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REALM Bimonthly Meeting (1st & 3rd Saturday) 2019-07-30T18:43:52.944Z

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Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on How much fraud is there in academia? · 2023-11-16T20:47:28.985Z · LW · GW

There are still more issues. Even if the results of a study can be reproduced given the raw data, and even if the findings can be replicated in subsequent studies, that does not ensure that results have identified the effect researchers claim to have found. 

This is because studies can rely on invalid measures. If a study claims to measure P, but fails to do so, it may nevertheless pick up on some real pattern other than a successful measurement of P. In these cases, results can replicate and appear legitimate even if they don't show what they purport to show.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on How much fraud is there in academia? · 2023-11-16T14:48:17.279Z · LW · GW

There’s been some survey data on this, e.g.: 

Fanelli, D. (2009). How many scientists fabricate and falsify research? A systematic review and meta-analysis of survey data. PloS one4(5), e5738. 

This study reports that ~2% admitted to data fabrication. However, it is of course difficult to get a good estimate by asking people, since this is a case where people have strong incentives to lie. Asking people about suspicions of colleagues may give an overestimate. So I think in general it’s very hard to estimate actual fabrication rates.

One obvious issue is that many instances of fraud that are caught are likely to be cases where the data looked suspicious to others. This requires eyes to be on the data, for someone to notice, for that person to follow through, and most importantly, for the fraud to be sloppy enough that someone noticed it. This means identified cases of fraud are probably from people who are less careful. So we’re seeing the most blatant, obvious, and sloppy fraud. People who are very good at committing fraud are much more likely to go undetected. And that’s scary.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-19T00:27:27.014Z · LW · GW

I don't think the claims are stance independent, either, so I don't think there's any loss. In other words, I don't think typical moral claims imply stance-independence or stance-dependence. They don't imply or hint at any particular metaethical position at all. Why suppose that they do?

We don't take causal claims like "It's going to rain tomorrow" to imply a position on how to interpret quantum mechanics. Likewise, it may be that everyday moral claims are simply indeterminate with respect to metaethical presuppositions.
 

My claim is that normative claims have subtypes. "subjectively wrong" doesn't mean what "objectively wrong" means.

I agree. But I don't think these categories and distinctions regularly figure into everyday normative and evaluative claims. They're philosophical inventions, and have little to do with what ordinary moral and normative discourse is about. At any rate, to the extent that some form of these notions does manifest, I don't think we can readily read it off of the superficial appearance of seemingly fact-stating claims just by examining the structure of toy moral sentences in the abstract. If we want to know what people are doing when they make moral claims, we should be doing empirical work that involves examining actual instances of usage, not hypothetical ones.

In a way that's your position , too, since you think subjective wrongness exists and objective wrongness doesn't.

Depending on precisely what is meant by subjective wrongness, I don't even believe some forms of that exist, either.

You're not making an noncommital statement because you think there is nothing to choose between objectivity and subjectivity.

Sorry, not sure what you mean. Can you clarify or restate? The way I use moral and normative language is idiosyncratic and certainly doesn't reflect ordinary usage. I'm discussing how other people use these terms, not how I use them. If someone wants to know how I use normative language I can just tell them. No need to speculate.
 

Likewise, realistic metaethics has implications for normative ethics ,not so much in terms of what is wrong , but in terms of how wrong it is.

What do you mean when you say that metaethics has implications for how wrong something is?
 

Which gets us back to the issue of slightly misrepresenting relativist views...leaving out the stance dependence makes the problem slightly harder to spot.

I'm not sure if what you're referring to is my criticism of Carroll's remark, but my criticism is that he characterizes relativism in terms of agent rather than appraiser relativism.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T20:17:34.523Z · LW · GW

Moral realists are going to differ with respect to what they think the metaphysical status of the moral facts are. Moral naturalists may see them roughly as a kind of natural fact, so moral facts might be facts about e.g., increases in wellbeing, while non-naturalists would maintain that moral facts aren't reducible to natural facts. 

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T18:34:51.440Z · LW · GW

A moral realist would think that there are facts about what is morally right or wrong that are true regardless of what anyone thinks about them. One way to put this is that they aren't made true by our  desires, goals, standards, values, beliefs, and so on. Rather, they are true in a way more like how claims about e.g., the mass of an object are true. Facts about the mass of an object aren't made true by our believing them or preferring them to be the case.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T18:33:05.133Z · LW · GW

Why do you say they're lossy or inaccurate renditions of it? My position on this is that statements like "murder is wrong" are simply normative claims, and they are in no way more indicative of realism or antirealism. I'm still not understanding why you think they'd indicate realism. Why presuppose that such statements have anything to do with expressing metanormative standards at all? They're normative claims, not metaethical ones, and it's not clear to me why we'd imagine a normative claim (i.e., a claim about something being right, wrong, permissible, impermissible, and so on) suggests any particular metanormative stance, unless such a stance were :

(a) explicitly accompanying the remark, e.g., "murder is objectively wrong"

(b) we had background knowledge about the speaker in question that would suggest they're using that way, e.g., a moral realist says "murder is wrong"

or 

(c) we had background knowledge about the degree to which such language was typically used to convey claims with particular metanormative presuppositions, e.g., we ran a bunch of surveys and discovered most people from the population the person is from are committed to moral realism

Without such information, I see no particular reason to presume such remarks hint at realism merely by examining the structure of the sentence.
 

That would be true of casual conversati on, but not philosophical debate.

I disagree. Such norms apply to philosophical conversations as well. For what it's worth, I'm a moral antirealist and I use normative language all the time. I don't think moral realists have any kind of monopoly on, or priority over, straightforward normative claims in any domain, because I don't think normative claims hint at any particular metanormative standards.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T15:43:19.374Z · LW · GW

Okay. Thanks. With respect, I disagree. I do not think that claims like "murder is wrong" or "pizza is tasty" in any way imply or even hint at normative realism about the claims in question. Both claims are completely consistent with antirealism, and it's not at all clear to me how either would indicate some form of normative realism. 

