The Trouble With "Good"

This very good post! Yay Yvain! You have high karma. Please give me stock advice.

I know a guy who constructed a 10-dimensional metric space for English words, then did PCA on it. There were only 4 significant components: good-bad, calm-exciting, open-closed, basic-elaborate. They accounted for 65%, 20%, 9%, and 5% of the variance in the 10-dimensional space, leaving 1% for everything else. This means that we need only 8 adjectives in English 99% of the time.

So it would not be surprising to find that our morality is a quick hack on the same machinery that runs our decisions about which food to eat or which pet to adopt.

This could be explored more deeply in another post.

Of course, the battle has already been half-lost once you have a category "drugs".

Especially since the category itself is determined by governmental fiat. I once saw an ad for employment at Philip Morris with a footnote to the effect that Philip Morris is a "drug-free workplace". I'm sure they've plenty of nicotine and caffeine there, they're simply using 'drugs' to mean "things to which the federal government has already said 'boo'"

Eliezer Yudkowsky currently has 2486 karma.

Ah, the good old days!

I'm taking an entire course called "Weird Forms of Consequentialism", so please clarify - when you say "utilitarianism", do you speak here of direct, actual-consequence, evaluative, hedonic, maximizing, aggregative, total, universal, equal, agent-neutral consequentialism?

pizza is good, seafood is bad

When I say something is good or bad ("yay doggies!") it's usually a kind of shorthand:

pizza is good == pizza tastes good and is fun to make and share

seafood is bad == most cheap seafood is reprocessed offcuts and gave me food poisoning once

yay doggies == I find canine companions to be beneficial for my exercise routine, useful for home security and fun to play with.

I suspect when most people use the words 'good' and 'bad' they are using just this kind of linguistic compression. Or is your point that once a 'good' label is assigned we just increment its goodness index and forget the detailed reasoning that led us to it? Sorry, the post was an interesting read but I'm not sure what you want me to conclude.

The overwhelmingly interesting thing I noticed here was that everyone seemed to accept - not explicitly, but implicitly very much - that an Obama supporter acting violently was in some sense evidence against Obama or justification for opposition to Obama; or, that a McCain supporter acting dishonestly was in some sense evidence against McCain or confirmation that Obama supporters were better people. To a Bayesian, this would be balderdash.

It would be Bayesian evidence of the right sign. But its magnitude would be vanishingly tiny.

Another problem: our interpretation of whether to upvote or downvote something depends on how many upvotes or downvotes it already has. Here on Less Wrong we call this an information cascade. In the mind, we call it an Affective Death Spiral.

Upvoted because of this bit. It's obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't made the connection between the two concepts previously.

I saw a presentation where someone took thousands of English words, placed them in a high-dimensional space based on, I think, what other words they co-occurred with, ran PCA on this space, and analyzed the top 4 resulting dimensions. The top dimension was "good/bad".

"Considered harmful" considered harmful.

How good is Eliezer at philosophy? Apparently somewhere around the level it would take to get 2486 karma.

Clearly this means I'm better at philosophy than Eliezer (2009). But to be serious, this reminds me how I need to value the karma scores of articles differently according to when they where made. The effects are pretty big. Completely irrelevant discussion threads now routinely get over 20 votes, while some insightful old writing hovers around 10 or 15.

"If we ask utilitarianism "Are drugs good or bad?" it returns: CATEGORY ERROR. Good for it."

It wouldn't be contradictory for someone to assign high utility to the presence of drugs and low utility to their absence. What you really mean is upon reflection, most people would not do this.

Emotivism has its problems. Notably, you can't use 'yay' and 'boo' exclamations in arguments, and they can't be reasons.

"Should I eat this apple?" Becomes simply "how do I feel about eating this apple" (or otherwise it's simply meaningless). But really there are considerations that go into the answer other than mere feelings (for example, is the apple poisonous?).

Because utilitarianism has a theory of right action and a theory of value, I don't think it's compatible with emotivism. But I haven't read much in the literature detailing this particular question, as I don't read much currently about utilitarianism.

