You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover.
I wish! Both metaethics and normative ethics are still mysterious and confusing to me (despite having read Eliezer's sequence). Here's a sample of problems I'm faced with, none of which seem to be helped by replacing the word "right" with "awesome": 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. I'm concerned this post might make a lot of people feel more clarity than they actually possess, and more importantly and unfortunately from my perspective, less inclined to look into the problems that continue to puzzle me.
I'd just like to say that although I don't have anything to add, there are all excellent questions and I don't think people are considering questions like these enough. (Didn't feel like an upvote was sufficient endorsement for everything in that comment!)
(Imagines going to the Cambridge Center for the Study of Awesome, located overlooking a gorgeous flowering canyon, inside a giant, dark castle in a remote area which you can only reach by piloting a mechanical T-Rex with rockets strapped to it. Inside, scientists with floor-length black leather lab coats are examining...)
I don't think that follows.
Rocket-boosted mechanical T-Rexes are possible; therefore, they are as "merely real" as anything else. The point of making life awesome is seeing the entire world as one vast game of Calvinball.
Think of the rocket-boosted mechanical T-Rex as a metaphor for indulging your inner child; you can replace it with anything you could imagine doing on a lark with infinite resources. The point of living in a Universe of Awesome is that you can wake up and say "dude, you know what would be awesome? A frikin metal T-Rex with rockets boosters!" And then you and your best friend spend 15 seconds air-guitaring before firing up the Maker and chunking out the parts and tools, then putting it together and flying it around. And then one of you turns to the other and says, "okay, that was awesome for like, five minutes. Now what?"
I'm thinking of it more like Minecraft in real life. I want a castle with a secret staircase because it would be awesome. What I did was spend a day of awesomeness building it myself instead of downloading it and only having five minutes of awesomeness.
right, hence the phrases "chunking out the parts and tools" and "putting it together".
I find woodworking and carpentry fun. However, I buy my lumber at Home Depot, rather than hiking out to the woods and felling trees myself, then painstakingly hewing and sanding them into planks.
Part of making the world more awesome is automating things enough that when you have an insanely awesome idea for a project, your starting point is fun rather than tedious. Since this is different for different people, the best solution is to have a system that can do it all for you, but that lets you do as much for yourself as you want.
Don't underestimate the importance of keeping a relatively constant temperature, also. Even simple dishes on an uneven flame require enormous attention to avoid burning.
Morality needs a concept of awfulness as well as awesomeness. In the depths of hell, good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.
In the depths of hell, good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.
Gloomiest sentence of 2013 so far. Upvoted.
I think that 'awesome' loses a lot of value when you are forced to make the statement "Watching lot of people die was the most awesome choice I had, because any intervention would have added victims without saving anyone."
I propose 'lame' and 'bummer' as antonyms for 'awesome'. Instead of trying to figure out the most awesome of a series of bad options, we can discuss the least lame.
[META] Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?
It was just hacked out in a couple of hours to organize my thoughts for the meetup. It has little justification for anything, very little coherent overarching structure, and it's not even really serious. It's only 90% true, with many bugs. Very much a worse-is-better sort of post.
Now it's promoted with 50-something upvotes. I notice that I would not predict this, and feel the need to update.
What should I (we) learn from this?
Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
Are people just really interested in morality, or re-framing of problems, or well-linked integration posts?
Because you make few assertions of substance, there is a lot of empty space (where people, depending on their mood, may insert either unrealistically charitable or unrealistically uncharitable reconstructions of reasoning) and not a lot of specific content for anyone to disagree with. In contrast, if I make 10 very concrete and substantive suggestions in a post, and most people like 9 of them but hate the 10th, that could make them very reluctant to upvote the post as a whole, lest their vote be taken as a blanket endorsement for every claim.
Because the post is vague and humorous, people leave it feeling vaguely happy and not in a mood to pick it apart. Expressing this vague happiness as an upvote reifies it and makes it more intense. People like 'liking' things they like.
The post is actually useful, as a way of popularizing some deeper and more substantive meta-ethical and practical points. Some LessWrongers may be tired of endlessly arguing over which theory is most ideal, and instead hunger for better popularizations and summaries of the extant philosophical progress we've already made, so that we can start peddling those views to the masses. They may view your post as an i
Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility / scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn't an average of hundreds of scalar ratings -- it's the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn't see, doesn't care about, or doesn't understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.
