As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.
"Universal values" is usually understood by way of an analogy to a universal law of nature. If there are universal values they are universal in the same way f=ma is universal. Importantly this does not mean that everyone at all times will have these values, only that the question of whether or not a person holds the right values can be answered by comparing their values to the "universal values".
There is a separate question about what beliefs about morality people (or more generally, agents) actually hold and there is another question about what values they will hold if when their beliefs converge when they engulf the universe. The question of whether or not there are universal values does not traditionally bear on what beliefs people actually hold and the necessity of their holding them. It could be the case that there are universal values and that, by physical necessity, no one ever holds them. Similarly, there could be universal values that are held in some possible worlds and not others. This is all the result of the simply observation that ought cannot be derived from is. In the above comment you conflate about a half dozen distinct theses.
But all those things are pure descriptions. Only moral facts have prescriptive properties and while it is clear how convection supervenes on quarks it isn't clear how anything that supervenes on quarks could also tell me what to do. At the very least if quarks can tell you what to do it would be weird and spooky. If you hold that morality is only the set of facts that describe people's moral opinions and emotions (as you seem to) than you are a kind of moral anti-realist, likely a subjectivist or non-cognitivist.
Excellent, excellent point Jack.
This is poetry! Hope you don't mind me pasting something here I wrote in another thread:
"With unobjectionable values I mean those that would not automatically and eventually lead to one's extinction. Or more precisely: a utility function becomes irrational when it is intrinsically sel... (read more)