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Morality is Awesome
(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?
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"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.
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"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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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"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.
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Comments (437)
According to Leibniz, this is the most awesome of all possible worlds.
Falsified by diarrhea. Next!
I don't agree with Leibniz, but I do find his "best of all possible worlds" concept really useful for talking about what utilitarians try to do.
(This is not a good characterization of Leibniz's actual conceptual system, for what it's worth;---the arguments that this is the "best of all possible worlds" are quite technical and come from the sort of intuitions that would later inspire algorithmic information theory; certainly neither blind optimism nor psychologically contingent enthusiasm about life's bounties were motivating the arguments. Crucially, "best" or similar, unlike "awesome", is potentially philosophically simple (in the sense of algorithmic information theory), which is necessary for Leibniz's arguments to go through. (This comment is directed more at the general readership than the author of the comment I'm replying to.))
My recollection of Leibniz's view is dim but I recollect that the essence of it is that the perfection of the world is a consequence of the perfection of God. It would reflect poorly on the Omnipotence, Omniscience, Benevolence & Supreme Awesomeness &c of the Deity and Designer if he bashed out some second-rate less than perfectly good (or indeed merely averagely awesome) world. For the benefit of the general readership, the book to read on this is Candide by Voltaire. You will never see rationalists in quite the same way again... :-)
Link to Candide
I think this comment reinforces Will_Newsome's point. The textbook Rhetoric, Logic, and Argumentation: A Guide for Student Writers by Magedah Shabo (quite correctly) uses Voltaire's Candide as the very first example of a straw man fallacy on page 95.
Nice catch!
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.
Great! I really like this.
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?
No thanks. Awesomeness is more complex than can be achieved with wireheading.
I can't bring myself to see the creation of an awesomeness pill as the one problem of such huge complexity that even a superintelligent agent can't solve it.
My first thought was that an awesomeness pill would be a pill that makes ordinary experience awesome. Things fall down. Reliably. That's awesome!
And in fact, that's a major element of popular science writing, though I don't know how well it works.
Psychedelic drugs already exist...
One time my roommate ate shrooms, and then he spent about 2 hours repeatedly knocking over an orange juice jug, and then picking it up again. It was bizarre. He said "this is the best thing ever" and was pretty sincere. It looked pretty silly from the outside though.
I have no doubt that you could make a pill that would convince someone that they were living an awesome life, complete with hallucinations of rocket-powered tyrannosaurs, and black leather lab coats.
The trouble is that merely hallucinating those things, or merely feeling awesome is not enough.
The average optimizer probably has no code for experiencing utility, it only feels the utility of actions under consideration. The concept of valuing (or even having) internal experience is particular to humans, and is in fact only one of the many things that we care about. Is there a good argument for why internal experience ought to be the only thing we care about? Why should we forget all the other things that we like and focus solely on internal experience (and possibly altruism)?
I'm anti-orgasmium, but not necessarily anti-experience-machine. I'm approximately a median-preference utilitarian. (This is more descriptive than normative)
For as long as I've been here, which admittedly isn't all that long.
Here's your problem.
No. Most of us are preferentists or similar. Some of us are not consequentialists at all.
... no?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lb/notforthesakeofhappinessalone/
Interesting stuff. Very interesting.
Do you buy it?
That article is arguing that it's all right to value things that aren't mental states over a net gain in mental utility.[1] If, for instance, you're given the choice between feeling like you've made lots of scientific discoveries and actually making just a few scientific discoveries, it's reasonable to prefer the latter.[2]
Well, that example doesn't sound all that ridiculous.
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.
And I think that Eliezer's argument is misguided, too. He can't stand the idea that scientific discovery is only an instrument to increase happiness, so he makes it a terminal value just because he can. This is less horrible than the hippie who thinks that maintaining her "naturalness" is more important than avoiding a painful death, but it's not much less dumb.
[1] Or a net gain in "happiness," if we don't mind using that word as a catchall for "whatever it is that makes good mental states good."
[2] In this discussion we are, of course, ignoring external effects altogether. And we're assuming that the person who gets to experience lots of scientific discoveries really is happier than the person who doesn't, otherwise there's nothing to debate. Let me note that in the real world, it is obviously possible to make yourself less happy by taking joy-inducing drugs — for instance if doing so devalues the rest of your life. This fact makes Eliezer's stance seem a lot more reasonable than it actually is.
I surmise from your comments that you may not be aware that Eliezer's written quite a bit on this matter; http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexityofvalue is a good summary/index ( is one of my favorites). There's a lot of stuff in there that is relevant to your points.
However, you asked me what I think, so here it is...
The wording of your first post in this thread seems telling. You say that "Refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, full stop."
Do you want to become orgasmium?
Perhaps you do. In that case, I direct the question to myself, and my answer is no: I don't want to become orgasmium.
That having been established, what could it mean to say that my judgment is a "mistake"? That seems to be a category error. One can't be mistaken in wanting something. One can be mistaken about wanting something ("I thought I wanted X, but upon reflection and consideration of my mental state, it turns out I actually don't want X"), or one can be mistaken about some property of the thing in question, which affects the preference ("I thought I wanted X, but then I found out more about X, and now I don't want X"); but if you're aware of all relevant facts about the way the world is, and you're not mistaken about what your own mental states are, and you still want something... labeling that a "mistake" seems simply meaningless.