As one of the upvoters, here is my thought process, as far as I recall it:
WTF?!! What does it even mean?
Wait, this kind of makes sense intuitively.
Hey, every example I can try actually works. I wonder why.
OK, so the OP suggests awesomeness as an overriding single intuitive terminal value. What does he mean by "intuitive"?
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack "awesome" eventually fails on some example, while the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn't.
He must be onto something.
Oh, and his approach is clearly awesome, so the post is self-consistent.
Gotta upvote!
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack "awesome" eventually fails on some example, why the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn't.
Totally. Hence the link to fake utility functions. I could have made this clearer; you're not really supposed to unpack it, just use it as a rough pointer to your built-in moral intuitions. "oh that's all there is to it".
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
Don't worry. I basically just went over this post, then went over "joy in the merely good". We also discussed a bit, but the shield against useless philosophy provided by using "awesome" instead of "good" only lasted so long...
That said, it would have been nice to have you and your ideas there.
I have typically been awful at predicting which parts of HPMOR people would most enjoy. I suggest relaxing and enjoying the hedons.
Karma votes on this site are fickle, superficial, and reward percieved humour and wit much more than they do hard work and local unconventionality; you're allowed to be unconventional to the world-at-large, even encouraged to, if it's conventional in LW; the reverse is not encouraged.
Your work was both novel and completely in line with what is popular here, and so it thrived. Try to present a novel perspective arguing against things that are unanymously liked yet culture-specific, such as sex or alcohol or sarcasm or Twitter or market economies as automatic optimizers, and you might not fare as well.
You can pick up on those trends by following the Twitter accounts of notable LWers, watch them pat each other on the back for expressing beliefs that signal their belonging to the tribe, and mimick them for easy karma, which you can stock reserves of for the times where you feel absolutely compelled to take a stand for an unpopular idea.
This problem is endemic of Karma systems and makes LW no worse than any other community. It's just that one would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard.
Awesome post, BTW. Nice brain-hacking.
My impression of this post (which may not be evident from my comments) went something like this:
1) Hah. That's a really funny opening.
2) Oh, this is really interesting and potentially useful, AND really funny, which is a really good combination for articles one the internet.
3) How would I apply this idea to my life?
4) think about it a bit, and read some comments, think some more
5) Wait a second, this idea actually isn't nearly as useful as it seemed at first.
5a) To the extent that it's true, it's only the first thesis statement of a lengthy examination of the actual issue
5b) The rest of the sequence this would need to herald to be truly useful is not guaranteed to be nearly as fun
5c) Upon reflection, while "awesome" does capture elements of "good" that would be obscured by "good's" baggage, "awesome" also fails to capture some of the intended value.
5d) This post is still useful, but not nearly as useful as my initial positive reaction indicates
5e) I am now dramatically more interested in the subject of how interesting this post seemed vs how interesting it actually was and what this says about the internet and people and ideas, then about the content of the article.
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
I DUNT KNOW LETS TRY
It's not necessarily that a highly upvoted post is deemed better on average, each individual still only casts one vote. The trichotomy of "downvote / no vote / upvote" doesn't provide nuanced feedback, and while you'd think it all equals out with a large number of votes, that's not so because of a) modifying visibility by means secondary to the content of the post, b) capturing readers' interest early to get them to vote in the first place and c) various distributions of opinions about your post all projecting onto potentially the same voting score (e.g. strong likes + strong dislikes equalling the score of general indifference), all three of which can occur independently of the post's real content.
The visibility was increased with the promotion of your post. While you did need initial upvotes to support that promotion, once achieved there's no stopping the chain reaction: People want to check out that highly rated top post, they expect to see good content and often automatically steelman / gloss over your we...
Whether to use "awesome" instead of "virtuous" is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. If you've gotten to the point where you're set on using "awesome" instead of "good", you've already chosen your answer to most of the difficult questions.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don't look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn't care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
If you don't think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfu...
