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srn347 comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong
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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,
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.
"blackboxing"?
As in "I blackedboxed metaethics by using the word 'awesome'".
Nice, I wish I could blackbox in newcomb's problem (like eliezer does).
Isn't what "naming" means in the first place?
"Reverse tabooing" seems like a fine phrase. It's at least somewhat clear what it means, and it doesn't come pre-loaded with distracting connotations. I think it would be difficult to improve upon it.
How about "Plancheting"?
A 'planchet' is a blank coin, ready to be minted - which seems analogous to what's being done with these words (and has the delightful parallelization of metaphor with "coining a phrase").
The downside of this is that most people won't know what "planchet" means. The advantage of "taboo" is it's already intuitive what is meant when you here it.
That's a good point.
Heh, good point(s) there. I never thought removing meaning would actually make an argument clearer, but somehow it did.