You can still have a LessWrong, because one can clearly demonstrate that people avoidably draw wrong conclusions from unreliable screening tests, commit conjunction fallacies, and so on. There are agreed ways of getting at the truth on these things and people are capable of understanding the errors that they are making, and avoiding making those errors.
Values are a harder problem. Our only source of moral knowledge (assuming there is such a thing, but those who believe there is not must dismiss this entire conversation as moonshine) is what people generally do and say. If contradictions are found, where does one go for evidence to resolve them?
You’re right—there is a class of problems for which we can know what the right answer is, like the Monty Hall problem. (Although I notice that the Sleeping Beauty problem is a math problem on which we were not able to agree on what the right answer was, because people had linguistic disagreements on how to interpret the meaning of the problem.)
You can still have a LessWrong, because one can clearly demonstrate that people avoidably draw wrong conclusions from unreliable screening tests, commit conjunction fallacies, and so on. There are agreed ways of getting at the truth on these things and people are capable of understanding the errors that they are making, and avoiding making those errors.
Values are a harder problem. Our only source of moral knowledge (assuming there is such a thing, but those who believe there is not must dismiss this entire conversation as moonshine) is what people generally do and say. If contradictions are found, where does one go for evidence to resolve them?
You’re right—there is a class of problems for which we can know what the right answer is, like the Monty Hall problem. (Although I notice that the Sleeping Beauty problem is a math problem on which we were not able to agree on what the right answer was, because people had linguistic disagreements on how to interpret the meaning of the problem.)