Tim: "If rerunning the clock produces radically different moralities each time, the relativists would be considered to be correct."
Actually compassion evolved many different times as a central doctrine of all major spiritual traditions. See the charter for compassion. This is in line with my prediction that I made independently and being unaware of this fact until I started looking for it back in late 2007 and eventually finding the link in late 2008 with Karen Armstrong's book The Great Transformation.
Tim: "Why is it a universal moral attractor?" Eliezer: "What do you mean by "morality"?"
Central point in my thinking: that is good which increases fitness. If it is not good - not fit - it is unfit for existence. Assuming this to be true we are very much limited in our freedom by what we can do without going extinct (actually my most recent blog post is about exactly that: Freedom in the evolving universe).
from the Principia Cybernetica web: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/POS/Turchap14.html#Heading14
"Let us think about the results of following different ethical teachings in the evolving universe. It is evident that these results depend mainly on how the goals advanced by the teaching correlate with the basic law of evolution. The basic law or plan of evolution, like all laws of nature, is probabilistic. It does not prescribe anything unequivocally, but it does prohibit some things. No one can act against the laws of nature. Thus, ethical teachings which contradict the plan of evolution, that is to say which pose goals that are incompatible or even simply alien to it, cannot lead their followers to a positive contribution to evolution, which means that they obstruct it and will be erased from the memory of the world. Such is the immanent characteristic of development: what corresponds to its plan is eternalized in the structures which follow in time while what contradicts the plan is overcome and perishes."
Eliezer: "It obviously has nothing to do with the function I try to compute to figure out what I should be doing."
Once you realize the implications of Turchin's statement above it has everything to do with it :-)
Now some may say that evolution is absolutely random and direction less, or that multilevel selection is flawed or similar claims. But reevaluating the evidence against both these claims by people like Valentin Turchin, Teilhard De Chardin, John Stewart, Stuart Kaufmann, John Smart and many others regarding evolution's direction and the ideas of David Sloan Wilson regarding multilevel selection, one will have a hard time maintaining either position.
:-)
Actually compassion evolved many different times as a central doctrine of all major spiritual traditions.
No, it evolved once, as part of mammalian biology. Show me a non-mammal intelligence that evolved compassion, and I'll take that argument more seriously.
Also, why should we give a damn about "evolution" wants, when we can, in principle anyway, form a singleton and end evolution? Evolution is mindless. It doesn't have a plan. It doesn't have a purpose. It's just what happens under certain conditions. If all life on Earth was destroyed by run...
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.