Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2

OpenThreadGuy

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

From the comment by Richard Chappell:

(namely, whatever terminal values the speaker happens to hold, on some appropriate [if somewhat mysterious] idealization).

(i) 'Right' means, roughly, 'promotes external goods X, Y and Z' (ii) claim i above is true because I desire X, Y, and Z.

People really think EY is saying this? It looks to me like a basic Egoist stance, where "your values" also include your moral preferences. That is my position, but I don't think EY is on board.

"Shut up and multiply" implies a symmetry in value between different people that isn't implied by the above. Similarly, the diversion into mathematical idealization seemed like a maneuver toward Objective Morality - One Algorithm to Bind Them, One Algorithm to Rule them All. Everyone gets their own algorithm as the standard of right and wrong? Fantastic, if it were true, but that's not how I read EY.

It's strange, because Richard seems to say that EY agrees with me, while I think EY agrees with him.

I think you are mixing up object-level ethics and metaethics here. You seem to be contrasting an Egoist position ("everyone should do what they want") with an impersonal utilitarian one ("everyone should do what is good for everyone, shutting up and multiplying"). But the dispute is about what "should", "right" and related words mean, not about what should be done.

Eliezer (in Richard's interpretation) says that when someone says "Action A is right" (or "should be done"), the meaning of this is r... (read more)

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2

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