I don't understand two sentences in a row. Not here, not in the meta-ethics sequence, not anywhere where you guys talk about morality.
I don't understand why I seem to be cognitively fine on other topics on Less Wrong, but then all of a sudden am Flowers for Algernon here.
I'm not going to comment anymore on this topic; it just so happens meta-morality or meta-ethics isn't something I worry about anyway. But I would like to part with the admonition that I don't see any reason why LW should be separating so many words from their original meanings -- "good", "better", "should", etc. It doesn't seem to be clarifying things even for you guys.
I think that when something is understood -- really understood -- you can write it down in words. If you can't describe an understanding, you don't own it.
Huh? I'm asserting that most people, when they use words like "morality", "should"(in a moral context), "better"(ditto), etc, are pointing at the same thing. That is, we think this sort of thing partly captures what people actually mean by the terms. Now, we don't have full self knowledge, and our morality algorithm hasn't finished reflecting (that is, hasn't finished reconsidering itself, etc), so we have uncertainty about what sorts of things are or are not moral... But that's a separate issue.
As far as the rest... I'm prett...
On Wei_Dai's complexity of values post, Toby Ord writes:
The kind of moral realist positions that apply Occam's razor to moral beliefs are a lot more extreme than most philosophers in the cited survey would sign up to, methinks. One such position that I used to have some degree of belief in is:
Strong Moral Realism: All (or perhaps just almost all) beings, human, alien or AI, when given sufficient computing power and the ability to learn science and get an accurate map-territory morphism, will agree on what physical state the universe ought to be transformed into, and therefore they will assist you in transforming it into this state.
But most modern philosophers who call themselves "realists" don't mean anything nearly this strong. They mean that that there are moral "facts", for varying definitions of "fact" that typically fade away into meaninglessness on closer examination, and actually make the same empirical predictions as antirealism.
Suppose you take up Eliezer's "realist" position. Arrangements of spacetime, matter and energy can be "good" in the sense that Eliezer has a "long-list" style definition of goodness up his sleeve, one that decides even contested object-level moral questions like whether abortion should be allowed or not, and then tests any arrangement of spacetime, matter and energy and notes to what extent it fits the criteria in Eliezer's long list, and then decrees goodness or not (possibly with a scalar rather than binary value).
This kind of "moral realism" behaves, to all extents and purposes, like antirealism.
I might compare the situation to Eliezer's blegg post: it may be that moral philosophers have a mental category for "fact" that seems to be allowed to have a value even once all of the empirically grounded surrounding concepts have been fixed. These might be concepts such as "would aliens also think this thing?", "Can it be discovered by an independent agent who hasn't communicated with you?", "Do we apply Occam's razor?", etc.
Moral beliefs might work better when they have a Grand Badge Of Authority attached to them. Once all the empirically falsifiable candidates for the Grand Badge Of Authority have been falsified, the only one left is the ungrounded category marker itself, and some people like to stick this on their object level morals and call themselves "realists".
Personally, I prefer to call a spade a spade, but I don't want to get into an argument about the value of an ungrounded category marker. Suffice it to say that for any practical matter, the only parts of the map we should argue about are parts that map-onto a part of the territory.