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.
I can see why it would seem this way to you, but from our perspective, it just looks like people around here tend to have background knowledge that you don't. More specifically: most people here are moral anti-realists, and by rationality we only mean general methods for acquiring accurate world-models and achieving goals. When people with that kind of background are quick to reject claims like "Compassion is a universal moral value," it might superficially seem like they're being arbitrarily dismissive of unfamiliar claims, but we actually think we have strong reasons to rule out such claims. That is: the universe at its most basic level is described by physics, which makes no mention of morality, and it seems like our own moral sensibilities can be entirely explained by contingent evolutionary and cultural forces; therefore, claims about a universal morality are almost certainly false. There might be some sort of game-theoretic reason for agents to pursue the same strategy under some specific conditions---but that's really not the same thing as a universal moral value.
"Universal values" presumably refers to values the universe will converge on, once living systems have engulfed most of it.
If rerunning the clock produces radically different moralities each time, the relativists would be considered to be correct.
If rerunning the clock produces highly similar moralities, then the moral objectivists will be able to declare victory.
Gould would no-doubt favour the first position - while Conway Morris would be on the side of the objectivists.
I expect that there's a lot of truth on the objectivist side - though perhap... (read more)