I don’t think there’s actually any substantive disagreement here. “Good,” “bad,” “adequate,” “inadequate”—these are all just words. The empirical facts are what they are, and we can only call them good or bad relative to some specific standard. Part of Eliezer’s endearing writing style is holding things to ridiculously impossibly high standards, and so he has a tendency to mouth off about how the human brain is poorly designed, human lifespans are ridiculously short and poor, evolutions are stupid, and so forth. But it’s just a cute way of talking about things; we can easily imagine someone with the same anticipations of experience but less ambition (or less hubris, if you prefer to say that) who says, “The human brain is amazing; human lives are long and rich; evolution is a wonder!” It’s not a disagreement in the rationalist’s sense, because it’s not about the facts. It’s not about neuroscience; it’s about attitude.
I don’t think there’s actually any substantive disagreement here. “Good,” “bad,” “adequate,” “inadequate”—these are all just words. The empirical facts are what they are, and we can only call them good or bad relative to some specific standard. Part of Eliezer’s endearing writing style is holding things to ridiculously impossibly high standards, and so he has a tendency to mouth off about how the human brain is poorly designed, human lifespans are ridiculously short and poor, evolutions are stupid, and so forth. But it’s just a cute way of talking about things; we can easily imagine someone with the same anticipations of experience but less ambition (or less hubris, if you prefer to say that) who says, “The human brain is amazing; human lives are long and rich; evolution is a wonder!” It’s not a disagreement in the rationalist’s sense, because it’s not about the facts. It’s not about neuroscience; it’s about attitude.