My sense is that this assertion can be empirically falsified for all levels of abstraction below “Do what is right.”
Indeed, this is one of many reasons why I am starting to think “go meta” is really, really good advice.
Edit: Clarification, what I mean is that I think virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, and the less popular ethical theories agree way more than their proponents think they do. At this point this is still a guess.
[...]and related-to-rationality enough to deserve its own thread.
I’ve gotten to thinking that morality and rationality are very, very isomorphic. The former seems to require the latter, and in my experience the latter gives rise to the former. So they may not even be completely distinguishable. We’ve got lots of commonalities between the two, noting that both are very difficult for humans due to our haphazard makeup, and both have imaginary Ideal versions (respectively: God, and the agent who only has true beliefs and optimal decisions and infinite computing power, and they seem to be correlated (though it is hard to say for sure), and the folk versions of both are always wrong. By which I mean when someone has an axe to grind, he will say it is moral to X, or rational to X, where really X is just what he wants, whether he is in a position of power or not. Related to that I’ve got a pet theory that if you take the high values of each literally, they are entirely uncontroversial, and arguments and tribalism only begin when people start making claims of what each implies, but once again I can’t be sure at this juncture.
What say ye, Less Wrong?
Irrationality game comment
The correct way to handle Pascal’s Mugging and other utilitarian mathematical difficulties is to use a bounded utility function. I’m very metauncertain about this; my actual probability could be anywhere from 10% to 90%. But I guess that my probability is 70% or so.
Could have hyperlinked it to the article.
On the People page, the picture next to Richard Carrier’s name is the same as the picture next to Richard Boyd’s.
and that’s because science.
That made me smile, [edit] especially because I had just recently read the Language Log article Because NOUN.
The rest of the video made me kind of uncomfortable, though, because it felt like (and I guess sort of was) an advertisement, and you keep saying “worldview naturalism” where anyone else would have said “the naturalistic worldview” or just “naturalism”.
(And this is just a personal thing, but I would have put Hofstadter’s GEB and Drescher’s Good & Real in the self and free will readings section.)
Overall, cool website.
Signing up was a waste of time. This course is for people who don’t know anything at all.
Much to everyone else’s chagrin.
Nope, I’m talking about the humans’ in questions subjective “nows”, not their futures. Although if a person isn’t particularly rational and has never heard of rationality and if you mentioned it to him he wouldn’t feel particularly motivated to become more rational has a pretty irrational-looking future, and in such case there’s no choice to make, no will, only a default path.
I have a general policy of downvoting anything in rot13. No, I’m not going to work to read your comment!
Instead, put your spoiler text in the hover text of a fake url, like this
Syntax:
[like this](http://notareal.url/ “See? See how much better this is?”)
I disagree with your treatment of statement #5. It’s hard to explain directly why, so let me analogize:
Humans aren’t perfectly rational. However, we can strive to be more rational, even though we as humans can never reach perfect rationality.
Now, replace “rational” and “rationality” in the above with “moral” and “morality” and therein lies the reasoning. To say that you could be doing more for charity, or you could be nicer to your fellow man, &c., is exactly saying that you could be more moral. But this “could” is in a purely abstract sense; humans are exactly as moral (and as rational) as they can by given their own brains.
Thus it is written:
If you feel that giving 5% of your income to charity isn’t enough, and that the moral ideal is 10%, try giving 6%. Make the best choices you can make with the willpower you have. The choice isn’t between giving 5% and 10%; you don’t have that much willpower in the bank. The choice is between giving 5% and 6%. The better choice is 6%. Now you’ve made a better choice; feel happy. Feeling guilty about not having willpower doesn’t contribute to the development of willpower. Rather, try for the proper exercise of available willpower, and the slow reshaping of the self that results.
If employers cared more about intelligence than conscientiousness, you’d think a college admission would suffice for employment. (Heck, I don’t know, maybe it does with certain colleges.)
But as wedrifid points out, this would require the system to be sane, which is not that likely.
This is vastly over-simplified.
Of course it is. It is a single sentence, not a detailed map of the desired hiring conditions for every job in the world.
College degrees are better signals for conscientiousness than intelligence, which is no coincidence, since employers in real life care more about conscientiousness.
No. The whole point of that phrase is to not get overly complicated in explaining other people’s failures.
There is only so much transhumanism one can cram into an 18-minute talk.
I’d like to point out that anyone who does not share the (claimed) Infinite Certainty should be upvoting, as this confidence level is infinitely higher than any other possible confidence level. (It’s kind of like, if you agree that dividing by zero is merely an error, then any claim to infinite certainty is also an error, almost exactly the same error in fact.)
For anyone who is not aware, the parent comment is definitely sarcasm.
Fair enough.
The title of this post tempted me to make another article called “Eliezer apparently right about just about everything else” but I already tried that and it was a bad idea.