"homosexuality is moral"
How is that example any different, how is it not also a matter of your individual moral preferences? Again, you can imagine a society or species of rational agents that regard homosexuality as moral, just as you can imagine one that regards it as immoral.
The fact that something is true only relative to a frame of reference does not mean it "can by definition not be objectively right or wrong".
By objectively right or wrong I meant right or wrong regardless of the frame of reference (as it's usually interpreted as far as I know). Of course you can be mistaken about your own preferences, and other agents can be mistaken when describing your preferences.
"Agent A has preference B" can be correct or incorrect / right or wrong / accurate or inaccurate, but "Preference B is moral, period, for all agents" would be a self-contradictory nonsense statement.
If he had said "abortion", would you tell him that a medical procedure is a completely different thing to an empirical claim?
Of course "I think abortion is moral" can widely differ from rational agent to rational agent. Clippy talking to AbortAI (the abortion maximizing AI) could easily agree about what constitutes an abortion, or how that procedure is usually done. Yet they wouldn't need to agree about the morality each of them ascribes to that procedure. They would need to agree on how others ("this human in 21th century America") morally judge abortion, but they could still judge it differently. It is like "I prefer a ball in the box over no ball in the box", not like "There is a ball in the box".
Forgive me if I disagree with that particular empirial claim about how our community thinks.
I forgive you, though I won't die for your sins.
"The Bible is right because of the evidence of a supernatural resurrection" is an argument in itself.
It is ... an argument ... strictly formally speaking. What else could explain some eye witness testimony of an empty grave, if not divine intervention?
However, the prior of supernatural resurrections might be raised by a particular solution to the First Cause problem.
Only when some nonsense about "that cause must be a non-physical mind" (without defining what a non-physical mind is, and reaching that conclusion by saying "either numbers or a mind could be first causes, and it can't be numbers") is dragged in, even then the effect on the prior of some particular holy text on some planet in some galaxy in some galactic cluster would be negligible.
but I have no idea how it bears on your misreading of my comment.
"I can confirm that it is indeed annoying", although I of course admit that this is branching out on a tangent - but why shouldn't we, it's a good place for branching out without having to start a new topic, or PMs.
Not everything I write needs to be controversial between us, it can be related to a comment I respond to, and you can agree or disagree, engage or disengage at your leisure.
I find most rationalists encounter more irrational beliefs being protected off from rational ones than the inverse.
What do you mean, protected off in the sense of compartmentalized / cordoned off?
How is that example any different, how is it not also a matter of your individual moral preferences? Again, you can imagine a society or species of rational agents that regard homosexuality as moral, just as you can imagine one that regards it as immoral.
We seem to be using "moral" differently. You're using it to refer to any preference, whereas I'm using it to refer to human ethical preferences specifically. I find this is more useful, for the reasons EY puts forth in the sequences.
...By objectively right or wrong I meant right or wrong regard
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.