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Stuart_Armstrong 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.
It depends on the expertise; for instance, if we're talking about systems of axioms, then mathematicians may be those with the most relevant opinions as to whether one system has preference over others. And the idea that a unique system of moral axioms would have preference over all others makes no mathematical sense. If philosphers were espousing the n-realism position ("there are systems of moral axioms that are more true than others, but there will probably be many such systems, most mutually incompatible"), then I would have a hard time arguing against this.
But, put quite simply, I dismiss the moral realistic position for the moment as the arguments go like this:
There are too many 'undefined's in there. There is also very little philosphical literature I've encountred on 2), 3) and 4), which is at least as important as 1). A lot of the literature on 1) seems to be reducible to linguistic confusion, and (most importantly) different moral realists have different reasons for believing 1), reasons that are often contradictory.
From a outsider's perspective, these seem powerful reasons to assume that philosphers are mired in confusion on this issue, and that their opinions are not determining. My strong mathematical reasons for claiming that there is no "superiority total ordering" on any general collection of systems of axioms clinches the argument for me, pending further evidence.