On to your analogy:
If someone wants to "keep her body natural", then conditional on that even being a coherent desire[1], what's wrong with it? If it harms other people somehow, then that's a problem... otherwise, I see no issue. I don't think it makes this person "kind of dumb" unless you mean that she's actually got other values that are being harmed by this value, or is being irrational in some other ways; but values in and of themselves cannot be irrational.
This construal is incorrect. Say rather: Eliezer does not agree that scientific discovery is only an instrument to increase happiness. Eliezer isn't making scientific discovery a terminal value, it is a terminal value for him. Terminal values are given.
Why are we doing that...? If it's only about happiness, then external effects should be irrelevant. You shouldn't need to ignore them; they shouldn't affect your point.
[1]Coherence matters: the difference between your hypothetical hippie and Eliezer the potential-scientific-discoverer is that the hippie, upon reflection, would realize (or so we would like to hope) that "natural" is not a very meaningful category, that her body is almost certainly already "not natural" in at least some important sense, and that "keeping her body natural" is just not a state of affairs that can be described in any consistent and intuitively correct way, much less one that can be implemented. That, if anything, is what makes her preference "dumb". There's no analogous failures of reasoning behind Eliezer's preference to actually discover things instead of just pretend-discovering, or my preference to not become orgasmium.
I have never used the word "mistake" by itself. I did say that refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, which is mathematically true, unless you disagree with me on the definition of "hedonistic utilitarian mistake" (= an action which demonstrably results in less hedonic utility than some other action) or of "orgasmium" (= a state of maximum personal hedonic utility).[1]
I point this out because I think you are quite right: it doesn't make sense to tell somebody that they are mistaken in "wanting" something.
Indeed, I never argued that the dying hippie was mistaken. In fact I made exactly the same point that you're making, when I said:
What I said was that she is misguided.
The argument I was trying to make was, look, this hippie is using some suspect reasoning to make her decisions, and Eliezer's reasoning looks a lot like her's, so we should doubt Eliezer's conclusions. There are two perfectly reasonable ways to refute this argument: you can (1) deny that the hippie's reasoning is suspect, or (2) deny that Eliezer's reasoning is similar to hers.
These are both perfectly fine things to do, since I never elaborated on either point. (You seem to be trying option 1.) My comment can only possibly convince people who feel instinctively that both of these points are true.
All that said, I think that I am meaningfully right — in the sense that, if we debated this forever, we would both end up much closer to my (current) view than to your (current) view. Maybe I'll write an article about this stuff and see if I can make my case more strongly.
[1] Please note that I am ignoring the external effects of becoming orgasmium. If we take those into account, my statement stops being mathematically true.
I don't think those are the only two ways to refute the argument. I can think of at least two more:
(3) Deny the third step of the argument's structure — the "so we should doubt Eliezer's conclusions" part. Analogical reasoning applied to surface features of arguments is not reliable. There's really no substitute for actually examining an argument.
(4) Disagree that construing the hippie's position as constituting any sort of "reasoning" that may or may not be "suspect" is a meaningful description of what's going on in your hypothetical (or at least, the interesting aspect of what's going on, the part we're concerned with). The point I was making is this: what's relevant in that scenario is that the hippie has "keeping her body natural" as a terminal value. If that's a coherent value, then the rest of the reasoning ("and therefore I shouldn't take this pill") is trivial and of no interest to us. Now it may not be a coherent value, as I said; but if it is — well, arguing with terminal values is not a matter of poking holes in someone's logic. Terminal values are given.
As for your other points:
It's true, you didn't say "mistake" on its own. What I am wondering is this: ok, refusing to become orgasmium fails to satisfy the mathematical requirements of hedonistic utilitarianism.
But why should anyone care about that?
I don't mean this as a general, out-of-hand dismissal; I am asking, specifically, why such a requirement would override a person's desires:
Person A: If you become orgasmium, you would feel more pleasure than you otherwise would.
Person B: But I don't want to become orgasmium.
Person A: But if you want to feel as much pleasure as possible, then you should become orgasmium!
Person B: But... I don't want to become orgasmium.
I see Person B's position as being the final word on the matter (especially if, as you say, we're ignoring external consequences). Person A may be entirely right — but so what? Why should that affect Person B's judgments? Why should the mathematical requirements behind Person A's framework have any relevance to Person B's decisions? In other words, why should we be hedonistic utilitarians, if we don't want to be?
(If we imagine the above argument continuing, it would develop that Person B doesn't want to feel as much pleasure as possible; or, at the least, wants other things too, and even the pleasure thing he wants only given certain conditions; in other words, we'd arrive at conclusions along the lines outlined in the "Complexity of value" wiki entry.)
(As an aside, I'm still not sure why you're ignoring external effects in your arguments.)
The difficulty here, of course, is that Person B is using a cached heuristic that outputs "no" for "become orgasmium"; and we cannot be certain that this heuristic is correct in this case. Just as Person A is using the (almost certainly flawed) heuristic "feel as much pleasure as possible", which outputs "yes" for "become orgasmium".
