I don’t think Scott is claiming it’s arbitrary, I think he’s claiming it’s subjective, which is to say instrumental. As Eliezer kept pointing out in the morality debates, subjective things are objective if you close over the observer—human (ie. specific humans’) morality is subjective, but not arbitrary, and certainly not unknowable.
But also I don’t think that phylo categorization is stronger per se than niche categorization in predicting animal behavior, especially when it comes to relatively mutable properties like food consumption. Behavior, body shape etc are downstream of genes, but genes are cyclical with niche. And a lot of animals select their food opportunistically.
Phylo reveals information that niche doesn’t. But niche also reveals information that is much harder to predict from phylo. I think Scott’s objection goes against the absolutizing claim that “phylo is all you need.”
I don’t think Scott is claiming it’s arbitrary, I think he’s claiming it’s subjective, which is to say instrumental. As Eliezer kept pointing out in the morality debates, subjective things are objective if you close over the observer—human (ie. specific humans’) morality is subjective, but not arbitrary, and certainly not unknowable.
But also I don’t think that phylo categorization is stronger per se than niche categorization in predicting animal behavior, especially when it comes to relatively mutable properties like food consumption. Behavior, body shape etc are downstream of genes, but genes are cyclical with niche. And a lot of animals select their food opportunistically.
Phylo reveals information that niche doesn’t. But niche also reveals information that is much harder to predict from phylo. I think Scott’s objection goes against the absolutizing claim that “phylo is all you need.”