem to possess more of the heroic traits of 
courage and heroism.  And yet:

     "How tough can it be to act all brave and courageous when you're 
pretty much invulnerable?"
             -- Empowered, Vol. 1

I can't remember if I read the following point somewhere, or 
hypothesized it myself:  Fame, in particular, seems to combine 
additively with all other personality characteristics.  Consider 
Gandhi.  Was Gandhi the most altruistic person of the 20th century, or 
just the most famous altruist?  Gandhi faced police with riot sticks 
and soldiers with guns.  But Gandhi was a celebrity, and he was 
protected by his celebrity.  What about the others in the march, the 
people who faced riot sticks and guns even though there wouldn't be 
international headlines if they were put in the hospital or gunned down?

What did Gandhi think of getting the headlines, the celebrity, the 
fame, the place in history, becoming the archetype for non-violent 
resistance, when he took less risk than any of the people marching 
with him?  How did he feel when one of those anonymous heroes came up 
to him, eyes shining, and told Gandhi how wonderful he was?  Did 
Gandhi ever visualize his world in those terms?  I don't know; I'm not 
Gandhi.

This is not in any sense a criticism of Gandhi.  The point of 
non-violent resistance is not to show off your courage.  That can be 
done much more easily by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.  Gandhi 
couldn't help being somewhat-but-not-entirely protected by his 
celebrity.  And Gandhi's actions did take courage - not as much 
courage as marching anonymously, but still a great deal of courage.

The bias I wish to point out is that Gandhi's fame score seems to get 
perceptually added to his justly accumulated altruism score.  When you 
think about nonviolence, you think of Gandhi - not an anonymous 
protestor in one of Gandhi's marches who faced down riot clubs and 
guns, and got beaten, and had to be taken to the hospital, and walked 
with a limp for the rest of her life, and no one ever remembered her name.

Similarly, which is greater - to risk your life to save two hundred 
children, or to risk your life to save three adults?

The answer depends on what one means by greater.  If you ever have to 
choose between saving three adults and saving two hundred children, 
then choose the latter.  "Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he 
had saved the whole world" may be a fine applause light, but it's 
terrible moral advice if you've got to pick one or the other.  So if 
you mean "greater" in the sense of "Which is more important?" or 
"Which is the preferred outcome?" or "Which should I choose if I have 
to do one or the other?" then it is greater to save two hundred than 
three.

But if you ask about greatness in the sense of revealed virtue, then 
someone who would risk their life to save only three lives, reveals 
more courage than someone who would risk their life to save two 
hundred but not three.

This doesn't mean that you can deliberately choose to risk your life 
to save three adults, and let the two hundred schoolchildren go hang, 
because you want to reveal more virtue.  Someone who risks their life 
because they want to be virtuous has revealed far less virtue than 
someone who risks their life because they want to save others. 
Someone who chooses to save three lives rather than two hundred lives, 
because they think it reveals greater virtue, is so selfishly 
fascinated with their own "greatness" as to have committed the moral 
equivalent of manslaughter.

It's one of those wu wei scenarios:  You cannot reveal virtue by 
trying to reveal virtue.  Given a choice between a safe method to save 
the world which involves no personal sacrifice or discomfort, and a 
method that risks your life and requires you to endure great 
privation, you cannot become a hero by deliberately choosing the 
second path.  There is nothing heroic about wanting to be a hero.  It 
would be a lost purpose.

Truly virtuous people who are genuinely trying to save lives, rather 
than trying to reveal virtue, will constantly seek to save more lives 
with less effort, which means that less of their virtue will be 
revealed.  It may be confusing, but it's not contradictory.

But we cannot always choose to be invulnerable to bullets.  After 
we've done our best to reduce risk and increase scope, any remaining 
heroism is well and truly revealed.

The police officer who puts their life on the line with no 
superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, 
and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater 
virtue than Superman - who is only a mere superhero.

**

Something to Protect

Followup to:  Tsuyoku Naritai, Circular Altruism

In the gestalt of (ahem) Japanese fiction, one finds this oft-repeated 
motif:  Power comes from having something to protect.

I'm not just talking about superheroes that power up when a friend is 
threatened, the way it works in Western fiction.  In the Japanese 
version it runs deeper than that.

In the X saga it's explicitly stated that each of the good guys draw 
their power from having someone - one person - who they want to 
protect.  Who?  That question is part of X's plot - the "most precious 
person" isn't always who we think.  But if that person is killed, or 
hurt in the wrong way, the protector loses their power - not so much 
from magical backlash, as from simple despair.  This isn't something 
that happens once per week per good guy, the way it would work in a 
Western comic.  It's equivalent to being Killed Off For Real - taken 
off the game board.

