I'm really having trouble understanding how this isn't tantamount to moral relativism -- or indeed moral nihilism. The whole point of "morality" is that it's supposed to provide a way of arbitrating between beings, or groups, with different interests -- such as ourselves and Pebblesorters. Once you give up on that idea, you're reduced, as in this post, to the tribalist position of arguing that we humans should pursue our own interests, and the Pebblesorters be damned. When a conflict arises (as it inevitably will), the winner will then be whoever has the bigger guns, or builds AI first.

Mind you, I don't disagree that this is the situation in which we in fact find ourselves. But we should be honest about the implications. The concept of "morality" is entirely population-specific: when groups of individuals with common interests come into contact, "morality" is the label they give to their common interests. So for us humans, "morality" is art, music, science, compassion, etc. in short, all the things that we humans (as opposed to Pebblesorters) like. This is what I understand Eliezer to be arguing. But if this is your position, you may as well come out and admit that you're a moral relativist, because this is the position that the people who are scared of moral relativism are in fact scared of. What they dread is a world in which Dennis could go on saying that Dennis-morality is what really matters, the rest of us disagree, war breaks out, Dennis kills us all, eats the whole pie, and is not spanked by any cosmic force. But this is indeed the world we live in.

The Second World War, as a whole, was probably the most catastrophic event in humanity's recorded history. The world was pretty much screwed as soon as it started -- indeed, probably as soon as Hitler acquired control of Germany.

For the purpose of saving humanity in the future, it may not be most effective to focus our attention on particular decisions (even apparently large ones) made during the course of the war (indeed, near the end of it); we risk missing the forest for the trees.

Eliezer, you're definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it's not just you -- pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.

"Untestable" does not mean "untestable by humans using current technology". What it means is untestable, period -- even by (say) a hypothetical being with godlike powers. This is what distinguishes a chocolate cake in the sun from "post-colonial alienation". If a chocolate cake spontaneously formed in the Sun, there would be physical consequences. These consequences would necessarily be detectable to sufficiently advanced beings. We need only imagine a Laplacian calculator, for example.

The feasibility of performing the verification is utterly beside the point, because we're only interested in the meaning of the statement.

Contrast this with "post-colonial alienation". The problem there is not that we lack some technological gadget. Rather, the problem is that no being, not even a god or a Laplacian demon, could verify the statement. In the case of a chocolate cake, you simply present God with a list of ingredients, and tell him/her to look for them in the Sun; but what do you tell God to look for in the works of Shakespeare in order to determine whether there is "post-colonial alienation"?

So this is not a counterexample to logical positivism at all. In fact, you yourself already gave the positivist's reply to this criticism in "Belief in the Implied Invsible". The point is, you're allowed in logical positivism to use the full apparatus of mathematics and logic (and that includes probability theory!) in formulating theories (hence the name logical positivism); verificationism is not a constraint on mathematics.

(Correction: "Tom Tyler" above is a typo for "Tim Tyler")

Tom Tyler: The point [Watson] was making was that that stuff isn't real, it's all actually down to physiology

Eliezer: Tim, that wouldn't argue against Freud.

It's hard to see how any philosophy of mind (whether physicalist, dualist, or idealist) could directly argue against Freud, whose important claims were about psychology itself, not what psychology reduces to.

Eliezer, it's particularly important to make a distinction, as the SEP and Wikipedia articles do to an extent, between "behaviorism" as a methodological stance in the field of psychology (of which Skinner was an advocate), and "(logical) behaviorism" as a position in the philosophy of mind associated with the logical positivists such as Carnap.

Carnap's thesis, as expressed in his 1932/33 article "Psychology in Physical Language", was simply that psychology could (ultimately) be reduced to physics -- a proposition I presume you accept, but which used to be controversial, and still is in some quarters. Because neuroscience was not as advanced in the 1930s as it is now, the examples that Carnap gave of "translations" (e.g. "Mr. A is excited" translates into various propositions about his physical behavior, such as jumping up and down yelling, high blood pressure, etc.) have mislead some later readers (such as Hilary Putnam) into thinking that Carnap was saying mental states just consist of observed macroscopic behavior. In truth, however, there is nothing in Carnap's article to suggest that the "behavior" of which mental states are alleged to consist excludes the microscopic behavior of neurons.

Growing human brains are wired to learn syntactic language - even when syntax doesn't exist in the original language, the conditional response to the words in the environment is a syntactic language with those words.

This, under the name "universal grammar", is the insight that Noam Chomsky is famous for.

At the risk of revealing my identity, I recall getting into an argument about this with Michael Vassar at the NYC meetup back in March (I think it was). If memory serves, we were talking at cross-purposes: I was trying to make the case that the discipline of theoretical ("Chomskian") linguistics, whose aim is to describe the cognitive input-response system that goes by the name of the "human language faculty", teaches us not to regard individual languages such as English or French as Platonic entities, but rather merely as ad-hoc labels for certain classes of utterances. Vassar, it seemed (and he's of course welcome to correct me if I'm misremembering), took me to be arguing for the Platonicity of some more abstract notion of "human language".

A felony conviction within 10 years is usually admissible on the question of credibility if the perpetrator takes the stand.

Does this apply only when the perpetrator lied about the felony conviction (which would be directly relevant to credibility), or just in general (on the theory that people with felony convictions are Bad and thus likely to be dishonest)?

The book How Music Really Works has some decent ideas about the evolution of music.

On the contrary. That is exactly the sort of rubbish that gives evolutionary psychology such a bad name.

The idea that something like music -- an extremely high-level byproduct of human cognition -- could be explained directly as an evolutionary adaptation is absurd enough. (Imagine trying to give a Darwinian account of why chess pieces move in the way they do.) The invocation of sexual selection -- the process that explains the peacock's fancy tail -- borders on the ludicrous. Sexual selection is only a candidate explanation in cases of marked sexual dimorphism -- a significant phenotypic difference between males and females, as in the peacock. The fact (if true) that professional musicians statistically tend to be males doesn't come anywhere close to cutting it.

Douglas Knight:

I've heard that isn't true in tonal languages

Where did you hear that?

It's false. "Tone" as a lexical property of words (as in "tonal languages") is a specific technical concept that is not to be confused with "intonation", which is an essentially universal phenomenon of human speech.