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only person who reads MoR who actually thinks MoR!Hermione is more awesome than MoR!Quirrell. Of course I have access to at least some info others don't, but still...
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the "probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you" and "stereotype of a winner" axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she's more academically successful than anyone I've ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn't visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn't let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione - when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy - but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that's really awesome.
Well, to a first approximation, on a moral level, Quirrell is who I try not to be and Hermione is who I wish I was, and on the level of intelligence, it's not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one's intellect since I strictly contain both. Ergo I find Hermione's choices more impressive than Quirrell's choices.
Quirrel strikes me as the sort of character who is intended to be impressive. Pretty much all his charactaristics hit my "badass" buttons. The martial arts skills, the powerful magical field brushing at the edges of Harry's little one, etc. However, I wouldn't want to be like Quirrel, and I can't imagine being Quirrel-like and still at all like myself. Whereas Hermione impresses me in the sense of being almost like a version of myself that gets everything I try to be right and is better than me at everything I think matters. Hermione is more admirable to me than Quirrel, but my sense of awe is triggered more by badass-ness than admiration.
If you don't think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying "I don't know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can't be awesome." Hitler was evil, not bad.
And that you probably haven't watched stuff like Triumph of the Will to understand why Nazi aesthetics and propaganda could be so effective.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I'm missing something.
You totally are. The point of Goetz's comment and mine was not that Hitler was 'awesome' simply because of ordinary in-group/out-group dynamics which apply to like every other leader ever and most of whom are not particularly 'awesome'; the point was that Hitler and the Nazis were unusually 'awesome' in appreciating shock and awe and technocratic superiority and Nazi Science (sneers at unimpressive projects) and geez I even named one of the stellar examples of this, Triumph of the Will, which still remains one of the best examples of the Nazi regime's co-option of scientists and artists and film-makers and philosophers to glorify itself and make it awesome. It's an impressive movie, so impressive that
Riefenstahl's techniques, such as moving cameras, the use of long focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography, have earned Triumph recognition as one of the greatest films in history.
or
...The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will "sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century".[
Also, I had a fit of the far view, and it occurred to me that Germany was rather a medium-sized country (I'm so used to continental superpowers, but the world wasn't always like that), and it tried to become a large country, and it took a big alliance of the other major powers to take it down. This is awesome from a sufficient distance.
Is it "awesome" to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women?
Is it "awesome" to be the one who gets crushed?
Having such enemies in the first place? Definitely not.
There are entire cultural systems of tracking prestige based around having such enemies; the vestiges of them survive today as modern "macho" culture. Having enemies to crush mercilessly, and then doing so, is an excellent way to signal power to third parties.
So it seems to me that the positive responses to this post have largely been of the form "hey, this is a useful intuition pump!" and the negative responses to this post have largely been of the form "hey, this is a problematic theory of morality." For what it's worth, my response was in the former camp, so I'd like to say a little more in its defense.
One useful thing that using the word "awesome" instead of the word "moral" accomplishes is that it redefines the search space of moral decisions. The archetypal members of the category "moral decisions" involve decisions like whether to kill, whether to steal, or whether to lie. But using the word "awesome" makes it easier to realize that a much larger class of decisions can be thought of as moral decisions, such as what kind of career to aim for.
Awesome and moral clearly have overlap. How much?
There's a humorous, satirical news story produced by The Onion, where the US Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is "totally badass". And it is, even though badass-ness is not a criteria to decide the death penalty's legality.
Similarly, awesomeness makes me think of vengeance. Though some vengeance is disproportionate with the initial offense, and thus not so awesome, vengeance seems on the whole to have that aura of glorious achievement that you'd find at the climax of an action / adventure film. And yet that doesn't really match my ideas of morality, though maybe I don't feel strongly positively enough for the restoration of justice.
The idea that vengeance is awesome but not moral might be an artifact of looking at it from the victor's side vs target's side. So maybe we should distinguish between awesome experiences and awesome futures / histories / worlds.
But those were just the first distinctions between morality and awesomeness I thought of while reading. I'm probably missing a lot of stuff, since morality and awesomeness are both big, complicated things. They're probably too big to think about all at once in ...
metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out
Metaethics is about coping with people disagreeing about what is and is not awesome.
