Prior or posterior to looking for sources and failing to find one? If the latter, why?
Neither the thought nor the expression sound like Churchill, and Google didn’t find a source. A more assiduous search (i.e. going through the first four pages of results instead of the first two) turns up this, a dustbin of unsourced quotations on the Wikipedia talk page for Churchill. At this point I think it pretty clear he never said it.
ETA: Here and here a Churchill historian who has published a book of Churchill quotations asserts he never said it, and gives some sourced quotations of some things he did say about democracy. They are completely inconsistent with the “five minute conversation” quote. I think that puts sufficient nails in the coffin.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
I observe that by their very nature claims that something is the “best argument against X” can more readily support X than undermine it.
Rejecting all the arguments against democracy that are better than said five minute conversation constitutes rather comprehensive support for democracy. (It rules out considerations of the various failure modes, perverse incentives and biases that are associated with such a system.)
He never said they were “rejected” or “ruled out”. Just weaker than the conversation—which I assume is because the average person is much worse than you, as cultured political disputant, experience.
Probably not true, still, unless you have the raw mind power to deduce all the flaws of the human mind from that mere conversation. And even then, only maybe.
Just because individual voters vote poorly (or because individual purchasers only buy things based on how cheap they are) doesn’t mean that democracy (or the market) don’t work.
Also, remember that Churchill was a colonialist and opposed the independence of India.
The cases are not really parallel. A bad capitalist loses money and becomes less strongly weighted in a sensible list of all capitalists. A bad voter gets a bad government, but is quite unlikely to lose his vote as a result, although it’s been known to happen. But the feedback is very slow, very uncertain, and worst of all, binary—you can’t lose 10% of your vote.
It’s not strictly binary. Absurdities like the electoral college and gerrymandering can effectively devalue some people’s votes without eliminating them outright.
A bad capitalist loses money and becomes less strongly weighted in a sensible list of all capitalists
Markets have very strong self-corrective behavior
What about the auto bailouts and record bonuses in finance after the recent economic crisis? Or do you think this is a case of the faults you point out in democracy (slow, weak punishment) leaking into capitalism?
People use the words “capitalist” and “capitalism” to mean several different things, and a lot of conversations using that word run awry because the participants either don’t realize this — or, worse, become derailed into dictionary arguments about whose definition is legitimate.
For instance, many right-libertarians use “capitalism” to mean an economic system that is simultaneously unregulated and free from coercion and fraud. The way they use the word, the United States today does not have a “capitalist” economy.
Meanwhile, many leftists use “capitalism” to mean an economic system in which a minority of participants own the industrial and finance capital, and through this ownership exercise economic and political power over the majority who make use of that capital to do labor. The way they use the word, the United States does have a “capitalist” economy.
For that matter, some use “capitalist” to mean an advocate of capitalist economy; others use it to mean an owner of capital. A capitalist might not be a capitalist. For instance, right-libertarians might say that Warren Buffett, who advocates increased taxes on the rich, is a capitalist [investor] who is not a capitalist [advocate of unregulated free market].
Capitalism is about capital accumulation. People who are good at achieving capital accumulation, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become rich capitalists.
Democracy is about the will of the voters. Since it does not have a metric to optimize for outside the will of the voters, it does not actually care if the voters are complete idiots.
Democracy is supposed to optimize for the will of the voters, but in fact it optimizes for the ability to get the votes. If I can make people vote for me even if I don’t give them what they want (e.g. because I lie to them, or because I convince them that my competitors would be even worse), I win the election.
I could similarly say: People who are good at getting votes, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become successful politicians in democracy.
Democracy uses the will of the voters as a tool to build a good society for the voters, in the same way that autocracy uses the will of a philosopher-king to build a good society for the subjects. It, or rather the people who set it up, didn’t give a damn about the will of the voters per se; what they wanted was the wellbeing, agency, and other CEV stuff of the population. You are confusing their means with an end in itself.
I think you are correct, provided your own assumptions that politics is about building a good society for the subjects/voters/citizens, ie: that politics is a large-scale extension of ethics.
