What's the relation between religion and morality? I drew up a table to compare the two. This shows the absolute numbers and the percentages normalized in two directions (by religion, and by morality). I also highlighted the cells corresponding to the greatest percentage across the direction that was not normalized (for example, 22.89% of agnostics said there's no such thing as morality, a higher percentage than any other religious group).

Many pairs were highlighted both ways. In other words, these are pairs such that "Xs are more likely to be Ys" and vice-versa.

• [BLANK]; [BLANK]
• Atheist and not spiritual; Consequentialist
• Agnostic; No such thing
• Deist/Pantheist/etc.; Virtue ethics
• Committed theist; Deontology

(I didn't do any statistical analysis, so be careful with the low-population groups.)

I am obliged to act based on my best information about the situation. If that best information tells me that:

• I have no special positive obligations to anyone involved,

• The one person is not willing to be run over to save the others (or simply willing to be run over e.g. because ey is suicidal), and

• The one person is not morally responsible for the situation at hand or for any other wrong act such that they have waived their right to life,

Then I am obliged to let the trolley go. However, I have low priors on most humans being so very uninterested in helping others (or at least having an infrastructure to live in) that they wouldn't be willing to die to save the entire rest of the human species. So if that were really the stake at hand, the lone person tied to the track would have to be loudly announcing "I am a selfish bastard and I'd rather be the last human alive than die to save everyone else in the world!".

And, again, prudential concerns would probably kick in, most likely well before there were hundreds of people on the line.

I think I may have artificially induced an Ugh Field in myself.

A little over a week ago it occurred to me that perhaps I was thinking too much about X, and that this was distracting me from more important things. So I resolved to not think about X for the next week.

Of course, I could not stop X from crossing my mind, but as soon as I noticed it, I would sternly think to myself, "No. Shut up. Think about something else."

Now that the week's over, I don't even want to think about X any more. It just feels too weird.

And maybe that's a good thing.

Let's examine the problem in more detail: Different disaster scenarios would require different pieces of information, so it would help if you knew exactly what kind of catastrophe. However, if you can preserve a very large compendium of knowledge, then you can create a catalogue of necessary information for almost every type of doomsday scenario (nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, etc.) so that you will be prepared for almost anything. If the amount of information you can save is more limited, then you should save the pieces of information that are the most likely to be useful in any given scenario in "catastrophe-space." Now we have to go about determining what these pieces of information are. We can start by looking at the most likely doomsday scenarios--Yoreth, since you started the thread, what do you think the most likely ones are?

The game of Moral High Ground (reproduced completely below):

At last it is time to reveal to an unwitting world the great game of Moral High Ground. Moral High Ground is a long-playing game for two players. The following original rules are for one M and one F, but feel free to modify them to suit your player setup:

1. The object of Moral High Ground is to win.

2. Players proceed towards victory by scoring MHGPs (Moral High Ground Points). MHGPs are scored by taking the conspicuously and/or passive-aggressively virtuous course of action in any situation where culpability is in dispute.

(For example, if player M arrives late for a date with player F and player F sweetly accepts player M's apology and says no more about it, player F receives the MHGPs. If player F gets angry and player M bears it humbly, player M receives the MHGPs.)

1. Point values are not fixed, vary from situation to situation and are usually set by the person claiming them. So, in the above example, forgiving player F might collect +20 MHGPs, whereas penitent player M might collect only +10.

2. Men's MHG scores reset every night at midnight; women's roll over every day for all time. Therefore, it is statistically highly improbable that a man can ever beat a woman at MHG, as the game ends only when the relationship does.

3. Having a baby gives a woman +10,000 MHG points over the man involved and both parents +5,000 MHG points over anyone without children.

My ex-bf and I developed Moral High Ground during our relationship, and it has given us years of hilarity. Straight coupledom involves so much petty point-scoring anyway that we both found we were already experts.

By making a private joke out of incredibly destructive gender programming, MHG releases a great deal of relationship stress and encourages good behavior in otherwise trying situations, as when he once cycled all the way home and back to retrieve some forgotten concert tickets "because I couldn't let you have the Moral High Ground points". We are still the best of friends.

Play and enjoy!

From Metafilter

Suppose you know from good sources that there is going to be a huge catastrophe in the very near future, which will result in the near-extermination of humanity (but the natural environment will recover more easily). You and a small group of ordinary men and women will have to restart from scratch.

You have a limited time to compile a compendium of knowledge to preserve for the new era. What is the most important knowledge to preserve?