It happens after all. Some people think that copying art so that more people can experience it is awesome. Others think that it's so non-awesome that preventing the first group from doing it is awesome. Yet another group is indifferent to copying, but thinks the prevention is so non-awesome that preventing that is awesome. (This was the least mind-killing example I could think of. Please don't derail the discussion arguing it. The point is that there are nontrivial numbers of human beings in all three camps.)
We also observe that the vast majority of humans agree on some questions of awesomeness. Being part of a loving family: awesome! Killing everyone you meet whose height in millimeters is a prime number: not awesome! Maybe this is just an aspect of being human: sharing so much dna and history. Or maybe all these people are independently rediscovering some fundamental truth that no one can quite put their finger on, in much the same way that cultures around the world invented arithmetic long before Peano.
What ca...
That's applied ethics, not metaethics.
(I think it's sad, but better than the alternatives.)
Great! This means that in order to develop an AI with a proper moral foundation, we just need to reduce the following statements of ethical guidance to predicate logic, and we'll be all set:
Thank you. For a short summary of the whole situation, this is fantastically non-confused and seems like a good intuition pump.
I think "awesome" implies that something is extraordinary. I would hope you'd continue to enjoy parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales, but eventually you'd get used to them unless more awesomeness got added.
Whether everyone and every moment can be awesome-- by their standards, not ours-- is a worthwhile question. Even if the answer is 'no', how close can you get?
I used to be someone who prioritized making the world as weird and interesting a place as possible. Then an incredibly important thing happened to me this year, at Burning Man:
Halfway through the week, a gigantic mechanical squid wandered by, spouting fire from its tentacles.
And I didn't care. Because Burning Man is just uniformly weird all over the place and I had already (in 2 days) hedonic treadmilled on things-in-the-reference-class-of-giant-mechanical-squid-that-shoot-fire-from-their-tentacles.
(I had spend the previous 12 years of my life wishing rather specifically for a gigantic mechanical squid to wander by randomly. I was really pissed off when I didn't care when it finally happened)
"Giant parties in space whales" isn't all that much different than "heaven involves lots of gold and niceness and nobody having to work ever again." I'm near-certain that the ideal world is mostly ordinary (probably whatever form of ordinary can be most cheaply maintained) with punctuated moments of awesome that you can notice and appreciate, and then reminisce about after you return to normalcy.
Some of those punctuations should certainly involve giant space-whale parties (...
the ideal world is mostly ordinary (probably whatever form of ordinary can be most cheaply maintained) with punctuated moments of awesome that you can notice and appreciate
Hm.
So, there was a time when being cold at night and in the winter was pretty much the standard human experience in the part of the world I live in. Then we developed various technologies for insulating and heating, and now I take for granted that I can lounge around comfortably in my underwear in my living room during a snowstorm.
If I lived during that earlier period, and I shared your reasoning here, it seems to me I would conclude that the ideal world involved being uncomfortably cold throughout most of the winter. We would heat the house for parties, perhaps, and that would make parties awesome, and we could reminisce about that comfortable warmth after the party was over and we'd gone back to shivering in the cold under blankets. That way we could appreciate the warmth properly.
Have I understood your reasoning correctly, or have I missed something important?
Yes and no.
I deliberately wander around outside in the cold before I come in and drink hot chocolate. (In this case, strong cold is preferable, for somewhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours before additional cold stops making the experience nicer).
I don't deliberately keep my house freezing in the winter, but when I'm in control of the temperature (not often, with roommates), I don't turn the heat on until it's actually interfering with my ability to do work. I know people who keep it even colder and they learn to live with it. I'm not sure what's actually optimal - it may very from person to person, but overall you probably aren't actually benefiting yourself much if you keep your house in the 70s during winter
Part of the key is variation, though. I also deliberately went to a giant party in the desert. It turns out that it is really hard to have fun in the desert because learning to properly hydrate yourself is hard work. But this was an interesting experience of its own right and yes, it was extremely nice to shower when I got back.
It's probably valuable to vary having at least one element of you life be extremely "low quality" by modern western standards, most of the time.
(nods) I sympathize with that reasoning. Two things about it make me suspicious, though.