However, most people don’t share the LW notions of ethics, so real-world politics has tended to be more sort of, “What people resort to when fundamental ethical disagreements occur over terminal values or moral epistemology.” I think this view is more historical: politics has been an extension of diplomacy, a continuing attempt to prevent Hobbes’s “war of all against all” (or rather, a war of Moral Greens versus Moral Blues versus Moral Grays versus Moral Reds, etc for however many different fundamental moral views are current in the population).
What are LW ethics? DIfferent individuals seem to adopt every possible theory except Divine Command, AFAICT.
I don’t think there is even that exception.
ETA: There have been long term participants who had that ethical system (and associated beliefs). Both because they were simply religious and because they went loopy with convoluted meta reasoning and ended up back there.
I suppose people use the term “LW ethics” to refer to Eliezer’s moral indexicalism (Is there a name for the position that has actually been adopted into more wide-spread use here?) plus consequentialism, but I agree with the objection to the suggestion of uniformity.
I suppose people use the term “LW ethics” to refer to Eliezer’s moral indexicalism (Is there a name for the position that has actually been adopted into more wide-spread use here?)
Subjectivism.
plus consequentialism,
The consequentialism is of the utilitarian variety , which isn’t particularly compatible with subjectivism/indexicality. So there’s two theories. There’s also the objective-sounding CEV thing, and the
deflationary-sounding tendency to talk about “morality” and “preferences” interchangeably.
Really? In that case, I’m strongly against using that, because the term “subjectivism” seems ill-defined, not very illuminating, and has a bunch of wrong connotations. In particular, as I read him, Eliezer does think that we are all talking about the same thing, that we have a shared referential intention, and that disagreement is therefor substantial and about the truth-value of a definite proposition that has a truth-value. (Which is precisely the reason why I think his theory is wrong.)
The consequentialism is of the utilitarian variety , which isn’t particularly compatible with subjectivism/indexicality. So there’s two theories.
Of course; one is a metaethical theory, the other is an ethical theory. But I think the two are very compatible, simply because they’re orthogonal.
really? In that case, I’m strongly against using that, because the term “subjectivism” seems ill-defined,
By whom? It seems well-defined by professional philosophes to me.
not very illuminating, and has a bunch of wrong connotations
To whom? It is not a force of nature that makes words have connotations. The individual brings whatever connotations they bring.
In particular, as I read him, Eliezer does think that we are all talking about the same thing, that we have a shared referential intention, and that disagreement is therefor substantial and about the truth-value of a definite proposition that has a truth-value. (Which is precisely the reason why I think his theory is wrong.)
Then what happened to the indexicality you mentioned? (And for which there is independent evidence, such as “Yudkowsky!good”)? If the truth values of ethical claims are indexed to individuals, where does the disagreement come from?
Of course; one is a metaethical theory, the other is an ethical theory. But I think the two are very compatible, simply because they’re orthogonal.
Subjectivism, by itself is a metaethical theory which yields object-level results when an individuals prefrences are plugged in.
Utilitarianism, by itself is a metaethical theory which yields object-level results when a societies preferences are plugged in.
What I want is not automatically what the greatest Number wants, so they are incompatible.
By whom? It seems well-defined by professional philosophes to me.
Well, the Stanford Encyclopedia doesn’t give a unambiguous definition of it; it says that it’s about “mind-(in)dependence”, but says that there is some disagreement about what precisely that means. Intuitively, I feel Eliezer’s view is not illuminatingly called subjectivist because for him, moral statements are simply about the properties of a certain abstract algorithm.
Interstingly, I found this piece, according to which Eliezer’s view is clearly relativist.
Then what happened to the indexicality you mentioned?
Imagine two humans standing besides each other and disagreeing about the truth of “it’s bright here”. (Assume they’re both blind and so only have indirect evidence, otherwise disagreement doesn’t really make sense or would necessarily be about the standard of brightness, which is a tricky issue in itself.) Since they’re in the same place, they are using the indexical “here” with the same reference. For Eliezer, as I understand him, the same thing happens when two humans disagree about “one should do X”: the indexical “should” has the same reference when used by either of them.
Not responding to the last section because I’m not following it. I see your point that the whole utilitarianism/CEV/preferences business—in my view, the ethical as opposed to the metaethical part—is somewhat muddled up in Eliezer’s writing, though.
