whether to kill, whether to steal, or whether to lie

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.

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.

In some cases of assessing ... one would sometimes have to lie ...in order to be a Perfectly Moral Good Individual who does not Like Evil Things.

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.

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.

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.

I dunno, maybe this is just me complaining about consequentialism-in-general again with a different vocabulary.

This does seem to be the substance of your example.

I dunno, maybe this is just me complaining about consequentialism-in-general again with a different vocabulary.

(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.)

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.

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...

Upvoted; whatever its relationship to what the OP actually meant, this is good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation

Exactly right. In fact I do this explicitly, by invoking "fake utility functions" in point 2.

You think you can just redefine words, but you can't,

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).

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Is the first time that movie's ever been mentioned in the context of this site? Well done.

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.

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.

Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)

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.

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).

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 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.)

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!

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 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.

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.

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. ^_^

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.

"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'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!)

We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?

No. Most of us are preferentists or similar. Some of us are not consequentialists at all.

is this forum collectively anti-orgasmium, now?

For as long as I've been here, which admittedly isn't all that long.

Because being orgasmium is by definition more pleasant than not being orgasmium. Refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, full stop.[1]

[1] We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?

Here's your problem.

[1] We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?

... no?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lb/notforthesakeofhappinessalone/

We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?

No thanks. Awesomeness is more complex than can be achieved with wireheading.

I'm anti-orgasmium, but not necessarily anti-experience-machine. I'm approximately a median-preference utilitarian. (This is more descriptive than normative)

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.

As badass as shooting a fish in a barrel. Which is to say, no, not really.

Heinlein's The Rolling Stones has a very elegant balance of home and adventure. The family lives in a space ship.

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 rest my case.

I think I'd be sad to turn into orgasmium without having been a whale first. :(

The canonical english word is "Wonderful", not "Wondersome".

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.

This is the unextrapolated awesomeness. I think we would tend to agree on much more of what is awesome if we extrapolated.

Also, from a personal perspective, I rather like quiet comfort, although I cannot really say it's "awesome".

This is a serious bug. Non-exciting and comfortable can be awesome, even though the word doesn't bring it to mind. Thanks.

Given you have enemies you hate deeply enough? Yes.

Having such enemies in the first place? Definitely not.

Maybe. (Though Conan would disagree. I'm sure we could have a nice discussion/battle about it.) I think the balance of awesomeness does come out against it. As awesome as it is to crush your enemies, I don't really like people getting hurt.

I notice that using "awesomeness" gives a different answer (more ambiguous) than "right" or "good" in this case. I think this is a win because the awesomeness criteria is forcing me to actually evaluate whether it is awesome, instead of just trying to signal.

Is it "awesome" to be the one who gets crushed?

No.

This is a good summary of the metaethics problem.

I disagree with your conclusion. (It hasn't gotten very far). I think EY's metaethics sequence handles it quite nicely. Specifically joy in the merely good and the idea of morality as an abstract dynamic procedure encoded in human brains.

You are right that it shouldn't directly be that which is desirable. I guess there is a bug in the OP explanation in that "awesome" does not automatically feel like it should be outside yourself.

The excitingness connotation is a bug.

Meta-ethics is usually the process of thinking about awesomeness while getting confused by the facts that words feel like they have have platonic essences, and that the architecture of the human goal system isn't obvious and intuitive (things feel like they can be innately motivating). Good meta-ethics could be called dissolving those confusions. [Meta-ethics is best not practiced unless you're confident you can get it right, since getting it wrong can lead you to absurd conclusions.]

Metaethics is describing the properties of the kind of theory that is capable of deciding if something is awesome.

So "morality is awesome" implies that hedonic treadmills are part of morality, not problems? Not a big bullet to bite.

I frankly hope it represents the future of LessWrong.