I am not sure the reason you gave, that it's phrased as a one place predicate, is any kind of substantive indication of realism. I can grant that:

"Murder is wrong," is more consistent with, and more likely to be an expression of a realist stance than "I disapprove of murder," but whether it is more consistent with what someone would say if they were a realist about the issue in question relative to some other remark that is less likely to express realism doesn't indicate in absolute terms that it meaningfully hints at realism. However, nothing bars a normative realist from expressing subjective attitudes, and nothing bars an antirealist from employing conventional assertoric language to express subjective (or more generally nonrealist) evaluative standards or normative judgments.

For one thing, expressions of our preferences often exclude any explicit qualification that they are our preferences because in many contexts it would violate Gricean maxims to explicitly indicate that something is a preference, or an expression of our subjective attitudes. To the extent that most people aren't gastronomic realists, a statement like "chocolate ice cream is delicious" doesn't need "...in my opinion" at the end, or "I consider" at the beginning because this is implicit. People may include such qualifications explicitly, but typically only in contexts in which e.g., some contextual goal is relevant, such as not offending someone with a contrary opinion, or to emphasize that you are stating a contrary opinion.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T13:42:53.153Z · LW · GW

It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to suggest that these things are viewed on LW in something like the way the analytic/synthetic distinction and reductionism were viewed among empiricist philosophers when Quine wrote "Two Dogmas"

 

That's fair. I can grant that. Like you, I'm less sure about the general attitude towards moral realism here. I'd have thought inclinations were more towards dissolve-the-dispute than a decidedly antirealist stance. I'd be interested in finding out more about people's metaethical views on LW.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T03:52:36.251Z · LW · GW

Fair enough. I still think find it somewhat unappealing to use a title that implies people are being dogmatic without providing much in the way of support for the implication. I'd prefer titles be accurate rather than clever.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T03:08:21.679Z · LW · GW

Right, I think we're on the same page. I would just add that I happen to not think there's anything especially tricky about rejecting normative realism in particular. Though I suppose it would depend on what's meant by "tricky." There's construals on which I suppose I would think that. I'd be interested in omnizoid elaborating on that.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-17T01:17:38.818Z · LW · GW

If the claim is that it would be inconsistent to consider intuitions as a means of justification, but then reject them as a means of justification specifically with respect to moral realism, that would be inconsistent. But someone can endorse mathematical realism and not moral realism simply by finding the former and intuitive and not finding the latter intuitive. They could still acknowledge that intuitions could serve as a justification for moral realism if they had the intuition, but just lack the intuition.

Second, note that omnizoid originally said

And it's very tricky to develop a mathematical realism which doesn't use an epistemology also permitting moral realism. 

I don't see anything tricky about this. One can be a normative antirealist and reject both epistemic and moral realism, because both are forms of normative realism, but not reject mathematical realism, because it isn't a form of normative realism. In other words, one can consistently reject all forms of normative realism but not reject all forms of descriptive realism without any inconsistency.


 

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T23:03:31.827Z · LW · GW

I'm not sure if you're a moral realist. What do you mean when you say this?

A moral realist may think that there are e.g., facts about what you should or shouldn't do that you are obligated to comply with independent of whether doing so would be consistent with your goals, standards, or values. So, for instance, they would hold that you "should't torture babies for fun," regardless of whether doing so is consistent with your values. In doing so, they aren't appeal to their own values, or anyone else's values, but to facts about what's morally right or wrong that are true without reference to, and in a way that doesn't depend on, any particular evaluative standpoint.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T22:58:41.058Z · LW · GW

Same here. Yet what I've found is that philosophers often make claims about other people's experiences, but don't bother to ask anyone or gather data on what other people report about their experiences. Hence why experimental philosophy is important.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T22:57:18.252Z · LW · GW

I certainly don't think they're seeking disconfirmation of their theories. Quite the contrary, much of analytic philosophy seems dedicated to starting with one's conclusions, then coming up with justifications for why they are correct. That seems to be built into the very method. Have you read Bishop and Trout's paper that makes this point? 

Here it is: Bishop, M., & Trout, J. D. (2005). The pathologies of standard analytic epistemology. Nous, 39(4), 696-714.

And here's a quote: 

Now, back to the stasis requirement: If an epistemic theory forced us to radically alter our considered epistemic judgments (e.g., our epistemic judgments in reflective equilibrium), then ipso facto that theory is unacceptable. While perhaps not all proponents of SAE embrace the stasis requirement (e.g., see Unger 1984), we think that Kim is right in identifying it as a success condition that most proponents of SAE place on epistemological theories. But it is not a requirement that is often explicitly stated. So where do we find it? We suggest that the commitment to stasis is embodied in the method of SAE. Philosophers accept or reject an epistemological theory on the basis of whether it accords with their considered judgments. (p. 701)

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T22:53:37.516Z · LW · GW

What's a moral bad, as opposed to a nonmoral bad?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T22:52:51.669Z · LW · GW

Why does that indicate realism? If someone says "Pizza is tasty" does that hint at gastronomic realism?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T19:40:47.660Z · LW · GW

Thanks for clarifying. 

You'll get no disagreement from me. I'm a proponent of the view that standard accounts of moral realism are typically either unintelligible (non-naturalist accounts usually, or any accounts that maintain that there are irreducibly normative facts, or categorical reasons, or external reasons, etc.), or trivial (naturalist realist accounts that reduce moral facts to descriptive claims that have normative authority).

