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Desrtopa comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (466)
It doesn't seem very sensible to call a claim that someone "ought" to do something "false" if you're denying that an "ought" claim could ever be meaningful in the first place.
Anyway, it's a very annoying argument. It seems an awful lot like saying "You can't prove there's a such thing as value, therefore I refuse to take your money."
I'd be tempted to respond by hitting him with a stick until he conceded that stopping getting hit by a stick was a sufficient motivation to do X.
I think you misinterpreted the quote; Alonzo Fyfe is criticizing ethical non-naturalism (the claim that moral facts are not reducible to facts about the world), not endorsing it.
You're right that I misinterpreted it, but from reading the essay, it seems less like a substantive argument to me than dicking around with semantics. The whole point could have been made much more succinctly with a "taboo 'ought.'"
Any argument that entails responding to "you ought to do X" with "prove it" is awfully unlikely to convince your interlocutor; it's rude and will only set them on edge.
"Taboo X" is a LessWrong-ism...
It is, but Less Wrong didn't invent the idea of recognizing arguments as conflicts of semantics.
If you're trying to win points for succinctness, including by reference the Sequences is probably not a good plan. That's the sin of hidden complexity.
Assuming that your audience isn't familiar with the sequences and proceeds to go read the article, yes, that's not succinct. But the audience probably already has a cached idea of disagreements being semantic conflicts, so while he's not literally in a position to get the same idea across in two words, it could probably be compressed down at least as far as
"When I say that I 'ought' to do something, I mean that it's in accordance with my own innate desires and values as a human. My values and desires are real 'is' facts about the universe with a physical basis, and so 'ought' facts can be neatly derived from 'is' facts. This is as useful a definition of 'ought' as you're likely to get, and a definition that divorces normative facts from positive ones, saying that you cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is' doesn't offer any practical advantage."