Ask an anarchist. Taxation of X% means you're forced to work for X% of the year without getting paid. Therefore, since slavery is "being forced to work without pay" taxation is slavery. Since slavery is bad, taxation is bad. Therefore government is bad and statists are no better than slavemasters.4

Nitpick: Under most current systems of taxation, you choose how much to work, and then lose a certain percentage of your income to taxes. A slave does not have the power to choose how much (or whether) to work. This is generally considered a relevant difference between taxation and slavery.

I would venture that emotivism can be a way of setting up short-run incentives for the achievement of sub-goals. If we think "Bayesian insights are good," we can derive some psychological satisfaction from things which, in themselves, do not have direct personal consequences.

By attaching "goodness" to things too far outside our feedback loops, like "ending hunger," we get things like counterproductive aid spending. By attaching "goodness" too strongly to subgoals close to individual feedback loops, like "publishing papers," we get a flood of inconsequential academic articles at the expense of general knowledge.

To make an outrageous metaphor: our brains run a system rather like Less Wrong's karma.

It's not outrageous at all, actually. Affective asynchrony shows that we have independent ratings of goodness and badness, just like LW votes... but on the outside of the system, all that shows is the result of combining them.

That is, we can readily see what someone "votes" for different things in their environment, but not what inputs are being summed. And when we look at ourselves, we expect to find a single "score" on a thing.

The main difference is that in humans, upvotes and downvotes don't count the same, and a sufficiently high imbalance between the two can squelch the losing direction. On the other hand, a close match between the two results in "mixed feelings" and a low probability of acting, even if the idea really is a good one.

And good decision-making in humans requires (at minimum) examining the rationale behind any downvotes, and throwing out the irrational ones.

Emotivism also does a remarkably good job capturing the common meanings of the words "good" and "bad". An average person may have beliefs like "pizza is good, but seafood is bad", "Israel is good, but Palestine is bad", "the book was good, but the movie was bad", "atheism is good, theism is bad", "evolution is good, creationism is bad", and "dogs are good, but cats are bad". Some of these seem to be moral beliefs, others seem to be factual beliefs, and others seem to be personal preferences. But we are happy using the word "good" for all of them, and it doesn't feel like we're using the same word in several different ways, the way it does when we use "right" to mean both "correct" and "opposite of left".

They do feel like different meanings to me.

Granted, I'm not a native English speaker, but my native language also uses the same word for many (though not all) of those. (For books and movies we'd use the words for ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ instead. And for weather we use ‘beautiful’ and ‘bad’.)

I remember coming to the sudden realization that I don't have to sort people into the "good" box or the "bad" box--people are going to have a set of traits and actions which I would divide into both, and therefore the whole person won't fit into either. I don't remember what triggered the epiphany, but I remember that it felt very liberating. I no longer had to be confused or frustrated when someone who usually annoyed me did something I approved of, or someone I liked made a choice I disagreed with.

So, you see, this idea already has a high karma score for me, so I'm upvoting it. ;)

An average person may have beliefs like "pizza is good, but seafood is bad", "Israel is good, but Palestine is bad" [...] Some of these seem to be moral beliefs, others seem to be factual beliefs, and others seem to be personal preferences. But we are happy using the word "good" for all of them, and it doesn't feel like we're using the same word in several different ways, the way it does when we use "right" to mean both "correct" and "opposite of left".

To be annoying, "good" does have different uses. The opposite of moral "good" is "evil" the opposite of quality "good" is "poor" and the opposite of correctness "good" is "incorrect". These opposites can all use the word "bad" but they mean completely different things.

If I say murder is bad I mean murder is evil.
If I say that pizza is bad I mean that pizza is of poor quality.
If I say a result was bad I mean that the result was incorrect.

I can not remember if there is a word that splits the moral "good" and quality "good" apart.

This has nothing to do with the majority of your post or the points made another than to say that "Boo, murder!" means something different than "Boo, that pizza!" Trying to lump them all together is certainly plausible, but I think the distinctions are useful. If they only happen to be useful in a framework built on emotivism, fair enough.

...that an Obama supporter acting violently was in some sense evidence against Obama or justification for opposition to Obama; or, that a McCain supporter acting dishonestly was in some sense evidence against McCain or confirmation that Obama supporters were better people. To a Bayesian, this would be balderdash.

