What if we actually found this stone tablet and it said "no, morality is maximising your score in tetris"?

Homosexuality is a sin

Any idea where this stone tablet is, so I can break it?

Wow. I've been guilty of this for a while, and not realized it. That "is this action morally wrong" question really struck me.

Myself, I believe that there is an objective morality outside humanity, one that is, as Eliezer would deride the idea, "written on a stone tablet somewhere". This may be an unpopular hypothesis, but accepting it is not a prerequisite for my point. When asked about why certain actions were immoral, I, too, have reached for the "because it harms someone" explanation... an explanation which I just now see as the sin of Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points.

What I really believe, upon much reflection, is that there are two overlapping, yet distinct, classes of "wrong" actions: one we might term "sins", and the other we might term "social transgressions". Social Transgressions is that class of acts which are punishable by society, usually those that are harmful. Sins is that class of acts which goes against this Immutable Moral Law. Examples are given below, being (in the spirit of full disclosure) the first examples I thought of, and neither the more pure examples, nor the most defensible, non-controversial examples.

• Spitting on the floor of an office building is a social transgression, but not a sin.
• Homosexuality is a sin, but not a social transgression (insofar as it is accepted by society, which is more and more very day).
• Murder is both a sin and a social transgression.

I do not know if this is a defensible position, but I now recognize it as a clearer form of what I believe than what I had previously claimed to believe.

If this potential confusion is your real reason and not a convenient rationalization, I would suggest an EDIT along the lines of "<Argument> convinced me that <social value in error> was not a good one to hold, and I no longer think that Bayesian conspiracy is a good idea outside of the HPMoR fanfiction". If you still hold that it is, then bear it like a rationalist you aspire to be, since you presumably examined this model of action with an utmost care, to avoid any biases.

EDIT: I certainly do not plan to delete my discussion post with negative karma, though I did retract (not delete) one rather poorly thought out comment previously.

I'm newer than you and have not yet braved into the "Main" section, so I don't really know. I didn't know deleting a post could get you the karma back, that seems like a bad policy and counterproductive to what karma is supposed to do.

Still, I think you've "learned your lesson", so to speak, so I personally wouldn't mind at all.

I think even though the karma counter never goes below zero, downvotes still count and it won't go above zero until you get enough upvotes to cancel them out.

If this potential confusion is your real reason and not a convenient rationalization, I would suggest an EDIT along the lines of "<Argument> convinced me that <social value in error> was not a good one to hold, and I no longer think that Bayesian conspiracy is a good idea outside of the HPMoR fanfiction". If you still hold that it is, then bear it like a rationalist you aspire to be, since you presumably examined this model of action with an utmost care, to avoid any biases.

EDIT: I certainly do not plan to delete my discussion post with negative karma, though I did retract (not delete) one rather poorly thought out comment previously.

I don't want to do it just to get my Karma back

Good, because it wouldn't do that.

By the way, sorry that this comment treats you like you're new to LW -- I can see from going through your comment and post history that you're not. My mistake.

Not feasible. Let's aim for a more modest goal, say, better PR and functional communities.

Moreover, not this community's comparative advantage. Why do we think we'd be any better than anyone else at running the world? And why wouldn't we be subject to free-riders, power-seekers, and rationalists-of-fortune if we started winning?