shminux comments on Morality is Awesome - Less Wrong

86 [deleted] 06 January 2013 03:21PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 06 January 2013 09:04:34PM 32 points [-]

[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?

Comment author: shminux 06 January 2013 11:01:11PM *  12 points [-]

As one of the upvoters, here is my thought process, as far as I recall it:

  1. WTF?!! What does it even mean?

  2. Wait, this kind of makes sense intuitively.

  3. Hey, every example I can try actually works. I wonder why.

  4. OK, so the OP suggests awesomeness as an overriding single intuitive terminal value. What does he mean by "intuitive"?

  5. 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.

  6. He must be onto something.

  7. Oh, and his approach is clearly awesome, so the post is self-consistent.

  8. Gotta upvote!

  9. Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!

Comment author: [deleted] 07 January 2013 01:30:06AM 7 points [-]

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.