So, next question—what are they disagreeing about, if we taboo “immoral”?
Maybe they are not disagreeing about meaning of the words; they are just trying to influence how people behave.
Imagine that many people suddenly become interested in things being xyzzy. No one really knows what “xyzzy” means, or more precisely, you have thousand mutually contradictory explanations, some of them a bit more popular than the others. But for some reason people are enthusiastic about xyzzy things—for over 90% of them, xyzzy is an automatic applause light. Perhaps they rationalize that debating “xyzzy”, despite having no definition, must be xyzzy itself. It does not make sense at all.
Then some person says that reading LessWrong is very un-xyzzy, and some other person disagrees and says that reading LessWrong is actually very close to the real essence of xyzzy-ness. They argue by comparing LessWrong to other things, either popularly considered un-xyzzy, or popularly considered xyzzy; and then the other side counter-argues that xyzzy-ness or un-xyzzy-ness of X is not a good evidence for xyzzy-ness or un-xyzzy-ness of LessWrong, because LessWrong is not the same thing as X. Which side would you join? Assuming that you consider the whole concept of “xyzzy” meaningless, should you even try to join one of the sides?
Well, even assuming the whole thing is a nonsense, it is a nonsense with real-world consequences, if people care about that nonsense. If for 90% people being xyzzy is an automatic applause light, then successfully arguing that yes, LessWrong is xyzzy, means a huge increase in a number of readers. On he other hand, convincing people that LessWrong is un-xyzzy, means that many people will avoid this site. This may help or harm our instrumental goals.
I don’t think the entire morality debate is exactly like this; but it has this component. If it didn’t, we could just taboo “morality” and replace it with words like “harm-minimizing” and “religion-following”. But by doing so, each side would give up a word with positive connotations for both sides, and replace it with a word appealing only to its followers. That would be wasteful. If there is a word with positive connotations, you want to associate it with your cause, the precision of the debate be damned.
You want to argue that—to use the argument from the article—tolerating homosexuality is harm-minimizing and xyzzy; or that supressing homosexuality is religion-following and xyzzy. Because humans are not completely rational, and that “and xyzzy” part is really going to make them more likely to join one of the sides.
This (more specifically the last couple paragraphs) is exactly what I was getting at. I don’t know if it’s more intelligible to anyone else than what I wrote, but from this perspective it looks like you clicked.
Maybe they are not disagreeing about meaning of the words; they are just trying to influence how people behave.
Imagine that many people suddenly become interested in things being xyzzy. No one really knows what “xyzzy” means, or more precisely, you have thousand mutually contradictory explanations, some of them a bit more popular than the others. But for some reason people are enthusiastic about xyzzy things—for over 90% of them, xyzzy is an automatic applause light. Perhaps they rationalize that debating “xyzzy”, despite having no definition, must be xyzzy itself. It does not make sense at all.
Then some person says that reading LessWrong is very un-xyzzy, and some other person disagrees and says that reading LessWrong is actually very close to the real essence of xyzzy-ness. They argue by comparing LessWrong to other things, either popularly considered un-xyzzy, or popularly considered xyzzy; and then the other side counter-argues that xyzzy-ness or un-xyzzy-ness of X is not a good evidence for xyzzy-ness or un-xyzzy-ness of LessWrong, because LessWrong is not the same thing as X. Which side would you join? Assuming that you consider the whole concept of “xyzzy” meaningless, should you even try to join one of the sides?
Well, even assuming the whole thing is a nonsense, it is a nonsense with real-world consequences, if people care about that nonsense. If for 90% people being xyzzy is an automatic applause light, then successfully arguing that yes, LessWrong is xyzzy, means a huge increase in a number of readers. On he other hand, convincing people that LessWrong is un-xyzzy, means that many people will avoid this site. This may help or harm our instrumental goals.
I don’t think the entire morality debate is exactly like this; but it has this component. If it didn’t, we could just taboo “morality” and replace it with words like “harm-minimizing” and “religion-following”. But by doing so, each side would give up a word with positive connotations for both sides, and replace it with a word appealing only to its followers. That would be wasteful. If there is a word with positive connotations, you want to associate it with your cause, the precision of the debate be damned.
You want to argue that—to use the argument from the article—tolerating homosexuality is harm-minimizing and xyzzy; or that supressing homosexuality is religion-following and xyzzy. Because humans are not completely rational, and that “and xyzzy” part is really going to make them more likely to join one of the sides.
This (more specifically the last couple paragraphs) is exactly what I was getting at. I don’t know if it’s more intelligible to anyone else than what I wrote, but from this perspective it looks like you clicked.