Even though the nine members are very friendly to Altman, they are also sufficiently professional class people, Responsible Authority Figures of a type, that one would expect the board to have real limits,

Maybe I'm making some mistake, since I haven't followed it closely, but this very same board was on track to sign off on the original deal that you found completely unacceptable, was it not? These exact same "Professional class Responsible Authority Figures" were about to give up control, do obvious damage to the nonprofit's mission, and go off and do "generic nonprofit" things while Altman and investors ran everything? The deal couldn't have happened without a majority of that board?

If that's true, I don't see how you could possibly imagine that they're suitable people to oversee anything that would demand they show any backbone. They've already capitulated once, or at least signaled every intention of doing so.

And, to be honest, Professional class Responsible Authority Figures are usually not the people you want when a boat may have to be rocked.

"Sandwich" is still more tightly defined than their version of "chemical", and is still a useful concept that "carves reality at the joints" even if it's a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it's cutting on.

You'd have to go all the way to "bad stuff" to get a comparably bad definition.

The thing is that it's not a matter of different definitions at all. The Boubas don't have a definition, and they are not "internally consistent", not even vaguely so. A "chemical" is "anything that seems weird or artificial", which no two of them will agree on in every case. There is no shared criterion, even among themselves, for deciding what qualifies.

Also, I can pretty much guarantee you that people did some pretty sketchy stuff with food in 1660.

Sorry, no, sometimes people are just wrong.

This means that moral progress can require intellectual progress.

It's a pretty big assumption to claim that "moral progress" is a thing at all.

A couple of those might have been less taboo 300 years ago than they are now. How does that square with the idea of progress?

Here are a few sample answers scored as genuine taboos.

Did you leave any answers out because they were too taboo to mention? Either because you wouldn't feel comfortable putting them in the post, or because you simply thought they were insanely odious and therefore obvious mistakes?

From Wikipedia:

In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[18] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[17] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, "then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world".[17]

... and anyway it's not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of "scapegoating and blame".

The ancient past was terrifically violent.

Some hypothetical past person's not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn't preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.

I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don't bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is "the problem" is badly suspect. So is the idea that "the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival" and that's somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with "survival" arguments... assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.

It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings... which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.

in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it's far too applicable.

They do it in science and technology too. You're constantly seeing "My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial".

Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.

Of course people will use the knowledge they gain in collaboration with you for the purposes that they think are best.

It is entirely normal for there to be widely accepted, clearly formalized, and meaningfully enforced restrictions on how people use knowledge they've gotten in this or that setting... regardless of what they think is best. It's a commonplace of professional ethics.

I guess it depends on how it's described in context. And I have to admit it's been a long time. I'd go reread it to see, but I don't think I can handle any more bleakness right now...

When­ever I find my will to live be­com­ing too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll

I don't see where you get that. I saw no suggestion that the aliens (or vampires) in Blindsight were unaware of their own existence, or that they couldn't think about their own interactions with the world. They didn't lack any cognitive capacities at all. They just had no qualia, and therefore didn't see the point of doing anything just for the experience.

There's a gigantic difference between cognitive self-awareness and conscious experience.