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:
Damn but that's a good example. Is it too long to submit to the Rationality Quotes thread?
Choices can be wrong, and that one is. The hippy is simply mistaken about the kinds of differences that exist between "natural" and "non-natural" things, and about how much she would care about those differences if she knew more chemistry and physics. And presumably if she was less mistaken in expectations of what happens "after you die".
As for relating this to Eliezer's argument, a few examples of wrong non-subjective-happiness values is no demonstration that subjective happiness is the only human terminal value. Especially given the introspective and experimental evidence that people care about certain things that aren't subjective happiness.
Except, you know, the original literal meaning. The one that is means "able to cause the experience of awe".
Things that cause awe may also be awesome/excellent/great/cool but it isn't the same thing.
Where I come from, it connotes "I'm an idiot". Exrpessing such a high degree of approbation about antyhing is seen as sign of mental feebleness.
Are you sure this is universally true, or just true of certain ways of such expression? I used to be fairly sparse in my praise but after practicing it I found that you can praise people both genuinely and in a high-status way. The best description I can come up with is that it involves expressing only gratitude/admiration without tinging it at all with jealousy/the desire to manipulate/insecurity; the problem with this description is that the jealousy/desire to manipulate/insecurity part is often largely subconscious, so the usefulness of this depends on how good one is at introspecting.
I didn't even say ti was universally true.
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.
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.
I... approve of this for nonexperts and nonAI purposes. This might actually be pretty cool.
I frankly hope it represents the future of LessWrong.
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 obfuscation, by saying "I don't know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can't be awesome." Hitler was evil, not bad.
That's exactly right. Including "awesome". Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are awesome. A God who will squish you like a bug if you dare not to worship him is awesome, awe-full, and awful.
Saying that it's good because it's vague, because it's harder to screw up when you don't know what you're talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.
Awesome already refers to the same things good is supposed to refer to, for those people who have already decided to use "awesome" instead of "good". The "Is this right?" question that invokes virtues and rules is not a confused notion of what is awesome. It's a different, incompatible view of what we "ought" to do.
You appear to have invented your own highly specific meaning of "awesome", which appears synonymous with "effective". As such, "awesome" (in my experience generally used as a contentless expression of approval, more or less, with connotations of excitingness) is not fulfilling it's intended goal of intuition-pump for you. Poor you. Those of us who use "awesome" in the same way as nyan_sandwich, however, have no such problem.
That is explicitly the goal here - to use the vague goodness of "awesome" as a hack to access moral intuitions more directly.
Actually, aren't there existing connotations of "awesome" - exciting, dramatic and so on - for everyone?
I think your post is aimed too high. Nyan is not trying to resolve the virtue ethics / deontology / consequentilist dispute.
Instead, he's trying to use vocabulary to break naive folks out of the good --> preferences --> good.
At that level of confusion, the distinction between good, virtue, or utility is not yet relevant. Only after people stop defining good in an essentially circular fashion is productive discussion of different moral theories even possible.
Attacking Nyan for presuming moral realism is fighting the hypothetical.
Can't we resolve this simply by amending the statement to "Morality is awesome for everybody." Dying pathetically is not an awesome outcome for the people who had to do it. Arguing that innocent people were pathetic actually emphasizes the point. If Hitler's actions made tons of people pathetic instead of awesome then those actions were most certainly immoral.
Incidentally, I do not expect nyan_sandwich to retitle the OP based on my comment. I think that the "for everybody" part can probably just be implicit.
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...
Canon!Luna is more awesome than MoR!Hermione too.
However, a universe with MoR!Hermione in it is likely to be far more awesome than a universe with canon!Luna substituted in. MoR!Hermione is a heck of a lot more useful to have around for most purposes, including the protection of awesome things such as canon!Luna.
MoR!Quirrel certainly invokes "Fictional Awesomeness". That thing that makes many (including myself) think "Well he's just damn cool and I'm glad he exists in that fictional universe (which can't have any direct effect on me)". Like Darth Vader is way more awesome than Anakin Skywalker even though being a whiny brat is somewhat less dangerous than being a powerful, gratuitously evil Sith Lord. I personally distinguish this from the 'actual awesomeness' of the kind mentioned here. I'm not sure to what extent others consider the difference.
I didn't, and still don't... but now I'm a little bit disturbed that I don't, and want to look a lot more closely at Hermione for ways she's awesome.
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.
Let's say they're different kinds of awesome to me. Overall, I think Quirrell is more awesome... until I remember Hermione is twelve.
Yeah, that sounds like either a miscalibrated sense of awe (i.e. very different priorities), or like a reaction to private information.
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.
Wait, all of her? Including the obnoxious controlling parts?
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.
That's probably why. For many mere mortals like myself MoR!Quirrell is simply awesome: competent, unpredictable, in control, a level above everyone else. Whereas MoR!Hermione is, while clever and knowledgeable, too often a damsel in distress, and her thought process, decisions and actions are uniformly less impressive than those of Harry or Quirrell. Not sure if this is intentional or not. At this point I'm rooting for Quirrell to win. Maybe there will be an alternate ending which explores this scenario.
Is this simply a case of rooting for whoever looks like they're going to win?
