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It’s objectively not good enough to be good to a boring degree. The world is full of bullying, we should stand up to it, and to stand up effectively against bullying is rarely boring.
Objective general morality exists, it doesn’t have to exist for the sake of anything outside itself, and you should collaborate control over the world with objective general morality if not outright obey it; whichever is better after fully accounting for the human hunger for whimsy. The protection of whimsy is objectively a fragment of objective goodness.
All the narrative proofs that the world should not flow in accordance with good intentions are just hints about how to refine one’s conception of Good Itself so that it does not lead to outcomes that are, surprise surprise, actually bad.
“Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.”
― Karl PopperA person can rationalize the existence of causal pathways where people end up not understanding things that you think are literally impossible to misunderstand, and then very convincingly pretend that that was the causal pathway which led them to where they are,
and there is also the possibility that someone will follow such a causal pathway towards actually sincerely misunderstanding you and you will falsely accuse them of pretending to misunderstand.
This is wonderful; feels much more friendly, practical, and conducive to ideal speech situations. If someone tries to attack me for a wrong probability, I can respond “I’m just talking but with additional clarity; no one is perfect.”
I am under the impression that here at LessWrong, everyone knows we have standards about what makes good, highly-upvotable top-level content. Currently I would not approve of a version of myself who would conform to those standards I perceive, but I can be persuaded otherwise, including by methods such as improving my familiarity with the real standards.
Addendum: I am not the type of guy who does homework. I am not the type of guy who pretends to have solved epistemology when they haven’t. I am the type of guy who exchanges considerations and honestly tries to solve epistemology, and follows up with “but I’m not really sure; what do you guys think?” That is not highly-upvotable content in these parts’a town.
No one will hear my counter-arguments to Sabien’s propaganda who does not ask me for them privately. Sabien has blocked me for daring to be unsubtle with him. He is equally welcome as anyone else to come forth to me and exchange considerations. I will not be lured into war; if it is to be settled, then it will be settled with words and in ideal speech situations.
Certain texts are characterized by precision, such as mathematical proofs, standard operating procedures, code, protocols, and laws. Their authority, power, and usefulness stem from this quality. Criticizing them for being imprecise is justified.
Nope; precision has nothing to do with intrinsic value. If Ashley asks Blaine to get her an apple from the fridge, many would agree that ‘apple’ is a rather specific thing, but if Blaine was insistent on being dense he can still say “Really? An apple? How vague! There are so many possible subatomic configurations that could correspond to an apple, and if you don’t have an exact preference ordering of sub-atomically specified apple configurations, then you’re an incoherent agent without a proper utility function!”
And Blaine, by the way, is speaking the truth here; Ashley could in fact be more specific. Ashley is not being completely vague, however; ‘apple’ is specific enough to specify a range of things, and within that range it may be ambiguous as to what she wants from the perspective of someone who is strangely obsessed with specificity, but Ashley can in fact simply and directly want every single apple that matches her rangerately-specified criteria.
So it is with words like ‘Good’, ‘Relevant’, ‘Considerate’, ‘Justice’, and ‘Intrinsic Value Strategicism’.
Explain, please? I affirm the importance of charitability and I am interested in greater specificity about what you have identified as ‘aggressiveness’. I see aggressiveness as sometimes justified.
No standing with whom? I am requesting that you not be cruel over shallow and irrelevant matters; that is exactly what I should be doing here no matter the density and inconsiderateness of you or anyone else.
My standing with Omniscient beings is the standing that should primarily matter to allegedly rational people.
I should have done the second; I was mistaken that clicking “Read More” in the commenting guidelines would not reward me with sufficient clarity about Duncan’s elaborate standards; I apologize for my rude behavior.
I insist that you either always use it non-violently or always explain why it does not just mean ‘being weird and disagreeable’, and also why it doesn’t mean anything else that is entirely morally irrelevant either, because you should never be cruel over anything that is morally irrelevant.
Why the downvotes? “Lizardman” is a great status-reducing thing to call a person just for being too weird and disagreeable! :)
This was the original reasoning behind judges-elected-for-life—that society needed principled men and women of discernment who did not need to placate or cater to lizardman.
After all, no one of discernment would ever heed a true lizardman. They know the difference between someone who seems like a lizardman and someone who is a lizardman.
No sane person can disagree with any of this succinctly on the level of truth nor of misleadingness; excellently written.
