OK, Tim Tyler's link is interesting. I don't know every much about evolution (basically what I've read here plus a little bit); can someone who knows more say whether this is an idea worth paying attention to? And if it's not, why is it confused?

OK, Tim Tyler's link is interesting. I don't know every much about evolution (basically what I've read here plus a little bit); can someone who knows more say whether this is an idea worth paying attention to? And if it's not, why is it confused?

haha, that's great!

Didn't we already have this exact post?

Maybe people have an instinct to preserve their former strategies, because doing so often works. If you find out a new fact, you don't usually have to abandon your whole set of beliefs. Are view shattering facts/arguments more common for abstract issues?

"you cannot come up with clever reasons why the gaps in your model don't matter." Sure, sometimes you can't, but sometimes you can; sometimes there are things which seem relevant but which are genuinely irrelevant, and you can proceed without understanding them. I don't think it's always obvious which is which, but of course, it's a good idea to worry about falsely putting a non-ignorable concept into the "ignorable" box.

Excellent analogy TGGP. (and I say that as a meat eater)

IL My understanding was that Terminal Values are not something you ever observe directly (nobody can simply list their Terminal Values). Moral arguments change what use as our approximation to the Moral Calculation. However, if moral arguments did make our actual moral calculations diverge (that is, if our actual moral calculation is not a state function with respect to moral arguments) then that does disprove Eliezer's meta-ethics (along with any hope for a useful notion of morality it seems to me).

I haven't thought about this in-depth, but I almost always wait a while before I try to get off the plane.

Moreover, even if they did have moralities, they would probably be very very different moralities, which means that the act of doing opposing things does not mean they are disagreeing, they are just maximizing for different criteria. The only reason it's useful to talk about human's disagreeing is that it is very likely that we are optimizing for the same criteria if you look deep enough.