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ControlsFreak


				

				

				
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joined 2022 October 02 23:23:48 UTC

				

User ID: 1422

ControlsFreak


				
				
				

				
4 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 02 23:23:48 UTC

					

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User ID: 1422

there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"

This is the strawest of straw men.

the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).

YesChad.jpg

But, ya know, for an entirely different reason. Nothing to do with voting. Identity theft is awful. I absolutely want anyone who is trying to acquire an ID that is in any way related to any component of my personal information to have to jump through hoops to do so. I know full well that this means that I also have to jump through some hoops at times. E.g., when I moved states right after school, but didn't rent with a traditional lease or utilities that were in my name, I had to figure out how to jump through the right hoops to get appropriate documents. For most people, this is a big headache at most once or twice in their life, but it is an eminently solvable headache. For identity theft mills, this is a cost that scales poorly and significantly hinders their ability to wreck massive headaches for large swathes of people.

I would also note that when I had the aforementioned headache, the easiest document for me to acquire that would then help me unlock many other documents was voter registration. The baseline level of hoops that we require of people for voting is wayyyy easier than literally any other thing. I could see someone thinking that we should just bump up the registration to being a full "voting-only ID", still with an obscenely low level of hoops to jump through. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, but then we really just get down to haggling about price. What specific hoops would you allow for obtaining a "voting-only ID"? If you let there be even one hoop, someone out there will have a story about how, in their highly-specific situation, this one hoop is actually an annoying headache for them. We will never have anything other than tradeoffs, nothing other than both Type I and Type II errors, and nearly everyone is allergic to actually using numbers to analyze these tradeoffs.

It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones?

When the last of the human resistance makes their Final Stand against the God AI which only has nuclear weapons, they will primarily base their efforts out of data centers. Strangely for the Yuddites, the humans will not think to pull any plugs while they're there.

Money is no object.

Don't listen to the haters saying to travel the world. Go to the moon, my man.

Game theory seems to be an attempt at predicting what is likely to occur. I'm not interested in what is likely to occur at the moment. I'm interested in what we can say at the meta level. So, when you ask, "Should they?" I can interpret this two ways. First would be whether there is some sort of objective "should", and I think you have utterly rejected this possibility. Second would be, and this is what I think you're speaking to in your latest comment, a hypothetical, "If someone wants to achieve End A, then they should ____." That is simply a description of possible means, and others could obviously disagree with you on an estimation of likelihoods of success and such.

If this is the case, then I think that you have agreed without speaking plainly about your agreement. That it is purely power politics and its extension. While there may be lingering questions about optimal means to achieve the goals of power politics, I think you would say that it just is the situation, that there is just power politics, and that there is nothing more to say about the situation. They may shut up and multiply and then pursue their axioms by means of power politics, and there is nothing more to say, except that you don't personally like it and may engage in your own power politics in return. Is this about right as an exposition of your views, or is there something specific that I've actually gotten wrong about your meta view?

Your personal preferences are not in question, so it is of no help to describe your personal preferences again.

Instead, we're talking about people in general, from the outside view. Maybe I shouldn't have used the general "you", so I'll try to correct that here. People in society have different axioms, and there is no objective way to reconcile them. Instead, there is only power politics. And if people in society decide to promote their own preferred code and to promulgate it above others, then they might as well feel like they can just cancel, deplatform, shame, struggle session, brainwash, and intimidate people to be inculcated with their view? That if that isn't producing the desired results, power politics may be continued by other means, in the Clausewitzian sense, all the way to total war and genocide? And there would be nothing else to say about this other than that you don't personally like it? Maybe that you (here, may be actually the specific you) might respond, as a last resort, in your own mind, with power politics or its extension, in the form of watering the Tree of Liberty? Is this about right as an exposition of your views?

And for those who disagree, well the Tree of Liberty isn't going to water itself.

So again, just power politics, all the way to power politics by other means? This seems to be your conclusion, and you seem perfectly happy to use a euphemism for it. Why not simply speak plainly and affirm it directly?

