Eigenvalues for Distance from The Buddhist Precepts And The Ten Commandments

post by benjamin.j.campbell (benjamin-j-campbell) · 2022-11-14T05:50:24.100Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

2 comments

I have a little ethical morality deep dive I could use your help with. I'm trying to work out how universally accepted the Buddhist precepts and the Christian 10 Commandments are in the LW community, so that I can engineer more utopian futures. I'm also trying to work out how far short of our own goals we fall on each one of the precepts/commandments. Then we can collapse these distinct eigenvalues down into a root-mean-square (RMS) of how far off our moral compass we are, collectively.
 

I've made two Google Forms quizzes.

Please do each one until you get sick of answering questions.

Nothing is mandatory.

Everything is encouraged.
 

I'll share my research data with anyone who wants it.

I could also make the Actions quiz more concrete, to focus on individual scenarios. I found myself tempted to adjust my scores as I was doing this to be more in line with what I thought I "should" answer. The is/ought brainrot is real.

 

Quiz 1: Level of Agreement with The Precepts/Commandments
https://forms.gle/hcxdoQRYx7FZ8yCy5
 

Quiz 2: How Much My Actions Align with The Precepts/Commandments

https://forms.gle/twoymHm89eYERf2h9
 

 

Thanks for participating and engaging! I hope it's fun and not too morally depressing to compare ourselves to our utopias. The Good News is that if you can be bad, you can also be good. And there's very little reason not to be.

2 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by JBlack · 2022-11-14T08:56:16.626Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not sure what use this will be to you, or anyone. Nearly half of the commandments are of the "do not believe anything outside the cult" type and somewhat noxious to anyone not a part of it. Very little of it looks in any way relevant to any sort of utopia, where I would expect even fewer of the questions to be relevant. The wording of the post suggests that these are supposed to be "our own goals", which seems to me a huge biasing statement right up front. On top of that, the rating guidelines are worded in an extremely confusing way. For example, a rating of 1.00 for "Thou shalt have no other gods before me [YHWH]" apparently means "I have never once not done having no other gods before YHWH". That seems to be going over the top in negations.

comment by Stephen Fowler (LosPolloFowler) · 2022-11-14T06:01:53.029Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What is meant by eigenvalue/vector in this context?

I would suggest rethinking the quiz to make it faster to and easier to answer. Maybe just copy a format that already exists from a study on religious belief?