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.

"I am not a moral relativist." http://lesswrong.com/lw/t9/no_license_to_be_human/

"I am not a meta-ethical relativist" http://lesswrong.com/lw/t3/the_bedrock_of_morality_arbitrary/mj4

"what is right is a huge computational property—an abstract computation—not tied to the state of anyone's brain, including your own brain." http://lesswrong.com/lw/sm/the_meaning_of_right/

The problem is, EY may just be contradicting himself, or he may be being ambiguous, and even deliberately so.

"what is right is a huge computational property—an abstract computation—not tied to the state of anyone's brain, including your own brain."

I think his views could be clarified in a moment if he stated clearly whether this abstract computation is identical for everyone. Is it AC_219387209 for all of us, or AC_42398732 for you, and AC_23479843 for me, with the proviso that it might be the case that AC_42398732 = AC_23479843?

Your quote ma... (read more)

13Jadagul14y

I'm pretty sure Eliezer is actually wrong about whether he's a meta-ethical relativist, mainly because he's using words in a slightly different way from the way they use them. Or rather, he thinks that MER is using one specific word in a way that isn't really kosher. (A statement which I think he's basically correct about, but it's a purely semantic quibble and so a stupid thing to argue about.) Basically, Eliezer is arguing that when he says something is "good" that's a factual claim with factual content. And he's right; he means something specific-although-hard-to-compute by that sentence. And similarly, when I say something is "good" that's another factual claim with factual content, whose truth is at least in theory computable. But importantly, when Eliezer says something is "good" he doesn't mean quite the same thing I mean when I say something is "good." We actually speak slightly different languages in which the word "good" has slightly different meanings. Meta-Ethical Relativism, at least as summarized by wikipedia, describes this fact with the sentence "terms such as "good," "bad," "right" and "wrong" do not stand subject to universal truth conditions at all." Eliezer doesn't like that because in each speaker's language, terms like "good" stand subject to universal truth conditions. But each speaker speaks a slightly different language where the truth conditions on the word represented by the string "good" stands subject to a slightly different set of universal truth conditions. For an analogy: I apparently consistently define "blonde" differently from almost everyone I know. But it has an actual definition. When I call someone "blonde" I know what I mean, and people who know me well know what I mean. But it's a different thing from what almost everyone else means when they say "blonde." (I don't know why I can't fix this; I think my color perception is kinda screwed up). An MER guy would say that whether someone is "blonde" isn't objectively true or fal