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Grognor comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong
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-Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly
Or, as the Language Log puts it:
It's Language Log, without the, goddammit!
Without the what? That isn't grammatical.
Without the fnord, of course.
What "of course"?
Upvoted under the presumption that you're being ironic.
Why, do you say “Less Wrong”, or “the Less Wrong”?
Swap out "grammar" and "style" for "morality" and "ethics"?
Disagree strongly. What the heck is "evidence" for morality? Unless "emulate X" is one of your values, your ethical system needn't aspire to approximate anything.
But if you are settling a question of morality, I take it as being a question between multiple people (that's not explicit, but seems to be implicity part of the above). One's personal ethical system needn't aspire, but when settling a question of group ethics or morality, how do you proceed?
Or for that matter, how do I analyze my own ethics? How do I know if I'm achieving ataraxia without looking at the evidence: do my actions reduce displeasure, etc? The result of my (or other people's) actions are relevant evidence, providing necessary feedback to my personal system of ethics, no?
Just so we're clear, I'm using "ethics" and "morality" as synonyms for each other and for "terminal values".
If you're settling a dispute, there's no objectively true meta-morality to go to in the same way as people speaking is the objectively there state of a language. One party wants some things, the other party wants other things, and depending on what the arbitrator wants, and how much power everyone involved has, the dispute will be settled in a certain way.
As for how you analyze your own ethics: You can't, as far as I know. The question of e.g. "do my actions reduce displeasure?" is only relevant once you've decided you want to reduce displeasure. We make decisions by measuring our actions' impact on reality and then measuring that against our values, but we've got nothing to measure our values against.
One of my favorite things about many constructed languages is that they get rid of this distinction entirely. You don't have to worry about whether or not "Xify" is a so-called real word for any given value X, you only have to check if it X's type fits the pattern. This happens merely because it's a lot easier, when you're working from scratch anyways, to design the language that way than to have to come up with a big artificial list of -ify words.