According to such a view, it is possible that when John asserts “Stealing is wrong” he is saying something true, but that when Jenny asserts “Stealing is wrong” she is saying something false.
would seem to be trivially true, if they are in fact talking about sentences there. Just have Jenny be speaking a foreign language that contains the same symbols with a different meaning. By that standard, anything anyone says ever could safely be considered relative.
On the other hand if they’re talking about propositions then it would seem to be trivially false, because propositions have truth values.
They are talking about propositions, and the point is that the sentence “Stealing is wrong” expresses different propositions when uttered by different people, just like “I’m sleepy” does. That’s what indexicality is!
That’s what I meant by “talking about sentences”. Any sentence can express different propositions when uttered by different people. Just have people speaking different languages. So clearly “means different things when said by different people” isn’t half specific enough to have any dire metaethical implications.
We are speaking the same language. Yet we express different propositions when we say “I’m sitting at a table.” This is not trivial; for example, various other sentences do not have this property. So the SEP quote, once interpreted correctly, is non-trivial, too, because it is quite clear that the writer did not intend your “speaking different languages” interpretation.
Also, you can divorce a technical notion of a sentence from that of a string of sounds; sentencehood might be a two-place predicate of a string and a language.
But I could easily claim that the way strings like “me” and “here” change their meanings depending on context just shows that we do not always speak the same language. I could think of a language as just being a mapping from symbols to propositions, in which case any variation in propositions expressed means that it is not the same language.
You could argue that there is some kind of mapping to an intermediate state we have in common: symbol -> intermediate -> proposition where symbol -> intermediate is your “language”. But then I would ask why anyone should care about that particular intermediate state, and whether that intermediate state can be compellingly or uniquely defined with respect to words like “wrong”.
But I could easily claim that the way strings like “me” and “here” change their meanings depending on context just shows that we do not always speak the same language.
Then you are employing the word “language” in an idiosyncratic, confusing, and, in my opinion, not very useful way. Note that we also switch languages depending on where we are (“here”) and, in fact, continuously all the time (“now”). Good luck building a theory on that.
You might want to look up the notion of a Kaplanian character, which is precisely the intermediate level that you’re suggesting. A character is a function from contexts of utterance to propositions, and the (language-relative) meaning of a sentence is such a character, so, as you say, you could think of a language as a relation between strings and characters (not a function, because of ambiguity). In that picture, an expression is called “indexical” when its character is not a constant function.
Why we should care about that? Because it’s useful in explaining why we understand each other despite the fact that we don’t express the same propositions with one and the same sentence all the time, I suppose.
So the claim that “wrong” is indexical is certainly meaningful and non-trivial. Whether it’s correct is another matter. (I think it isn’t.)
I could think of a language as just being a mapping from symbols to propositions, in which case any variation in propositions expressed means that it is not the same language.
If that’s what counts as a language, I think we should deny the existence of languages:
“Rather than take for granite that Ace talks straight, a listener must be on guard for an occasional entre nous and me...or a long face no see. In a roustabout way, he will maneuver until he selects the ideal phrase for the situation, hitting the nail right on the thumb. The careful conversationalist might try to mix it up with him in a baffle of wits. In quest of this pinochle of success, I have often wrecked my brain for a clowning achievement, but Ace’s chickens always come home to roast. From time to time, Ace will, in a jersksome way, monotonise the conversation with witticisms too humorous to mention. It’s high noon someone beat him at his own game, but I have never done it; cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down.” From A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
Yet we express different propositions when we say “I’m sitting at a table.”
Well, if that’s the way to read the SEP quote, then it does look trivially true. At least as trivial as this claim:
It is possible that when John says “It is raining today”, he is saying something true, while when Jenny says “The dog is brown” she is saying something false.
The non-trivial reading would have to be that John and Jenny are asserting the same proposition, but that Jenny’s assertion is true while John’s is false.
On the other hand if they’re talking about propositions then it would seem to be trivially false, because propositions have truth values.
It doesn’t follow from the fact that propositions have truth values that the SEP quote is trivially false. “Stealing is wrong” as asserted by John and “Stealing is wrong” as asserted by Jenny both have truth values, they just don’t have the same truth values. You need another premise.