Surprisingly, the claim that moral realism isn't coherent is not popular in contemporary metaethics and I almost never see anyone arguing for it, aside from myself, so it's nice to see someone make a similar claim.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T19:36:47.499Z · LW · GW

Same here. When I experience pain, I only notice that it's something I want to avoid. I don't think of it as "bad" in some stance-independent way. I don't want other people to be in pain, either, but that isn't part of my phenomenology. It's a desire, or attitude that I have, and it has nothing to do with moral realism.

Note something else strange about the remark. It says "when we reflect on pain we conclude that..."

It's strange to make a claim about what other people conclude. Who is "we" here? It's not me, nor does it appear to be you. Yet for some reason we're supposed to take the author's phenomenology as evidence in favor of realism, yet phenomenology that doesn't lend itself to realism (or even lends itself to antirealism) seems to be ignored.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T19:33:00.971Z · LW · GW

One issue that is downplayed is that it's not at all clear whether or not the way professional moral philosophers think about these issues reflects how nonphilosophers think about them. The best current studies on how nonphilosophers think about these issues finds that when you explain metaethical positions to people, and give them the standard metaethical positions to choose from, about 75% favor antirealist positions. The participants in question were only in the United States and were sampled from populations more likely to be antirealists (including e.g., students), but the high levels of antirealism still raise serious questions about whether moral realists are correct when they presume all or most people find realism intuitive. There is little evidence this is the case, and quite strong evidence that it isn't.

See, for instance, Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T18:54:57.819Z · LW · GW

That's true, but consequentialism, deontology, etc. are typically categorized as normative ethical theories, while claims like "don't kill" are treated as first-order normative moral claims. 

The term "metaethics" is typically used to refer to abstract issues about the nature of morality, e.g., whether there are moral facts. It is pretty much standard in contemporary moral philosophy to refer to consequentialism as a normative moral theory, not a metaethical one.

 I don't think there are correct or incorrect definitions, but describing consequentialism as a metaethical view is at least unconventional from the standpoint of how these terms are used in contemporary moral philosophy.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T18:49:08.099Z · LW · GW

I don't think it hints at realism. Why do you think it does?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T15:00:10.083Z · LW · GW

I understand if it's a reference to Quine, but a title like that is still provocative and carries rhetorical weight. I see little reason in giving the impression that people are being "dogmatic" about something, and even less if you don't actually think that. I'm also not sure how many readers are going to pick up on the reference, either (it wouldn't surprise me if they did, I'm not sure one way or the other).

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:57:30.718Z · LW · GW

Why do you think it's the best argument for theism?

Also, there's huge selection effects -- studying POR makes people less religious. 

...Right, and what if selection effects are causing people more disposed to endorse moral realism to become academic philosophers? If that's the case, the 62% moral realism among philosophers may also reflect selection effects, rather than philosophers being persuaded by the quality of the arguments.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:54:52.866Z · LW · GW

Can you elaborate? Why is it a metaethical position because it's a form of consequentialism?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:52:53.089Z · LW · GW

I'm explicitly denying that that covers all the possibilities. You can also endorse incoherentism or indeterminacy.

Also, when you say that the claims aren't truth-apt, are you supposing that the claims themselves have a meaning, or that the person who made the claim means to communicate something with a given moral utterance?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:50:40.871Z · LW · GW

Yes, and, in addition to that, the best current studies on how nonphilosophers think about these issues find that across a variety of paradigms, respondents in the US tended to favor antirealism at a ratio of about 3:1, with most endorsing some type of relativism. See Pölzler and Wright (2020). In other words, when given the option to endorse a variety of metaethical positions, about 75% of the respondents in this study favored some type of antirealiasm.

Note that P&W's studies relied on online samples from a population that is disproportionately nonreligious, and student samples, which are disproportionately more inclined towards relativism (see Beebe & Sackris, 2016), so they are probably not representative of the United States population as a whole.

References

Beebe, J. R., & Sackris, D. (2016). Moral objectivism across the lifespan. Philosophical Psychology, 29(6), 912-929.

Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(1), 53-82.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:46:54.414Z · LW · GW

Can you clarify which questions you take to be easy? I'm not necessarily disagreeing. I'm trying to get clear on what you take to be easy questions, and what you take the answer to be.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:41:47.748Z · LW · GW

What's the inconsistency? You could have an intuition that mathematical realism is true, and that moral realism isn't.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:40:52.288Z · LW · GW

What's the reductio, exactly?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T14:40:04.903Z · LW · GW

My goal with the remark is to accurately characterize relativism. Not to defend it. If someone wants to object to relativism on the grounds that it doesn't achieve anything, that's orthogonal to the point I was making. I'm not really sure I understand the objection, though. When you say the judgments achieve nothing, can you clarify what you mean? If I judge others as doing something wrong, I'm not sure why it would be an objection to tell me that this doesn't achieve anything. Would it avoid the objection by achieving something in particular? If so, what?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T04:29:24.976Z · LW · GW

And it's very tricky to develop a mathematical realism which doesn't use an epistemology also permitting moral realism. 

Why? Can you endorse mathematical realism, but reject all forms of normative realism, including epistemic and moral realism?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T04:27:26.334Z · LW · GW

Thus, to deny this, one needs to think either moral claims aren't truth apt, they're all false, or they depend on attitudes.  

No they don't. The standard claim that all antirealist positions are either relativism, error theory, or noncognitivism is false: it requires antirealist positions to include a semantic claim about the meaning of moral claims.

But an antirealist can both deny that there are stance-independent moral facts, and deny the philosophical presuppositions implicit in the claim that there is some kind of correct analysis of moral claims, such that moral claims are either truth apt, all false, or depend on attitudes. Also, an antirealist can endorse indeterminacy about the meaning of moral claims, and maintain that they aren't determinately truth-apt, false, or dependent on attitudes. For an example, see:

Gill, M. B. (2009). Indeterminacy and variability in meta-ethics. Philosophical studies, 145(2), 215-234.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T04:20:27.632Z · LW · GW

The people who've most seriously studied philosophy of religion tend to be theists (69.5%), which is larger than the proportion of philosophers specializing in metaethics that endorse moral realism (65.4%). Do you think this is good evidence that theism is true? I don't.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T04:10:10.701Z · LW · GW

Can you elaborate on Eliezer being a moral realist? Is there a summary anywhere or could you provide one?

