= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jhuffman comments on Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (198)
There are a lot of posts here that presuppose some combination of moral anti-realism and value complexity. These views go together well: if value is not fundamental, but dependent on characteristics of humans, then it can derive complexity from this and not suffer due to Occam's Razor.
There are another pair of views that go together well: moral realism and value simplicity. Many posts here strongly dismiss these views, effectively allocating near-zero probability to them. I want to point out that this is a case of non-experts being very much at odds with expert opinion and being clearly overconfident. In the Phil Papers survey for example, 56.3% of philosophers lean towards or believe realism, while only 27.7% lean towards or accept anti-realism.
http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
Given this, and given comments from people like me in the intersection of the philosophical and LW communities who can point out that it isn't a case of stupid philosophers supporting realism and all the really smart ones supporting anti-realism, there is no way that the LW community should have anything like the confidence that it does on this point.
Moreover, I should point out that most of the realists lean towards naturalism, which allows a form of realism that is very different to the one that Eliezer critiques. I should also add that within philosophy, the trend is probably not towards anti-realism, but towards realism. The high tide of anti-realism was probably in the middle of the 20th Century, and since then it has lost its shiny newness and people have come up with good arguments against it (which are never discussed here...).
Even for experts in meta-ethics, I can't see how their confidence can get outside the 30%-70% range given the expert disagreement. For non-experts, I really can't see how one could even get to 50% confidence in anti-realism, much less the kind of 98% confidence that is typically expressed here.
Is there a reason I should care about the % of any group of people that think this or that? Just give us the argument, or write another article about it. It sounds interesting.
Re: "Is there a reason I should care about the % of any group of people that think this or that?"
Generally speaking, yes, of course. If lots of experts in a relevant field think something is true, then their opinion carries some weight.
In things related to observable facts or repeatable experiments I'd agree. In more abstract things, I'm less interested in what the polls say.
Moral realism is a school of thought which has come in and out of style and favor among philosophers. Plato was arguably an moral realist; this isn't a new idea or area of debate amongst philosophers. Telling me where we are on the constantly shifting scale of acceptance is really pretty meaningless. Its like telling me 58% of fashion designers like the color black this year.
Just to be sure, are you saying that you think there is a fact of the matter about whether moral realism is true, but you don't think philosophers' opinions are significantly correlated with this fact?
Moral realism is a meta-ethical view - I do not know that a such a viewpoint can be as a matter of fact correct or incorrect. Maybe an ethical realist would argue that it is a matter of fact, I'm not sure - an anti-realist might argue that neither viewpoint can be a matter of fact. The whole argument is really about "what are facts" and "what can be objectively true or false" so I suppose that someone may extend this view to the meta-layer where the merits of the viewpoint itself are discussed although I think that would not be very useful.
I'm going to deploy what I call the Wittgenstein Chomsky blah blah blah argument. Philosophy is just words in English; there is little ultimate meaning we are going to find here unless we declare our mathematical axioms. Already most of the views here seem reconcilable by redefining what exactly the different words mean.
To answer the question: some things can be proven objectively true, some things can be proven objectively false, some things can be proven to be undecidable. A fact is a true statement that follows from your given system of axioms. I personally am unsure if most moral principles or meta ethical systems can be declared objectively true or false with a standard ethical system, but I'm not going to take it seriously until a theorem prover says so. We are never going to convince each other of ultimate philosophical truth by having conversations like this.
I suppose this makes me an anti-realist, unless someone feels like redefining realism for me. :D
Again, it feels like I am missing something... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/ helped a little.
While at times Toby Ord refers to 56% as "most" philosophers, a claim that is disputable on grounds of fashion, at other times he draws the line at 20%; the point is that realist philosophers are not a tiny minority, rejecting widely accepted arguments.