The main reason for why I was able to abandon religion was to realize that what I want implies what is right. That still feels intuitively right. I didn't expect to see many people on LW to argue that there exist preference/(agent/mind)-independent moral statements like 'it is right to help people' or 'killing is generally wrong'.
Well, something I've been noticing is that in their tell your rationalist origin stories, the reason a lot of people give for why they left their religion aren't actually valid arguments. Make of that what you will.
If I parse this right it would mean that a Paperclip Maximizer is morally bankrupt?
Yes. It is morally bankrupt. (or would you not mind turning into paperclips if that's what the Paperclip Maximizer wanted?)
BTW, your current position is more-or-less what theists mean when they say atheists are amoral.
Yes. It is morally bankrupt. (or would you not mind turning into paperclips if that's what the Paperclip Maximizer wanted?)
Yes, but that is a matter of taste.
BTW, your current position is more-or-less what theists mean when they say atheists are amoral.
Why would I ever change my current position? If Yudkowsky told me there was some moral laws written into the fabric of reality, what difference would that make? Either such laws are imperative, so that I am unable to escape them, or I simply ignore them if they are opposing my preferences.
Assume all...
In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.