From Costanza's original thread (entire text):
This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.
Meta:
- How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
- Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.
I'll try: any claim that a fundamental/terminal moral goal 'is good' reduces to a tautology on this view, because "good" doesn't have anything to it besides these goals. The speaker's definition of goodness makes every true claim of this kind true by definition. (Though the more practical statements involve inference. I started to say it must be all logical inference, realized EY could not possibly have said that, and confirmed that in fact he did not.)
Though technically it may see the act of caring about goodness as good. So I have to qualify what I said before that way.
Because if the function could look at the mechanical, causal steps it takes, and declare them perfectly reliable, it would lead to a flat self-contradiction by Lob's Theorem. The other way looks like a contradiction but isn't. (We think.)
Thank you, this helps a lot.
Ooh yeah, didn't spot that one. (As someone who spent a lot of time when younger thinking about this and trying to be a good person, I certainly should have spotted this.)