By “if they’re talking about propositions” I meant assuming that they mean “Stealing is wrong” to refer to a particular proposition (ie. asserting that John and Jenny are stating the same proposition) rather than a sentence (string of words).
Right, so you’d need a premise like “A given proposition can only have one truth value”. That’s not trivial though, and it’s been the subject of historical debate. For example, “Hen is sitting” is true...and false....and true again. You can work around that by saying “propositions come with time indexes” or something, but that’s far from trivial. Why can’t differences in speaker have the same effect?
So the SEP quote may be trivially false under a certain understanding of ‘proposition’ but I take it the issue of how to understand propositions is part of what the SEP quote intends to raise.
“Indexed to something mind-dependent ” and “indexed to something about an individual” are not both more precise than your “indexical”
I don’t find it illuminating to be told that morality is about an abstract algorithm , since that does not tell me whether the algorithm is defined at the individual, group, or universal level; nor whether it is cognactively accessible; nor whether it is mind dependent
You have said that moral claims are indexical, and also that “should” always has the same referent .hat is it so where does the last indexicality come from...what makes it vary?
Let me take another try at the last section: ethics and metaethics aren’t orthogonal . Not all combinations work. As object level ethics, utilitarianism is incompatible with metaethics that is indexed to or relative to individuals.
I’m using “utilitarianism” in the standard philosophical sense, not in the LessWrong “uses utility functions” sense. As such, it already has a utility function—the utility functions of everyone that exists.
I don’t think claims about how something seems to me need independent substantiation.
Oh, come on...
That there is a definite and uniform LW ethics is not a default: such a claim needs support itself.
But that’s not the claim under discussion. The claim that we’re (well, I’m—you kind of aren’t) discussing is that there is a definite and uniform position that one person, namely Eliezer, has laid out in a sequence. I’m not sure how you are supposed to prove that absence of something, in this case a change of mind, by the way...
You can use an ad hominem against an argument from authority. It’s fighting fire with fire by showing that the authority isn’t such a good authority. Sure, that has no bearing on the truth of the statement, but the appeal to authority never did in the first place.
The point is that Churchill opposed democracy in a situation where the verdict of history is that opposing democracy was absolutely the wrong thing to do. A quote which shows Churchill being elitist and against democracy completely fits with that. That isn’t obviously a case of misattribution at all, it’s just Churchill being Churchill.
Of course, Churchill was known for speaking out in favor of democracy in the context of Britain, but don’t confuse that with wanting democracy for everyone.
The point is that Churchill opposed democracy in a situation where the verdict of history is that opposing democracy was absolutely the wrong thing to do.
What point would that be? True opposing independence for India turned out to be wrong, then again independence for the African colonies has been mostly a disaster.
Test: find someone who just voted and ask the person to (a) justify their vote, and (b) justify the purchase of some large ticket item (cell phone, car, house) they made. I bet they make more intelligent arguments for (b) than (a).
Given an impartial arbitrator to judge the intelligence of the arguments, I think I would probably take that bet, at least for cell phone or laptop scale purchases, rather than something like a house or car, where the decisions are usually made over much longer timeframes.
However, regardless of which decisions people argue for more persuasively, it doesn’t really prove much, because these types of explanations overwhelmingly tend to be justifications people create for themselves, rather than the true reasons underlying their decisions.
They may be able to justify the act of purchase, but they won’t be able to justify (or usually, even comprehend) how their purchase affects the prices and supply of items on the market. Yet their purchase does exactly that, and does so much better than some central authority setting prices and deciding how much of an item is to be sold. In fact, that’s the best system we’ve found so far of running a market and it depends on millions of people who are only acting for their own selfish reasons and have no idea how what they are doing affects the larger picture.
They aren’t equivalent. Markets have very strong self-corrective behavior that either punish poor decisions, or reward someone else who fixes the result of the poor decision. Democracy punishes poor voter decisions extremely weakly if at all, and on much longer timescales. The behavior of individual voters can be generalized to the behavior of voters en masse.