I think Alito is pretty obviously right to make comparisons to print media, though even with that, there's still plenty of tricky. In fact, I think that we really shouldn't even speak the words "social media" or "internet" in this discussion. Instead, from a historical perspective, this really seems like a core freedom of the press issue. That is, for centuries after the printing press was created, governments around the world went to great lengths to control its use. Examples are found in Acemoğlu and Robinson. Private entities or companies would operate a printing press, and regular people could go interact with these operators in sort of a regular way; say, if they wanted to print up a pamphlet to hand out about their views or a newspaper or something, they would go to the printer, submit what they wanted to have printed, pay them however much money, then come back and receive their product after it was printed. Much the same as today, you could say that those private entities had some rights of their own to do business, and they might refuse to print something if they really disagreed with it (they didn't have to bake the cake or make the website; could ban the local Alex Jones, or whatever analogy you want). So what did governments do? They pressured press operators to adopt criteria that the government found favorable. Maybe they'd even issue local monopolies and say that only so-and-so had the right to run a press in a particular area. Of course, the guys they picked always somehow knew what sets of views they needed to have (and which they needed to reject to print) in order to keep their license and continue making bank.

As countries became more liberal democratic, they realized that this was a problem. Some countries kept the monopolies, but passed pretty strict non-discrimination laws, saying that they had to just print whatever the customers wanted; no letting pro-monarchists print their pamphlets and rejecting revolutionary pamphlets. Others, like the US, passed freedom of the press provisions, simply saying that the government needed to stay TF away from press operators; no monopolies, no threats of shutting them down if they don't toe the party like, just leave Britney press operators alone. All of them. Whoever wanted to just buy a press and print.

As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press. It's not an institutional press, like NYT/CBS/whatever. It's literally anybody who waltzes down to their press company and wants to use the press. And I think the underlying motivation, while not putting in words that it's effectively a non-discrimination law, was understood to have a non-discrimination effect. Whether or not there could be enough history here to make a legal determination given our current laws, just from a 'theory of good institutions in the vein of Why Nations Fail', it would be a pretty rough outcome for countries that went down the "freedom of the press" route rather than the non-discrimination route to discover that natural monopolies might arise to make this whole branch of the endeavor ultimately fruitless, if governments could just discreetly threaten the natural monopolists. I just hope we don't have to see a nation or three literally fail from going down this route before we either rekindle the non-discrimination-type theoretical roots of the freedom of the press or we explicitly adopt something that is a standalone non-discrimination provision.

Some additional nice things that this view captures: The third-party business is important and captured here. Old school printing presses were also third parties. It doesn't matter whether the guy who is asking the printer to print the thing is the NYT or Joe from across the street; if the government doesn't have a reason that is compelling enough to overcome 1A speech scrutiny, so that they can go directly to NYT/Joe and directly tell him that he can't say that, then they should be prohibited by 1A press scrutiny from going down the street to the local print shop or the commercial entity that actually does the physical printing for NYT and telling them that they shouldn't print it.

I think this distinction also captures some of the "government need" doctrine, as well. I accept that there are some genuine government needs that can overcome 1A speech scrutiny. For example, they can legitimately tell folks who have security clearances that they're not allowed to just write a book blowing a bunch of classified information. Of course, how is this balanced with things like the Pentagon Papers precedent? Well, in my view, the Pentagon Papers precedent is quite strong - if someone who didn't agree to keep classified information secret gets that classified information, for the most part, the government can't prohibit them from publishing it. There is some obvious danger here, but it's actually not all that far off from the tradeoffs we make in cybersecurity all over the place. If Party A discovers a flaw in Party B's software, even if Party B is a sensitive government function, the sort of accepted solution is that they tell Party B that they'll only have X days to implement a fix, to do what they can to protect some equities, and then they're going public. Yet, at the same time, some flaws are viewed as soooooo potentially damaging, that even Google's vulnerability team has failed to follow through on the threat to go public when the company with the flaw didn't bother repairing it. We basically let that decision be up to the Googles/Party A's.

Similarly, when the Intercept/Guardian got the Snowden files, they met with the NSA. The NSA did try to express the government's perspective on the matter. They asked the journalists to withhold some things from publication, arguing that some of the items were completely noncontroversial, directly within the government's known mission, were of extremely little "news value", and would cause significant damage to national security and/or sources/methods. I'm mostly fine with this, even though there is a lot of conversation here about government discussions being inherently coercive. It is genuinely difficult to draw lines here, and it's hard to come up with a good limit that prevents the Intercept/Guardian from getting the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment.

