Welcome to LessWrong! I see you have chosen trial by metaphorical fire.
I’m interested in learning more about your thoughts surrounding the question. The other answers have asked about the moral world phraseology but I’d like to be a bit more specific; would you say that:
Morality is a thing the world has, like the electromagnetic spectrum or gravity
Morality is a thing a person has, like being able to smell, or maybe like fear
Morality is a thing a group of people have, like relationships or clubs
I see elsewhere that you mentioned not knowing why murder is immoral, but then being able to tell murder is bad because of feelings. What do you think these feelings might be, and do you see them as related to the morality question at all? What about the difference between things we might guess the killer to feel (like guilt, remorse, or compunction) with the things the loved ones of the victim might feel (grief, sorrow, or wrath)?
What are your thoughts on Adam, Eve, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?
Thanks for the greeting ! Since theism is by far the most obvious discrepancy between my opinions and the community’s, I figured I should clear that up as soon as possible.
When I don’t think specifically about it, I just don’t have opinions. I usually feel that morality is a thing, but most of the time I don’t think about what morality is. Likewise, I’m no expert of christian dogma. I weakly feel that I must not take the Genesis literally, and I strongly feel that talking snakes don’t exist. In general, I weakly feel that [whatever the Church says about it] just like if you ask me about AI, I’ll answer [whatever Yudkowsky wrote].
All in all, the discussion so far has made pretty clear that I should taboo the word “morality” in my upcoming post... I’d say morality is something the world has ? In the context where I used it above, that’s what I meant by “a moral world” : morality is taken as a property of the world, that pervades its components be them actions (murdering is bad), objects (murder is bad) and people (murderers are bad). These three sentences make sense to me, but they don’t designate the same kind of bad. Although I have no right to claim that someone is irredeemably evil (Hitler might have done something right), I could condemn a specific action (Chauvin shouldn’t have killed Floyd).
I’m not sure about groups of people. I guess you could judge an ideology and judge the group of people who follow that ideology ? That does not sound very helpful, because it’s a weak judgement of every individual, which begs the question of their individual morality. Although it could probably be used as a useful judging heuristic (this group of people is good, so its members are likely to be good), I don’t see how to reach this conclusion without evaluating many members.
When I said that about feelings, I meant that it was my everyday tool to distinguish good from bad, just like my everyday tool to evaluate the correctedness of a mathematical demonstration is “is the result coherent and interesting ?”. It is merely an indicator, and not what I would use if presented with a specific, important case. They’re correlated with morality (which is why I use them) but not perfectly. I also know murder is bad because I was taught so, because many people think murder is bad, etc… All is evidence, strong or weak. In no way does it tell me why something is moral, although if I try to go up the reasoning chain I might find something interesting. In this case, I found that my reasoning was stopped at “God said so.” and I was unsatisfied, hence why I sought help.
Since theism is by far the most obvious discrepancy between my opinions and the community’s, I figured I should clear that up as soon as possible.
The premise may be true, but I strongly disagree with this conclusion!
Do you feel that you have to settle this question before you can be a rationalist? You don’t. I didn’t. I compartmentalized. (At first.) I considered what I knew of religion and science to be separate magisteria. I figured that once I learned more, the two worldviews would eventually reconcile. (God is a God of Truth, after all.) Well, they kind of did, but not the way I had expected.
Philosophers have been debating this for centuries. If you use their approach, you’ll probably never get anywhere. We can argue you around in circles all day. I do have the patience to debate this in good faith, and would be willing to do so again if you want.
But once you figure out epistemic rationality, the rest is easy. The answer to the question of God’s existence is obvious. Dead serious. It’s that clear-cut.
I should taboo the word “morality” in my upcoming post
No need to be hasty; you have merely stepped squarely into one of the community’s bugaboos.
A little historical context: this place used to be aggressively atheist, so much so that only a handful of people of faith hung around. In time we determined this to be counter-productive, because these are rarely the kinds of conversations that change anyone’s mind, and it distracted from our true purpose of developing better ways of thinking. As a consequence pretty much anything about God became taboo, and the subject of moderation: the official position was (and mostly still is?) that even though it is a conversation worth having there are lots of places to have those conversations and this is not one of them.
Absent the legacy of the internet atheism wars, things settled down pretty well. Indeed you will find quite a bit of content on some key subjects:
community: as a general matter for human welfare, and the welfare of this place in particular
religion: for the effects on the previous two things, and naturally the legacy atheist stuff
It’s normal for people to make reference to biblical stories or rabbinical argumentation for germane examples and jokes alike.