Winston Churchill
I find it rather unlikely that he ever said that. Google turns up only unattributed repetitions.
Wikipedia and Wikiquote require quotes to be attributed using reliable sources. I think the rationality quotes threads should adopt the same standard.
Prior or posterior to looking for sources and failing to find one? If the latter, why?
EDIT: I meant the former.
Neither the thought nor the expression sound like Churchill, and Google didn’t find a source. A more assiduous search (i.e. going through the first four pages of results instead of the first two) turns up this, a dustbin of unsourced quotations on the Wikipedia talk page for Churchill. At this point I think it pretty clear he never said it.
ETA: Here and here a Churchill historian who has published a book of Churchill quotations asserts he never said it, and gives some sourced quotations of some things he did say about democracy. They are completely inconsistent with the “five minute conversation” quote. I think that puts sufficient nails in the coffin.
-- H.L. Mencken
I observe that by their very nature claims that something is the “best argument against X” can more readily support X than undermine it.
Rejecting all the arguments against democracy that are better than said five minute conversation constitutes rather comprehensive support for democracy. (It rules out considerations of the various failure modes, perverse incentives and biases that are associated with such a system.)
He never said they were “rejected” or “ruled out”. Just weaker than the conversation—which I assume is because the average person is much worse than you, as cultured political disputant, experience.
Probably not true, still, unless you have the raw mind power to deduce all the flaws of the human mind from that mere conversation. And even then, only maybe.
This is is a problem here.
Fixed, thanks.
That’s like saying that the best argument against capitalism is a five minute conversation with the average person about how he decides to buy things.
Or, in other words, Fallacy of composition .
Just because individual voters vote poorly (or because individual purchasers only buy things based on how cheap they are) doesn’t mean that democracy (or the market) don’t work.
Also, remember that Churchill was a colonialist and opposed the independence of India.
The cases are not really parallel. A bad capitalist loses money and becomes less strongly weighted in a sensible list of all capitalists. A bad voter gets a bad government, but is quite unlikely to lose his vote as a result, although it’s been known to happen. But the feedback is very slow, very uncertain, and worst of all, binary—you can’t lose 10% of your vote.
It’s not strictly binary. Absurdities like the electoral college and gerrymandering can effectively devalue some people’s votes without eliminating them outright.
What about the auto bailouts and record bonuses in finance after the recent economic crisis? Or do you think this is a case of the faults you point out in democracy (slow, weak punishment) leaking into capitalism?
People use the words “capitalist” and “capitalism” to mean several different things, and a lot of conversations using that word run awry because the participants either don’t realize this — or, worse, become derailed into dictionary arguments about whose definition is legitimate.
For instance, many right-libertarians use “capitalism” to mean an economic system that is simultaneously unregulated and free from coercion and fraud. The way they use the word, the United States today does not have a “capitalist” economy.
Meanwhile, many leftists use “capitalism” to mean an economic system in which a minority of participants own the industrial and finance capital, and through this ownership exercise economic and political power over the majority who make use of that capital to do labor. The way they use the word, the United States does have a “capitalist” economy.
For that matter, some use “capitalist” to mean an advocate of capitalist economy; others use it to mean an owner of capital. A capitalist might not be a capitalist. For instance, right-libertarians might say that Warren Buffett, who advocates increased taxes on the rich, is a capitalist [investor] who is not a capitalist [advocate of unregulated free market].
You’re confusing the different metrics at work.
Capitalism is about capital accumulation. People who are good at achieving capital accumulation, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become rich capitalists.
Democracy is about the will of the voters. Since it does not have a metric to optimize for outside the will of the voters, it does not actually care if the voters are complete idiots.
Democracy is supposed to optimize for the will of the voters, but in fact it optimizes for the ability to get the votes. If I can make people vote for me even if I don’t give them what they want (e.g. because I lie to them, or because I convince them that my competitors would be even worse), I win the election.
I could similarly say: People who are good at getting votes, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become successful politicians in democracy.
You are entirely correct, and this is the good critique of democracy.
Democracy uses the will of the voters as a tool to build a good society for the voters, in the same way that autocracy uses the will of a philosopher-king to build a good society for the subjects. It, or rather the people who set it up, didn’t give a damn about the will of the voters per se; what they wanted was the wellbeing, agency, and other CEV stuff of the population. You are confusing their means with an end in itself.
