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Liron comments on The Power of Positivist Thinking - Less Wrong
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Comments (48)
1 and 2: Taboo the word "right". You haven't come anywhere close to the territory.
Eliezer can use "right" casually in this discussion, thanks to his 10,000-word reduction of it on OB; I may or may not agree with his reduction, but at least I know what sort of evidence would verify or falsify a claim he makes about "right" and "wrong".
The rest of us should probably be more cautious with those words when verifiability is in the air.
Yes we know "right"'s relationship to the territory has to do with the complexites of the brain. But the entire "right" module can still be part of a reduction.
Tabooing is useful for:
Making sure your reduction attempt isn't circular
Figuring out what a speaker actually means when they use a word whose referent is ambiguous (like "make a sound") or just points to their own confusion (like Searle's "semantics")
No need for it ere.
In that case, I don't disagree on substance. But as a matter of clarity,
seems too casual for good communication; it's what a person would say who takes "right" and "wrong" to be simple ontologically basic properties of the universe.
On the other hand, the less misleading locutions I can think of would be pretty unwieldy in everyday conversation. I wonder if there's better language we can use or invent to talk about morality from this perspective...