Not that clearly? I agree that Anderson is using vague, morally-charged (what constitutes “progress”?), and hyperbolic (“everything in society”!?) language, but the comment still has empirical content: if someone told you about an alien civilization in which “blerples do the bulk of the work when it comes to maintaining society, but splapbops’ agency causes there to be nothing to pay the blerples with”, that testimony would probably change your implied probability distribution over anticipated observations of the civilization (even if you didn’t know what blerples and splapbops were).
Normative beliefs are ambiguous unless we have a shared, concrete understanding of what constitutes “good”, or “progress” in this case. I suspect my understanding of progress diverges from Stuart’s to a large extent.
Stability might be less ambiguous, but I wish it was operationalized. I agree with Hanson that value talk is usually purposely ambiguous because it’s not about expressing probability distributions, but rather about implying a stance and signaling an attitude.
I’m just confused because the post specifically said non-normative, and this is clearly normative.
Not that clearly? I agree that Anderson is using vague, morally-charged (what constitutes “progress”?), and hyperbolic (“everything in society”!?) language, but the comment still has empirical content: if someone told you about an alien civilization in which “blerples do the bulk of the work when it comes to maintaining society, but splapbops’ agency causes there to be nothing to pay the blerples with”, that testimony would probably change your implied probability distribution over anticipated observations of the civilization (even if you didn’t know what blerples and splapbops were).
Normative beliefs are ambiguous unless we have a shared, concrete understanding of what constitutes “good”, or “progress” in this case. I suspect my understanding of progress diverges from Stuart’s to a large extent.
Stability might be less ambiguous, but I wish it was operationalized. I agree with Hanson that value talk is usually purposely ambiguous because it’s not about expressing probability distributions, but rather about implying a stance and signaling an attitude.