You think that [I think that] Quirrell/Voldemort is going to win? O.O I wish. After all, what's the worst that can happen if he does?
This surprises me, but I'm not sure what I've mismodelled. To my mind, Hermione is trusting about moral rules in a way that I wouldn't have expected you to like that much, but perhaps it's just a trait that I don't like that much.
Harry seems more awesome to me because he has a strong drive to get to the bottom of things-- not the same thing as intelligence, though it might be a trait that wouldn't be as interesting in an unintelligent character. (Or would it be? I can't think of an author who's tried to portray that.)
I would be fascinated to read a character who can Get Curious and think skeptically and reflectively about competing ideas, but is only of average intelligence.
Trying to model this character in my head has resulted in some sort of error though, so there's that...
Time to taboo intelligence.
I can imagine writing this character, because it's the way I feel a lot of the time... Knowing I read some important fact once but not being able retrieve it, lacking the working memory to do logic problems in my head and having to stop and pull out pen and paper, etc. I'm arguably of somewhat higher than average intelligence, but I'm quite familiar with the feeling of my brain not being good enough for what I want to do.
Those personality traits are not just correlated with intelligence, they almost certainly cause it - thinking is to some degree a skill set, and innate curiosity + introspection + skepticism would result in constant deliberate practice. So those traits + average intelligence can only coexist if the character has recently undergone a major personality change, or suffered brain damage.
Arguably Watson is an attempt at this.
Except Watson was intended to be above average intelligence, but below Sherlock level intelligence, so he fails on the last account. He was very intelligent, just not as absurdly inelligent as Sherlock, so he appeared to be of average or lower intelligence.
That's a dangerous combination.
The Millionaire Next Door may include a bunch of people who can think clearly without being able to handle a lot of complexity.
Maybe Next Door? Or am I missing something?
Amazon link. The primary takeaway from the book is that high consumption and high wealth draw from the same resource pool, and so conflict.
In general, I wonder if this shows up as characters who see virtue as intuitive, rather than deliberative. Harry sometimes gets the answer right, but he has to think hard and avoid tripping over himself to get there; Hermione often gets the answer right from the start because she appears to have a good feel for her situation.
Moving back to wealth, and generalizing from my parents, it's not clear to me that they sat down one day and said "you know how we could become millionaires? Not spending a lot of money!" rather than having the "consume / save?" dial in their heads turned towards save, in part because "thrift => wealth" is an old, old association.
If you model intelligence differences as primarily working memory differences, it seems reasonable to me that high-WM people would be comfortable with nuance and low-WM people would be uncomfortable with it; the low-WM person might be able to compensate with external devices like writing things down, but it's not clear they can synthesize things as easily on paper as a high-WM person could do in their head (or as easily as the high-WM person using paper!).
Upvoted; whatever its relationship to what the OP actually meant, this is good.
Reminding yourself of your confusion, and avoiding privileging hypotheses, by using vague terms as long as you remember that they're vague doesn't seem so 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.
Clearly reducing the number of disgusting Untermenschen and increasing the Lebensraum for the master race is awesome if you consider yourself to be one of the latter.
[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
or
(Oh, how that must burn in the hearts of American feminists: the great female filmmaker is not American, and was a lackey of the Nazis.)
I watched it once, and was very impressed, personally.
Take a moment to savor that. Hitler and Naziism are the ultimate embodiment of evil in the West; modern cinema, invented in America & Europe, are world-around still recognized as one of the quintessentially Western mediums. But here we have a propaganda movie, produced to glorify Hitler and Naziism, 100% glorifying Hitler and Naziism, featuring only Hitler and Naziism, commissioned by Hitler who "served as an unofficial executive producer", etc etc and not only has it not been consigned to the dust-heap of history, it is still watched, admired, and studied by those who are sworn to hate Naziism and anything even slightly like it such as eugenics or criticism of Israel.
Now that is "awesome".
Minor note: According to an article in Wired recently, the Nazis invented 3D movies.
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.
That was the German narrative, was it not? Starting from the avowed English-French 'encircling' of Germany - why do you think they were allied in the first place with decrepit Poland?
I don't understand why this was downvoted :( I upvoted it because it's a good point and true. Is it too understanding to Nazis?
Probably. I remember a similar conversation where I posted a Wittgenstein lambasting mindless British nationalism in a WWII context, and VladimirM stepped in to defend said nationalism to much upvotes.
Not very rational to vote down a fact >:( it's not even politics like that one just the things they believed. Is there any post on bias against the poor Nazis, it seems a bad plan if you want human rationality to tar facts about them with the same brush as their evil deeds.
They had population of 70 million (probably after eating Austria) which was quite a lot at the time, compared to 48 million of Britain and about as much of France. The only more populous independent countries in 1939 were China, USA, the USSR and perhaps Japan.
I would say that the world being taken over by an evil dictator is a lot less awesome than the world being threatened by an evil dictator who's heroically defeated.
Exactly right. In fact I do this explicitly, by invoking "fake utility functions" in point 2.
You're right I'm playing fast and loose a bit here. I guess my "morality is awesome" idea doesn't work for people who are in possession of the actual definition of awesome.
