As for the is-ought problem, if we accept that "ought" is just a matter of calculations in our brain returning an output
But we shouldnt accept that, because we can miscalculate an "ought" or antyhing else. The is-ought problem is the problem of correctly inferring an ought from a tractable amount of "is's".
(and reject that it's a matter of e.g. our brain receiving supernatural instruction from some non-physical soul), then the "ought" is describable in terms of the world-that-is, because every algorithm in our brain is describable in terms of the world-that-is.
It perhaps might be one day given sufficiently advanced brain scanning, but we don't have that now, so we still have an is-ought gap.
It's not a matter of "cramming" an entire world-state into your brain -- any approximation that your brain is making, including any self-identified deficiency in the ability to make a moral evaluation in any particular situation, are also encoded in your brain -- your current brain, not some hypothetical superbrain.
The is-ought problem is epistemic. Being told that I have an epistemically inaccessible black box in my head that calculates oughts still doesn't lead to a situation where oughts can be consciously undestood as correct entailments of is's.
because we can miscalculate an "ought" or anything else.
One way to miscalculate an "ought" is the same way that we can miscalculate an "is" -- e.g. lack of information, erroneous knowledge, false understanding of how to weigh data, etc.
And also, because people aren't perfectly self-aware, we can mistake mere habits or strongly-held preferences to be the outputs of our moral algorithm -- same way that e.g. a synaesthete might perceive the number 8 to be colored blue, even though there's no "blue" light frequency striking the optical nerve. But that sort of thing doesn't seem as a very deep philosophical problem to me.
I have several questions related to this:
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
And on the sequences page:
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.