The first is that it seems to elide the difference between choosing to experience cold when doing so is nice, and not having such a choice. it seems to me that this difference is incredibly important.
The second is its calibration against "modern" standards.
I suspect that if I lived a hundred years ago I would similarly be sympathetic to the idea that it's valuable to have at least one element of my life be extremely low quality by "modern" standards, and if I'm alive a hundred years from now I will similarly be sympathetic to it.
Which leads me to suspect that what's going on here has more to do with variety being a valuable part of constructing an optimal environment than it does with ordinariness.
"Morality is awesome", as a statement, scans like "consent is sexy" to me. Neither of these statements are true enough to be useful except as signalling or a personal goal ("I would like to find X thing I believe to be moral more awesome, so as to hack my brain to be more moral").
In some cases of assessing morality/awesomeness or consent/sexiness correlation, one would sometimes have to lie about their awesomeness/sexiness preferences, and ignore those preferences in order to be a Perfectly Moral Good Individual who does not Like Evil Things.
There is also normative ethics, which is about how to decide if something is awesome, and metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out.
Metaethics is about how to decide how to decide if something is awesome.
IMHO I think this awesomeness equating with morality is very wrong. Say those soldiers who shot down a number of innocent civilians, check the vid, it was pretty awesome for them. When it obviously isn't awesome to others. Perhaps we have to respect some universal agreed upon boundaries withing giving exceptions.
I upvoted this post because it was clear, interesting, and relatively novel, but I'm concerned that it could tend to lead to what I'm going to call "narrative bias" even though I think that already means something.
Imagine someone who's living a fairly mediocre life. Then, they get attacked - mugged or something. This isn't fun for them, but they acquire a wicked keen scar, lots of support from their friends, and a Nemesis who gives them Purpose in Life. They spend a long time hunting their nemesis, acquiring skills to do so, etc. etc., and eve...
The point of having LW posts around is not to take their titles as axioms and work from there. My hardware, corrupted as it is, has no intrinsic interest in traumatizing children, so I don't suspect my brain of doing something wrong when it tells me "if it were reliably determined that traumatizing children led to awesome outcome X, then we should traumatize children, especially considering we are in some sense already doing this."
In other words, I think an argument against traumatizing children to make superheroes, if it were determined that this would actually work, is either also an argument against mandatory education or else has to explain why it isn't suffering from status quo bias (why are we currently traumatizing children exactly the right amount?).
Edit: I'm not sure I said quite what I meant to say above. Let me say something different: the post you linked to is about how, when humans say things like "doing superficially bad thing X has awesome consequence Y, therefore we should do X" you should be skeptical because humans run on corrupted hardware which incentivizes them to justify certain kinds of superficially bad things. But what you're being skeptical of is the premise "doing superficially bad thing X has awesome consequence Y," or at least the implicit premise that it doesn't have counterbalancing bad consequences. In this discussion nyan_sandwich and I are both taking this premise for granted.
This may be a minor nit, but... is this forum collectively anti-orgasmium, now?
Because being orgasmium is by definition more pleasant than not being orgasmium. Refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, full stop.[1] (Well, that's not actually true, since as a human you can make other people happier, and as orgasmium you presumably cannot. But it is at least on average a mistake to refuse to become orgasmium; I would argue that it is virtually always a mistake.)
[1] We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?
[1] We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?
... no?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lb/not_for_the_sake_of_happiness_alone/
But the logic that Eliezer is using is exactly the same logic that drives somebody who's dying of a horrible disease to refuse antibiotics, because she wants to keep her body natural. And this choice is — well, it isn't wrong, choices can't be "wrong" — but it reflects a very fundamental sort of human bias. It's misguided.
Very well, let's back up Eliezer's argument with some hard evidence. Fortunately, lukeprog has already written a brief review of the neuroscience on this topic. The verdict? Eliezer is right. People value things other than happiness and pleasure. The idea that pleasant feelings are the sole good is an illusion created by the fact that the signals for wanting something and getting pleasure from it are comingled on the same neurons.
