[extropy-chat] Would You Enjoy Knitting?

[Robin Hanson]

At 03:45 PM 7/4/2006, Mark Walker wrote:
> > ... Many married people want to be less tempted to betray their
> > marriage. ... Many somewhat altruistic people would like to be more
> > truly altruistic.  Many soldiers would like to be more courageous in
> > battle.  And so on.
>
>If I understand you Robin you are saying that self-deception is the root
>cause of us wanting to be more ideal. The idea is that I might deceive
>myself about how good looking I am, and since this is a matter of
>self-deception at some level (however one describes the cognitive states of
>self-deception) I realize that I am not what I claim to be. But I am not
>sure how this helps. Is the idea that if say I am objectively a 5 out of 10
>on the good looking scale but deceive myself that I am a 7 then wanting to
>be ideal is a way of letting my beliefs track the truth. If this is the case
>then shouldn't my goal to be a 7 objectively so that now my beliefs and the
>truth dovetail? How do you explain my wanting to be a 10 if I don't deceive
>myself as being a 10? Is the idea that there would be an iteration of the
>problem until I reached perfection? If so, it looks like I would have to
>have some pretty sophisticated beliefs to explain all of this.

I find this paragraph somewhat hard to follow.   Other people respect us
more when we are more ideal, and so we want to give the impression that
we are relatively ideal, but we don't actually want to be that ideal.   So we
deceive ourselves into thinking we are more ideal than we are, to try to have
it both ways - to gain the respect of others while avoiding the costs of being
ideal.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323