DefectiveAlgorithm comments on Beware the Nihilistic Failure Mode - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Gram_Stone 09 July 2015 03:31PM

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Comment author: Gram_Stone 09 July 2015 08:26:53PM 1 point [-]

But you still have yet to explicitly describe what you mean by nihilism. Could you? How have I misrepresented whom you believe to be the average self-identifying nihilist?

And yeah, I suppose in that sense my 'morality' does tie into my actual values, but only my values as applied to an unrealistic thought experiment, and then again a world in which everyone but me adhered to my notions of morality (and I wasn't penalized for not doing so) would still be preferable to me than a world in which everyone including me did.

Can you explain how the statement 'A world in which everyone but me does not murder is preferable to a world in which everyone including me does not murder' is a misinterpretation of this quotation?

Comment author: DefectiveAlgorithm 09 July 2015 08:33:22PM *  0 points [-]

What I meant when I called myself a nihilist was essentially that there was no such thing as an objective, mind-independent morality. Nothing more. I would still consider myself a nihilist in that sense (and I expect most on this site would), but I don't call myself that because it could cause confusion.

Can you explain how the statement 'A world in which everyone but me does not murder is preferable to a world in which everyone including me does not murder' is a misinterpretation of this quotation?

It isn't, although that doesn't mean I would necessarily murder in such a world.

EDIT: Well, my nihilism was also a justification for the belief that it's silly to care about morality, and in that sense at least I'm no longer a nihilist in the sense that I was. That was just one aspect of my 'my eccentricities make me superior, everyone else's eccentricities are silly' phase, which I think I moved beyond around the time I stopped being a teenager.

Comment author: Gram_Stone 09 July 2015 08:41:23PM 1 point [-]

What I meant when I called myself a nihilist was essentially that there was no such thing as an objective, mind-independent morality. Nothing more. I would still consider myself a nihilist in that sense (and I expect most on this site would), but I don't call myself that because it could cause confusion.

I agree that morality is not in the quarks.

It isn't.

That doesn't seem like a huge bullet to bite?

Comment author: DefectiveAlgorithm 09 July 2015 08:52:01PM 0 points [-]

What bullet is that? I implicitly agreed that murder is wrong (as per the way I use the word 'wrong') when I said that your statement wasn't a misinterpretation. It's just that as I mentioned before, I don't care a whole lot about the thing that I call 'morality'.