[ExI] Meta question

[William Flynn Wallace]

School is often a hindrance for education. What I meant by moral education
is learning to be virtuous; sometimes by hearing an important lesson like
from the engineer, sometimes by taking a stand like you about the
certification or the capacitance.  anders

Here is a story I just shared with a friend:

When a man came to my house and told me that my dogs had been trashing his
garden and threatened to shoot them, I lit up and told him that I'd burn
his house down.  He turned and walked away while I told him that if he shot
my dogs he'd be in deep shit.

He was about twice my size and looked very threatening, but I paid no
attention to that.  If I had been asked beforehand what I would have done I
am not at all sure that I would have successfully predicted my behavior in
the real situation.  Ditto being in combat.  Would I be a hero, a wimp?  No
idea.  And neither does anyone else.  The guy went home and called the
deputy sheriff on me.  He was really shaken.

Did I act morally?  Questionable, certainly.  But given the situation
beforehand I don't think that I would have predicted that I'd act like I
did.  Far from it.  He really got me angry.  Being angry and combative, or
fearful like in combat, can veto all the ethics you learned from Aristotle
or just by thinking for year and years.

You remember the Kitty Genovese story?  It's about a woman who was killed
on a city street while others watched and did nothing, not even call the
police.  Psych students told that story said that they would have done
something, but many repetitions of that done in experiments on city streets
with hidden cameras show that extremely few people do anything to help.

If a man was sprawled on a street would you assume he was drunk and pass on
by?  Just about everybody does.

Putting in answers on a paper and pencil test of moral thinking and
behavior can be totally uncorrelated with real life behavior.  That's one
big problem with the current favorite:  would you throw a switch to divert
a train and kill one person while saving five?  Not a real situation and
maybe, again, uncorrelated with action done in a real one.

bill w


On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Anders <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2016-08-19 17:42, Keith Henson wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 2:14 AM, Anders <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>>
>>> I was deeply moved by Spike's story about the Messerschmitt engineer.
>>> Yes,
>>> this is what real moral education is about.
>>>
>> It's been a long time, but I can't remember _any_ moral eduction in
>> school.  Still, I think I made the right choices even without such
>> education.
>>
>
> School is often a hindrance for education. What I meant by moral education
> is learning to be virtuous; sometimes by hearing an important lesson like
> from the engineer, sometimes by taking a stand like you about the
> certification or the capacitance.
>
> I think Aristotle was right on the money in the Nichomachean ethics: we
> should strive to be excellent people, and the way to be virtuous is by
> learning to act in virtuous ways. This is not something you learn by
> hearing good arguments, but by doing the right things (or failing, and
> trying harder again). This kind of virtue ethics is IMHO limited, so you
> may want to figure out your moral system using more modern approaches or
> thinking really hard about who you want to be, but there is a key truth to
> that setting down good habits can make doing the right choices easier and
> more natural.
>
> I have just spent the entire evening adding an awkward correction factor
> to a graph in a paper. It is handling the difference in star density inside
> the Milky Way and in the universe at large, but the number gets cube-rooted
> and the overall function is plotted on a log-scale so the difference is
> minimal: if you compare with and without you see a difference, but nobody
> would really notice the flaw if I left it out. But I would know I had
> fudged my calculations, or more correctly, chosen some recreation over
> providing the best scientific analysis of the question at hand. There is a
> professional ethics in science, and I want to be good at the sane parts of
> it. Hence late evening wrestling with curve fitting. This experience is
> leaving neural traces that likely will make me a bit more conscientious as
> a researcher in the future.
>
>
>
> --
> Dr Anders Sandberg
> Future of Humanity Institute
> Oxford Martin School
> Oxford University
>
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>
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