So no, Eliezer is not misguided. On the contrary, the evidence is on his side. People really do value more things than just happiness. If you want more evidence consider this thought experiment Alonso Fyfe cooked up:
...Assume that you and somebody you care about (e.g., your child) are kidnapped by a mad scientist. This scientist gives you two options:
Option 1: Your child will be taken away and tortured. However, you wi
We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?
No. Most of us are preferentists or similar. Some of us are not consequentialists at all.
I dunno, I feel like judgments of awesomeness are heavily path-dependent and vary a lot from person to person. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the project of Coherent Extrapolated Volition, but I hold out even less for Coherent Extrapolated Awesomeness. So the vision of the future is people pushing back and forth, the chuunibyous trying to fill the world with dark magic rituals and the postmodernists wincing at their unawesome sincerity and trying to paint everything with as many layers of awesome irony as they can.
Also, from a personal perspective, I r...
Interesting rephrasing of morality...but would it still hold if I asked you to taboo "awesome"?
No.
If I taboo "awesome" directly, I'd miss something. (complexity of value)
The point of taboo is usually to remove a problematic concept that has too much attached confusion, or to look inside a black box.
The point of saying "Awesome" is actually the opposite: it was deliberately chosen for it's lack of meaning (points 1 and 4), and to wrap up everything we know about morality (that we go insane if we look at at the wrong angle) into a convenient black box that we don't look inside, but works anyway (point 2,3,5).
But again,
If we still insist on being confused, or if we're just curious, ... then we can see the metaethics sequence for the full argument, details, and finer points.
In other words "taboo awesome" is a redirect to the metaethics sequence.
This is interesting. Can we come up with a punchy name for good uses of "reverse tabooing"?
One reason I particularly like the choice of the word "awesome," which is closely related to and maybe just a rephrasing of your first point, is that it is much less likely to trigger redirects to cached thoughts that sound deep. Moreover, since "awesome" is not itself a word that sounds deep, talking about morality using the language of awesomeness inoculates against the trying-to-sound-deep failure mode.
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist.
Where did the idea come from that only consequentialists thought about consequences? If I'm a deontologist, and I think the rules include "Don't murder," I'm still allowed to notice that a common consequence of pointing a loaded gun at a person and pulling the trigger is "murder."
Don't consequentialists think that only consequences matter?
"Awesome" does not refer to anything else.
Except, you know, the original literal meaning. The one that is means "able to cause the experience of awe".
Extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.
Things that cause awe may also be awesome/excellent/great/cool but it isn't the same thing.
You know, I'm not sure that I'd rather be turned into a whale than orgasmium. In fact, I'm not really sure that I'd rather be an unmodified human than be turned into orgasmium, but I don't lean towards orgasmium as the most awesome thing I could possibly be.
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist.
Not necessarily. If I tell a story of how I went white water rafting, and the person I'm talking to tells me that what I did was "awesome," is he or she really thinking of the consequences of my white water rafting? Probably not. Instead, he or she probably thought very little before declaring the white water rafting awesome. That's an inherent problem to using awesome with morality. Awesome is usually used without thought. If you determine morality based on awesomeness, then you are moralizing without thinking at all, which can often be a problem.
I like the word awesome a lot, but as a particular useful word in English have noticed it becoming very overused of late.
Awesome decomposes to full of awe, or inspiring of awe. Wondersome, full of wonder or inspiring of wonder, seems like it would be similarly useful.
Can anyone coin relevant neologisms?
I so wanted to come up with an objection or a counter-argument, after all, the whole premise is silly on the face of it. But instead I only recall an old commercial for something, which goes something like "Don't fight awesome. It will only make it awesomer!". Can't find a link, though.
Good post, but I can easily imagine awesome ways to starve hundreds of children.
"Awesome" to me means impressive and exciting in a pleasant manner. You seem to use it to mean desirable. If morality just means desirability, then there's no reasons to use the word morality. I think that for morality to have any use, it has to be a component of desirability, but not interchangeable with it.
"In some sense, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?"
In some sense, it probably would, it's just a sense that doesn't have any weight to speak of in deciding whether a nuclear war is a good idea. Even reliably settled arguments are not one-sided; there are usually considerations aligned against even the most obviously right decisions, and denying the existence or correctness of such considerations damages one's epistemic rationality.
