Phrasing the moral example this way is likely to cause participants in the discussion to get mind-killed and not conductive to get them to reason freely.

In particular it distracts here from the strawman he's making. Most atheists do think that there something wrong with rape and murder.

I told him "they" assume no such thing - his own link is full of talk about how to deal with disagreements.

1. By definition, you can only care about your own preferences. That being said, it's certainly possible for you to have a preference for other people's preferences to be satisfied, in which case you would be (indirectly) caring about the preferences of others.

2. The question of whether humans all value the same thing is a controversial one. Most Friendly AI theorists believe, however, that the answer is "yes", at least if you extrapolate their preferences far enough. For more details, take a look at Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

Running off the same axioms and references rules).

In a sense that means the same laws, but the laws are not independently existing entities that mathematical truths correspond to.

As someone who has spent a lot of time with religious conservatives, I've heard the sort of argument given by Robertson many times before. And they use it as an actual argument used against nihilism, which they tend to think follows directly from atheism. So Scott is completely right to address it as such.

I think Robertson conflates the two because he (and others like him) can't really imagine a coherent non-arbitrary atheist moral realist theory. Can anyone here give a good example of one that couldn't include what the murderer he depicts seems to believe?

That doesn't establish that mathematics is true by correspondence,.

An alternative without programming changes would be biweekly "incisive open threads", similar to Ozy's race-and-gender open threads

Feel free to start a "political thread". Worst case: the thread gets downvoted.

However, there were already such threads in the past. Maybe you should google them, look at the debate and see what happened back then -- because it is likely to happen again.

and downvoting customarily tabood in them.

Not downvoting brings also has its own problems: genuinely stupid arguments remain visible (or can even get upvotes from their faction), people can try winning the debate by flooding the opponent with many replies.

Another danger is that political debates will attract users like Eugine Nier / Azathoth123.

Okay, I do not know how to write it diplomatically, so I will be very blunt here to make it obvious what I mean: The current largest threat to the political debate on LW is a group called "neoreactionaries". They are something like "reinventing Nazis for clever contrarians"; kind of a cult around Michael Anissimov who formerly worked at MIRI. (You can recognize them by quoting Moldbug and writing slogans like "Cthulhu always swims left".) They do not give a fuck about politics being the mindkiller, but they like posting on LessWrong, because they like the company of clever people here, and they were recruited here, so they probably expect to recruit more people here. Also, LessWrong is pretty much the only debate forum on the whole internet that will not delete them immediately. If you start a political debate, you will find them all there; and they will not be there to learn anything, but to write about how "Cthulhu always swims left", and trying to recruit some LW readers. -- Eugine Nier was one of them, and he was systematically downvoting all comments, including completely innocent comments outside of any political debate, of people who dared to disagree with him once somewhere. Which means that if a new user happened to disagree with him once, they usually soon found themselves with negative karma, and left LessWrong. No one knows how many potential users we may have lost this way.

I am afraid that if you start a political thread, you will get many comments about how "Cthulhu always swims left", and anyone who reacts negatively will be accused of being a "progressive" (which in their language means: not a neoreactionary). If you will ask for further explanation, you will either receive none, or a link to some long and obscurely written article by Moldbug. If you downvote them, they will create sockpuppets and upvote their comments back; if you disagree with them in debate, expect your total karma to magically drop by 100 points overnight.

Therefore I would prefer simply not doing this. But if you have to do it, give it a try and see for yourself. But please read the older political threads first.

The issue is, I don't see NRx providing a clear difference between monarchy and modern demotic dictatorship, and clear ways of preventing the first from sliding into the second.

I've read Hoppe years ago, so far I remember I have not seen a solution to that. The only thing I remember is that a king si really really sure his heirs will inherit so he has a vested interest in not screwing up a country. But such sureness of inheritance means the people really consent to monarchy that is in practice a democracy.

Furthermore I don't understand the whole idea of starting on top, i.e. designing a form of government, instead of starting in the bottom, like the morals and culture of the age.

I mean, for example, if monarchy is so much more desirable then it is obvious why we don't have it: because we as a people became more depraved and not worthy for it e.g. having too much envy.

Another thing I don't understand in these designs is that they are about drawing rules when in reality it is possible to act outside the rules, this is called revolution or coups. Thus a realistic political philosophy cannot simply say if everybody accepts these rules all will be right. The very first political philosopher, Aristotle, wanted to figure out which rules are simply the more likely to obeyed, as in, the least likely to lead to coups and revolutions, the least likely to cause behavior outside the rules. It seems NRx like everybody else is simply trying to find good rules today. This is a really short-sighted. BTW aristotle's solution was a kind of democracy where the rich have more votes. We have this, in practice (the rich buy votes).

So maths is physics.

But I can write an equation for an inverse cube law of gravity, which doesn't apply to this universe. What does it correspond to?

Do you think that the Islamic State is an entity which will vanish in the future or not?

In the future? Yes. In the near future? Unlikely. The Islamic State is a reaction to forces that have been at work in the Middle East for some decades now and there are certain parties who think it in their short-term benefit for the Islamic State to continue its existence.

Do you think that their particularly violent brand of jihadism is a worse menace to the sanity waterline than say, other kind of religious movements, past or present?

No. It's violent enough that it's not the sort of thing that makes people insane, but rather the sort of thing that attracts the insane.

Do you buy the idea that fundamentalism can be coupled with technological advancement, so that the future will presents us with Islamic AI's?

It's possible. Terrorists tend to be educated and the most common college degree among them is engineering. There are certainly people with the relevant background to enable technological advancement.

Do you think that the very same idea of rationality can be the subject of existential risk?

No. If rationality ceased to exist tomorrow, someone would just reinvent it later. As long as people are around and civilization remains a possibility, rationality won't be permanently gone.

What do Neoreactionaries think of the Islamic State? After all, it's an exemplar case of the reactionaries in those areas winning big. I know it's only a surface comparison, I'm sincerely curious about what a NR think of the situation.

It happened under Obama's watch, so it's clearly evidence of the failure of leftist politics.