Regarding this statement: "it's wrong to torture babies for fun," this is a normative moral claim, not a metaethical one. A moral antirealist can agree with this (I'm an antirealist, and I agree with it). Nothing about agreeing or disagreeing with that claim entails realism.

Your position sounds like antirealism to me, but I'm not sure if it would fit with any of the standard categories. A lot hinges on your statement that:

I would say that by calling a moral proposition true what we are primarily doing is advocating or condemning certain acts/people, rather than trying to create a correspondence between listeners' beliefs and reality.

If you were claiming that moral claims, despite appearing to be saying things that were true or false, were actually, instead, used to condemn acts/people, that would sound like some type of expressivism/noncognitivism, but since you're also trying to maintain use of the term "true," I'm not sure what to make of it. Omnizoid's suggestion of quasi-realism makes some sense since part of the goal is to maintain the ability to say that one's moral claims are true while still treating them as largely serving an expressive role; those accounts hinge on deflationary views of truth though and it doesn't sound exactly like you're endorsing that. 

I think the central question would be: Do you think that there are facts about what people morally should or shouldn't do, or what's morally good or bad, that are true independent of people's goals, standards, or values? If yes, that's moral realism. If not, that's moral antirealism.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T04:03:29.066Z · LW · GW

As omnizoid points out, utilitarianism is not a metaethical position. It is not a form of realism.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T04:02:09.099Z · LW · GW

Moral relativism does not necessarily entail that if society approves of torture, then torture is "okay." It only entails that it's okay relative to that culture's moral standards. But it does not follow that other individuals or cultures must also think it's okay. They can think it's not okay.

Relativism holds that moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of individuals or groups. So a claim like "torture is not wrong," would mean something like "torture is not inconsistent with our culture's moral standards." If it isn't inconsistent with a culture's moral standards, the statement would be trivially true. Furthermore, an appraiser relativist does not have to tolerate another individual or culture with different moral standards acting in accordance with those moral standards. At best, only certain forms of agent relativism which hold that an action is morally right or wrong relative to the standards of the agent performing an act (or that agent's culture). As Gowans notes in the SEP entry on agent and appraiser relativism:

"[...] that to which truth or justification is relative may be the persons making the moral judgments or the persons about whom the judgments are made. These are sometimes called appraiser and agent relativism respectively. Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basis of our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards are those of the persons we are judging (of course, in some cases these may coincide). Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed in the discussion that follows."

Are you rejecting agent relativism, appraiser relativism, or both with your example of torture?

As far as most philosophers not being relativists: this isn't to say you're mistaken (since that's also my impression) but what are you basing that conclusion off of?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T03:56:04.820Z · LW · GW

I don’t have much in the way of any general opposition to Carrol’s remarks in the quote you provide but I do think Carroll characterizes relativism in a way that may be inaccurate, or at least incomplete. According to Carroll:

“If a community decides that something is moral, then it’s moral. That’s what it means to be moral. And people who are outside the community have nothing to say about that, have no rights, no leverage, to critique it.”

This may be true of some forms of moral relativism, but not all or the most defensible forms. Nothing about moral relativism prohibits the relativist from judging the moral actions of other people, or the cultural standards of other cultures, nor does relativism entail that they have no right or leverage to criticize those cultures. After all, the latter appear to be moral or at least normative claims themselves, and if you’re a relativist, you could reasonably ask: no right or leverage relative to what moral standard? The standards of the people or cultures I am judging, or relative to my own standards? A relativist does not have to think they can only judge people according to those people’s standards; they can endorse appraiser relativism, and think that they can judge others relative to their own standards.
 

One shortcoming in descriptions of moral relativism is that they frequently fail to distinguish between agent and appraiser relativism. Agent relativism holds that moral standards are true or false relative to the agent performing the action (or that agent’s culture). Appraiser relativism holds that moral standards are true or false relative to the moral framework of the agent (or the culture of the agent) judging the action in question. Here’s how the SEP distinguishes them:

“Appraiser relativism suggests that we do or should make moral judgments on the basis of our own standards, while agent relativism implies that the relevant standards are those of the persons we are judging.”

Many common depictions of relativism focus on agent relativism. And this seems consistent with Carrol’s description. Yet I suspect this emphasis stems from a tendency to characterize relativism in ways that seem to have more straightforward normative implications: people often reject relativism because it purportedly encourages or mandates indifference towards people with different moral standards. But this would only be true of at best some forms of moral relativism. Incidentally, Gowans, the author of the SEP article on moral relativism, says:

“Appraiser relativism is the more common position, and it will usually be assumed in the discussion that follows."

I don’t know if this is true. But if it is, there’s something odd about depictions of relativism that seem closer to agent relativism than appraiser relativism. Appraiser relativism can get you something pretty close to the kind of constructivism Carroll describes, so I don’t think the relativism/constructivism distinction was necessary here. Relativism itself has the resources to do what Carroll proposes.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T03:39:24.655Z · LW · GW

We can communicate the meaning of mathematical facts in ways you can't communicate the meaning of irreducibly normative moral facts. The former are intelligible, the latter aren't. So it's not clear you can even present us with an intelligible set of propositions in the form of putative "moral facts" for us to entertain whether or not reason could allow us to discover them. "Discover what?" We can ask, and you won't be able to intelligibly communicate what it is we're supposedly discovering. The kind of moral realism you endorse isn't merely false, it's not even intelligible.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Two Dogmas of LessWrong · 2022-12-16T03:36:52.773Z · LW · GW

1. Putting stock in philosophers

My general impression is that you put far too much stock in what a majority of philosophers think. While lots of people thinking something is some evidence that it’s true, and lots of “experts” thinking something is even better evidence, I have yet to hear a compelling account of why I should think philosophers are experts at reaching correct philosophical conclusions in a reliable and consistent way, across different issues. 

