Alice: "Science has a set of norms or guides-to-action called the scientific method. These have truth-values which are objective in the sense of not being a matter of individual whim"
Bob: "I don't believe you! What experiments do you perform to measure these truth-values, what equipment do you use?"
Charlie: "I don;'t believe you! You sound like you believe in some immaterial ScientificMethod object for these statements to correspond to!".
....welcome to my world.
Dave: Behaving as though objective scientific facts exist has made it possible for me to talk to people all over the world, for the people I care about to be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, have potable water to drink and plenty of food to eat, and routinely survive incidents that would have killed us in pre-scientific cultures, and more generally has alleviated an enormous amount of potential suffering and enabled an enormous amount of value-satisfaction.
I am therefore content to continue behaving as though objective scientific facts exist.
If, hy...
There seems to be a widespread impression that the metaethics sequence was not very successful as an explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's views. It even says so on the wiki. And frankly, I'm puzzled by this... hence the "apparently" in this post's title. When I read the metaethics sequence, it seemed to make perfect sense to me. I can think of a couple things that may have made me different from the average OB/LW reader in this regard: