You could become trapped in “low motives” or dysfunctional mindsets yourself, as a result of spending too much attention on modeling them in others
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I think these potential downsides are actually real and people who fear them have a point. I’d love to hear the case for these fears being unrealistic or surmountable.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
I find that a lot of times when people do to-me-incomprehensibly bad things their motivations aren't necessarily "low"!
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
I mean, it makes sense, right. The members of any sufficiently large group of people are not going to be that far off Median Human Badness (although certainly there are groups that are worse/better than average). So any group is going to have lots of people w/ noble motivations.
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Replying to @ozyfrantz @s_r_constantin
Most commonly of course the noble motivations and low motivations are mixed up together. (In people who do good things as well!)
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Replying to @ozyfrantz @s_r_constantin
In Judaism, everyone has a Good Inclination and an Evil Inclination inside them. And it's possible to harness the Evil Inclination to do good things and to misuse the Good Inclination to do evil things. I'm an atheist at this point but I still find it to be a useful framework.
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Replying to @slooterman @ozyfrantz
interesting. i’ve heard of this but don’t have a great sense of what these are. what’s the evil inclination if it’s not just an inclination to do evil things?
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ozyfrantz
It's a drive to satisfy ones own pleasure. There's a midrash (exegetical text) in which the rabbis manage to capture and lock up the Evil Inclination. The result is that nobody gets out of bed to work, nobody has sex with their wives or husbands, and chickens stop laying eggs.
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So you kind of need the Evil Inclination, because it's motivating in a way the Good Inclination is not.
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Yeah, I wouldn’t call that evil then! & it’s not a secret that people have it.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @ozyfrantz
Perhaps. I think it's a better way to look at why people do bad things. Almost nobody wakes up in the morning, twirls their villain mustache, and then thinks about how to murder the most babies. It's often an issue of being more self-serving than is technically optimal.
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