And, in any case, there are a variety of reasons why we should seriously doubt that what amounts to barely over a 2:1 ratio of realists to antirealists is anything more than paltry evidence for realism. What matters is why philosophers endorse realism. Do they have good arguments? Does studying philosophy cause people to be realists? If it does, why does it do so? We don’t know enough about the base rate of endorsement of realism among the general population, we don’t know enough about whether self-selection effects cause people more disposed to endorse realism to become philosophers, we don’t know why they endorse realism, and so on. F

Furthermore, if you ask around, you’ll find philosophers commenting on how the rise of realism is fairly recent, and if you go back a few decades, most philosophers seemed to be moral antirealists (sadly, we don’t have PhilPapers surveys from the 20th century). If we go back even further, we might find most were moral realists. Realism has waxed and waned in popularity among philosophers. It's unclear whether its popularity is due to good arguments or due to fashionable trends in the field.

I’d be curious to hear how much stock you think we should put in philosophers on these matters, and why. What kind of expertise do philosophers have? Why should we think that they are generally better at converging on correct conclusions about realism and consciousness than people on LessWrong? 

2. Updating doesn’t change much in this case

One can grant that most philosophers endorse a position contrary to their positions, consider that some evidence for their views, and yet still be unconvinced. How strong of evidence do you take it to be that e.g., 62% of philosophers endorse moral realism? How much should that increase my confidence that moral realism is true? And why?

You endorse utilitarianism, even though most philosophers reject it, and possibly by a larger margin than they reject moral realism. Only 30.6% endorsed or leaned towards consequentialism, and only a subset of these would endorse utilitarianism. It’s not likely that the total number of philosophers who endorse utilitarianism is as high as the amount who endorse moral antirealism (~26%), since this would require almost all of those who endorse consequentialism to be utilitarians as well.

Presumably you take the majority rejection of utilitarianism as some evidence against it, but not enough to overturn your confidence in utilitarianism. Perhaps the same is true of people that lean towards antirealism and physicalist views of consciousness. It’s hard to know. 

3. Dogmas

I also want to briefly flag that your title, “Two Dogmas of LessWrong,” seems to suggest that rejecting moral realism and antiphysicalist views of consciousness are “dogmas.” I’m not sure that they are. Yet you may want to consider that the prominence of both views among philosophers may likewise be dogmas or, more plausibly, there may be more foundational dogmas common among contemporary analytic philosophers that cause higher rates of realism and antiphysicalist views of consciousness than in the absence of those dogmas. I’m not idly speculating: I think this is in fact the case. I’m not the first to suggest this, and I won’t be the last. 

There have been a variety of traditions and thinkers that have raised concerns about analytic philosophy’s methods, and it’s strange approach to language, concepts, metaphysics, and epistemology, from the pragmatists in the form of James and the more caustic FCS Schiller, to positivists, through Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophers, and more recently experimental philosophers and others who have questions the ubiquity and reliance on intuitions among philosophers. 

Whatever their flaws, in these various ways these thinkers and approaches have raised what I take to be very serious challenges to mainstream philosophical methods, challenges that I saw echoed in the critical stance many people associated with LessWrong took towards much of contemporary philosophy. I suspect the root of the problem isn’t realism and antiphysicalist views about consciousness, but analytic philosophy’s methods. If your methods aren’t any good, you’re going to end up with lots of people converging on bad ideas. Garbage in, garbage out. I should note that these are preliminary remarks, and I’m not attempting to make a more comprehensive case against the methods of contemporary philosophy. While that’s something I have done in passing in other comments, I’m more interested in a positive case for why we should put stock in contemporary analytic philosophy in the first place. It doesn’t strike me as having an especially good track record at solving problems.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Against meta-ethical hedonism · 2022-12-02T18:07:26.178Z · LW · GW

This, I think, is a key point, and one that could be stressed more forcefully:

“I suspect that the appeal of meta-ethical hedonism derives at least in part from mixing normative epistemology together with the epistemology of consciousness in a manner that allows confusions about the latter to disguise muddiness about both.”

Many of these arguments seem to appeal to questionable views about consciousness; if we reject those views, then it’s not clear how plausible the rest of the argument is, or indeed, if elements of the argument aren’t even intelligible (because they rely on confusions about consciousness that can’t be made coherent), then we’re not even dealing with an argument, just the appearance of one.

This points towards a deeper worry I have about arguments like these. While you raise what I take to be credible epistemic concerns, it’s unclear whether metaethical hedonism can even get to the stage of being evaluated in this way if we cannot first assess whether it can offer us an account of normative realism that isn’t vacuous, self-contradictory, or unintelligible.

Take the claim that there are stance-independent normative moral facts. A naturalist might end up identifying such facts with certain kinds of descriptive claims. If so, it’s unclear how they can capture the kinds of normativity non-naturalists want to capture. While such accounts can be intelligible, it’s unclear whether they can simultaneously be both intelligible and nontrivial: such accounts would amount to little more than descriptive identifications of moral facts with some set of natural facts. Without bringing the unintelligible elements back in, this takes morality out of the business of having the overriding authority to mandate what we should and shouldn’t do independent of our goals and values. 

Naturalism ends up delivering us a completely toothless notion of moral “norms”: these are norms that I either already cared about because they aligned with my goals, or still don’t care about because they don’t align with my goals. In the former case, I would have acted on those goals anyway, and realism adds nothing to my overall motivation, while in the latter case, I would at worst simply come to recognize I have no interest in doing what’s “morally good.” And what is the naturalist going to say? That I am “incorrect”? Well, so be it. That I am “irrational”? Again, so what? All these amount to are empty labels that have no authority.

