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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Strong moral realism, meta-ethics and pseudo-questions. - Less Wrong
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I truly and honestly say to you, Roko, that while you got most of my points, maybe even 75% of my points, there seems to be a remaining point that is genuinely completely lost on you. And a number of other people. It is a difficult point. People here are making fun of my attempt to explain it using an analogy to Lob's Theorem, as if that was the sort of thing I did on a whim, or because of being stupid. But... my dear audience... really, by this point, you ought to be giving me the benefit of the doubt about that sort of thing.
Also, it appears from the comment posted below and earlier that this mysterious missed point is accessible to, for example, Nick Tarleton.
It looks to me like the opposing position is not based on disagreement with this point but rather outright failure to understand what is being said.
Well, you did make a claim about what is the right translation when speaking to babyeaters:
But there has to be some standard by which you prefer the explanation "we mistranslated the term 'morality'" to "we disagree about morality", right? What is that? Presumably, one could make your argument about any two languages, not just ones with a species gap:
"We and Spaniards are talking about a different subject matter and it is an error of the computer translation programs that the word comes out as "morality" in both cases. Morality is about how to protect freedoms, not restrict them, everyone knows that and they happen to be right. If we could get past difficulties of the translation, the Spaniards would agree with us about what is moral, we would agree with them about what is familydutyhonoring."
ETA: A lot of positive response to this, but let me add that I think a better term in the last place would be something like "morality-to-Spaniards". The intuition behind the original phrasing was to show how you can redefine Spanish standards of morality to be "not-morality", but rather, just "things that we place different priority on".
But it's clearly absurd there: the correct translation of ética is not "ethics-to-Spaniards", but rather, just plain old "ethics". And the same reasoning should apply to the babyeather case.
To go a step further, moral disagreement doesn't require a language barrier at all.
"We and abolitionists are talking about a different subject matter and it is an error of the "computer translation programs" that the word comes out as "morality" in both cases. Morality is about how to create a proper relationship between races, everyone knows that and they happen to be right. If we could get past difficulties of the "translation", the abolitionists would agree with us about what is moral, we would agree with them about what is abolitionism."