You’ll also find quite a bit of moral discussion over at our sibling website, the Effective Altruism Forum. There’s a lot of interrogation of questions like the moral value of animals, and of far-future humans. Some of this tackles problems like where the morality comes from, and these are good subjects to peruse because in order to argue for something outside the norm you need to establish how the normal works, so it can be extended.
You might be better served by tabooing God, so people stay focused on the arguments. If you were to try and get the same reasoning you are using now, but without terminating at God specifically, what do you think it would look like?
Speaking as a mod, I wanted to briefly endorse the “LessWrong is not a place to discuss whether God is real” (because there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that).
I haven’t yet read this post thoroughly so don’t have a strong sense of whether ryan_b’s advice is appropriate, but I roughly agreed with his description of the historical context.
I kind of have mixed feelings about this. When I first found LessWrong, I was very much a theist (and was miserable because of it). Developing my epistemic rationality was important in finally breaking me out of that harmful attractor. I don’t want to deny others my path, and I don’t want to scare off any theists who are willing to try the scout mindset. If that means discussing religious topics in scout mode, so be it.
The community should be allowed to grow. I think that means engaging new people in good faith who aren’t as rational as we might like yet. The more obvious questions seem like good practice. Maybe the alternative is entrance exams or something. I did read through the Sequences before my first post.
At the same time, Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. We do have to enforce our high standards of discourse, or we’ll lose them. I mostly trust the moderators here, they’ve been doing a good job. There are certainly other places to discuss this, and arguments have been compiled and catalogued on both sides, but I don’t know of any others with our high standards.
The historical context paragraph sounds about right to me. Debates can sometimes change minds in the audience if they’re already on the fence, but has a strong tendency to put people in solider mode, which just entrenches people in their current views more. The New Atheist movement seems to have died down, or at least changed tactics, so it seems like the topic is politically less dangerous now.
I don’t want to scare off any theists who are willing to try the scout mindset
In support of the mod position, this is one of the motivations for it in the first place. The tone of the community was actively hostile to theists, and we reasonably predicted that demanding people abandon their identities as the first step in community engagement would have an extremely low success rate. I can’t speak with authority, but I feel like at least a few of the mods personally knew theists who struggled with that exact issue, which informed their position.
I also have the impression, which may be mistaken, that people following your path was a hoped-for outcome and that this would be aided by our enforcement of a taboo. It feels to me like the separate magisterium is the natural consequence of our current state of affairs.
Welcome to LessWrong! I see you have chosen trial by metaphorical fire.
I’m interested in learning more about your thoughts surrounding the question. The other answers have asked about the moral world phraseology but I’d like to be a bit more specific; would you say that:
Morality is a thing the world has, like the electromagnetic spectrum or gravity
Morality is a thing a person has, like being able to smell, or maybe like fear
Morality is a thing a group of people have, like relationships or clubs
I see elsewhere that you mentioned not knowing why murder is immoral, but then being able to tell murder is bad because of feelings. What do you think these feelings might be, and do you see them as related to the morality question at all? What about the difference between things we might guess the killer to feel (like guilt, remorse, or compunction) with the things the loved ones of the victim might feel (grief, sorrow, or wrath)?
What are your thoughts on Adam, Eve, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?
Thanks for the greeting ! Since theism is by far the most obvious discrepancy between my opinions and the community’s, I figured I should clear that up as soon as possible.
When I don’t think specifically about it, I just don’t have opinions. I usually feel that morality is a thing, but most of the time I don’t think about what morality is.
Likewise, I’m no expert of christian dogma. I weakly feel that I must not take the Genesis literally, and I strongly feel that talking snakes don’t exist. In general, I weakly feel that [whatever the Church says about it] just like if you ask me about AI, I’ll answer [whatever Yudkowsky wrote].
All in all, the discussion so far has made pretty clear that I should taboo the word “morality” in my upcoming post...
I’d say morality is something the world has ? In the context where I used it above, that’s what I meant by “a moral world” : morality is taken as a property of the world, that pervades its components be them actions (murdering is bad), objects (murder is bad) and people (murderers are bad). These three sentences make sense to me, but they don’t designate the same kind of bad.
Although I have no right to claim that someone is irredeemably evil (Hitler might have done something right), I could condemn a specific action (Chauvin shouldn’t have killed Floyd).
I’m not sure about groups of people. I guess you could judge an ideology and judge the group of people who follow that ideology ? That does not sound very helpful, because it’s a weak judgement of every individual, which begs the question of their individual morality.
Although it could probably be used as a useful judging heuristic (this group of people is good, so its members are likely to be good), I don’t see how to reach this conclusion without evaluating many members.
