Will_Sawin comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Will_Sawin 09 June 2011 05:46PM

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Comment author: Will_Sawin 13 June 2011 03:28:55PM 0 points [-]

For example I could use a variant of CEV (call it Coherent Extrapolated Pi Estimation) to answer "What is the trillionth digit of pi?" but that doesn't imply that by "the trillionth digit of pi" I actually mean "the output of CEPE"

(I notice an interesting subtlety here. Even though what I infer from "you should order X" is (1) "according to Bob's computation, the arg max of ... is X", what Bob means by "you should order X" must be (2) "the arg max of ... is X", because if he means (1), then "you should order X" would be true even if Bob made an error in his computation.)

Do you accept the conclusion I draw from my version of this argument?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 13 June 2011 06:48:00PM 0 points [-]

I agree with you up to this part:

But this is certainly not the definition of water! Imagine if Bob used this criterion to evaluate what was and was not water. He would suffer from an infinite regress. The definition of water is something else. The statement "This is water" reduces to a set of facts about this, not a set of facts about this and Bob's head.

I made the same argument (perhaps not very clearly) at http://lesswrong.com/lw/44i/another_argument_against_eliezers_metaethics/

But I'm confused by the rest of your argument, and don't understand what conclusion you're trying to draw apart from "CEV can't be the definition of morality". For example you say:

Well, why does it have a long definition? It has a long definition because that's what we believe is important.

I don't understand why believing something to be important implies that it has a long definition.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 13 June 2011 06:55:07PM 1 point [-]

Ah. So this is what I am saying.

If you say "I define should as [Eliezers long list of human values]"

then I say: "That's a long definition. How did you pick that definition?"

and you say: 'Well, I took whatever I thought was morally important, and put it into the definition."

In the part you quote I am arguing that (or at least claiming that) other responses to my query are wrong.

I would then continue:

"Using the long definition is obscuring what you really mean when you say 'should'. You really mean 'what's important', not [the long list of things I think are important]. So why not just define it as that?"

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 13 June 2011 08:33:41PM *  2 points [-]

One more way to describe this idea. I ask, "What is morality?", and you say, "I don't know, but I use this brain thing here to figure out facts about it; it errs sometimes, but can provide limited guidance. Why do I believe this "brain" is talking about morality? It says it does, and it doesn't know of a better tool for that purpose presently available. By the way, it's reporting that <long list of conditions> are morally relevant, and is probably right."

Comment author: Wei_Dai 14 June 2011 06:30:03PM 0 points [-]

By the way, it's reporting that <long list of conditions> are morally relevant, and is probably right.

Where do you get "is probably right" from? I don't think you can get that if you take an outside view and consider how often a human brain is right when it reports on philosophical matters in a similar state of confusion...

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 14 June 2011 10:04:14PM *  0 points [-]

Salt to taste, the specific estimate is irrelevant to my point, so long as the brain is seen as collecting at least some moral information, and not defining the whole of morality. The level of certainty in brain's moral judgment won't be stellar, but more reliable for simpler judgments. Here, I referred "morally relevant", which is a rather weak matter-of-priority kind of judgment, as opposed to deciding which of the given options are better.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 13 June 2011 10:17:53PM 0 points [-]

Beautiful. I would draw more attention to the "Why.... ? It says it does" bit, but that seems right.

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