In that case, depending on whether you are being difficult or not, I recommend finding another vaguely good and approximately meaningless word that is free of philosophical connotations to stand in for "awesome", or just following the "if you are still confused" procedure (read metaethics).
Perhaps. I certainly wouldn't endorse it in general. I have inside view reasons that it's a good idea (for me) in this particular case, though; I'm not just pulling a classic "I don't understand, therefore it will work". Have you seen the discussion here?
I'm confused about what you are saying. Here you seem to be identifying consequentialism with "awesome", but above, you used similar phrasings and identified "awesome" with Space Hitler, which nearly everyone (including consequentialists) would generally agree was only good if you don't look at the details (like people getting killed).
Can you clarify?
Was Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Was Space Hitler good? No. If you say "morality is what is awesome," then you are either explicitly signing on to a morality in which the thing to be maximized is the glorious actions of supermen, not the petty happiness of the masses, or you are misusing the word "awesome."
This doesn't seem to pose any kind of contradiction or problem for the "Morality is Awesome" statement, though I agree with you about the rest of your comment.
Is Space Hitler awesome? Yes. Is saving everyone from Space Hitler such that no harm is done to anyone even more awesome? Hell yes.
Remember, we're dealing with a potentially-infinite search space of yet-unknown properties with a superintelligence attempting to maximize total awesomeness within that space. You're going to find lots of Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superheroes fighting off the hordes of Evil-Nazi-Mutant-Zombie-Alien-Viking-Spider-Henchmen, and winning.
And what's more awesome than a Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superhero? Being one. And what's more awesome than being a Ninja-Robot-Pirate-BountyHunter-Jedi-Superhero? Being a billion of them!
Suppose a disaster could be prevented by foresight, or narrowly averted by heroic action. Which one is more awesome? Which one is better?
Tvtropes link: Really?
My numerous words are defeated by your single link. This analogy is irrelevant, but illustrates your point well.
Anyway, that's pretty much all I had to say. The initial argument I was responding to sounded weak, but your arguments now seem much stronger. They do, after all, single-handedly defeat an army of Ninja-Robot-... of those.
Preventing disaster by foresight is more likely to work than narrow aversion by heroic action, so the the awesomeness of foresight working gets multiplied by a larger probability than the awesomeness of heroic action working when you decide to take one approach over the other. This advantage of the action that is more likely to work belongs in decision theory, not your utility function. Your utility function just says whether one approach is sufficiently more awesome than the other to overcome its decision theoretic disadvantage. This depends on the probabilities and awesomeness in the specific situation.
Reading this comment thread motivated me to finally look this up -- the words "cheesy" and "corny" actually did originally have something to do with cheese and corn!
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 eventually there is a kickass showdown where the nemesis - fairly old by this point, wasn't going to last long even absent violence - is taken down.
Or, for a simpler case: the death of Batman's parents. Batman's parents' death was not particularly awesome, but Batman got really awesome as a result.
It is not moral to attack mediocre people or orphan impressionable rich children, regardless.
I dunno, maybe this is just me complaining about consequentialism-in-general again with a different vocabulary.
If it reliably resulted in more superheros and nobel-proze winners and such, I think it would be awesome (and moral) to traumatize kids.
If it's not reliable, and only some crazy black swan, then not.
This does seem to be the substance of your example.
Agreed. Most people already agree that it is moral to force kids to go to school for years, which can be a traumatizing experience for some, and school is not even all that reliable at producing what it claims to want to produce, namely productive members of society.
Even if net awesomeness increases though, do awesome ends justify non-awesome means?
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.
(nods) I think so. Supposing that Bruce Wayne being Batman is a good thing, and supposing that his parents being killed was indispensible to him becoming Batman, then a consequentialist should endorse his parents having been killed. (Of course, we might ask why on earth we're supposing those things, but that's a different question.)
Disagree. P(parents killed | becoming like Batman) being high doesn't imply that P(becoming like Batman | parents killed) is high.
I agree with your assertion, but I suspect we're talking past each other, probably because I was cryptic.
Let me unpack a little, and see if you still disagree.
There's 30-year-old Bruce over there, and we have established (somehow) that he is Batman, that this is a good thing, and that it would not have happened had his parents not been killed. (Further, we have established (somehow) that his parents' continued survival would not have been an even better thing.)
And the question arises, was it a good thing that his parents were killed? (Not, "could we have known at the time that it was a good thing", merely "was it, in retrospect, a good thing?")
I'm saying a consequentialist answers "yes."
If your disagreement still applies, then I haven't followed your reasoning, and would appreciate it if you unpacked it for me.
As a consequentialist, I think the only good reason to judge past actions is to help make future decisions, so to me the question "was it a good thing that his parents were killed?" cashes out to "should we adopt a general policy of killing people's parents?" and the answer is no. (I think Alicorn agrees with me.)
It seems to me like a bad idea to judge past actions on the basis of their observed results; this leaves you too susceptible to survivorship bias. Past actions should be judged on the basis of their expected results. If I adopt a bad investment strategy but end up making a lot of money anyway, that doesn't imply that my investment strategy was a good idea.
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 can you do when you meet someone who disagrees with you and a lot is at stake? Well, there's always force. Or if you have some ideas about awesomeness in common, you can argue based on those. Is there another option? In practice, people do change their idea of awesomeness after talking to other people.
