It’s too late for me. It might work to tell the average person to use “awesomeness” as their black box for moral reasoning as long as they never ever look inside it. Unfortunately, all of us have now looked, and so whatever value it had as a black box has disappeared.
You can’t tell me now to go back and revert to my original version of awesome unless you have a supply of blue pills whenever I need them.
If the power of this tool evaporates as soon as you start investigating it, that strikes me as a rather strong point of evidence against it. It was fun while it lasted, though.
It’s too late for me. It might work to tell the average person to use “awesomeness” as their black box for moral reasoning as long as they never ever look inside it. Unfortunately, all of us have now looked, and so whatever value it had as a black box has disappeared.
You seem to be generalizing from one example. Have you attempted to find examples of people who have looked inside the box and not destroyed its value in the process?
I suspect that the utility of this approach is dependent on more than simply whether or not the person has examined the “awesome” label, and that some people will do better than others. Given the comments I see on LW, I suspect many people here have looked into it and still find value. (I will place myself into that group only tentatively; I haven’t looked into it in any particular detail, but I have looked. OTOH, that still seems like strong enough evidence to call “never ever look inside” into question.)
It’s too late for me. It might work to tell the average person to use “awesomeness” as their black box for moral reasoning as long as they never ever look inside it. Unfortunately, all of us have now looked, and so whatever value it had as a black box has disappeared.
You can’t tell me now to go back and revert to my original version of awesome unless you have a supply of blue pills whenever I need them.
If the power of this tool evaporates as soon as you start investigating it, that strikes me as a rather strong point of evidence against it. It was fun while it lasted, though.
You seem to be generalizing from one example. Have you attempted to find examples of people who have looked inside the box and not destroyed its value in the process?
I suspect that the utility of this approach is dependent on more than simply whether or not the person has examined the “awesome” label, and that some people will do better than others. Given the comments I see on LW, I suspect many people here have looked into it and still find value. (I will place myself into that group only tentatively; I haven’t looked into it in any particular detail, but I have looked. OTOH, that still seems like strong enough evidence to call “never ever look inside” into question.)