= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
No, blue is what's perceived as blue.
Was Neptune not blue in 1400 because nobody had perceived it yet?
It was blue because its color was within the set of colors that were commonly perceived as blue. It's the color that is defined by human perception, not each individual instance of said color.
Arguably Watson is an attempt at this.
Except Watson was intended to be above average intelligence, but below Sherlock level intelligence, so he fails on the last account. He was very intelligent, just not as absurdly inelligent as Sherlock, so he appeared to be of average or lower intelligence.
OK, let's say you're right, and people say "awesome" without thinking at all. I imagine Nyan_Sandwich would view that as a feature of the word, rather than as a bug. The point of using "awesome" in moral discourse is precisely to bypass conscious thought (which a quick review of formal philosophy suggests is highly misleading) and access common-sense intuitions.
I think it's fair to be concerned that people are mistaken about what is awesome, in the sense that (a) they can't accurately predict ex ante what states of the world they will wind up approving of, or in the sense that (b) what you think is awesome significantly diverges from what I (and perhaps from what a supermajority of people) think is awesome, or in the sense that (c) it shouldn't matter what people approve of, because the 'right' think to do is something else entirely that doesn't depend on what people approve of.
But merely to point out that saying "awesome" involves no conscious thought is not a very strong objection. Why should we always have to use conscious thought when we make moral judgments?
Those are both good points. I view it as a bug because I feel like too much ethical thought bypasses conscious thought to ill affect. This can range from people not thinking about the ethics homosexuality because their pastor tells them its a sin to not thinking about the ethics of invading a country because people believe they are responsible for an attack of some kind, whether they are or not. However, Nyan_Sandwich's ethics of awesome does appear to bypass such problems, to an extent. It's hardly s, but it appears like it would do its job better than many other ethical systems in place today.
I should note that it wasn't ever intended to be a very strong objection. As a matter of fact, the original objection wasn't to the conclusions made, but to the path taken to get to them. If an argument for a conclusion I agree with is faulty, I usually attempt to point out the faults in the argument so that the argument can be better.
Also, I apologize for taking so long to respond. life (and Minecraft playing) interfered with me checking LessWrong, and I'm not yet used to checking it regularly as I'm new here.
To say that something's 'consequentialist' doesn't have to mean that it's literally forward-looking about each item under consideration. Like any other ethical theory, consequentialism can look back at an event and determine whether it was good/awesome. If you going white-water rafting was a good/awesome consequence, then your decision to go white-water rafting and the conditions of the universe that let you do so were good/awesome.
That misses my point. When people say awesome, they don't think back at the consequences or look forward for consequences. People say awesome without thinking about it AT ALL.
It does matter what the Bible says or not iff the same people who claim to believe the snake was Satan also believe the Bible is truth, since this would entail a contradiction.
That's a good point, but, in that case, we should be making the judgement that they're holding contradictory beliefs for believing the snake is Satan and the Bible is true, rather than make the judgement that they're believing the ridiculous claim that there once was a talking snake.
There is of course zero evidence in the Bible for that point of view, and it contradicts itself internally, even beyond what would be normal given the source.
Going strictly by Genesis, the talking snake is really, honestly, just a talking snake. Satan isn't even mentioned until much later.
It's not actually important for the purposes of this discussion what the Bible says or not. What's important is what people believe. If many Christians believe the snake was Satan, then it doesn't matter what the Bible actually says when we discuss whether or not their beliefs are true, absurd, or, in some way, ridiculous.
In the same way, it doesn't actually matter, for the purposes of this discussion, what evolution actually says, but, rather, what people who believe in evolution believe it says.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
Greetings! I am Viktor Brown (please do not spell Viktor with a c), and I tend to go by deathpigeon (please do not capitalize it or spell pigeon with a d) on the internet. (I cannot actually think of a place I don't go by deathpigeon...) I'm currently 19 years old. I'm unemployed and currently out of school since my parents cut off me off for paying for school. I consider myself to be a rationalist, a mindset that comes from how I was raised rather than any particular moment in my life. When I was still in university, I was studying computer science, a subject that still interests me, and I learned some programming in C++. When I get a positive enough income flow that I can afford to continue my schooling, I plan on continuing to study computer science. Around the internet, I tend to hang out in the TvTropes fora, where I also go by deathpigeon. I make a point of regularly reviewing my beliefs, be they political, religious, or something else. I'm not entirely sure what else to say, since I'm terrible with social situations, and introducing myself to a bunch of strangers is a situation I'm especially bad with.
In response to
Morality is Awesome
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist.
Not necessarily. If I tell a story of how I went white water rafting, and the person I'm talking to tells me that what I did was "awesome," is he or she really thinking of the consequences of my white water rafting? Probably not. Instead, he or she probably thought very little before declaring the white water rafting awesome. That's an inherent problem to using awesome with morality. Awesome is usually used without thought. If you determine morality based on awesomeness, then you are moralizing without thinking at all, which can often be a problem.
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OK, so how else might we get people to gate-check the troublesome, philosophical, misleading parts of their moral intuitions that would have fewer undesirable side effects? I tend to agree with you that it's good when people pause to reflect on consequences -- but then when they evaluate those consequences I want them to just consult their gut feeling, as it were. Sooner or later the train of conscious reasoning had better dead-end in an intuitively held preference, or it's spectacularly unlikely to fulfill anyone's intuitively held preferences. (I, of course, intuitively prefer that such preferences be fulfilled.)
How do we prompt that kind of behavior? How can we get people to turn the logical brain on for consequentialism but off for normative ethics?
Am I to understand that you're suggesting that we apply awesomeness to the consequences, and not the actions? Because that would be different from what I thought was being implied by saying "'Awesome' is implicitly consequentialist." What I took that to mean is that, when one looks at an action, and decides whether or not it is awesome, the person is determining whether or not the consequences are something that they find desirable. That is distinct from looking at consequences and determining whether or not the consequences are awesome. That requires one to ALREADY be looking at things consequentially.
I think that, after thinking of things, when people use the term "awesome" they use it differently depending on how they view the world. If someone is already a consequentialist, that person will look at things consequentially when using the word awesome. If someone is already a dentologist, that person will look at the fulfillment of duties when using the word awesome. This is just a hypothesis, and I'm not very certain that it's true, at the moment.
I'm not entirely sure how to prompt that sort of behavior, to be honest.