The "people" who disagree don't have to be separate beings. They can be subminds within a single human. The situation is pretty much the same (except you can't really use force).
Metaethics is that art of trying to deal with this. It hasn't gotten very far.
ಠ_ರೃ I disapprove of your example, sah!
ETA: Just joking with you I wanted to use that face.
We can use PURE WILLPOWER.
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.
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?
That's the idea.
EDIT:
If you follow this line of reasoning as far as it goes, I think you find that there isn't really any good reason to distinguish "I caused this" and "I failed to prevent this". In other words, as soon as you allow some consequentialism into your moral philosophy, it takes over the whole thing. I think...
There's something screwy going on in your reasoning. Imagine the following closing argument at a murder trial:
Edit 1/11: Because it isn't clear: No reasonable deontologist would find this reasoning persuasive. nyan is at risk of strawmanning the opposing position - see our further conversation below.
This is a result of screwy reasoning within Deontology, not within nyan_sandwich's post.
Sounds like a shoe-in for an insanity plea...
Let's use examples to tease apart the difference.
A consequentialist says: "Death is bad. Person A could have donated their income and saved that child, but they didn't. The consequence was death. Person B killed a child with a gunshot. The consequence was death. These two situations are equivalent."
The deontologist says "It was not the duty of person A to save a stranger-child. However, it is the duty of every person not to murder children. Person B is worse than person A, because he did not do his duty."
The virtue ethicist says - "By his actions, we deduce that Person A is either unaware of the good he could have done, or or he lacks the willpower, or he lacks the goodness to save the child. We deduce that person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up."
I think the crux of the divide is that virtue and deontological ethics are focused with evaluating whether an agent's actions were right or wrong, whereas consequentialist ethics is focused on creating the most favorable final outcome.
Personally, I use virtue ethics for evaluating whether my or another's action was right or wrong, and use consequentialism when deciding which action to take.
Only an extremely nearsighted consequentialist would say this. Whoever's saying this is ignoring lots of other consequences of Person A and Person B's behavior. First, Person A has to take an opportunity cost from donating their income to save children's lives. Person B doesn't take such an opportunity cost. Second, Person B pays substantial costs for killing children in some combination of possible jail time, lost status, lost allies, etc. Third, the fact that Person B decided to murder a child is strong evidence that Person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up in the sense that locking up Person B has the best consequences. Etc.
What's the difference?
Truth be told at the end of the day those three moral systems are identical, if examined thoroughly enough. This type of discussion is only meaningful if you don't think about it too hard...once the words get unpacked the whole thing dissolves.
But if we don't think too hard about it, there is a difference. Which moral philosophy someone subscribes to describes what their "first instinct" is when it comes to moral questions.
From wikipedia:
But - if the deontologist thinks hard enough, they will conclude that sometimes lying is okay if it fulfills your other duties. Maximizing duty fulfillment is equivalent to maximizing moral utility.
When a virtue ethicist is judging a person, they will take the intended consequences of an action into account. When a virtue ethicist is judging their own options, they are looking at the range of there own intended consequences...once again, maximizing moral utility.
And, as you just illustrated, the farsighted consequentialist will in fact take both intention and societal repercussions into account, mimicking the virtue and deontological ethicists, respectively.
It's only when the resources available for thinking are in short supply that these distinctions are meaningful...for these three moral approaches, the starting points of thought are different. It's a description of inner thought process. Conclusions of these different processes only converge after all variables are accounted for...and this doesn't always happen with humans.
So in answer to your question, when planning my own actions I first begin by taking possible consequences into account, whereas when judging others I begin by taking intentions into account, and asking what it says about that person's psychology. Given enough time and processing power, I could use any of these systems for these tasks and come to the same conclusions, but since I do not possess either, it does make a practical difference which strategy I use.
(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...)
So "awesome" now means making reality closer to fiction? What happened to your old posts about joy in the merely real, dragons vs zebras, and so on?
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.
I've seen a suggestion that the reason cooking is a fairly common hobby these days is that a lot of the dreary parts (plucking chickens, hauling wood and drawing water, keeping an eye on your rice, pureeing, etc.) are handled by machines.
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.
Actually that last description sounds like it would plateau really fast.
I frankly think the Cambridge Center for the study of Awesome would become run of the mill in a few months, and that's WITH the rest of the world being "ordinary" for comparison purposes.
Just because a literal flying t-rex gets old faster than they expected, doesn't mean you couldn't have a great deal of fun in a world like that.
Of course, presumably self imposed challenges (eg videogames that don't just let you win) would be fairly commonplace.
Empirically, that general type of thing is good for at least a week worth of awesome. http://www.burningman.com/
Fair enough, but I still think the "universe as a vast game of Calvinball" description still stands in principle. (Or if you want a less coloquial descriptor, check out Finite and Infinite Games ).
I rest my case.
Are you at all familiar with the webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja? I was strongly reminded of the whole King Radical arc going on while reading your post, and even more so with Eliezer's comment about the Cambridge Center for the Study of Awesome. I basically just want to know if the parallels I see are real or entirely from my own pattern-matching.
Not familiar at all.
