Marius

Karma: 342

Marius May 1, 2011, 5:07 PM
0 points
in reply to: Amanojack’s comment on: What is Metaethics?
Ok, so if I understand you correctly: It is actually meaningful to ask “what general preferences should I cultivate to get more enjoyment out of life?” If so, you describe two types of preference: the higher-order preference (which I’ll call a Preference) to get enjoyment out of life, and the lower-order “preference” (which I’ll call a Habit or Current Behavior rather than a preference, to conform to more standard usage) of eating soggy bland french fries if they are sitting in front of you regardless of the likelihood of delicious pizza arriving. So because you prefer to save room for delicious pizza yet have the Habit of eating whatever is nearby and convenient, you can decide to change that Habit. You may do so by changing your behavior today and tomorrow and the day after, eventually forming a new Habit that conforms better to your preference for delicious foods.

Am I describing this appropriately? If so, by the above usage, is morality a matter of Behavior, Habit, or Preference?

Marius Apr 30, 2011, 9:54 PM
1 point
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Politics is the Mind-Killer
I wouldn’t mind “ask experts who do not post to Wikipedia or write for Britannica” to rate the articles for accuracy, neutrality, etc. I would expect them to call Wikipedia more comprehensive, to call Britannica more neutral, and I have no idea which would be rated more accurate. If they did indeed call the Wikipedia articles more neutral, I’d have to update my understanding of the field.

My experience: I fixed mistakes in two articles, then got thoroughly distressed and stopped participating. I’m an anesthesiologist, as background. The first article was on a painkiller, and I found my changes overwritten by a drug enthusiast who believes/writes that narcotics are non-addictive. I did not push the issue. The second article was on anesthesia, and I linked to a reference document published by the American Society of Anesthesiologists (the premier research organization of anesthesiologists in the US.) A nurse anesthetist editor was very proud of his ability to prevent any documents from the ASA from being linked to on the page while maintaining a link to the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, and made it clear that it was his “turf” and that he was highly political. I did persist briefly to see what would happen: he tracked my real identity and threatened me. I immediately lost all interest.

I don’t believe Britannica is trying for neutrality per se. I believe it’s trying for objectivity, which is related but nonidentical. On many topics wikipedia attempts objectivity as well rather than neutrality (evolution vs intelligent design, for instance).

Marius Apr 30, 2011, 1:39 PM
4 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Politics is the Mind-Killer
Well, to compare neutrality we can do one of four things: a: rely on the impressions of people who’ve used both (survey people who’ve claimed to have read both) b: trace the prior likelihood of either group of authors being biased on the material they’re writing about (the profit motive vs writing about what you’re passionate about) c: ask contributors what they’ve seen done that damages the neutral point of view d: come up with a neutral definition of neutrality.

It sounds like you want to do d: how might we start on such a thing?

Oh, and obviously yeah—“neutral” will depend on your culture. Objectivity might or might not, but neutrality must. So this makes d trickier.

Marius Apr 30, 2011, 1:28 PM
4 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Politics is the Mind-Killer
Oh, I certainly agree with this. I’d just trace it back to Wikipedia’s roots—and I suspect that as fewer people are familiar with Britannica, Wikipedia will lose that more and more.

Marius Apr 30, 2011, 3:34 AM
0 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Politics is the Mind-Killer
Britannica authors, for instance, are Britannica authors first and moneymakers second and opinionated people third or fourth. Wikipedia authors are highly opinionated, and are compromising (which fixes some objectivity problems but is a poor substitute for objectivity or neutrality). So the Britannica author is likely to be less expert than the sum of wikipedia authors but much more neutral.

Marius Apr 29, 2011, 10:15 PM
10 points
on: How hard do we really want to sell cryonics?
Cryonics is a field where raising awareness is genuinely beneficial to the believers- not just to the administrators of related organizations. Being frozen and then revived requires (inter alia): a dedication to proper freezing maintenance, a method of revivification, a willingness to spend resources to revive you in particular, and experience in curing/reviving humans. If cryonics falls out of favor for any period of time, the dedication to proper freezing maintenance is likely to suffer. The more people that are frozen, the more avidly entrepreneurs will seek to invent methods of revivification, and the more experience physicians will have in treating the newly-revived. If you do not have a plan in place to ensure that you will actually be revived once it becomes possible, you may at least hope that people you’ve convinced to be frozen may remember you.

Marius Apr 29, 2011, 10:01 PM
−1 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Politics is the Mind-Killer
How is that different from standard encyclopedia practice? It at least initially appears that it’s one of the few things standard encyclopedias do better than wikipedia.

Marius Apr 29, 2011, 9:24 PM
1 point
in reply to: Nornagest’s comment on: Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?
I don’t mean to overstate the reliability of suicide rates for happiness. A variety of factors may influence them. However, there are reasons to believe they correlate with happiness.

What is a good measure of happiness? Virtually all measures are deeply flawed, but the most reliable is probably: Intra-observer self-report in situations when signalling is unlikely. People are probably decent at knowing when they were happier or less happy within their own lives. Inter-observer reports are far harder to justify.

