Richard4

"propounding neutrality is just as attackable as propounding any particular side."

Indeed. (I hope Robin is reading.)

If we sufficiently value episodes of aesthetic appreciation (in general, not only when done by us), etc., then the "compromise" could be a net positive, even from the perspective of our current values.

(But perhaps the point is that our values are in fact not so agent-neutral.)

Seconding Peter -- the post should say "one boxing", right?

Eliezer - 'I would be willing to get a PhD thesis if it went by the old rules and the old meaning of "Prove you can make an original, significant contribution to human knowledge and that you've mastered an existing field", rather than, "This credential shows you have spent X number of years in a building."'

British and Australasian universities don't require any coursework for their PhDs, just the thesis. If you think your work is good enough, write to Alan Hajek at ANU and see if he'd be willing to give it a look.

Hmm, reminds me of a post I wrote two years earlier.

Incidentally, I think one of Bond's "real life examples" exposes an important ambiguity:

A: "I can even handle misplaced apostrophes every now and then. Not excessive amounts of them, [...]" B: "Perhaps double-check your grammar before you write a grammar rant that refers to 'amounts of apostrophes'." C: " ...the ad hominem nature of [B's reply] takes the sanctimonious angle that any who criticize must be without stain."

Bond writes, "B's reply was not ad hominem... (read more)

Aristotle, anyone?

"asking how is it that the word 'right' came to refer to rightness is like asking why 'green' means green"

Yeah, that's not exactly what I meant. As I see it there are two stages: there's the question how the symbols 'right' (or 'green') get attached to the concept that they do, and then there's the more interesting question of how this broad sense of the term determines -- in combination with the actual facts -- what the term actually refers to, i.e. what property the concept denotes. So I should have asked how it is that our sense of the concep... (read more)

Larry, no, the mix-up is yours. I didn't say anything about morality, I was talking about the word 'right', and the meta-semantic question how it is that this word refers to rightness (some particular combination of terminal values) rather than, say, p-rightness.

Some of these (e.g. Roko's) concerns might be clarified in terms of the distinctions between sense, reference, and reference-fixing descriptions. I take it Eliezer wants to use 'right' as a rigid designator to denote some particular set of terminal values, but others have pointed out that this reference fact is fixed by means of a seemingly 'relative' procedure (namely, whatever terminal values he himself happens to hold, on some appropriate [if somewhat mysterious] idealization). There is also some concern that this doesn't match the plain meaning or sense of the term 'right', as everyone else understands it.

"I can only plead that when I look over my flawed mind and see a core of useful reasoning, that I am really right, even though a completely broken mind might mistakenly perceive a core of useful truth."

"humans have received a moral gift, which Pebblesorters lack, in that we started out interested in things like happiness instead of just prime pebble heaps. Now this is not actually a case of someone reaching in from outside with a gift-wrapped box... it is only when you look out from within the perspective of morality, that it seems like a gr... (read more)

jsalvati - "I think the difference is that in a world where one of them is miscalculating, that person can be shown that they are miscalculating and will then calculate correctly."

This still won't do, due to path-dependence and such. Suppose Bob could be corrected in any number of ways, and each will cause him to adopt a different conclusion -- and one that he will then persist in holding no matter what other arguments you give him. Which conclusion is the true value for our original morality_Bob? There can presumably be no fact of the matter, on... (read more)

Psy-Kosh - "Well... the computation your brain is, under the hood, performing when you're trying to figure out things about "what should I do?""

That just pushes my question back a step. Don't the physical facts underdetermine what computation ('abstracted idealized dynamic') my brain might be interpreted as performing? It all depends how you abstract and idealize it, after all. Unless, that is, we think there's some brute (irreducible) facts about which are the right idealizations...

HA - "what resources do you recommend I look into to find people taking a more rigorous approach to understanding the phenomenon of human morality"

If you're interested in the empirical phenomenon, I'm the wrong person to ask. (Maybe start with the SEP on moral psychology?) But on a philosophical level I'd recommend Peter Railton for a sophisticated naturalistic metaethic (that I respect a lot while not entirely agreeing with). He has a recent bloggingheads diavlog, but you can't go past his classic article 'Moral Realism' [here if you have jstor ... (read more)

Eliezer - that's all well and good, but what in the world do you think determines which computation or 'abstract idealized dynamic' a mortal human is actually referring to? Won't this be radically underdetermined?

You suggest that "Bob and Sally could be talking about different things when they talk about Enamuh". What's the difference between a world where they're talking about different things vs. a world where they are talking about the same thing but one of them is 'miscalculating'? What facts (about their dispositions and such) would determine which of the two explanations holds, on your view?

Carl - "If you're going to define 'fully reasonable' to mean sharing your moral axioms, so that a superintelligent pencil maximizer with superhuman understanding of human ethics and philosophy is not a 'reasonable agent,' doesn't this just shift the problem a level? Your morality_objectivenorms is only common to all agents with full reasonableness_RichardChappell, and you don't seem to have any compelling reason for the latter (somewhat gerrymandered) account of reasonableness save that it's yours/your culture's/your species.'"

I don't mean to def... (read more)

"Perhaps Richard means that we could suppose that abortion is indeed prohibited by morality_Bob..."

That's right. (I didn't mean to suggest that there's never any disputing what someone's moral commitments are; just that this wasn't supposed to be in dispute in the particular case I was imagining.) I take it that Sally and Bob could disagree even so, and not merely be talking past each other, even if one or both of them was impervious to rational argument. It is at least a significant cost of your theory that it denies this datum. (It doesn't have... (read more)

Larry, not that the particular example is essential to my point, but you're clearly not familiar with the strongest pro-life arguments.

"My notion of goodness may be slightly different to yours - how can we have a sensible conversation where you insist on using the word "morality" to refer to morality_Eliezer2008?"

This is an important objection, which I think establishes the inadequacy of Eliezer's analysis. It's a datum (which any adequate metaethical theory must account for) that there can be substantive moral disagreement. When Bob says "Abortion is wrong", and Sally says, "No it isn't", they are disagreeing with each other.

I don't see how Elieze... (read more)

I've an old post - 'Verification and Base Facts' - which shows how a non-verificationist can still capture much of what was most compelling in verificationism.

I second Unknown. It's worth noting that trolls like Caledonian also deter other (more reasonable) voices from joining the conversation, so it's not at all clear that his contributions promote dissent on net. (And I think it is clear that they don't promote reasonable dissent.)