This idea is awesome.
Metaethics is about how to decide how to decide if something is awesome.
Thank you. For a short summary of the whole situation, this is fantastically non-confused and seems like a good intuition pump.
[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?
LW is broken. Aspiring rationalistis should welcom argument contrary to their biases, but actually downvote it. Aspiring rationalists should not welcome pandering, dumbed-down ideas that don't really solve problems or challenge them, but do.
Have you considered the possibiltiy that some people actually found this useful?
You see to be assuming that if someone judges something to be useful, that is the last word on the subject.
I am assuming that if someone judges something to be useful, they are likely to upvote based on that. This is an alternative hypothesis to the one presented in your comment, that "aspiring rationalists" upvoted this because it is a "pandering, dumbed-down idea" that "do[es]n't really solve problems or challenge them".
Not really differrent. If you pander to someone by presenting dumbed-down ideas as profound, they are liable to like them and judge them to be useful. People judge junk food to be worth eating, after all.
Are you arguing that judgments of usefulness have, in this case, (and others?) been distorted by the halo effect? Or have I misunderstood this comment?
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.
Yep. It's intended as an introduction to the long and not-very-exciting metaethics sequence.
Yeah, it tends to melt down under examination. (because "awesome" is a fake utility function, as per point 2). The point was not to give a bulletproof morality procedure, but to just reframe the issue in a way that bypasses the usual confusion and cached thoughts.
So I wouldn't expect it to be useful to people who have their metaethical shit together (which you seem to, judging by the content of your rituals). It was explicitly aimed at people in my meetup who were confused and intimidated by the seeming mysteriousness of morality.
Yes the implications of this are very interesting.
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.
hear, hear!
Yes, humour tends to be upvoted a lot, but it's just not true that you can never get good karma by arguing against the LW majority position. For example, the most upvoted top-level post ever expresses scepticism about the Singularity Institute.
I notice that you're discussing what "they" do on LW. Not that I can honestly object; I'm often tempted to do so myself. It really helps when trying to draw the line between my own ideas, and all those crazy ideas everyone else here has.
But I think we are both actually fairly typical LWers, which means that it would be more correct to say something like "It's just that one would expect us to hold ourselves to a higher standard". This is a very different thought somehow, more than one would expect from a mere pronoun substitution.
It seems to me that the change is that with "us" the speaker is assumed to identify with the group under discussion. Specifically, it seems like they consider(ed) LW superior, and are disappointed that we have failed in this particular; whereas with "they" it seems to be accusing us of hypocrisy.
"Them" as in "the rest of the community, excepting the exceptions". I hold myself to those standards just fine, and there may well be others who do.
Relatedly, I often find replacing "one would expect" with "I expect" has similar effects.
Especially when it turns out the latter isn't true.
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!
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".
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.
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 important step in that Voltairean process, even if it doesn't advance the distinct project of constructing the substance-for-future-popularization in the first place.
Meta-ethics is hard. There are very few easy answers, and there's a lot of disagreement. Uncertainty and disagreement, and in general lack of closure, create a lot of unpleasant dissonance. Your article helps us pretend that we can ignore those problems, which alleviates the dissonance and makes us feel better. This would help explain why applause-lighting posts in areas like meta-ethics or the hard problem of consciousness see better results than applause-lighting posts in areas where substantive progress is easier.
The post invites people to oversimplify their utility calculations via the simple dichotomy 'is it awesome, or isn't it?'. Whether or not your post is useful, informative, insightful ,etc., it is quite clearly 'awesome,' as the word is ordinarily used. So your post encourages people to simplify their evaluation procedure in a way that favors the post itself.
I would tentatively advocate this (especially since there is already a system in place for filtering content into 'promoted' material for those who want a slower stream). More writing => more good writing.
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.
Ironically, this is my most-upvoted comment in several months.
Yes, to counter this effect I tend to upvote the math-heavy decision theory posts and comment chains if I have even the slightest idea what's going on, and the Vladimirs seem to think it's not stupid.
It's an interesting perspective and it presents previous thinking on the subject in a more accessible manner.
Hence, one upvote. I don't know that it's worth sixty-three upvotes (I don't know that it's not), but I didn't upvote it sixty-three times. Also, I see from the comments that it's encouraged some interesting conversations (and perhaps some reading of the meta-ethics sequence, which I think is actually fairly well written if a little dense).
In other words, congratulations on writing something engaging! It's harder than it looks.
I have typically been awful at predicting which parts of HPMOR people would most enjoy. I suggest relaxing and enjoying the hedons.
For me, high (insight + fun) per (time + effort).
I upvoted it because I loved what you did. (I did feel it was, er... awesome, but before reading that comment I couldn't have put it down in words.)
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 weaker points. Then there's a kind of implied peer pressure similar to Ash's conformity experiments; you see a highly upvoted post, then monkey see monkey do kicks in, at least skewing your heuristics.
Lastly people you keep invested until the end of your post are more likely to upvote than downvote, and your pixel art does a good job of capturing attention, the opening scene of a movie is crucial. The lower the entry barrier into a post, the more people will tag along. A lesson well internalized by television. Compare the vote counts of some AIXI related posts and yours.