People report being happier when they live in places with adequate sunshine; inadequate sunshine correlates with increased suicide rates. People report being happier when they are not facing loss of job, public humiliation, divorce, and a number of other events; these events correlate with increase suicide rates. People report being happier when mental illness symptoms are reduced (particularly depression); people with mental illness (particularly depression) have a higher suicide rate.

Obviously, suicide rates are not a perfect proxy for happiness… but I cannot find a more reliable easily-measured statistic.

Marius Apr 29, 2011, 8:33 PM
4 points
in reply to: Sniffnoy’s comment on: Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place?
Surely suicide rate is a much more trustworthy marker for (un)happiness than “numerical response to a survey question”. So it is our previous flimsy understandings of what areas are happy (based only on the highly suspect methodology of surveys) that is wiped out by the new data regarding suicide rates.

As gwern points out, divorce is a poor marker; suicide remains a useful marker because it is nearly-univerally forbidden.

Marius Apr 29, 2011, 10:01 AM
5 points
on: Extremely Important Cell Phone Feature Missing
Satellite phones can currently be purchased by individuals or towns, and yet even the most affluent towns that fear being attacked don’t appear to be purchasing them. A nonprofit could be set up to (in increasing order of importance)
1. Donate satellite phones to more impoverished towns.
2. Be a centralized location to which emergency messages can be sent.
3. Actually do something about genocide beyond issuing a press release.
My guess is that 3. is the sticking point—that a satellite capability on cell phones is actually only helpful to lost Westerners outside the range of a cellular tower, and might be best marketed to hikers.

An even lower cost universal solution might involve green lasers and Morse code, though various governments will object.

Marius Apr 29, 2011, 2:54 AM
−1 points
in reply to: AlephNeil’s comment on: What are the leftover questions of metaethics?

What does it mean for modus ponens to “do worse” than something? It might “do badly” in virtue of there not being any relevant statements of the form “A” and “if A then B” lying around. That would hardly make MP “fallacious” though. It might be that by deducing “B” from “A” and “if A then B” we thereby deduce something false. But then either “A” or “if A then B” must have been false (or at least non-true), and it hardly counts against MP that it loses reliability when applied to non-true premises.

Well, look at the Problem of Identity. I start with an apple or a boat, and I brush molecules off the apple or replace the boards on the boat, and end up with something other than an apple or a boat. This shouldn’t be a problem, except that I’ve got a big Modus Ponens chain (this is an apple; an apple with a molecule removed is still an apple) that fails when the chain gets long enough. To fix my problem, I’ve got to:

a. Say actually, there are almost no apples in the world. Modus Ponens rarely applies to the real world because almost no premises are perfectly true. When someone asks “is this delicious-looking fruit an apple”, I have to say “Dunno, probably not.”

b. Say actually, there are apples, and an apple missing a molecule remains an apple, and Modus Ponens works except in rare corner cases. And experience/tradition/etc can help us know where those corner cases are, so we can avoid mistakenly applying Modus Ponens when it will lead from correct premises to incorrect conclusions.

Here you’re talking about Euclidean geometry as an empirical theory of space (or perhaps space-time), as opposed to Euclidean geometry as a branch of mathematics

Well, Euclidean geometry is extremely interesting because it works relatively well as a theory of space, without actually relying on empirical data.

Users of a language have to agree on the meanings of primitive words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘then’, or else they’re just ‘playing a different game’.

I hope that logic (like Euclidean geometry) is actually telling us something about the world, not just about the words/rules we started with. If modus ponens is purely a linguistic trick rather than a method of increasing our knowledge, then it’s as useful as chess. I think it’s far more useful, and lets us obtain better approximations of the actual world.

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 8:44 PM
7 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: What are the leftover questions of metaethics?
I think the village girl in New York example can actually be understood a step farther. She doesn’t just need to look at the dresses—the catalogs in her village show what they look like and cost. She also needs to see what people in New York actually dress like, and how the dresses work for them on the street.

Just so, many people have presented ethical dilemmas that are not part of our everyday experiences. If we have a useful morality core, then it (like most other senses or heuristics) is useful only in the areas in which it’s been trained. The village girl needs the street experience in NYC to make good purchases. So the two arbitrary sequences would have to be similar enough to the intuiter’s actual experiences to be accurately compared to one another.

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 7:02 PM
3 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: What are the leftover questions of metaethics?
You are certainly at least partly right. But:

After all, “contraband” methods of persuasion are rarely punished

Contraband methods of persuasion are weakly punished, here and elsewhere, by means of public humiliation along with repudiation of the point trying to be made. Some people go so far as to give fallacious defenses of positions they hate (on anonymous forums) in order to weaken support for those positions. Interestingly, the contexts where we think logic is most important (like this site) are much less tolerant of fallacies than the contexts where we think logic is less important (politics or family dinner). So while I’d love to dismiss that cynical explanation, I can’t quite so easily.