When I said that about feelings, I meant that it was my everyday tool to distinguish good from bad, just like my everyday tool to evaluate the correctedness of a mathematical demonstration is “is the result coherent and interesting ?”. It is merely an indicator, and not what I would use if presented with a specific, important case.
They’re correlated with morality (which is why I use them) but not perfectly. I also know murder is bad because I was taught so, because many people think murder is bad, etc… All is evidence, strong or weak.
In no way does it tell me why something is moral, although if I try to go up the reasoning chain I might find something interesting.
In this case, I found that my reasoning was stopped at “God said so.” and I was unsatisfied, hence why I sought help.
The premise may be true, but I strongly disagree with this conclusion!
Do you feel that you have to settle this question before you can be a rationalist? You don’t. I didn’t. I compartmentalized. (At first.) I considered what I knew of religion and science to be separate magisteria. I figured that once I learned more, the two worldviews would eventually reconcile. (God is a God of Truth, after all.) Well, they kind of did, but not the way I had expected.
Philosophers have been debating this for centuries. If you use their approach, you’ll probably never get anywhere. We can argue you around in circles all day. I do have the patience to debate this in good faith, and would be willing to do so again if you want.
But once you figure out epistemic rationality, the rest is easy. The answer to the question of God’s existence is obvious. Dead serious. It’s that clear-cut.
Rationality first. The rest follows.
No need to be hasty; you have merely stepped squarely into one of the community’s bugaboos.
A little historical context: this place used to be aggressively atheist, so much so that only a handful of people of faith hung around. In time we determined this to be counter-productive, because these are rarely the kinds of conversations that change anyone’s mind, and it distracted from our true purpose of developing better ways of thinking. As a consequence pretty much anything about God became taboo, and the subject of moderation: the official position was (and mostly still is?) that even though it is a conversation worth having there are lots of places to have those conversations and this is not one of them.
Absent the legacy of the internet atheism wars, things settled down pretty well. Indeed you will find quite a bit of content on some key subjects:
community: as a general matter for human welfare, and the welfare of this place in particular
morality/ethics: for people, for AGI, for groups
religion: for the effects on the previous two things, and naturally the legacy atheist stuff
It’s normal for people to make reference to biblical stories or rabbinical argumentation for germane examples and jokes alike.
You’ll also find quite a bit of moral discussion over at our sibling website, the Effective Altruism Forum. There’s a lot of interrogation of questions like the moral value of animals, and of far-future humans. Some of this tackles problems like where the morality comes from, and these are good subjects to peruse because in order to argue for something outside the norm you need to establish how the normal works, so it can be extended.
You might be better served by tabooing God, so people stay focused on the arguments. If you were to try and get the same reasoning you are using now, but without terminating at God specifically, what do you think it would look like?
Speaking as a mod, I wanted to briefly endorse the “LessWrong is not a place to discuss whether God is real” (because there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that).
I haven’t yet read this post thoroughly so don’t have a strong sense of whether ryan_b’s advice is appropriate, but I roughly agreed with his description of the historical context.
I kind of have mixed feelings about this. When I first found LessWrong, I was very much a theist (and was miserable because of it). Developing my epistemic rationality was important in finally breaking me out of that harmful attractor. I don’t want to deny others my path, and I don’t want to scare off any theists who are willing to try the scout mindset. If that means discussing religious topics in scout mode, so be it.
The community should be allowed to grow. I think that means engaging new people in good faith who aren’t as rational as we might like yet. The more obvious questions seem like good practice. Maybe the alternative is entrance exams or something. I did read through the Sequences before my first post.
At the same time, Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. We do have to enforce our high standards of discourse, or we’ll lose them. I mostly trust the moderators here, they’ve been doing a good job. There are certainly other places to discuss this, and arguments have been compiled and catalogued on both sides, but I don’t know of any others with our high standards.
The historical context paragraph sounds about right to me. Debates can sometimes change minds in the audience if they’re already on the fence, but has a strong tendency to put people in solider mode, which just entrenches people in their current views more. The New Atheist movement seems to have died down, or at least changed tactics, so it seems like the topic is politically less dangerous now.
In support of the mod position, this is one of the motivations for it in the first place. The tone of the community was actively hostile to theists, and we reasonably predicted that demanding people abandon their identities as the first step in community engagement would have an extremely low success rate. I can’t speak with authority, but I feel like at least a few of the mods personally knew theists who struggled with that exact issue, which informed their position.
I also have the impression, which may be mistaken, that people following your path was a hoped-for outcome and that this would be aided by our enforcement of a taboo. It feels to me like the separate magisterium is the natural consequence of our current state of affairs.