You are also called nyan_sandwich, have a good reputation on this site (AFAICT), yet provide us with some guilty pleasures (of an easy-to-parse comfort-food-for-thought post, talk about nomen est omen, nom nom). In short, you covered all your populist bases. They are all belong to you.
I don't think it was promoted until it had >30, so maybe that helped a bit, but I have another visibility explanation:
I tend to stick around in my posts and obsessively reply to every comment and cherish every upvote, which means it gets a lot of visibility in the "recent comments" section. My posts tend to have lots of comments, and I think it's largely me trying to get the last word on everything. (until I get swamped and give up)
It is kind of odd that unpromoted posts in main have strictly less visibility than posts in discussion...
This is a good explanation. I get it now I think. Now the question is if we should be doing more of that?
EDIT: also, what does this mean:
Basically, name causes behavior, as far as I can tell. Your nickname is indeed very aptronymical (?) to providing a quick and easy lunch for the hungry mind in a humorous or good-feeling manner.
I think
a community in which people have a good idea but err on the side of not writing it up will tend toward a community in which people err on the of side of not bothering to flesh out their ideas?
fun and clarity are good starting points for structure, seriousness and watertightness? Picking out the bugs feels like a useful exercise for me, having just read the bit of the sequence talking about the impact of language.
I thought it was fun and clear and I liked the cute whale, but also it made me think. ^_^
My own guess, based on nothing much other than a hunch: Morality as Awesomeness sounds simple and easy to do. It also sounds fun and light, unlike many of the other Ethical posts on LW. People have responded positively to this change of pace.
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.
Concur. Upvoted.
"Least not-awesome choice" is isomorphic to "most awesome choice".
Curiously, I like everything about your comment but this, it's central point. Indeed, a concept of negative utility is probably useful; but this is not why.
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.
Sucks less sucks less.
What's the adjectival form of suck?
Sucky. As in: "That movie was really sucky."
ETA: It's even in the dictionary!
Sucky. (It's kind of sucky, but oh well.)
Sounds like an excellent idea.
Gloomiest sentence of 2013 so far. Upvoted.
I tend to use the word fun.
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.
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.
A good point.
With the archetypal answers being "no". Perhaps the word "morality" cues proscriptive, inhibitory, avoidance thoughts for you, while awesomeness cues prescriptive, excitatory, attractive ones.
"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.
It was secretly meant to be parsed the other way: "awesome is morality". Sorry to confuse.
It's not about signalling, it's supposed to be an entirely personal thing.
It's not about hacking your brain to find your current conception of morality more awesome either. It's about flushing out your current conception of morality and rebuilding it from intuition without interference from Deep Wisdom or philosophical cached thoughts.
I assume the capitals are about signaling "goodness". Sometimes one will have to lie about what is actually moral, in order to appear "moral". The awesomeness basis is orthogonal to this, except that it seems to make the difference between what is actually good and "morality" more explicit.
I use Meaningful Initial Caps to communicate tone, but recognize that it's nonstandard. Sorry for any confusion.
So as far as I can tell, you're saying that "awesomeness" is a good basis for noticing what one's brain currently considers moral, so it can then rebuild its definitions from there.
To extend the metaphor, "sexiness is (perceived by the intuitive parts of your brain, absent intervention from moralizing or abstract-cognition parts, as) consent" is a good thing to pay attention to, so you can know what that part of you actually cares about, which gives you new information that isn't simply from choosing a side on the "Sexiness is about evopsych and golden ratios and trading meat for sex!" versus "Sexiness is about communication and queer theory praxis and bucking stereotypes!" battle.
What I'm curious about is:
What, then, do you rebuild your current conception of morality from? "Blowing up people, when I have vague evidence that they're mooks of the Forces of Evil, by the dozens, is a bad idea, even though it seems awesome" seems like a philosophical cached thought to me. Do you think it's something else?
Counterfactual terrorism - "but those mooks may not be mooks!" - isn't a good tool for discerning actual bad ideas.
If I respond to "Consent is sexy!" by saying "But some of my brain doesn't think that!", noticing what those brainbits actually think, then change those brainbits to find sexy what I think of as "consent", I'm not in a very different situation from the person who's cheering blindly for consent being sexy. I just believe my premise more on the ground level, which will blind me to ways in which my preconceived notions of consent might suck.
In other words, both my intuitive models of awesomeness and my explicit models of morality might be lame in many invisible ways. What then?
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: 1. Be excellent to each other. 2. Party on, dudes!
He does say that if you need more detailed knowledge you should read the metaethics sequence.
</nitpick>
Is the first time that movie's ever been mentioned in the context of this site? Well done.
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! :-))"
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.
To say that something's 'consequentialist' doesn't have to mean that it's literally forward-looking about each item under consideration. Like any other ethical theory, consequentialism can look back at an event and determine whether it was good/awesome. If you going white-water rafting was a good/awesome consequence, then your decision to go white-water rafting and the conditions of the universe that let you do so were good/awesome.
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.
Is it more awesome to have a 1% chance of there being 100 identical copies of you running on a simulation, or to a certainty of one copy of you running on a simulation? If you can't answer that, it's because you are ambivalent about the outcomes.
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!)
Awesome summary, thanks!