Uh, to a Bayesian this would be relevant evidence. Or do I misunderstand something?

Excellent post. Upvoted! (Literally.)

Is the usual definition of utilitarianism taken to weight the outcomes for all people equally? While utilitarian arguments often lead to conclusions I agree with, I can't endorse a moral system that seems to say I should be indifferent to a choice between my sister being shot and a serial killer being shot. Is there a standard utilitarian position on such dilemmas?

"To a Bayesian, this would be balderdash."

Um, not the 'Bayesians' here. There is a distinct failure to acknowledge that not everything is evidence regarding everything else.

If the people here wished to include the behavior of a political candidate's supporter in their evaluation of the candidate, they'd make excuses for doing so. If they wished to exclude it, they would likely pass over it in silence - or, if it were brought up, actively denigrate the idea.

Judging what is and is not evidence is an important task that has been completely ignored here.

It seems to me that ANY moral theory is, at its root, emotive. A utilitarian in the form of "do utile things!" decides that maximizing utility feels good, and so is moral. In other words, the argument for the basic axiom of utilitarianism is "Yay utility!"

A non-emotive utilitarianism, or any consequentialist theory, could never go beyond "A implies B." That is, if people do A, the result they will get is B. Without "Yay B!" this is not an argument for doing A.

Am I missing something?

Hi, I really enjoyed your essay. I also enjoyed the first half of the comments. The question it brought me to was: whether or not there is no higher utilty than transformation? I was wondering if I could hear your opinion on this matter.

It seems to me if transformation of external reality is the primer assesment of utility, then humans should ratioanlity question their emotivism based on pratical solutions. But what if the abiilty to transform external reality was not teh primer assesement of utility? Recently I have been immersed in Confucian thinkinng, which places harmony as the pinnicale of importance. If you do not mind I would like to share some thoughts from this perspetive.

When faced with a problem it seems that as humasn our inital solution is to increase the complexity of our interaction with said aspect of the external world through expanding scale, organization, detail, of our involvement with that portion of reality in hopes of transforming that reality to our will. Is this logical? Yes, we have clearly demonstrated a potential to transform reality, but have any of our transformations justify the rationale that transformation will eventually lead to a uptoian plateau? Or to put it another way, does the transformation of one good/bad scenario ever completely deplete the nessecity for further transformation? If anything, it seems that our greatest acheivements of transformation have only created an even more dire need for transformation. The creation of nuclear power/weapons was supposed to end war and provide universal energy; now we are faced with the threat of nuclear waste and global anhilation. Genetically engineering food was supposed to feed the world; in ameriac we have created a obessity epidemic, and the modern agricultral practices of the world walk a fine line between explosive yeild and ecological destruction.

I was somewhat hesitant to say it because of a preceived emotivism of this blog, but what I am questioning is the discourse of progress. Transformation is progress. You say:

"In general, any debate about whether something is "good" or "bad" is sketchy, and can be changed to a more useful form by converting the thing to an action and applying utilitarianism." But is that not soley based on a emotive value of progress?

From the harmonizing perspective emotivism in itself contains utilty because it is in our common irratioanlity that humans can truly relate. If we did institutionally preceed arbitrary value wtih a logic of transformational utility would this not marganilze a huge portion of humanity that is not properly equipped to rationalize action in such a way? It legitimizes intellectual dominace. In my opinion this is no different than if we were to say that whoever wins in an offical arm wrestle/ foot race has the correct values. That may seem completely absurd to you, but I would argue only because you are intellectually rather than physically dominate.

It should be noted that my argument is based on the premise that there are graduated levels of intellegence, and the level required to rationalize one potential transformation over another is sequesterd from the lower tiers.

I also write under the assumption that the discourse of progress (I think I called it utiltiy of transformation?) is emotive not rational in the sense that it is clearly the most effective cogntive paradigm for human evolution. Before my words come back to bite me, my concepts of "progress" and "evolution" are very different here. Progress is power to transform external reality (niche construction), evolution is transformation of the human structure (I will not comment on whether such orgnaic transformation is orthogenic or not)