I think you are correct, provided your own assumptions that politics is about building a good society for the subjects/voters/citizens, ie: that politics is a large-scale extension of ethics.
However, most people don’t share the LW notions of ethics, so real-world politics has tended to be more sort of, “What people resort to when fundamental ethical disagreements occur over terminal values or moral epistemology.” I think this view is more historical: politics has been an extension of diplomacy, a continuing attempt to prevent Hobbes’s “war of all against all” (or rather, a war of Moral Greens versus Moral Blues versus Moral Grays versus Moral Reds, etc for however many different fundamental moral views are current in the population).
What are LW ethics? DIfferent individuals seem to adopt every possible theory except Divine Command, AFAICT.
And how would it help?
I don’t think there is even that exception.
ETA: There have been long term participants who had that ethical system (and associated beliefs). Both because they were simply religious and because they went loopy with convoluted meta reasoning and ended up back there.
I suppose people use the term “LW ethics” to refer to Eliezer’s moral indexicalism (Is there a name for the position that has actually been adopted into more wide-spread use here?) plus consequentialism, but I agree with the objection to the suggestion of uniformity.
Subjectivism.
The consequentialism is of the utilitarian variety , which isn’t particularly compatible with subjectivism/indexicality. So there’s two theories. There’s also the objective-sounding CEV thing, and the deflationary-sounding tendency to talk about “morality” and “preferences” interchangeably.
Really? In that case, I’m strongly against using that, because the term “subjectivism” seems ill-defined, not very illuminating, and has a bunch of wrong connotations. In particular, as I read him, Eliezer does think that we are all talking about the same thing, that we have a shared referential intention, and that disagreement is therefor substantial and about the truth-value of a definite proposition that has a truth-value. (Which is precisely the reason why I think his theory is wrong.)
Of course; one is a metaethical theory, the other is an ethical theory. But I think the two are very compatible, simply because they’re orthogonal.
By whom? It seems well-defined by professional philosophes to me.
To whom? It is not a force of nature that makes words have connotations. The individual brings whatever connotations they bring.
Then what happened to the indexicality you mentioned? (And for which there is independent evidence, such as “Yudkowsky!good”)? If the truth values of ethical claims are indexed to individuals, where does the disagreement come from?
Subjectivism, by itself is a metaethical theory which yields object-level results when an individuals prefrences are plugged in.
Utilitarianism, by itself is a metaethical theory which yields object-level results when a societies preferences are plugged in.
What I want is not automatically what the greatest Number wants, so they are incompatible.
Well, the Stanford Encyclopedia doesn’t give a unambiguous definition of it; it says that it’s about “mind-(in)dependence”, but says that there is some disagreement about what precisely that means. Intuitively, I feel Eliezer’s view is not illuminatingly called subjectivist because for him, moral statements are simply about the properties of a certain abstract algorithm.
Interstingly, I found this piece, according to which Eliezer’s view is clearly relativist.
Imagine two humans standing besides each other and disagreeing about the truth of “it’s bright here”. (Assume they’re both blind and so only have indirect evidence, otherwise disagreement doesn’t really make sense or would necessarily be about the standard of brightness, which is a tricky issue in itself.) Since they’re in the same place, they are using the indexical “here” with the same reference. For Eliezer, as I understand him, the same thing happens when two humans disagree about “one should do X”: the indexical “should” has the same reference when used by either of them.
Not responding to the last section because I’m not following it. I see your point that the whole utilitarianism/CEV/preferences business—in my view, the ethical as opposed to the metaethical part—is somewhat muddled up in Eliezer’s writing, though.
That SEP page is curious, because this:
would seem to be trivially true, if they are in fact talking about sentences there. Just have Jenny be speaking a foreign language that contains the same symbols with a different meaning. By that standard, anything anyone says ever could safely be considered relative.
On the other hand if they’re talking about propositions then it would seem to be trivially false, because propositions have truth values.
They are talking about propositions, and the point is that the sentence “Stealing is wrong” expresses different propositions when uttered by different people, just like “I’m sleepy” does. That’s what indexicality is!
