Heading Toward: No-Nonsense Metaethics

I endorse the summary idea. It will help me decide whether and how carefully to read your posts.

I would like to know what you think; depending on what it is, I may or may not be interested in the details of why you think it. For example, I'd rather not spend lots of time reading detailed arguments for a position I already find obvious, in a subject (like metaethics) that I have comparatively little interest in. On the other hand, if your position is something I find counterintuitive, then I may be interested in reading your arguments carefully, to see if I need to update my beliefs.

This is Less Wrong, and you have 5-digit karma. We're not going to ignore your arguments because your conclusion sounds silly.

Furthermore, you don't necessarily have to post the summary prominently, if you really don't want to. You could bury it in these comments right here, for example.

My reaction to this idea depends a lot on how the sequence gets written.

If at every step along the way you appear to be heading towards a known goal, I'm happy to go along for the ride.

If you start to sound like you're wandering, or have gotten lost in the weeds, or make key assertions I reject and don't dispose of my objections, or I otherwise lose faith that you know where you're going, then having a roadmap becomes important.

Also, if your up-front list of claims turns out to be a bunch of stuff I think is unremarkable, I'll be less interested in reading the posts.

OTOH, if I follow you through the entire argument for an endpoint I think is unremarkable, I'll still be less interested, but it would be too late to act on that basis.

I would vote against the summary idea. Just in general, I like it better if a writer starts off with observations, builds their way up with chains of reasoning, and gets the reader everything they need to draw the conclusion of the author, as opposed to telling the reader what position they have, and then providing arguments for it. In terms of rationality, it's probably better to build to your conclusion.

In addition, if you are proposing anything controversial, posting a summary will spark debates before you really had given the requisite background knowledge.

I am more motivated to read the rest of your sequence if the summary sounds silly than if I can easily see the arguments myself.

Agreed. I know from experience how hard it is to convince someone to change their position on meta ethics. The reason for this is that if you post any specific example or claim that people disagree with, they will then look for reasons to disagree with your meta ethics based on that reason alone. Posting only abstract principles prevents this. It's the exact same motivation as for politics is the mindkiller or any other topic that is both complex and something people feel strongly about (ideal breeding grounds for motivated reasoning).

Nonetheless i would be very interested in seeing such a list.

I disagree with the grandparent and endorse not giving a summary.

I vote for writing a summary, and including it with the last post of the sequence. That way, extra-skeptical people can wait until the sequence has been posted in its entirety before deciding to read it based on the summary, without losing much expected value.

I suspect one reason Eliezer did not do this is that when you make a long list of claims without any justification for them, it sounds silly a

Why doesn't that apply to abstracts?

That's sort of like reading the end of a novel before you buy it. If you do include a summary, please announce what you're doing and make it something we can skip.

I suspect one reason Eliezer did not do this is that when you make a long list of claims without any justification for them, it sounds silly and people don't pay attention to the rest of the sequence.

Yeah, I am still waiting for someone to thoroughly cite all the relevant science to back up AI going FOOM.

Any plans for that? :P

As one self-contained point (which doesn't bear most of my intuition, isn't strong in itself), I don't see how finer details about the way brain actually works (e.g. roles of pleasure/desire) can be important for this question. The fact that this is apparently going to be important in the planned sequence tells me that it'll probably go in a wrong direction. Similarly, emphasis on science, where the sheer load of empirical facts can distract from the way they should be interpreted.

Multiple people made optimistic noises about the sequence, equally without explicit substantiation (we all have too little data to craft explicit reasons from). My honest expectation is that the sequence will go badly in some slightly subtle fashion that will produce confusion, little new understanding, and some debate. Maybe not, but that's what I expect more.

Lower your standards.

I care about this garden.

I would've voted this comment up instead of down if you had not included the suggestion "Lower your standards".

Raise your standards. A lot.

ETA: Full disclosure: Am a transhumanist.

You are like a black box that has something negative to say about every single post on Less Wrong.

That is a fact about posts on LessWrong, not a fact about Vladimir_Nesov.

That's fine -- your answer was enough to get a rough sketch of a Venn diagram :)

If nothing else, I'm going to be thoroughly citing all the relevant science to back up the basic perspective, which Eliezer didn't do. And I'll be explaining directly how pluralistic moral reductionism answers or dissolves traditional questions in metaethics, and how it responds to mainstream metaethical views, which Eliezer mostly didn't do. And I think I'll be making it clearer than Eliezer did that rigid designation of value terms to the objects of (something like) second-order desires is not the only useful reduction of moral terms, and that it's not too profitable to argue endlessly about where to draw the boundary. (We should be arguing about substance not symbol; the debate shouldn't be about 'the meaning of right.') And I'll be covering in more depth what the cognitive sciences tell us about how our intuitions about morality are generated. And... well, you'll see.