But with non-naturalist realist, what would it even mean for there to be a normative fact of the relevant kind? The kinds of facts that purport to have this kind of authority are often described as e.g., irreducibly normative, or as providing us with some kind of decisive, or external reasons that “apply” to us independent of our values. I don’t think proponents of such views can communicate what this would mean in an intelligible way. 

When I go about making decisions, I act in accordance with my goals and interests. I am exclusively motivated by those goals. If there were irreducibly normative facts of this kind, and they “gave me reasons,” what would that mean? That I “should” do something, even if it’s inconsistent with my goals? Not only am I not interested in doing that, I am not sure how I could, in principle, comply with such goals, unless, and only unless, I had the goal of complying with whatever the stance-independent moral facts turned out to be. As far as I can tell, I have no such goal. So I’m not even sure I could comply with those facts.

When it comes to pleasure and pain, these can either be trivially described so as to just be, by definition, states consistent with my goals and motivations, e.g., states I desire to have and to avoid, respectively. If not, it’s unclear what it would mean to say they were “intrinsically” good.

Philosophers routinely employ terms that may superficially appear to be meaningful. But, scratch the surface, and their terms simply can’t thread the conceptual needle.

In short, there is a deeper, and more worrisome problem with many accounts of moral realism: not only do they face seemingly insurmountable epistemic problems, and in the case of non-naturalist realism metaphysical problems but that at the very least non-naturalist realism also faces a more basic problem, which is that it’s so conceptually muddled it’s unclear whether there is an intelligible position to reject in the first place.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Against the normative realist's wager · 2022-10-14T22:47:56.503Z · LW · GW

I don't know if I count as a nihilist, as it's unclear what precisely is meant by the term in this and other contexts. I don't think there are stance-independent normative facts, and I don't think anything "matters" independently of it mattering to people, but I find it strange to suggest that if nothing matters in the former sense that nothing matters in the latter sense. 

Compare all this to gastronomic realism and nihilism. A gastronomic realist may claim there are facts about what food is intrinsically tasty or not tasty that is true of that food independent of how it tastes to anyone. A gastronomic nihilist would deny food is tasty or not tasty in this way. Food itself, they might maintain, is neither tasty or not tasty independently of how it tastes to people. But that doesn't mean people can't find things tasty or untasty. It just means that to find something tasty is to have a particular kind of psychological attitude towards it. Just the same, one could have moral attitudes, or stances, towards some actions and not others. And things can matter to someone. But I have no idea what it would mean for an action to be right or wrong, or for a particular set of considerations to "matter," independent of anyone's stances, or how much they matter to people. I think things can matter to people, but they can't just matter simpliciter. 

In that sense, I take a much stronger stance towards non-naturalist normative or moral realism than what seems implied in the post here: I am not convinced non-naturalist normative realism is even a meaningful position to take. As such, it's unclear to me how anyone could assign credence to it being true, since it's not clear to me it's the sort of thing that could true or false in principle, for the same reason a string of meaningless words couldn't be true or false. One way to put this is that I don't think normative realism's problems are metaphysical so much as conceptual. 

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Against the normative realist's wager · 2022-10-14T02:02:19.980Z · LW · GW

I'm a normative antirealist but I don't think non-naturalist normative realism is intelligible. As such, I find many of the considerations that assign nonzero credence to it hard to fathom. I don't know how to assign credence to utterances that I don't think are propositions and if they are I don't know what those propositions are.

I don't think it makes any sense to talk about things "mattering" in a stance independent way. It sounds like saying something can be strance independently fun or intrinsically tasty. Things matter to me. But I don't think the things that matter to me themselves have "matterworthiness."

Also, since I only act based on what matters to me, as far as I can tell it wouldn't matter to me whether anything mattered in the sense that realists seem to think that things matter. In other words, their very concept of the way in which things matter doesn't matter to me. Think about trying to have a tasty meal. I am going to eat foods that taste good to me, not foods that are "objectively tasty" independent of how they taste to me. Likewise, even if there were objective normative facts, well, so what? Why care about them?

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on I Really Don't Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky's Position on Consciousness · 2022-04-02T15:54:03.847Z · LW · GW

If many individual people talked about feeling these experiences even without being excessively primed with other people's philosophical discussions, would it make you 'believe in qualia', if you didn't have it?

 

No. Consider religion and belief in the supernatural. Due to the existence of pareidolia and other psychological phenomena, people may exhibit a shared set of psychological mechanisms that cause them to mistakenly infer the presence of nonphysical or supernatural entities where there are none. While I believe culture and experience play a significant role in shaping the spread and persistence of supernatural beliefs, such beliefs are built on the foundations of psychological systems people share in common. Even if culture and learning were wiped out, due to the nature of human psychology it is likely that such mistakes would emerge yet again. People would once again see faces in the clouds and think that there's someone up there.

So too, I suspect, people would fall into the same phenomenological quicksand with respect to many of the problems in philosophy. Even if we stopped teaching philosophy and all discussion of qualia vanished, I would not be surprised to find the notion emerge once again. People are not good at making inferences about what the world is like based on their phenomenology. I mean no disrespect, but your account sounds far more like the testimony of a religious convert than a robust philosophical argument for the existence of qualia. Take this blunt remark:

I know for certain that consciousness and qualia exist.

I've spent a lot of time discussing religion with theists, and one could readily swap out "consciousness and qualia" for "Jesus" our "God": "I know for certain that [God] exist[s]." I don't know for certain that qualia don't exist. I don't know for certain that God doesn't exist. I don't generally make a point of telling others that I know something "for certain," and if I did, I think I would appreciate if someone else suggested to me, hopefully kindly, that perhaps my declaration that I know something for certain serves more to convince myself than to convince others. 