The way it works in Western superhero comics is that the good guy gets 
bitten by a radioactive spider; and then he needs something to do with 
his powers, to keep him busy, so he decides to fight crime.  And then 
Western superheroes are always whining about how much time their 
superhero duties take up, and how they'd rather be ordinary mortals so 
they could go fishing or something.

Similarly, in Western real life, unhappy people are told that they 
need a "purpose in life", so they should pick out an altruistic cause 
that goes well with their personality, like picking out nice 
living-room drapes, and this will brighten up their days by adding 
some color, like nice living-room drapes.  You should be careful not 
to pick something too expensive, though.

In Western comics, the magic comes first, then the purpose:  Acquire 
amazing powers, decide to protect the innocent.  In Japanese fiction, 
often, it works the other way around.

Of course I'm not saying all this to generalize from fictional 
evidence. But I want to convey a concept whose deceptively close 
Western analogue is not what I mean.

I have touched before on the idea that a rationalist must have 
something they value more than "rationality":  The Art must have a 
purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion. 
But do not mistake me, and think I am advocating that rationalists 
should pick out a nice altruistic cause, by way of having something to 
do, because rationality isn't all that important by itself.  No.  I am 
asking:  Where do rationalists come from?  How do we acquire our powers?

It is written in the Twelve Virtues of Rationality:

     How can you improve your conception of rationality?  Not by 
saying to yourself, "It is my duty to be rational."  By this you only 
enshrine your mistaken conception.  Perhaps your conception of 
rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great 
Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, "The sky is green," and you look 
up at the sky and see blue.  If you think:  "It may look like the sky 
is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great 
Teacher," you lose a chance to discover your mistake.

Historically speaking, the way humanity finally left the trap of 
authority and began paying attention to, y'know, the actual sky, was 
that beliefs based on experiment turned out to be much more useful 
than beliefs based on authority.  Curiosity has been around since the 
dawn of humanity, but the problem is that spinning campfire tales 
works just as well for satisfying curiosity.

Historically speaking, science won because it displayed greater raw 
strength in the form of technology, not because science sounded more 
reasonable.  To this very day, magic and scripture still sound more 
reasonable to untrained ears than science.  That is why there is 
continuous social tension between the belief systems.  If science not 
only worked better than magic, but also sounded more intuitively 
reasonable, it would have won entirely by now.

Now there are those who say:  "How dare you suggest that anything 
should be valued more than Truth?  Must not a rationalist love Truth 
more than mere usefulness?"

Forget for a moment what would have happened historically to someone 
like that - that people in pretty much that frame of mind defended the 
Bible because they loved Truth more than mere accuracy.  Propositional 
morality is a glorious thing, but it has too many degrees of freedom.

No, the real point is that a rationalist's love affair with the Truth 
is, well, just more complicated as an emotional relationship.

One doesn't become an adept rationalist without caring about the 
truth, both as a purely moral desideratum and as something that's fun 
to have.  I doubt there are many master composers who hate music.

But part of what I like about rationality is the discipline imposed by 
requiring beliefs to yield predictions, which ends up taking us much 
closer to the truth than if we sat in the living room obsessing about 
Truth all day.  I like the complexity of simultaneously having to love 
True-seeming ideas, and also being ready to drop them out the window 
at a moment's notice.  I even like the glorious aesthetic purity of 
declaring that I value mere usefulness above aesthetics.  That is 
almost a contradiction, but not quite; and that has an aesthetic 
quality as well, a delicious humor.

And of course, no matter how much you profess your love of mere 
usefulness, you should never actually end up deliberately believing a 
useful false statement.

So don't oversimplify the relationship between loving truth and loving 
usefulness.  It's not one or the other.  It's complicated, which is 
not necessarily a defect in the moral aesthetics of single events.

But morality and aesthetics alone, believing that one ought to be 
"rational" or that certain ways of thinking are "beautiful", will not 
lead you to the center of the Way.  It wouldn't have gotten humanity 
out of the authority-hole.

In Circular Altruism, I discussed this dilemma:  Which of these 
options would you prefer:

    1. Save 400 lives, with certainty
    2. Save 500 lives, 90% probability; save no lives, 10% probability.

You may be tempted to grandstand, saying, "How dare you gamble with 
people's lives?"  Even if you, yourself, are one of the 500 - but you 
don't know which one - you may still be tempted to rely on the 
comforting feeling of certainty, because our own lives are often worth 
less to us than a good intuition.