That said, I think it is infinitely preferable to the option of going to third parties. The Intercept/Guardian definitely have to weigh a lot of things, including the possibility of the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment, but at least they're the ones with skin in the game and the ability to actually weigh them. Whoever it is that prints their physical copies or hosts their website may have some skin in the game, just because it is possible for people to flee to other printers/hosters out of fear of being censored, themselves, but that skin is wayyyyyyy thinner than the actual party who wants to publish the information/opinion that they have.

Of course, this would make it much harder for the government to do what they want to do. There are lots of bozos on twitter spouting bullshit that the government would like to get rid of. If they actually had to go through the bozos rather than twitter, there would be substantial refocusing of efforts towards things that actually matter for national security, not bozos spouting off about their personal beliefs on COVID or whatever.

Ok, great. Wanted to make sure I was understanding you and not strawmanning.

In your elaboration, you observe that you see no reason why anyone couldn't be a moral chauvinist. Do you see any reason why the next conclusion is anything other than that the only thing is power politics? That once one realizes that there is nothing to be done other than power politics to promote their own preferred code and to promulgate it above others, then you might as well just cancel, deplatform, shame, struggle session, brainwash, and intimidate people to be inculcated with your view? That if that isn't producing the desired results, power politics may be continued by other means, in the Clausewitzian sense, all the way to total war and genocide? Simply disposing of those who oppose your chauvinistic views may, indeed, promulgate your views above others.

a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything.

Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.

expected outcomes are really important

Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.

You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.

Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding you correctly. You reject the possibility of objective morality, but I think you might also be rejecting moral error theory. I think this means that you land somewhere in the land of meta-ethical moral relativism. Of course, I think this also rejects the core underpinning of the project of consequentialism/utilitarianism as being an objective basis for morality. Is this about right?

Then, I think the next move in the relativist frame is to say that individuals simply adopt whatever axioms they choose to adopt. So, like, if someone adopted the axiom that Ponzi schemes are good or the axiom that Llama-7b is the best arbiter of their morality or the axiom that if there were a way to give ALL to two-year olds, it would be good to do so... then, that's just totally and completely fine. That's their axiom, and all that can be done is carrying out that axiom with basic and complicated mathematics. Is that about right?

Then, lets suppose that you and someone else have adopted different axioms. They adopted the axiom that it is good to give ALL to two-year olds (if such a thing were technologically possible), while you adopt the axiom that it is bad. Presumably, you would say that they have no objective grounds on which to claim that your axiomatic system is wrong, and likewise, you would have no objective grounds on which to claim that their axiomatic system is wrong. You would both just go about using basic and complicated mathematics to satisfy your respective axioms, you'd both just shut up and multiply, and no other statements can be made about the situation. Is that about right?

See, this is why I sort of don't believe you when you say that we should just shut up and multiply. It doesn't seem like that's really what you think. If it's, "Shut up and multiply, but oh by the way, you definitely can't multiply," then it really means, "Shut up."

What on earth gives you that takeaway? It was never on the menu.

Because you're still saying stuff like:

I clearly stated that morality is fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent and as far as I can tell, there is no good reason to think that's not the case barring wishful thinking.

That does not sound like something I can just multiply to get. If so, you could also just multiply, and we'd get the same thing. Because that's the bit about empiricism. You know, the linked article that you linked.

Whereas, again, this:

You can perform utilitarian calculus

is option 2. That's not "fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent". It's a different option.

If, somehow you're actually an LLM, then you've achieved a working understanding of gestalt human morality simply by being fed an enormous amount of text and then doing multiplication (of matrices). It is obviously doable. A randomly instantiated neural net will predictably achieve it.

And this is a really weird option 3. So, yeah, I think you've again given me all three options. They're going to give me different answers. Which option is the right one? What does an empiricist as anti-epistemologist do with three different empirical answers to the same question?

those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg.

Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?

Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?

Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?

Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?

Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.

A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action.

Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".

Violinist argument

I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.

My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.

You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.

I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.

A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.

You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.

So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.

I see a lot of Science by Obfuscation. It's frustrating, because when I'm asked to review one of these papers, I don't know on the front end whether it's garbage or is genuinely using interesting and esoteric techniques from another area of literature that I'm just not familiar with. The latter is a real possibility that I have to spend a lot of time figuring out. Thankfully, I've only very rarely had to throw up my hands and tell the editors that I personally can't figure out what they're on about, and that maybe someone else would be a better reviewer. Unfortunately, the vast vast majority of my other experience is that once I can cut through their language to figure out what they're actually doing, I realize that it's really just dumb simple under the hood, and usually they don't really have any "contribution" over what has come before.