People often have conflicting intuitions, but there seems to be some hierarchy which tells which intuitions are more basic and thus to be preferred.

Actually, there is indeed such a hierarchy in moral reasoning, and it has been better studied/elucidated (by Kohlberg, Rest, et al) than logical reasoning has.

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 6:48 PM
3 points
in reply to: Clippy’s comment on: Avoiding Factual Muggings
The whole point of the tiger/rock parable is that the testing has all been done in environments devoid of tigers.

Similarly, the mugger-avoidance strategies I could offer to User:perturbation are all 100% effective since I’ve never been mugged… but I have no idea whether the opposite strategy would have been equally effective.

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 3:10 PM
8 points
in reply to: prase’s comment on: What are the leftover questions of metaethics?
All my answers to this are flawed. My best is: It’s like Euclidean geometry: humans (and other species) are constructed in a way that Euclidean geometry fits fairly well. The formalized rules of Euclidean geometry match spacial reality even better than what we’ve evolved, so we prefer them… but they’re similar enough to what we’ve evolved that we accept them rather than alternate geometries. Euclidean geometry isn’t right—reality is more complex than any system of geometry—but the combination of “works well enough”, “improves on our evolved heuristic”, and “matches our evolved heuristic well enough” combine to give it a privileged place. Just so, that system of formal logic works well enough, improves on our evolved reasoning heuristics, and yet matches those heuristics well enough… so we give formal logic a privileged place. The privilege is sufficient that many believe logic is the basis of Truth, that many theists believe that even angels or deities cannot be both A and not-A, and that people who use fallacies to convince others of truths are frequently considered to be liars. This does not sufficiently satisfy me.

An alternate answer, that a believer in absolute morality or logic might like, is that logic actually deserves a higher place than Euclidean geometry. Where geometry can be tested and modified wherever the data support a modification, logic can’t. No matter how many times our modus ponens does worse than an Appeal to Tradition or Ad Populum in some area of inquiry, we still don’t say “ok, alter the rules of logic for this area of inquiry to make Ad Populum the correct method there and Modus Ponens the fallacious method there”, we just question our premises, our methods of detection of answers, etc. So logic is special and is above the empirical method. I am unsatisfied by the above paragraph as well.

A third possibility is that it’s not—it’s just a code of conduct/signalling. We agree to only use logic to convince one another because it works well, because the use of other methods of persuasion can often be detected and punished, and because the people who can rely on logic rather than on other methods of persuasion are smarter and more trustworthy. In specific instances, logic might not be the best way to learn something or to convince others, but getting caught supporting or using contraband methods will be punished so we all use/support logic unless we’re sure we can get away with the contraband. This is an unsatisfying explanation to me as well.
What links here?
- Eugine_Nier's comment on The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Apr 29, 2011, 6:24 AM; 0 points)

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 12:46 PM
20 points
on: What are the leftover questions of metaethics?

All we have is factual questions about how people’s “morality cores” vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?

If there is a problem worth solving, it has to be related to “how compelling their voices are”. In the philosophy of logic, we classify “Modus Ponens” differently from “Appeal to Inappropriate Authority”—and not simply by asking statistically which is more convincing. An empirical discovery that arguments quoting Justin Bieber are highly likely to convince the listener do not move such arguments out of the “fallacy” category. Similarly, if metaethics is worthy of study, it must be able to say that certain arguments are better than others independently of their likelihood to convince the listener, and why.

If you believe that categories like “fallacy” are useless, then logic is just a crude stab at the true science of persuasion. If you believe there is no analogous category in ethics, it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything worthy of study.
What links here?
- Eugine_Nier's comment on The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Apr 29, 2011, 6:24 AM; 0 points)

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 10:24 AM
−1 points
in reply to: Amanojack’s comment on: What is Metaethics?
But I want an example of people acting contrary to their preferences, you’re giving one of yourself acting according to your current preferences. Hopefully, NMJablonski has an example of a common action that is genuinely contrary to the actor’s preferences. Otherwise, the word “preference” simply means “behavior” to him and shouldn’t be used by him. He would be able to simplify “the actions I prefer are the actions I perform,” or “morality is just behavior”, which isn’t very interesting to talk about.

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 2:55 AM
4 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Avoiding Factual Muggings
I can sell you a rock that will keep tigers away, for only $250 shipped. I’m carrying one right now, and I’ve never been attacked by a tiger.

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 2:47 AM
0 points
in reply to: NMJablonski’s comment on: What is Metaethics?
I don’t understand what you mean by preferences when you say “intelligent agents trying to fulfill their preferences”. I have met plenty of people who were trying to do things contrary to their preferences. Perhaps before you try (or someone tries for you) to distinguish morality from preferences, it might be helpful to distinguish precisely how preferences and behavior can differ?

Marius Apr 28, 2011, 1:43 AM
−2 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Consequentialism FAQ
If this is to be useful, it would have to read “that our intuitions are based on morality”.