I used to pick the “least bad” answer in such cases, but then I decided to clear all my previous answers, and now when I see a question to which the answer I wish I could give is “Mu” or “ADBOC” or “Taboo $word” or “Avada Ked--[oh right, new censorship policy, sorry]”, I just skip it.
I'm sorry, this is all I could think about the whole time reading your post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b1iwLIMmRQ
Seriously though, this terminology has been employed by Starglider in SL4 circles for ages. His explanation of a positive Singularity would be something like, "Everything gets really, really awesome really really fast." I do think it's a great word, despite the negative connotations.
In a world of hardship and mediocrity (hopefully not yours), even when implementing "degree of awesomeness" on a scale, it may be a bit of a stretch going "Hey, this cubicle job is more awesome than that cubicle job! ... twitching smile, furtive glances around", or even "Awesome, another ration of rice from USAID, that means I may survive yet another day! :-))"
(This is a semi-serious introduction to the metaethics sequence. You may find it useful, but don't take it too seriously.)
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into a whale. Is this awesome?
"Maybe? I guess it would be pretty cool to be a whale for a day. But only if I can turn back, and if I stay human inside and so on. Also, that's not a whale.
"Actually, a whale seems kind of specific, and I'd be suprised if that was the best thing the wizard can do. Can I have something else? Eternal happiness maybe?"
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into orgasmium, doomed to spend the rest of eternity experiencing pure happiness. Is this awesome?
...
"Kindof... That's pretty lame actually. On second thought I'd rather be the whale; at least that way I could explore the ocean for a while.
"Let's try again. Wizard: maximize awesomeness."
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned himself into a superintelligent god, and is squeezing as much awesomeness out of the universe as it could possibly support. This may include whales and starships and parties and jupiter brains and friendship, but only if they are awesome enough. Is this awesome?
...
"Well, yes, that is awesome."
What we just did there is called Applied Ethics. Applied ethics is about what is awesome and what is not. Parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales are awesome. ~666 children dying of hunger every hour is not.
(There is also normative ethics, which is about how to decide if something is awesome, and metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out. I'll tell you right now that those terms are not on the exam.)
"Wait a minute!" you cry, "What is this awesomeness stuff? I thought ethics was about what is good and right."
I'm glad you asked. I think "awesomeness" is what we should be talking about when we talk about morality. Why do I think this?
"Awesome" is not a philosophical landmine. If someone encounters the word "right", all sorts of bad philosophy and connotations send them spinning off into the void. "Awesome", on the other hand, has no philosophical respectability, hence no philosophical baggage.
"Awesome" is vague enough to capture all your moral intuition by the well-known mechanisms behind fake utility functions, and meaningless enough that this is no problem. If you think "happiness" is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.
If you do manage to actually implement "awesomeness" as a maximization criteria, the results will be actually good. That is, "awesome" already refers to the same things "good" is supposed to refer to.
"Awesome" does not refer to anything else. You think you can just redefine words, but you can't, and this causes all sorts of trouble for people who overload "happiness", "utility", etc.
You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover. Instead it brings to mind concrete things like starship-whale math-parties and not-starving children, which is what we want anyways. You are already enabled to take joy in the merely awesome.
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist. "Is this awesome?" engages you to think of the value of a possible world, as opposed to "Is this right?" which engages to to think of virtues and rules. (Those things can be awesome sometimes, though.)
I find that the above is true about me, and is nearly all I need to know about morality. It handily inoculates against the usual confusions, and sets me in the right direction to make my life and the world more awesome. It may work for you too.
I would append the additional facts that if you wrote it out, the dynamic procedure to compute awesomeness would be hellishly complex, and that right now, it is only implicitly encoded in human brains, and no where else. Also, if the great procedure to compute awesomeness is not preserved, the future will not be awesome. Period.
Also, it's important to note that what you think of as awesome can be changed by considering things from different angles and being exposed to different arguments. That is, the procedure to compute awesomeness is dynamic and created already in motion.
If we still insist on being confused, or if we're just curious, or if we need to actually build a wizard to turn the universe into an awesome place (though we can leave that to the experts), then we can see the metaethics sequence for the full argument, details, and finer points. I think the best post (and the one to read if only one) is joy in the merely good.