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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong
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I agree, but I'm really confused about the how the creators of that website intended for the question to help in deciding whether a user should date a certain individual. I wouldn't be able to tell if they answered "yes" because "Yay! Explosions!" and completely disregarded human deaths, or if they were saying "Indeed, there exists a sense in which nuclear war would create more excitement than a lack of one."
I feel like "excitement" carries a positive connotation, particularly in American culture, which makes me uneasy about any "yes" answers. :(
That's the point: you should (in particular) be comfortable with entertaining arguments for horrible things that carry positive connotations (just don't get carried away :-). The correctness of these arguments won't in general depend on whether their connotations align with those of the decisions reached upon considering all relevant arguments.
You're saying a lot of technically correct things that don't seem to be engaging what I'm saying. =/
Yes, I agree that there is some value in entertaining a "yes, during a nuclear war, there will be may be some more (positively) exciting things than in peacetime." This is something to take into account when deciding whether or not you should go to nuclear war.
Meanwhile, if you're trying to use the question to gauge the moral compass of the answering person, the "nuclear war is great and fun thing!" answer is not readily distinguishable from the "I am carefully entertaining the argument for a horrible thing" answer. Which is similar to the way "awesomeness" sometimes leads to ... awesome starvation schemes?
I think that using factual beliefs to signal something other than knowledge about the world is a bad idea. It encourages lying to yourself and others.
Still, in questions which have one correct answer (e.g. “Which is bigger, the earth or the sun” or “STALE is to STEAL as 89475 is to...”), I only mark the correct answer and “I don't know” (if it's there) as acceptable, and I mark the question as “Mandatory” if the “I don't know” answer is available. It's OK to be ignorant, but it's not OK to not admit it.