I take the hallmark of a good idea to be its utility. The notion of qualia has no value. On the contrary, I see it as a product of confusions and mistakes born of overconfidence in our intuitions and phenomenology and to the poor methods of academic philosophy, which serve to anoint such errors with the superficial appearance that they are backed by intellectual rigor.

I'd believe in qualia if and when the concept appears meaningful and when it can figure into our best scientific explanations of what the world is like. That is, I'd accept it if it were a useful feature of our explanations/allowed use to make more accurate predictions than alternative models that didn't posit qualia.

I take you'd likely disagree, and that's totally fine with me. But if we survive this century and colonize the stars, it will be due to knowledge and discoveries that pay their way by allowing us to understand and anticipate the world around us, and augment it to our ends. It will not be due to the notion of qualia, which will be little more than a footnote buried deep in the pages of some galactic empire's archives.
 

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on Cornell Meetup · 2021-11-23T23:33:23.305Z · LW · GW

I'm at Cornell. I study psychology and metaethics, but I do not work on AI alignment. I am always happy to provide insights from the areas I study to anyone working on AI alignment, though.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on 2020 PhilPapers Survey Results · 2021-11-03T23:03:43.344Z · LW · GW

When it comes to describing moral discourse in general, I endorse semantic pluralism / 'different groups are talking about wildly different things, and in some cases talking about nothing at all, when they use moral language'.


I agree, but this is orthogonal to whether moral realism is true. Questions about moral realism generally concern whether there are stance-independent moral facts. Whether or not there are such facts does not directly depend on the descriptive status of folk moral thought and discourse. Even if it did, it's unclear to me how such an approach would vindicate any substantive account of realism. 
 

You could call these views "anti-realist" in some senses. In other senses, you could call them realist (as I believe Frank Jackson does).

I'd have to know more about what Jackson's specific position is to address it. 

But ultimately the labels are unimportant; what matters is the actual content of the view, and we should only use the labels if they help with understanding that content, rather than concealing it under a pile of ambiguities and asides.

I agree with all that. I just don't agree that this is diagnostic of debates in metaethics about realism versus antirealism. I don't consider the realist label to be unhelpful, I do think it has a sufficiently well-understood meaning that its use isn't wildly confused or unhelpful in contemporary debates, and I suspect most people who say that they're moral realists endorse a sufficiently similar enough cluster of views that there's nothing too troubling about using the term as a central distinction in the field. There is certainly wiggle room and quibbling, but there isn't nearly enough actual variation in how philosophers understand realism for it to be plausible that a substantial proportion of realists don't endorse the kinds of views I'm objecting to and claiming are indicative of problems in the field.

I don't know enough about Jackson's position in particular, but I'd be willing to bet I'd include it among those views I consider objectionable.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on 2020 PhilPapers Survey Results · 2021-11-03T22:53:59.292Z · LW · GW

I also wanted to add that I am generally receptive to the kind of approach you are taking. My approach to many issues in philosophy is roughly aligned with quietists and draws heavily on identifying cases in which a dispute turns out to be a pseudodispute predicated on imprecision in language or confusion about concepts. More generally, I tend to take a quietist or a "dissolve the problem away" kind of approach. I say this to emphasize that it is generally in my nature to favor the kind of position you're arguing for here, and that I nevertheless think it is off the mark in this particular case. Perhaps the closest analogy I could make would be to theism: there is enough overlap in what theism refers to that the most sensible stance to adopt is atheism.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on 2020 PhilPapers Survey Results · 2021-11-03T22:46:24.360Z · LW · GW

I think there's enormous variation in what people mean by "moral realism", enough to make it a mostly useless term

 

I disagree with this claim, and I don’t think that, even if there were lots of variation in what people meant by moral realism, that this would render my claim that the large proportion of respondents who favor realism indicates a problem in the profession. The term is not “useless,” and even if the term were useless, I am not talking about the term. I am talking about the actual substantive positions held by philosophers: whatever their conception of “realism,” I am claiming that enough of that 60% endorse indefensible positions that it is a problem.

I have a number of objections to the claim you’re making, but I’d like to be sure I understand your position a little better, in case those objections are misguided. You outline a number of ways we might think of objectivity and subjectivity, but I am not sure what work these distinctions are doing. It is one thing to draw a distinction, or identify a way one might use particular terms, such as “objective” and “subjective.” It is another to provide reasons or evidence to think these particular conceptions of the terms in question are driving the way people responded to the PhilPapers survey.

I’m also a bit puzzled at your focus on the terms “objective” and “subjective.” Did they ask whether morality was objective/subjective in the 2009 or 2020 versions of the survey? 

It would be better to ask questions like 'is it a supernatural miracle that morality exists / that humans happen to endorse the True Morality

I doubt that such questions would be better. 

Both of these questions are framed in ways that are unconventional with respect to existing positions in metaethics, both are a bit vague, and both are generally hard to interpret. 

For instance, a theist could believe that God exists and that God grounds moral truth, but not think that it is a “supernatural miracle” that morality exists. It's also unclear what it means to say morality "exists." Even a moral antirealist might agree that morality exists. That just isn't typically a way that philosophers, especially those working in metaethics, would talk about putative moral claims or facts.

I’d have similar concerns about the unconventionality of asking about “the True Morality.” I study metaethics, and I’m not entirely sure what this would even mean. What does capitalizing it mean? 

It also seems to conflate questions about the scope and applicability of moral concerns with questions about what makes moral claims true. More importantly, it seems to conflate descriptive claims about the beliefs people happen to hold with metaethical claims, and may arbitrarily restrict morality to humans in ways that would concern respondents.