But if your precious daughter is one of the 500, and you don't know 
which one, then, perhaps, you may feel more impelled to shut up and 
multiply - to notice that you have an 80% chance of saving her in the 
first case, and a 90% chance of saving her in the second.

And yes, everyone in that crowd is someone's son or daughter.  Which, 
in turn, suggests that we should pick the second option as altruists, 
as well as concerned parents.

My point is not to suggest that one person's life is more valuable 
than 499 people.  What I am trying to say is that more than one's own 
life has to be at stake, before someone becomes desperate enough to 
override comfortable intuitions with math.  It takes visceral panic, 
channeled through cold calculation, to cut away all the distractions.

What if you believe that it is "rational" to choose the certainty of 
option 1?  Lots of people think that "rationality" is about choosing 
only methods that are certain to work, and rejecting all uncertainty. 
  But, hopefully, you care more about your daughter's life than about 
"rationality".

Will pride in your own virtue as a rationalist save you?  Not if you 
believe that it is virtuous to choose certainty.  You will only be 
able to learn something about rationality if your daughter's life 
matters more to you than your pride as a rationalist.

You may even learn something about rationality from the experience, if 
you are already far enough grown in your Art to say, "I must have had 
the wrong conception of rationality," and not, "Look at how 
rationality gave me the wrong answer!"

(The essential difficulty in becoming a master rationalist is that you 
need quite a bit of rationality to bootstrap the learning process.)

Is your belief that you ought to be rational, more important than your 
life?  Because, as I've previously observed, risking your life isn't 
comparatively all that scary.  Being the lone voice of dissent in the 
crowd and having everyone look at you funny is much scarier than a 
mere threat to your life, according to the revealed preferences of 
teenagers who drink at parties and then drive home.  It will take 
something terribly important to make you willing to leave the pack.  A 
threat to your life won't be enough.

Is your will to rationality stronger than your pride?  Can it be, if 
your will to rationality stems from your pride in your self-image as a 
rationalist?  It's helpful - very helpful - to have a self-image which 
says that you are the sort of person who confronts harsh truth.  It's 
helpful to have too much self-respect to knowingly lie to yourself or 
refuse to face evidence.  But there may come a time when you have to 
admit that you've been doing rationality all wrong.  Then your pride, 
your self-image as a rationalist, may make that too hard to face.

If you've prided yourself on believing what the Great Teacher says - 
even when it seems harsh, even when you'd rather not - that may make 
it all the more bitter a pill to swallow, to admit that the Great 
Teacher is a fraud, and all your noble self-sacrifice was for naught.

Where do you get the will to keep moving forward?

When I look back at my own personal journey toward rationality - not 
just humanity's historical journey - well, I grew up believing very 
strongly that I ought to be rational.  This made me an above-average 
Traditional Rationalist a la Feynman and Heinlein, and nothing more. 
It did not drive me to go beyond the teachings I had received.  I only 
began to grow further as a rationalist once I had something terribly 
important that I needed to do.  Something more important than my pride 
as a rationalist, never mind my life.

Only when you become more wedded to success than to any of your 
beloved techniques of rationality, do you begin to appreciate these 
words of Miyamoto Musashi:

     "You can win with a long weapon, and yet you can also win with a 
short weapon.  In short, the Way of the Ichi school is the spirit of 
winning, whatever the weapon and whatever its size."
             -- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

Don't mistake this for a specific teaching of rationality.  It 
describes how you learn the Way, beginning with a desperate need to 
succeed.  No one masters the Way until more than their life is at 
stake.  More than their comfort, more even than their pride.

You can't just pick out a Cause like that because you feel you need a 
hobby.  Go looking for a "good cause", and your mind will just fill in 
a standard cliche.  Learn how to multiply, and perhaps you will 
recognize a drastically important cause when you see one.

But if you have a cause like that, it is right and proper to wield 
your rationality in its service.

To strictly subordinate the aesthetics of rationality to a higher 
cause, is part of the aesthetic of rationality.  You should pay 
attention to that aesthetic:  You will never master rationality well 
enough to win with any weapon, if you do not appreciate the beauty for 
its own sake.

**

The kind of dedication that drove Musashi to win with any weapon - 
this reveals itself in heroism that sacrifices itself for that 
something to protect, but it also reveals itself in the drive to win 
whatever the weapon and whatever its size.  With self-sacrifice, if 
that is the winning way; and without self-sacrifice, if it is not.

So, do I get a PhD?

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence