thomblake comments on When None Dare Urge Restraint - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 December 2007 11:09PM

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Comment author: thomblake 26 April 2012 03:18:15PM 2 points [-]

I think the reason you're getting so many down votes...

I think it's more likely that I got downvotes because I was 1) telling people they're using a word wrong, and 2) invoking Aristotelian idioms in a context not friendly to Aristotle.

I'm not concerned.

"value" is only a behavioral mechanism on our own part. Lots of people ascribe negative or positive values to event X. Great. But that's just a response in the human brain(s) that observe(s) event X, not a part of event X itself.

That really isn't relevant. The words are also produced by human brains, and are often about value. If you say "good" and mean "bad", then you're using the word wrong. At a minimum, that's bad communication. And some words have "good" or "bad" as part of their meaning. If you don't want to imply virtue, you can say (for example) "bold" or "fearless" instead of "courageous" (if you want to imply vice, you can say "brash" or "reckless"). There are many words.