That’s what I meant by “talking about sentences”. Any sentence can express different propositions when uttered by different people. Just have people speaking different languages. So clearly “means different things when said by different people” isn’t half specific enough to have any dire metaethical implications.
We are speaking the same language. Yet we express different propositions when we say “I’m sitting at a table.” This is not trivial; for example, various other sentences do not have this property. So the SEP quote, once interpreted correctly, is non-trivial, too, because it is quite clear that the writer did not intend your “speaking different languages” interpretation.
Also, you can divorce a technical notion of a sentence from that of a string of sounds; sentencehood might be a two-place predicate of a string and a language.
But I could easily claim that the way strings like “me” and “here” change their meanings depending on context just shows that we do not always speak the same language. I could think of a language as just being a mapping from symbols to propositions, in which case any variation in propositions expressed means that it is not the same language.
You could argue that there is some kind of mapping to an intermediate state we have in common:
symbol -> intermediate -> propositionwheresymbol -> intermediateis your “language”. But then I would ask why anyone should care about that particular intermediate state, and whether that intermediate state can be compellingly or uniquely defined with respect to words like “wrong”.Then you are employing the word “language” in an idiosyncratic, confusing, and, in my opinion, not very useful way. Note that we also switch languages depending on where we are (“here”) and, in fact, continuously all the time (“now”). Good luck building a theory on that.
You might want to look up the notion of a Kaplanian character, which is precisely the intermediate level that you’re suggesting. A character is a function from contexts of utterance to propositions, and the (language-relative) meaning of a sentence is such a character, so, as you say, you could think of a language as a relation between strings and characters (not a function, because of ambiguity). In that picture, an expression is called “indexical” when its character is not a constant function.
Why we should care about that? Because it’s useful in explaining why we understand each other despite the fact that we don’t express the same propositions with one and the same sentence all the time, I suppose.
So the claim that “wrong” is indexical is certainly meaningful and non-trivial. Whether it’s correct is another matter. (I think it isn’t.)
If that’s what counts as a language, I think we should deny the existence of languages:
“Rather than take for granite that Ace talks straight, a listener must be on guard for an occasional entre nous and me...or a long face no see. In a roustabout way, he will maneuver until he selects the ideal phrase for the situation, hitting the nail right on the thumb. The careful conversationalist might try to mix it up with him in a baffle of wits. In quest of this pinochle of success, I have often wrecked my brain for a clowning achievement, but Ace’s chickens always come home to roast. From time to time, Ace will, in a jersksome way, monotonise the conversation with witticisms too humorous to mention. It’s high noon someone beat him at his own game, but I have never done it; cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down.” From A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs
Well, if that’s the way to read the SEP quote, then it does look trivially true. At least as trivial as this claim:
The non-trivial reading would have to be that John and Jenny are asserting the same proposition, but that Jenny’s assertion is true while John’s is false.
It doesn’t follow from the fact that propositions have truth values that the SEP quote is trivially false. “Stealing is wrong” as asserted by John and “Stealing is wrong” as asserted by Jenny both have truth values, they just don’t have the same truth values. You need another premise.
By “if they’re talking about propositions” I meant assuming that they mean “Stealing is wrong” to refer to a particular proposition (ie. asserting that John and Jenny are stating the same proposition) rather than a sentence (string of words).
Right, so you’d need a premise like “A given proposition can only have one truth value”. That’s not trivial though, and it’s been the subject of historical debate. For example, “Hen is sitting” is true...and false....and true again. You can work around that by saying “propositions come with time indexes” or something, but that’s far from trivial. Why can’t differences in speaker have the same effect?
So the SEP quote may be trivially false under a certain understanding of ‘proposition’ but I take it the issue of how to understand propositions is part of what the SEP quote intends to raise.
It’s not trivially false because philosophers take a sentence that appears to be in certain language to have its normal meaning in that language.
It’s not trivially true because identical sentences can have different truth values when spoken by different people, eg “my name is John”
I guess the idea is that assertions about morality are not propositions in that sense?
