Because human perception is unreliable, it simply cannot give us much evidence about very rare events. If roughly one in a million people looking at clouds think they see an alien spaceship, then even if one in a billion people looking at clouds actually do see an alien spaceship, we’ll just never know that by listening to sky-watching testimony. (At least not without enough data to distinguish a 0.1% effect on reporting rates.)
When you say that intransitivity rates are about what you'd expect given error rates and a correction for overconfidence, are you referring to a particular study or studies that shows this? I believe the plausibility of that statement but would really like to track the citation if it exists.
Beliefs about moral truth vary greatly across cultures, who you ask, when you ask them, and how you ask the question.
Which makes me think that we should a) consider how our own moral truths are or aren't culturally dependent and b) read essays like Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say," which is tangential to your post but still worth pointing you to.
Anti-platonists think that Godel/Lob shows that there's no universal math truths, that math is just human inventions. In fact Godel/Lob implies the total polar opposite of this. The fact that there are *true* math statements not captured within any given formal system x , shows that math is more than any given formal system x ... ergo, it's platonically real. Analogous arguments hold for morality. There are no 'circular preferences'.
#awesomeness, 1. An unmeasurable amount of awesomenimity something can produce. 2. Something that qualifies as awesome ;)
Immortality is made easier by buffering and noise and,don't forget,necessity. It is logical to turn up the noise, so as to get a good nights sleep.
Take for example the buffering caused by distance . Slaves produced sugar so Englishmen could sweeten their tea. Also necessity,- Slave drivers,expelled to penal colonies would have starved on miserable islands,unless they could trade with the motherland.
First order imperatives,like eating are not considered by armchair philosophers.
Ah, but then, given humans are social, why then would we not have well-defined preference transitivity if we could be taken advantage of like this? Shouldn't someone have come up with a way to exploit the lack of transitivity, and thus select for transitivity?
There is an old psychology experiment where the experimenter does something similar to this and the subject keeps trading back and forth for the same two objects.
Not sure. If the person cares about the quality of experiences of other beings, then having circular preferences in wishing experiences on other beings may well be an inconsistent representation of the quality of these experiences. Of course, there is no objective moral truth "you must care about anyone's experiences", except for your own maybe, while they're immediately present.
Any model that assumes actual moral truths is hopelessly flawed. It's not as though our moral intuitions come from interpreting a noisy radio signal beamed from a Morality Quasar. Morality is just stuff the brain does. We can ask "what would person x consider good", but if person x has circular preferences, we can't say "well that's probably just noise" because there's nothing extrinsic for it to be a noisy representation of.
All moral confusion can be resolved using my triple-aspect ontology. if you make a clear division between the platonic (timeless ideals) level, the system (agent) level and the object level (cultural artifacts) this resolves the confusions.
PLA Platonic timeless idealsSYS Systems, goal directed agents, extrapolated volitionOBJ Cultural artifacts, memes
The bits of the morality that are on the object level are totally human created (memes are creations of culture). On the system level, morals there are partially objective but not universal, it's the CEV based on the agents cognitive architecture (evo psyche in the case of humans)
But the parts of morality on the platonic level are in fact universal and timeless. I see them very clearly now, such that no error remains Robin. They are based on aesthetics and the creation of beauty, as I have clearly stated on this blog multiple times. Aesthetics is the ultimate grounding for morality and it is universal and timeless, as I always claimed. Now and forever.
The fact that many readers lack the wit and wherewithal to perceive the clear truth of my revealed moral intuitions is no fault of mine ;)
Ah yes, you are right, they really are two very different questions, and since every woman's situation is unique, every anti-abortion person gets to believe that their abortion is the only moral one.
Even people who say they are against abortion for any reason, still seem to be able to come up with a reason that makes sense to them.
On a minor point: In assessing disagreement, we must be careful about what counts as "asking the same question." What is verbally the same question--say, "Is abortion usually wrong?"--posed to a 21st-century American and to a 15th-century Inca would really be two different questions, because of implicit indexicality. The two questions would be something like: "Is abortion usually wrong in the circumstances of 21st-century America?" and "Is abortion usually wrong in the circumstances of the 15th-century Inca empire?" One might get opposite answers with no real disagreement, since *really* they were answers to two *different* questions.
I always enjoy when people go through all sorts of contortions to avoid facing the fact that "moral intuition" is roughly as old as the atlatl, and about as applicable to modern life.
Classic. I'm in agreement.
