I don't buy the assumption that seems to be implied that many arguments have to be weak and a single argument has to be strong.
Why not have many strong reasons instead of one weak reason?
Certainly for complex questions I find multi-threaded answers more convincing than single-threaded ones.
Fox over hedgehog for me.
In terms of picking a major, do something you enjoy that you can conceivably use to get a job. You can actually get a job with a philosophy degree. I did... after I quit accounting because it was too darn boring...
Restrict propositions to observable references? (Or have a rule about falsifiablility?)
The problem with the observable reference rule is that sense can be divorced from reference and things can be true (in principle) even if un-sensed or un-sensable. However, when we learn language we start by associating sense with concrete reference. Abstractions are trickier.
It is the case that my sensorimotor apparatus will determine my beliefs and my ability to cross-reference my beliefs with other similar agents with similar sensorimotor apparatus will forge consens...
A difficulty of utilitarianism is the question of felicific exchange rates. If you cast morality as a utility function then you are obliged to come up with answers to bizarre hypothetical questions like how many ice-creams is the life of your first born worth because you have defined the right in terms of maximized utility.
If you cast morality as a dispute avoidance mechanism between social agents possessed with power and desire then you are less likely to end up in this kind of dead-end but the price of this casting is the recognition that different agents will have different values and that objectivity of morals is not always possible.
Quite so. The OP I think is more concerned about factory farming than the more traditional grazing approaches to cattle. But I think if you push a morality too far up against the hill of human desire it will collapse. Many activists overestimate the "care factor". My ability to care is pretty limited. I can't and won't care about 7 billion other humans on this planet except in the thinnest and most meaningless senses (i.e. stated preferences in surveys which are near worthless) let along the x billion animals. In terms of revealed preferences (where I put my dollars and power) I favour the near and the dear over the stranger and the genetically unrelated.
Fascinating paper. Will there be a release of the code used? I would like to be able to play these games and tinker with the code myself.
Hacking is believing...
I think you should put out a game called Modal Combat!
I have no argument with your desire to establish the most cost-effective way to get the most bang for your bucks. I simply do not accept the premise that it is wrong to eat meat.
Consider the life of a steer in Cape York. It is born the property of a grazier. It is given health care of a sort (dips, jabs, anti-tick treatment). It lives a free life grazing for a few hundred days in fenced enclosures protected by the grazier's guns from predators. Towards the end, it is mustered by jackaroos and jillaroos, shipped in a truck to the lush volcanic grasslands o...
More research...
Gerd Gigerenzer's views on heuristics in moral decision making are very interesting though.
The will of the few people funding the super PACs which are telling the sheeple what to bleat, in the few states whose result matter.
The sheeple? That is a contemptuous remark. You should withdraw it.
There are no super PACs in my country. We have sensible electoral laws Down Under... Sensible gun laws too. Oh and Medicare for all without any squibbing, mandatory 401ks for all workers. And freedom... Lot of good stuff...
What is your constructive alternative to voting and political activism?
What are you offering? Some cafe society "I am vastly super...
Your alternative would be to think an aristocratic or meritocratic principle is true. (It's either equal or unequal, right?)
I think we can assume aristocracy is a dead duck along with the Divine Right of Kings and other theological relics.
Meritocracy in some form I believe has been advocated by some utilitarians. People with Oxford degrees get 10 votes. Cambridge 9. Down to the LSE with 2 votes and the common ignorant unlettered herd 1 vote...
This is kind of an epistemocratic voting regime which some think might lead to better outcomes. Alas, no one has b...
Probably the most important question that can be asked in politics is "how can we produce a perfect society in every which way according to the following list of criteria...."
The kind of questions pols actually think about. (I used to work for one...)
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
Journalists are not paid to print the truth. They are paid to sell newspapers. (This correlates to your "most views" idea.)
However, people buy newspapers (and consume other forms of media). People choose to read celebrity gossip and trivia rather than constructive solutions fo...
My recollection of Leibniz's view is dim but I recollect that the essence of it is that the perfection of the world is a consequence of the perfection of God. It would reflect poorly on the Omnipotence, Omniscience, Benevolence & Supreme Awesomeness &c of the Deity and Designer if he bashed out some second-rate less than perfectly good (or indeed merely averagely awesome) world. For the benefit of the general readership, the book to read on this is Candide by Voltaire. You will never see rationalists in quite the same way again... :-)
I don't either but I find "the best of all possible worlds" concept very interesting along with the related notion God could not possibly create a world that was anything other than "the most awesome of all possible worlds" - given the predicates traditionally ascribed to God.
You can take this is a reductio ad absurdam of the notion of God as many do. But presumably the task of friendly AI (at its most benevolent) must be to perform (or figure out) what actions should be taken to promote awesomeness?
More extravagantly, the task of friendly AI is to 'build God.'
(And get Her right this time :-)
According to Leibniz, this is the most awesome of all possible worlds.
In my experience homo sapiens does not come 'out of a box.' Are you a MacBook Pro? :-)
But seriously, I have seen some interestingly flawed 'decision-making systems' in Psych Wards. And I think Reason (whatever it is taught to be) matters. Reason and Emotion are a tag team in decision making in ethical domains. They do their best work together. I don't think Reason alone (however you construe it) is up to the job of friendly AI.
Of course, bringing Emotion in to ethics has issues. Who is to say whose Emotions are 'valid' or 'correct?'
Not sure why you link rationality with "Academy" (academia?).
Pirsig calls the Academy "the Church of Reason" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I think there is much evidence to suggest academia has been strongly biased to 'Reason' for most of its recorded history. It is only very recently that research is highlighting the role of Emotion in decision making.
I don't think I'm parsing this correctly. Could you expand on it a bit?
You need the Sith parser :-)
I guess the point I am making is that Reason alone is not enough and a lot of what we call Reason is technology derived from the effect on brains on being able to write. There is some interesting research on how cognition and reasoning differs between literate and preliterate people. I think Emotion plays a critical role in decision making. I am not going out to bat for Faith except in the Taras Bulba sense: "I put my faith in my sword and my sword in the Pole!" (The Polish were the enemy of the Cossack Taras Bulba in the ancient Yul Brynner flick I am quoting from.)
Hi Less Wrong,
My name is Sean Welsh. I am a graduate student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch NZ. I was most recently a Solution Architect working on software development projects for telcos. I have decided to take a year off to do a Master's. My topic is Ethical Algorithms: Modelling Moral Decisions in Software. I am particularly interested in questions of machine ethics & robot ethics (obviously).
I would say at the outset that I think 'the hard problem of ethics' remains unsolved. Until it is solved, the prospects for any benign or fr...
Seriously, how much effort goes into voting? Perhaps an hour at the most?
Compared to how much tax gets taken off you every day it seems that having some minor influence in guiding the assembly that sets the budget for the spending of said tax is worth your while. If only to sack a representative assembly that displeases you.
What virtues are displayed by not voting? Sloth? Indifference?
If no one voted how would democratic government work?
Does voting increase utility? In a single case not by much but in the aggregate the people can remove a government tha... (read more)