I don't know how much this should motivate you to update away from what you're proposing here, but I can do so here. My primary area of specialization, and the focus of my dissertation research, concerns the empirical study of folk metaethics (that is, the metaethical positions nonphilosophers hold). In particular, my focus in on the methodology of paradigms designed to assess what people think about the nature of morality. Much of my work focuses on identifying ways in which questions about metaethics could be ambiguous, confusing, or otherwise difficult to interpret (see here). This also extends to a lesser extent to questions about aesthetics (see here). Much of this work focuses on presenting evidence of interpretative variation specifically in how people respond to questions about metaethics. Interpretative variation refers to the degree to which respondents in a study interpret the same set of stimuli differently from one another. I have amassed considerable evidence of interpretative variation in lay populations specifically with respect to how they respond to questions about metaethics. 

While I am confident there is interpretative variation in how philosophers responded to the questions in the PhilPapers survey, I'm skeptical that such variation would encompass such radically divergent conceptions of moral realism that the number of respondents who endorsed what I'd consider unobjectionable notions of realism would be anything more than a very small minority.

I say all this to make a point: there may be literally no person on the planet more aware of, and sensitive to, concerns about how people would interpret questions about metaethics. And I am still arguing that you are very likely missing the mark in this particular case.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on 2020 PhilPapers Survey Results · 2021-11-03T02:46:43.224Z · LW · GW

The number of moral realists, and especially non-naturalist moral realists, both strike me as indications that there is something wrong with contemporary academic philosophy. It almost seems like philosophers reliably hold one of the less defensible positions across many issues.

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on I Really Don't Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky's Position on Consciousness · 2021-11-02T13:45:47.754Z · LW · GW

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I’m not sure the questions are sufficiently well-specified to be answerable, but I suspect if you rephrased them or we worked towards getting me to understand the questions, I’d just say “I don’t know.” But my not knowing how to answer a question does not give me any more insight into what you mean when you refer to qualia, or what it means to say that things “feel like something.”

I don’t think it means anything to say things “feel like something.” Every conversation I’ve had about this (and I’ve had a lot of them) goes in circles: what are qualia? How things feel. What does that mean? It’s just “what it’s like” to experience them. What does that mean? They just are a certain way, and so on. This is just an endless circle of obscure jargon and self-referential terms, all mutually interdefining one another.

I don’t notice or experience any sense of a gap. I don’t know what gap others are referring to. It sounds like people seem to think there is some characteristic or property their experiences have that can’t be explained. But this seems to me like it could be a kind of inferential error, the way people may have once insisted that there’s something intrinsic about living things that distinguishes from nonliving things, and living things just couldn’t be composed of conventional matter arranged in certain ways, that they just obviously had something else, some je ne sais quoi.

I suspect if I found myself feeling like there was some kind of inexplicable essence, or je ne sais quoi to some phenomena, I’d be more inclined to think I was confused than that there really was je ne sais quoiness. I’m not surprised philosophers go in for thinking there are qualia, but I’m surprised that people in the lesswrong community do. Why not think “I’m confused and probably wrong” as a first pass? Why are many people so confident that there is, what as far as I can tell, amounts to something that may be fundamentally incomprehensible, even magical? That is, it’s one thing to purport to have the concept of qualia; it’s another to endorse it. And it sounds not only like you claim to grok the notion of qualia, but to endorse it.

 

 



 

Comment by Lance Bush (lance-bush) on I Really Don't Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky's Position on Consciousness · 2021-11-01T21:12:47.955Z · LW · GW

It is a functional difference, but there must be some further (conscious?) reason why we can do so, right?


Do you mean like a causal reason? If so then of course, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with qualia.

Where I want to go with this is that you can distinguish them because they feel different, and that's what qualia refers to.

I have access to the contents of my mental states, and that includes information that allows me to identify and draw distinctions between things, categorize things, label things, and so on. A “feeling” can be cashed out in such terms, and once it is, there’s nothing else to explain, and no other properties or phenomena to refer to. 

I don’t know what work “qualia” is doing here. Of course things feel various ways to me, and of course they feel different. Touching a hot stove doesn’t feel the same as touching a block of ice. 

But I could get a robot, that has no qualia, but has temperature detecting mechanisms, to say something like “I have detected heat in this location and cold in this location and they are different.” I don’t think my ability to distinguish between things is because they “feel” different; rather, I’d say that insofar as I can report that they “feel different” it’s because I can report differences between them. I think the invocation of qualia here is superfluous and may get the explanation backwards: I don’t distinguish things because they feel different; things “feel different” if and only if we can distinguish differences between them.


This "feeling" in qualia, too, could be a functional property.

Then I’m even more puzzled by what you think qualia are. Qualia are, I take it, ineffable, intrinsic qualitative properties of experiences, though depending on what someone is talking about they might include more or less features than these. I’m not sure qualia can be “functional” in the relevant sense. 

How would you cash out "desire to move my hand away from the object" and "distinguish it from something cold or at least not hot" in functional terms?

I don't know. I just want to know what qualia are. Either people can explain what qualia are or they can’t. My inability to explain something wouldn’t justify saying “therefore, qualia,” so I’m not sure what the purpose of the questions are. I’m sure you don’t intend to invoke “qualia of the gaps,” and presume qualia must figure into any situation in which I, personally, am not able to answer a question you've asked. 

I'm asking you cash out desire and distinguishing in functional terms, too, and if we keep doing this, do "qualia" come up somewhere?

I don’t know what you think qualia are, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you. People keep invoking this concept, but nobody seems able to offer a substantive explanation of what it is, and why I should think I or anyone else has such things, or why such things would be important or necessary for anything in particular, and so on.

I hope I'm not coming off as stubborn here. I'm very much interested in answering any questions I'm able to answer, I'm just not sure precisely what you're asking me or how I might go about answering it. "What are the functional properties of X?" doesn't strike me as a very clear question.