because we can miscalculate an "ought" or anything else.
One way to miscalculate an "ought" is the same way that we can miscalculate an "is" -- e.g. lack of information, erroneous knowledge, false understanding of how to weigh data, etc.
And also, because people aren't perfectly self-aware, we can mistake mere habits or strongly-held preferences to be the outputs of our moral algorithm -- same way that e.g. a synaesthete might perceive the number 8 to be colored blue, even though there's no "blue" light frequency striking the optical nerve. But that sort of thing doesn't seem as a very deep philosophical problem to me.
We can correct miscalculations where we have an conscious epistemic grasp of how the calculation should work. If morality is a neural black box, we have no such grasp. Such a neural black box cannot be used to plug the is-ought gap, because it does not distinguish correct calculations from miscalculations.
I have several questions related to this:
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
And on the sequences page:
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.