If AI copied all human body layouts down to the subatomic level, then re-engineered all human bodies so they were no longer recognizably human but rather something human-objectively superior, then gave all former humans the option to change back to their original forms, would this have been a good thing to do?
I think so!
It has been warned in ominous tones that “nothing human survives into the far future.”
I’m not sure human-objectivity permits humanity to remain mostly-recognizably human, but it does require that former humans have the freedom to change back if they wish, and I’m sure that many would, and that would satisfy the criterion of something human surviving the far future.
(I apologize for being, or skirting too close to the edges of being, too political. I accept downvotes as the fair price and promise no begrudgement for it.)
I have an observation that I want more widely appreciated by low-contextualizers (who may be high or low in decoupling as well; they are independent axes): insisting that conversations happen purely in terms of the bet-resolvable portion of reality, without an omniscient being to help out as bet arbiter, can be frame control.
Status quos contain self-validating reductions, and people looking to score Pragmatic Paternalist status points can frame predictable bet outcomes as vindication of complacence with arbitrary, unreasonably and bullyishly exercised, often violent, vastly intrinsic-value-sacrificial power, on the basis of the weirdness and demonstrably inconvenient political ambitiousness of fixing the situation.
They seem to think, out of entitlement to epistemic propriety, that there must be some amount of non-[philosophical-arguments]-based evidence that should discourage a person from trying to resolve vastly objectively evil situations that neither the laws of physics, nor any other [human-will]-independent laws of nature, require or forbid. They are mistaken.
If that sounds too much like an argument for communism, get over it; I love free markets and making Warren Buffett the Chairman of America is no priority of mine.
If it sounds too much like an argument for denying biological realities, get over it; I’m not asking for total equality, I’m just asking for moral competence on behalf of institutions and individuals with respect to biological realities, and I detest censorship of all the typical victims, though I make exception for genuine infohazards.
If you think my standards are too high for humanity, were Benjamin Lay’s also too high? I think his efforts paid off even if our world is still not perfect; I would like to have a comparable effect, were I not occupied with learning statistics so that I can help align AI for this guilty species.
If you think factory farmed animals have things worse than children… Yes. But I am alienated by EA’s relative quietude; you may not see it this way, but so-called lip service is an invitation for privately conducted accountability negotiation, and I value that immensely as a foundation for change.
Engineering and gaming are just other words for understanding the constraints deeply enough to find the paths to desired (by the engineer) results.
Yes.
The words you choose are political, with embedded intentional beliefs, not definitional and objective about the actions themselves.
Well now that was out of left-field! People don’t normally say that without having a broader disagreement at play. I suppose you have a more-objective reform-to-my-words prepared to offer me? My point about the letter of the law being more superficial than the spirit seems like a robust observation, and I think my choice of words accurately, impartially, and non-misleadingly preserves that observation;
until you have a specific argument against the objectivity, your response amounts to an ambiguously adversarially-worded request to imagine I was systematically wrong and report back my change of mind. I would like you to point my imagination in a promising direction; a direction that seems promising for producing a shift in belief.
Funny that you think gameability is closer to engineering; I had it in mind that exceptioncraft was closer. To my mind, gameability is more like rules-lawyering the letter of the law, whereas exceptioncraft relies on the spirit of the law. Syntactic vs semantic kinda situation.
Arbitrary incompleteness invites gameability, and arbitrary specificity invites exceptioncraft.
You can quote text using a caret (>) and a space.
Surely to be truthful is to be non-misleading...?
Read the linked post; this is not so. You can mislead with the truth. You can speak a wholly true collection of facts that misleads people. If someone misleads using a fully true collection of facts, saying they spoke untruthfully is confusing. Truth cannot just always lead to good inferences; truth does not have to be convenient, as you say in OP. Truth can make you infer falsehoods.
Saying you put the value of truth above your value of morality on your list of values is analogous to saying you put your moral of truth above your moral of values; it’s like saying bananas are more fruity to you than fruits.
Where does non-misleadingness fall on your list of supposedly amoral values such as truth and morality? Is non-misleadingness higher than truth or lower?
I don’t agree that focusing on extrinsic value is less myopic than focusing on intrinsic value. This world is full of false promises, self-delusion, rationalization of reckless commitment, complexity of value, bad incentives/cybernetics, and the fallaciousness of planning. My impression is that the conscientious sort of people who think so much about utility have overconfidence in the world’s structural friendliness and are way more screwed than the so-called “myopic” value-focused individuals.