To me it seems that you are mixing together “better” in “morally better”, and “better” as “more efficient”. If we replace the second one with “more efficient”, we get:
Betterness (moral) is more efficient measure of being better (morally).
Clippiness is more efficient measure of being clippy.
I guess we (and Clippy) could agree about this. It is just confusing to write the latter sentence as “clippiness is better than betterness, with regards to being clippy”, because the two different meanings are expressed there by the same word “better”. (Why does this even happen? Because we use “better” as universal applause lights.)
EDIT: More precisely, the moral “better” also means more efficient, but at reaching some specific goals, such as human happiness, etc. So the difference is between “more efficient (without goals being specified)” and “more efficient (at this specific set of goals)”. Clippiness is more efficient at making paperclips, but is not more efficient at making humans happy.
This. “Good” can refer to either a two-place function ‘goodness(action, goal_system)’ (though the second argument can be implicit in the context) or to the one-place function you get when you curry the second argument of the former to something like ‘life, consciousness, etc., etc. etc.’. EY is talking specifically about the latter, but he isn’t terribly clear about that.
EDIT: BTW, the antonym of the former is usually “bad”, whereas the antonym of the latter is usually “evil”.
EDIT 2: A third meaning is the two-place function with the second argument curried to the speaker’s terminal values, so that I could say “good” to mean ‘good for life, consciousness, etc.’ and Clippy could say “good” to mean ‘good for making paperclips’, and this doesn’t mean one of us is mistaken about what “good” means, any more than the fact that we use “here” to refer to different places means one of us is mistaken about what “here” means.
To me it seems that you are mixing together “better” in “morally better”, and “better” as “more efficient”. If we replace the second one with “more efficient”, we get:
Betterness (moral) is more efficient measure of being better (morally).
Clippiness is more efficient measure of being clippy.
I guess we (and Clippy) could agree about this. It is just confusing to write the latter sentence as “clippiness is better than betterness, with regards to being clippy”, because the two different meanings are expressed there by the same word “better”. (Why does this even happen? Because we use “better” as universal applause lights.)
EDIT: More precisely, the moral “better” also means more efficient, but at reaching some specific goals, such as human happiness, etc. So the difference is between “more efficient (without goals being specified)” and “more efficient (at this specific set of goals)”. Clippiness is more efficient at making paperclips, but is not more efficient at making humans happy.
This. “Good” can refer to either a two-place function ‘goodness(action, goal_system)’ (though the second argument can be implicit in the context) or to the one-place function you get when you curry the second argument of the former to something like ‘life, consciousness, etc., etc. etc.’. EY is talking specifically about the latter, but he isn’t terribly clear about that.
EDIT: BTW, the antonym of the former is usually “bad”, whereas the antonym of the latter is usually “evil”.
EDIT 2: A third meaning is the two-place function with the second argument curried to the speaker’s terminal values, so that I could say “good” to mean ‘good for life, consciousness, etc.’ and Clippy could say “good” to mean ‘good for making paperclips’, and this doesn’t mean one of us is mistaken about what “good” means, any more than the fact that we use “here” to refer to different places means one of us is mistaken about what “here” means.