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torekp comments on Superintelligence 20: The value-loading problem - Less Wrong Discussion
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Not disagreeing with you, but when Toby Ord says that ethical realism favors simplicity of values - well, he just asserts it as far as I can see. I can think of my own Ockhamist/Solomonoff style argument for it, but it seems pretty weak. Human beings, and other moral patients, are awfully complex. Why shouldn't what is valuable be similarly complex? And one could run an Ockhamist argument for keeping one's model of human subjective values simple, too. The realism/anti-realism debate just looks completely orthogonal.
Anyone who thinks he's onto something, please explain what I'm missing.
I think what you are missing is that a lot of what we have learned about the universe turned out to be much simpler than one would have thought. A World with roughly 12 elementary particles was beyond the wildest dreams of some older civilizations, say, the Arabs in the 14th century. We have come to terms with the idea that reality is by and large summarizable by a few principles. So if morality turns out to be Real, it will probably also be somewhat simple. That's the intuition.
I started from the premise that human beings are complex, however few types of elementary particles we are made of. Put differently: physics is simple; history, geography, and zoology are complex. Morality could be like one of the last three.
But certainly you agree that the trend has been to find simple explanations for complex phenomena, which is from where those who hold that intuition are departing from.