So what are you doing about it? If you think these problems need to be solved, what are you doing to solve them? This reads like a call for other people (‘philosophers’) to do this rather than doing it yourself. Pointing out the existence of problems without at least suggesting a line of attack is not especially productive.
What am I doing about it? I’m making the meta-ethics relevant to Friendly AI the central research program of my career.
Even if that weren’t the case, I think that pointing out the problem without immediately, in the same blog post suggesting possible solutions is productive.
I don’t read it as a call-for-action-by-others at all. It seems that with this post and the previous one lukeprog is responsibly trying to verify that a problem exists, presumably as a necessary prologue to working on the problem or at least trying to strategize about how one might go about working on it. And I also don’t agree that it’s generally unproductive to point out the existence of problems without simultaneously offering suggestions about how to solve them: sometimes the first step really is admitting (or realizing, or verifying) you have a problem.
So what are you doing about it? If you think these problems need to be solved, what are you doing to solve them? This reads like a call for other people (‘philosophers’) to do this rather than doing it yourself. Pointing out the existence of problems without at least suggesting a line of attack is not especially productive.
AndrewHickey,
What am I doing about it? I’m making the meta-ethics relevant to Friendly AI the central research program of my career.
Even if that weren’t the case, I think that pointing out the problem without immediately, in the same blog post suggesting possible solutions is productive.
I don’t read it as a call-for-action-by-others at all. It seems that with this post and the previous one lukeprog is responsibly trying to verify that a problem exists, presumably as a necessary prologue to working on the problem or at least trying to strategize about how one might go about working on it. And I also don’t agree that it’s generally unproductive to point out the existence of problems without simultaneously offering suggestions about how to solve them: sometimes the first step really is admitting (or realizing, or verifying) you have a problem.
Andrew, I congratulate you on your intestinal fortitude in leaving that comment up, unedited, for others to learn from. Reminds me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079