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Wei_Dai comments on Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome - Less Wrong
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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.
I accept this may be a case of the Popularization Bias (speaking for myself). I'd like to see some posts on the arguments against anti-realism...
Agreed. Perhaps Toby or David Pearce can be persuaded.
I don't think I can persuaded.
I have many good responses to the comments here, and I suppose I could sketch out some of the main arguments against anti-realism, but there are also many serious demands on my time and sadly this doesn't look like a productive discussion. There seems to be very little real interest in finding out more (with a couple of notable exceptions). Instead the focus is on how to justify what is already believed without finding out any thing else about what the opponents are saying (which is particularly alarming given that many commenters are pointing out that they don't understand what the opponents are saying!).
Given all of this, I fear that writing a post would not be a good use of my time.
Alas. Perhaps some Less Wrongers with more time will write and post a hypothetical apostasy. I invite folk to do so.
This is a little unfair; as soon as you take a deflationary stance on anything, you're saying that the other stance doesn't really have comprehensible content, and it's a mistake to turn that into a general-purpose dismissal of deflationary stances.
If you think that's more true here than it is in other discussion forums, we're doing something very wrong. I understand that you're not able to spend time writing for this audience, but for those of us who do want to find out more about what moral realists are saying, every link you can provide to existing essays is valuable.
I, for one, am interested in hearing arguments against anti-realism.
If you don't have personal interest in writing up a sketch, that's fine. Might you have some links to other people who have already done so?
Elsewhere in the thread.