“Indexed to something mind-dependent ” and “indexed to something about an individual” are not both more precise than your “indexical”
I don’t find it illuminating to be told that morality is about an abstract algorithm , since that does not tell me whether the algorithm is defined at the individual, group, or universal level; nor whether it is cognactively accessible; nor whether it is mind dependent
You have said that moral claims are indexical, and also that “should” always has the same referent .hat is it so where does the last indexicality come from...what makes it vary?
Let me take another try at the last section: ethics and metaethics aren’t orthogonal . Not all combinations work. As object level ethics, utilitarianism is incompatible with metaethics that is indexed to or relative to individuals.
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory, not a metaethical theory.
Utilitarianism with a particular utility function is an ethical theory.
I’m using “utilitarianism” in the standard philosophical sense, not in the LessWrong “uses utility functions” sense. As such, it already has a utility function—the utility functions of everyone that exists.
Isn’t there an entire ethics Sequence?
Never mind, I’ll bugger off.
It seems to consist of someone thinkign aloud and changing their mind.
Wait, did I miss something? Which change of mind are you referring to?
Not in the sense that he announced a change of mind. More an overall drift.
Well, drift from where to where, then?
The situation would be much better if there were some discernable end point or trajectory to the drift.
You do realise that, being asked twice, you have failed to provide any substantiation of the claim(s) you’re making...
I don’t think claims about how something seems to me need independent substantiation.
That there is a definite and uniform LW ethics is not a default: such a claim needs support itself.
Oh, come on...
But that’s not the claim under discussion. The claim that we’re (well, I’m—you kind of aren’t) discussing is that there is a definite and uniform position that one person, namely Eliezer, has laid out in a sequence. I’m not sure how you are supposed to prove that absence of something, in this case a change of mind, by the way...
That is more of a default; OTOH, I have laid out, in the other subthread, how he has actually embraced four different positions.
Huh. Might as well stake my own position then. Humean sentimentalist/emotivist here, what up?
The logical structure of ethical claims.
You assume that good at capitalism implies good for capitalism implies good for society. This is a rather large assumption.
I assumed nothing of the kind; I did not draw the conclusion you seem to have leaped to.
Isn’t it sort of embarrassing to use an ad hominem against a quote which is so obviously misattributed?
You can use an ad hominem against an argument from authority. It’s fighting fire with fire by showing that the authority isn’t such a good authority. Sure, that has no bearing on the truth of the statement, but the appeal to authority never did in the first place.
The point is that Churchill opposed democracy in a situation where the verdict of history is that opposing democracy was absolutely the wrong thing to do. A quote which shows Churchill being elitist and against democracy completely fits with that. That isn’t obviously a case of misattribution at all, it’s just Churchill being Churchill.
Of course, Churchill was known for speaking out in favor of democracy in the context of Britain, but don’t confuse that with wanting democracy for everyone.
What point would that be? True opposing independence for India turned out to be wrong, then again independence for the African colonies has been mostly a disaster.
Test: find someone who just voted and ask the person to (a) justify their vote, and (b) justify the purchase of some large ticket item (cell phone, car, house) they made. I bet they make more intelligent arguments for (b) than (a).
Given an impartial arbitrator to judge the intelligence of the arguments, I think I would probably take that bet, at least for cell phone or laptop scale purchases, rather than something like a house or car, where the decisions are usually made over much longer timeframes.
However, regardless of which decisions people argue for more persuasively, it doesn’t really prove much, because these types of explanations overwhelmingly tend to be justifications people create for themselves, rather than the true reasons underlying their decisions.
They may be able to justify the act of purchase, but they won’t be able to justify (or usually, even comprehend) how their purchase affects the prices and supply of items on the market. Yet their purchase does exactly that, and does so much better than some central authority setting prices and deciding how much of an item is to be sold. In fact, that’s the best system we’ve found so far of running a market and it depends on millions of people who are only acting for their own selfish reasons and have no idea how what they are doing affects the larger picture.
They aren’t equivalent. Markets have very strong self-corrective behavior that either punish poor decisions, or reward someone else who fixes the result of the poor decision. Democracy punishes poor voter decisions extremely weakly if at all, and on much longer timescales. The behavior of individual voters can be generalized to the behavior of voters en masse.