I am humbled by how poorly my own personal knowledge would fare.

Is there any philosophy worth reading?

As far as I can tell, a great deal of "philosophy" (basically the intellectuals' wastebasket taxon) consists of wordplay, apologetics, or outright nonsense. Consequently, for any given philosophical work, my prior strongly favors not reading it because the expected benefit won't outweigh the cost. It takes a great deal of evidence to tip the balance.

For example: I've heard vague rumors that GWF Hegel concludes that the Prussian State (under which, coincidentally, he lived) was the best form of human existence. I've also heard that Descartes "proves" that God exists. Now, whether or not Hegel or Descartes may have had any valid insights, this is enough to tell me that it's not worth my time to go looking for them.

However, at the same time I'm concerned that this leads me to read things that only reinforce the beliefs I already have. And there's little point in seeking information if it doesn't change your beliefs.

It's a complicated question what purpose philosophy serves, but I wouldn't be posting here if I thought it served none. So my question is: What philosophical works and authors have you found especially valuable, for whatever reason? Perhaps the recommendations of such esteemed individuals as yourselves will carry enough evidentiary weight that I'll actually read the darned things.

Long ago I read a book that asked the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Contemplating this question, I asked “What if there really is nothing?” Eventually I concluded that there really isn’t – reality is just fiction as seen from the inside.

Much later, I learned that this idea had a name: modal realism. After I read some about David Lewis’s views on the subject, it became clear to me that this was obviously, even trivially, correct, but since all the other worlds are causally unconnected, it doesn't matter at all for day-to-day life. Except as a means of dissolving the initial vexing question, it was pointless, I thought, to dwell on this topic any more.

Later on I learned about the Cold War and the nuclear arms race and the fears of nuclear annihilation. Apparently, people thought this was a very real danger, to the point of building bomb shelters in their backyards. And yet somehow we survived, and not a single bomb was dropped. In light of this, I thought, “What a bunch of hype this all is. You doomsayers cried wolf for decades; why should I worry now?”

But all of that happened before I was born.

If modal realism is correct,* then for all I know there was a nuclear holocaust in most world-lines; it’s just that I never existed there at all. Hence I cannot use the fact of my existence as evidence against the plausibility of existential threats, any more than we can observe life on Earth and thereby conclude that life is common throughout the universe.

(*Even setting aside MWI, which of course only strengthens the point.)

Strange how abstract ideas come back to bite you. So, should I worry now?

A prima facie case against the likelihood of a major-impact intelligence-explosion singularity:

Firstly, the majoritarian argument. If the coming singularity is such a monumental, civilization-filtering event, why is there virtually no mention of it in the mainstream? If it is so imminent, so important, and furthermore so sensitive to initial conditions that a small group of computer programmers can bring it about, why are there not massive governmental efforts to create seed AI? If nothing else, you might think that someone could exaggerate the threat of the singularity and use it to scare people into giving them government funds. But we don’t even see that happening.

Second, a theoretical issue with self-improving AI: can a mind understand itself? If you watch a simple linear Rube Goldberg machine in action, then you can more or less understand the connection between the low- and the high-level behavior. You see all the components, and your mind contains a representation of those components and of how they interact. You see your hand, and understand how it is made of fingers. But anything more complex than an adder circuit quickly becomes impossible to understand in the same way. Sure, you might in principle be able to isolate a small component and figure out how it works, but your mind simply doesn’t have the capacity to understand the whole thing. Moreover, in order to improve the machine, you need to store a lot of information outside your own mind (in blueprints, simulations, etc.) and rely on others who understand how the other parts work.

You can probably see where this is going. The information content of a mind cannot exceed the amount of information necessary to specify a representation of that same mind. Therefore, while the AI can understand in principle that it is made up of transistors etc., its self-representation necessary has some blank areas. I posit that the AI cannot purposefully improve itself because this would require it to understand in a deep, level-spanning way how it itself works. Of course, it could just add complexity and hope that it works, but that’s just evolution, not intelligence explosion.

So: do you know any counterarguments or articles that address either of these points?

This seems to be another case where explicit, overt reliance on a proxy drives a wedge between the proxy and the target.

One solution is to do the CEV in secret and only later reveal this to the public. Of course, as a member of said public, I would instinctively regard with suspicion any organization that did this, and suspect that the proffered explanation (some nonsense about a hypothetical "Dr. Evil") was a cover for something sinister.