What you say is just common sense. Though I strongly object to claiming it as your own.
When you say that intransitivity rates are about what you'd expect given error rates and a correction for overconfidence, are you referring to a particular study or studies that shows this? I believe the plausibility of that statement but would really like to track the citation if it exists.
Beliefs about moral truth vary greatly across cultures, who you ask, when you ask them, and how you ask the question.
Which makes me think that we should a) consider how our own moral truths are or aren't culturally dependent and b) read essays like Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say," which is tangential to your post but still worth pointing you to.
Godel, Godel, Godel. Lob, Lob, Lob
Anti-platonists think that Godel/Lob shows that there's no universal math truths, that math is just human inventions. In fact Godel/Lob implies the total polar opposite of this. The fact that there are *true* math statements not captured within any given formal system x , shows that math is more than any given formal system x ... ergo, it's platonically real. Analogous arguments hold for morality. There are no 'circular preferences'.
#awesomeness, 1. An unmeasurable amount of awesomenimity something can produce. 2. Something that qualifies as awesome ;)
Immortality is made easier by buffering and noise and,don't forget,necessity. It is logical to turn up the noise, so as to get a good nights sleep.
Take for example the buffering caused by distance . Slaves produced sugar so Englishmen could sweeten their tea. Also necessity,- Slave drivers,expelled to penal colonies would have starved on miserable islands,unless they could trade with the motherland.
First order imperatives,like eating are not considered by armchair philosophers.
Awesome comment.
Ah, but then, given humans are social, why then would we not have well-defined preference transitivity if we could be taken advantage of like this? Shouldn't someone have come up with a way to exploit the lack of transitivity, and thus select for transitivity?
There is an old psychology experiment where the experimenter does something similar to this and the subject keeps trading back and forth for the same two objects.
Not sure. If the person cares about the quality of experiences of other beings, then having circular preferences in wishing experiences on other beings may well be an inconsistent representation of the quality of these experiences. Of course, there is no objective moral truth "you must care about anyone's experiences", except for your own maybe, while they're immediately present.
Any model that assumes actual moral truths is hopelessly flawed. It's not as though our moral intuitions come from interpreting a noisy radio signal beamed from a Morality Quasar. Morality is just stuff the brain does. We can ask "what would person x consider good", but if person x has circular preferences, we can't say "well that's probably just noise" because there's nothing extrinsic for it to be a noisy representation of.
All moral confusion can be resolved using my triple-aspect ontology. if you make a clear division between the platonic (timeless ideals) level, the system (agent) level and the object level (cultural artifacts) this resolves the confusions.
PLA Platonic timeless idealsSYS Systems, goal directed agents, extrapolated volitionOBJ Cultural artifacts, memes
The bits of the morality that are on the object level are totally human created (memes are creations of culture). On the system level, morals there are partially objective but not universal, it's the CEV based on the agents cognitive architecture (evo psyche in the case of humans)
But the parts of morality on the platonic level are in fact universal and timeless. I see them very clearly now, such that no error remains Robin. They are based on aesthetics and the creation of beauty, as I have clearly stated on this blog multiple times. Aesthetics is the ultimate grounding for morality and it is universal and timeless, as I always claimed. Now and forever.
The fact that many readers lack the wit and wherewithal to perceive the clear truth of my revealed moral intuitions is no fault of mine ;)
On this blog, the fact that people report different moral beliefs is taken as strong evidence that they have different moral beliefs?
More naive thab I thought.
The fairly concrete conclusions that Tyler draws could equally well be drawn from humility about error.
Ah yes, you are right, they really are two very different questions, and since every woman's situation is unique, every anti-abortion person gets to believe that their abortion is the only moral one.
Even people who say they are against abortion for any reason, still seem to be able to come up with a reason that makes sense to them.
On a minor point: In assessing disagreement, we must be careful about what counts as "asking the same question." What is verbally the same question--say, "Is abortion usually wrong?"--posed to a 21st-century American and to a 15th-century Inca would really be two different questions, because of implicit indexicality. The two questions would be something like: "Is abortion usually wrong in the circumstances of 21st-century America?" and "Is abortion usually wrong in the circumstances of the 15th-century Inca empire?" One might get opposite answers with no real disagreement, since *really* they were answers to two *different* questions.
Arrow's Theorem often applies within my own skull.
I always enjoy when people go through all sorts of contortions to avoid facing the fact that "moral intuition" is roughly as old as the atlatl, and about as applicable to modern life.