I went to the carnival and I met a fortune-teller. Everything she says comes true. Not only that, she told me that everything she says always comes true.

I said, "George Washington is my mother" and she said it wasn't true.

I said, "Well, if George Washington *was* my mother would you tell me so?" and she refused to say she would. She said she won't talk about what would be true if George Washingto was my mother, because George Washington is not my mother.

She says that everything she says comes true. She looked outside her little tent, and saw the sky was clear. She said, "If I tell you the sky is clear, then the sky is clear."

"But what if it was raining right now? If you told me it was raining, would it be raining?"

"I won't say what I'd tell you if it was raining right here right now, because it isn't raining."

"But if the sky is clear right now you'll tell me the sky is clear."

"Yes. Because it's true."

"So you'll only tell me that (if you say the sky is clear then the sky really is clear), when the sky really is clear?"

"Yes. I only tell you about true things. I don't tell you what I'd do if the world was some other way."

"Oh."

The same boy who rationalized a way into believing there was a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt, should know better than to rationalize himself into believing it is right to prefer joy over sorrow.

Obviously, he does know. So the next question is, why does he present material that he knows is wrong?

Professional mathematicians and scientists try not to do that because it makes them look bad. If you present a proof that's wrong then other mathematicians might embarrass you at parties. But maybe Eliezer is immune to that kind of embarrassment. Socrates presented lots of obvious nonsense and people don't think badly of him for it.

The usual reasons why *not* probably don't apply to him. I don't have any certainty why he does it, though.

When you try to predict what will happen it works pretty well to assume that it's all deterministic and get what results you can. When you want to negotiate with somebody it works best to suppose they have free will and they might do whatever-the-hell they want.

When you can predict what inanimate objects will do with fair precision, that's a sign they don't have free will. And if you don't know how to negotiate with them, you haven't got a lot of incentive to assume they have free will. But particularly when they're actually predictable.

The more predictable people get the less reason there is to suppose they have spirits etc motivating them. Unless it's information about the spirits you manipulate to predict what they'll do.

People keep using the term "moral relativism". I did a Google search of the site and got a variety of topics with the term dating from 2007 and 2008. Here's what it means to me.

Relative moral relativism means you affirm that to the best of your knowledge nobody has demonstrated any sort of absolute morality. That people differ in moralities, and if there's anything objective to say one is right and another is wrong that you haven't seen it. That very likely these different moralities are good for different purposes and different circumstances, and if a higher morality shows up it's likely to affirm that the different moralities you've heard of tend to each have its place.

This is analogous to being an agnostic about gods. You haven't seen evidence there's any such thing as an objectively absolute morality, so you do not assert that there is such a thing.

Absolute moral relativism accepts all this and takes two steps further. First, the claim is that there is no objective way to judge one morality better than another. Second, the claim is that without any objective absolute morality you should not have any.

This is analogous to being an atheist. You assert that there is no such thing and that people who think there is suffer from fallacious superstitions.

I can be a relative moral relativist and stil say "This is my morality. I chose it and it's mine. I don't need it to be objectively true for me to choose it. You can choose something else and maybe it will turn out we can get along or maybe not. We'll see."

Why should you need an absolute morality that's good all times and all places before you can practice any morality at all? Here I am, here's how I live. It works for me. If you want to politely tell me I'm all wrong then I'll listen politely as long as I feel like it.

We have quick muscles, so we do computation to decide how to organise those muscles.

Trees do not have quick muscles, so they don't need that kind of computation.

Trees need to decide which directions to grow, and which directions to send their roots. Pee on the ground near a tree and it will grow rootlets in your direction, to collect the minerals you give it.

Trees need to decide which poisons to produce and where to pump them. When they get chewed on by bugs that tend to stay on the same leaf the trees tend to send their poisons to that leaf. When it's bugs that tend to stay nearby the tree sends the poisons nearby. Trees can somewhat sense the chemicals that distressed trees near them make, and respond early to the particular sorts of threats those chemicals indicate.

Is all that built into the trees' genes? Do they actually learn much? I dunno. I haven't noticed anything like a brain in a tree. But I wouldn't know what to look for. Our brains use a lot of energy, we have to eat a lot to maintain them. They work fast. Trees don't need that speed.

I don't know how smart trees are, or how fast they learn. The esperiments have not been done.

I don't know how moral animals are that we share no common language with. Those experiments haven't been done either. We can't even design the experiments until we get an operational definition of morality.

What experiment would you perform to decide whether an animal was moral? What experiment would show whether an intelligent alien was moral? What experiment could show whether a human imprisoned for a vicious crime was moral?

If you can describe the experiment that shows the difference, then you have defined the term in a way that other people can reproduce.

If you've ever taken a mathematics course in school, you yourself may have been introduced to a situation where it was believed that there were right and wrong ways to factor a number into primes. Unless you were an exceptionally good student, you may have disagreed with your teacher over the details of which way was right, and been punished for doing it wrong.

My experience with math classes was much different from yours. When we had a disagreement, the teacher said, "How would we tell who's right? Do you have a proof? Do you have a counter-example?". And if somebody had a proof we'd listen to it. And if I jumped up and said "Wait, this proof is wrong!" then the teacher would say, "First you have to explain what he said up to the point you disagree, and see if he agrees that's what he means. Then you can tell us why it's wrong."

I never got punished for being wrong. If I didn't do homework correctly then I didn't get credit for it, but there was no punishment involved.

But Eliezer described people who disagreed about how many stones to put in a pile and who had something that looked very much like wars about it. That isn't like the math I experienced. But it's very much like the morality I've experienced.

Nominull, don't the primalists have a morality about heaps of stones?

They believe there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. They sometimes disagree about the details of which ways are right and they punish each other for doing it wrong.

How is that different from morality?

I think there is an important distinction between "kill or die" and "kill or be killed." The wolf's life may be at stake, but the rabbit clearly isn't attacking the wolf. If I need a heart transplant, I would still not be justified in killing someone to obtain the organ.

Mario, you are making a subtler distinction than I was. There is no end to the number of subtle distinctions that can be made.

In warfare we can distinguish between infantrymen who are shooting directly at each other, versus infantry and artillery or airstrikes that dump explosives on them at little risk to themselves.

We can distinguish between soldiers who are fighting for their homes versus soldiers who are fighting beyond their own borders. Clearly it's immoral to invade other countries, and not immoral to defend your own.

I'm sure we could come up with hundreds of ways to split up the situations that show they are not all the same. But how much difference do these differences really make? "Kill or die" is pretty basic. If somebody's going to die anyway, and your actions can decide who it will be, do you have any right to choose?

This series of Potemkin essays makes me increasingly suspicious that someone's trying to pull a fast one on the Empress.

Agreed. I've suspected for some time that -- after laying out descriptions of how bias works -- Eliezer is now presenting us with a series of arguments that are all bias, all the time, and noticing how we buy into it.

It's not only the most charitable explanation, it's also the most consistent explanation.

If you were to stipulate that the rabbit is the only source of nourishment available to the fox, this still in no way justifies murder. The fox would have a moral obligation to starve to death.

How different is it when soldiers are at war? They must kill or be killed. If the fact that enemy soldiers will kill them if they don't kill the enemy first isn't enough justification, what is?

Should the soldiers on each side sit down and argue out the moral justification for the war first, and the side that is unjustified should surrender?

But somehow it seems like they hardly ever do that....