All of ChrisBillington's Comments + Replies

Did the survey!

Minor quibble:

Number of Current Partners (for example, 0 if you are single, 1 if you are in a monogamous relationship ...)

Seems like bad wording - what if you're in exactly one polyamorous relationship? Your partner could be seeing other people, and even if you're not seeing anyone else you wouldn't call it monogamous.

I read most of this post with a furrowed brow, wondering what you were getting at, until I got to the point on free will, which I think makes some sense.

If good choices are relative to states of knowledge and abilities, then how are not all choices good choices, given that these things are beyond our control?

I think, yes, in order to have the concept of 'good' and 'bad' choices in hindsight, one has to assume the person could have acted differently, even though in a very strict free-will sense, they couldn't have.

However there are fundamental limits to how... (read more)

I believe CFAR workshops address a lot of these issues, a huge focus of them being the interplay between high-level, logically thought out cognition (system 2) and the lower level, intuitive thinking (system 1). One of the major points was that system 1 is actually very useful at providing information and making decisions, so long as you ask the question right. Smart people I think tend to under-utilise system 1, often ignoring their gut feeling when it is providing useful information.

To use your fashion example, If I consider dressing up nicely, part of m... (read more)

I'm not saying that ordinary usages of the word "should" are statements of morality, rather the opposite: statements of morality can be translated into ordinary usage, and if they can't they probably aren't coherent statements.

"I am morally obliged to treat this person's injury" "Why?" "Because it would stop their suffering"

Perhaps we prefer to call it a moral statement when it's about other people's utility functions, rather than our own. Then again, we usually don't feel morally obliged to cater to others' preferences except to the extent that we have a preference of our own for their preferences to be satisfied, which, thankfully, most people do.

I think the two senses are really the same: if you accept consequentialist ethics, then the moral debt meaning can be translated as "If you want utility for person/group X, you should do B".

Whenever people use this word "should" in a sneaky way in a debate, I always find myself reminding them that it only has meaning with respect to someone or some group's preferences, and by glossing over exactly who's preferences we're talking about, people can get away with making bad arguments.