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Random factoid: The post by Eliezer that I find most useful for describing (a particular aspect of) moral philosophy is actually a post about probability.
(In general I use most of the same intuitions for values as I do for probability; they share a lot of the same structure, and given the oft-remarked-on non-unique-decomposability of decision policies they seem to be special cases of some more fundamental thing that we don't yet have a satisfactory language for talking about. You might like this post and similar posts by Wei Dai that highlight the similarities between beliefs and values. (BTW, that post alone gets you half the way to my variant of theism.) Also check out this post by Nesov. (One question that intrigues me: is there a nonlinearity that results in non-boring outputs if you have an agent who calculates the expected utility of an action by dividing the universal prior probability of A by the universal prior probability of A (i.e., unity)? (The reason you might expect nonlinearities is that some actions depend on the output of the agent program itself, which is encoded by the universal prior but is undetermined until the agent fills in the blank. Seems to be a decent illustration of the more general timeful/timeless problem.)))
I think you mean that it would get you halfway there. Do you have good reason to think it would do the same for others who aren't already convinced? (It seems like there could be non-question-begging reasons to think that -- e.g., it might turn out that people who've read and understood it quite commonly end up agreeing with you about God.)
I think most of the disagreement would be about the use of the "God" label, not about the actual decision theory. Wei Dai asks:
This is very close to my variant of theism / objective morality, and gets you to the First and Final Cause of morality—the rest is discerning the attributes of said Cause, which we can do to some extent with algorithmic information theory, specifically the properties of Chaitin's number of wisdom, omega. I think I could argue quite forcefully that my God is the same God as the God of Aquinas and especially Leibniz (who was in his time already groping towards algorithmic information theory himself). Thus far the counterarguments I've seen amount to: "Their 'language' doesn't mean anything; if it does mean something then it doesn't mean what you think it means; if it does mean what you think it means then you're both wrong, traitor." I strongly suspect rationalization due to irrational allergies to the "God" word; most people who think that theism is stupid and worthless have very little understanding of what theology actually is. This is pretty much unrelated to the actual contents of my ideas about ethics and decision theory, it's just a debate about labels.
Anyway what I meant wasn't that reading the post halfway convinces the attentive reader of my variant of theism, I meant it allows the attentive reader to halfway understand why I have the intuitions I do, whether or not the reader agrees with those intuitions.
(Apologies if I sound curmudgeonly, really stressed lately.)
Will, may I suggest that you try to work out the details of your objective morality first and explain it to us before linking it with theism/God? For example, how are we supposed to use Chaitin's Omega to "discerning the attributes of said Cause"? I really have no idea at all what you mean by that, but it seems like it would make for a more interesting discussion than whether your God is the same God as the God of Aquinas and Leibniz, and also less likely to trigger people's "allergies".
I may well be being obtuse, but it seems to me that there's something very odd about the phrase "theism / objective morality", with its suggestion that basically the two are the same thing.
Have you actually argued forcefully that your god is also Aquinas's and Leibniz's? I ask because first you say you could, which kinda suggests you haven't actually done it so far (at least not in public), but then you start talking about "counterarguments", which kinda suggests that you have and people have responded.
I agree with Wei_Dai that it might be interesting to know more about your version of objective morality and how one goes about discerning the attributes of its alleged cause using algorithmic information theory.
This reflects a confusion I have about how popular philosophical opinion is in favor of moral realism, yet against theism. It seems that getting the correct answer to all possible moral problems would require prodigious intelligence, and so I don't really understand the conjunct of moral realism and atheism. This likely reflects my ignorance of the existent philosophical literature, though to be honest like most LessWrongers I'm a little skeptical of the worth of the average philosopher's opinion, especially about subjects outside of his specialty. Also if I averaged philosophical opinion over, say, the last 500 years, then I think theism would beat atheism. Also, there's the algorithm from music appreciation, which is like "look at what good musicians like", which I think would strongly favor theism. Still, I admit I'm confused.
I've kinda argued it on the meta-level, i.e. I've argued about when it is or isn't appropriate to assume that you're actually referring to the same concept versus just engaging in syncretism. But IIRC I haven't yet forcefully argued that my god is Leibniz's God. So, yeah, it's a mixture.
I replied to Wei Dai's comment here.
BTW, realistically, I won't be able to reply to your comment re CEV/rightness, though as a result of your comment I do plan on re-reading the meta-ethics sequence to see if "right" is anywhere (implicitly or explicitly) defined as CEV.
(Inebriated, apologies for errors or omissions.)
Surely typical moral realists, atheist or otherwise, don't believe that they've got the correct answer to all possible moral problems. (Just as no one thinks they're factually correct about everything.)
I don't think "averaged philosophical opinion" is likely to have much value. Nor "averaged opinion of good musicians" when you're talking about something that isn't primarily musical, especially when you average over a period for much of which (e.g.) many of the best employment opportunities for musicians were working for religious organizations.
(Human with a finite brain; apologies for errors or omissions.)
Apparently I mis-stated something. I'm a little too spent to fully rectify the situation, so here's some word salad: moral realism implies belief in a Form of the Good, but ISTM that the Form of the Good has to be personal, because only intelligences can solve moral problems; specifically, I think a true Form of the Good has to be a superintelligence, i.e. a god, who, if the god is also the Form of the Good, we call God. ISTM that belief in a Form of the Good that isn't personal is an obvious error that any decent moral philosopher should recognize, and so I think there must be something wrong with how I'm formulating the problem or with how I'm conceptualizing others' representation of the problem.
(nods) Very likely. To the extent that this technique is useful for rank-ordering philosophical positions I ought to adopt, I can also use it to rank-order various theological positions to determine which particular theology to adopt. (I've never done this, but I predict it's one that endorses literacy.)
That is an excellent point.