LessWrong 2.0 Reader

By “a moral world”, I mean that many actions or states are categorized as good or evil, and that this is a good measure to evaluate whether we should do these actions of reach these states, regardless of other measures such as expected utility or pleasure.

The last 10 words beg a lot of the question.

I would argue that living in a non-murdery society is good in terms of expected utility, and that breaking a social contract to avoid murder is bad, because breaking contracts is bad.

But you've ruled out that approach by fiat.

There are like, two millenia of God not killing Egyptian firstborns since then. I estimate the probability of God wanting me to kill Egyptian newborns as much lower than the probability of God wanting me to do whatever the Church says.

I agree that the mere fact that God is said to have killed the Egyptian firstborns is strong evidence against His existence (as you already pointed out).

I am aware of deontological ethics, and although I find the idea intuitively appealing, it's hardly satisfying. At least when I say "God said so" instead of "It is so" I have the hope that the Mysterious Word contains a meaning that I just don't understand.

It's because there is only one single place in the genome that you really want to track: the furin cleavage site (FCS). I assumed the wrong reason for using double CGG. 

It's not to distinguish natural from lab-made viruses (although it does do that). 

It's so that you can have a test in the lab for whether the FCS you have inserted is working or not. It's so that you can "check your work". 

The unique spelling with double CGG is the only one out of the 36 possible configurations of arginine (the "R" in the "PRRA" FCS insertion) that allows you to track whether the cleavage you are trying to engineer has happened.

Steven Quay explains this at the 59:00 mark of his interview with Julius KIllerby, which is well worth listening to in its entirety, as it explains the odds of a lab leak vs. natural evolution, based on undisputed facts.

To measure nonconformity I needed to define "nonconformity".

I think this is a fairly big mistake.

First, as a practical matter, one does not actually need to define something in order to measure it; often, the process works in the reverse order. For instance, I would guess that early scientists trying to measure temperature or air pressure first made a measurement device, then defined "temperature" or "air pressure" as the thing they measured. (Or if they did try to define temperature/air pressure beforehand, their definitions were probably incomplete/wrong until after they had the measurement devices.)

Second, and more importantly: when someone wants to "define" a word, they are usually confused about how words work [? · GW]. Definitions, as we usually use them, are not the correct data structure for word-meaning. Words point to clusters in thing-space [? · GW]; definitions try to carve up those clusters with something like cutting-planes. That's an unreliable and very lossy way to represent clusters, and can't handle edge-cases well or ambiguous cases at all.

If you want to measure some abstract thing like "nonconformity", then I'd suggest a process more like this:

• Come up with a bunch of crappy proxy measures.
• Go measure them all a bunch in the real world.
• Do a factor analysis and see if there's one big dominant factor which intuitively seems to match "nonconformity".

Note that you may not find one big factor which intuitively seems to match "nonconformity"! Whether "nonconformity" is a useful, predictive abstraction at all is an empirical question.

(Side note: I jumped from talking-about-clusters to talking-about-factor-analysis. Mathematically, these both do a very similar thing, at least if we're talking about Bayesian clustering models: both try to find some relatively-low-dimensional latent variables such that our observables are conditionally independent given the latents.)

Alternatively, rather than a formal factor analysis, you could use the intuitive equivalent: take a bunch of "proxy measures" or even just a list of examples, and try to intuit the unifying, shared aspect which makes them all good proxies/examples. This can be "less noisy" than a formal factor analysis, since you have some intuition for which-parts-are-important. This is especially useful for coming up with good mathematical definitions.

My point was that your question (how can there be morality without God) makes no sense unless you can say how there can be morality WITH a God.  

That is a very good argument I'd first heard at a converted Muslim's testimony (did God change his mind between Jesus and Mahomet ?).

My gut level tells me that genocide and torture is wrong. On the other hand, I've heard that Hell was not as torturous as usually assumed. A priest told me that the most horrific punishment was knowing our guilt and refusing to bask in God's glory. That resonates with my guts strongly, given that I feel existential anguish at the idea of being evil. Of course, that does not solve the question of why God used to flood the Earth and turn people into salt, and I gladly accept that as strong evidence that God does not exist. I don't understand why God's motivations are so weird. But I don't understand the motivations of most people I know (why do so few people try to be intelligent ?), so I take it as evidence that I should ask for help in the matter.

I'll consult a priest and report back on that.

As for my gut feeling about God's actions being morally okay, you've clearly demonstrated that my gut feeling is not coherent with what I believe... I've got to work on that, either by discovering a reason why God was justified (if it exists) or accepting this was not justified (or that it didn't happen). Accepting that it was not justified and that God did it is of course contradictory with my current belief in God.

Welcome to LessWrong! I see you have chosen trial by metaphorical fire.

I'm interested in learning more about your thoughts surrounding the question. The other answers have asked about the moral world phraseology but I'd like to be a bit more specific; would you say that:

• Morality is a thing the world has, like the electromagnetic spectrum or gravity
• Morality is a thing a person has, like being able to smell, or maybe like fear
• Morality is a thing a group of people have, like relationships or clubs

I see elsewhere that you mentioned not knowing why murder is immoral, but then being able to tell murder is bad because of feelings. What do you think these feelings might be, and do you see them as related to the morality question at all? What about the difference between things we might guess the killer to feel (like guilt, remorse, or compunction) with the things the loved ones of the victim might feel (grief, sorrow, or wrath)?

What are your thoughts on Adam, Eve, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?

His previous behavior 

How are actions like killing all firstborn Egyptian children that much different?

I generally agree with most of this, in the context of that particular conflict. It was a very smart war to invest in from the perspective of Azerbeijani leadership; Armenia really didn't have a realistic approach to defend.

Th one part I object to is "Pretty much all of these plans are underspecified outcomes, not realistic plans.". The title of the post is "Grand Strategy"; the whole point is to talk about general approaches, not specifics. Realistic plans would be the domain of strategy.