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nshepperd comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong
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It could be valid to define "better" any way you like. But the definition most consistent with normal usage includes all and only criteria that matter to humans. This is why people say things like "but is it truly, really, fundamentally better?" Because people really care about whether A is better than B. If "better" meant something else (other than better), such as produces more paperclips, then people would find a different word to describe what they care about.
Hrrm ok. That is a different way of looking at it.
My take on the word is that the normal usage of better is by itself a context free comparator. The context of the comparison comes from the things around it (implicitly or explicitly) thus "UberClippy is better than Clippy" (implied: At being a Paperclipper), Manchester United is better than Leeds (implied: At playing football), or even "Betterness is better for humans than clippiness". I have no problem with "Betterness is more humane than clippiness".
Note that I don't think i'm disagreeing with Eliezer here. Fundamentally you are processing the logical concept with a static context, i process it with a local context. Either way it's highly unlikely that the context you hold or that i would derive would be the same as the paperclipper versions of ourselves (or indeed any given brain in potential brain space).