As far as I'm concerned morality is arbitrary and inherently subjective

See, this is why I sort of don't believe you when you say that we should just shut up and multiply. It doesn't seem like that's really what you think. If it's, "Shut up and multiply, but oh by the way, you definitely can't multiply," then it really means, "Shut up."

Thankfully, consequentialism, especially utilitarianism, can be computed explicitly. Look at GiveWell or the EA movement for a good effort with the latter.

So, do you think this, or do you think that it's arbitrary, inherently subjective, and that we can't multiply?

Ah! I can make it really simple for you, without even getting into first principles:
  1. Find a paper on building the Transformer architecture/RWKV/Mamba or whatever is in vogue these days. I presume NeurIPS will suffice.

  2. Feed it a massive corpus of text. The scrapable internet is a good start.

  3. Stir the pot. (This is where the matrix multiplications come in, for those curious)

  4. Behold, an LLM with an intuitive understanding of morality.

Ok, so I guess now we have a third option. I could, 1) Shut up and multiply, but not multiply because that doesn't work, so just shut up, 2) Adopt consequentialism/utilitarianism and try to fire up a calculator, or 3) Just download some weights, hell, Llama-7b is enough, right? That'll then appropriately and accurately get me to a correct problem of evil?

Which one is the answer, because they're all different answers, and I suspect they'll give me different results. What does an empiricist as anti-epistemologist do with three different empirical answers to the same question?

On the topic of public transit, I recently listened to this podcast on the system in Santiago, Chile. However, the episode is almost twenty years old. It really makes me want to know what has happened since then. Does anybody have an idea of how to find a good source?

I rather like being playfully jocular or humorous. It really makes it plain and clear what's going on. Let me see if I can understand what you're saying. One can just pull some unprincipled definition of what counts as "evil" (or good)... any definition, literally does not matter. Like, your entire moral system could just be, "Ponzi schemes are good, actually," and that's it. That's all you've got. Then, we don't even need the bad old methods of calculation that required quaternions or elliptic curves; we can just add, subtract, and multiply. I'm not actually sure what to do in the next step. Is there another form of Bayes' rule that I can use to make progress? Maybe an inscrutable matrix form of it? I can't find one on Wikipedia. Maybe there's a NeurIPS paper you can link me to?

I'm not opposed to shutting up and multiplying, and I'm pretty good at coding. I just need to know what expression I'm supposed to use in my code. I'm tryna get to some way of commenting on the problem of evil.

This question is, in a strange way, sort of related to my own work that is squarely within my domain of expertise. There is a long history in the literature of a theoretical construct that is sort of related, in a way, to the actual thing we want to know. I observed that there are basically zero, AFAICT, papers out there that actually use the theoretical thing to go on and compute the thing that we actually want to know. It just doesn't seem to be a thing that you can actually do. So decades of papers just get to the point of the theoretical construct, and then stop. There is no actual coding of the thing we actually want - the thing that is actually useful - the thing that was the entire point of the investigation in the first place. It seems to be basically not possible to actually just shut up and compute it. And so the best paper of my career came at the problem from a completely different direction, saying that if we go a different route, we can have the thing that we want, with most of the properties that we were hoping to have. It has spawned a mini-literature of folks building on it now, since they're actually able to shut up and multiply now. So, by all means, let's figure out how to shut up and multiply our way from, "Ponzi schemes are good, actually," to a problem of evil. But it needs to be something that I can code, since that is the premise we're starting with.

Can one shut up and multiply their way to a problem of evil? Can you, like, multiply a quaternion by an elliptic curve, and it somehow pops out in there somewhere?

Maybe inflation just isn't something you can measure definitively?

I think this is pretty much it. The more I've been exposed to the problem, the more I've come around to the idea that measuring inflation is every and always a harder problem than you think. This remains true even after you've updated to thinking that it was harder than you thought before. I listen to a lot of EconTalk, and it comes up there time and time again. Best of Econtwitter just referred to the original Summers statement with, "file under: measuring inflation is always even more complicated than you think." You just have to make an obscene number of choices in the process, and they're kind of always having to deal with new products in an ad hoc way.

I've noticed him weaseling out of his own words, refusing to acknowledge clear evidence disproving his point, and in general engaging in convenient forgetfulness about the dozen times his claims were substantially rebutted.

Straight talk - is this grounds for banning now? ...because you're going to have a lot more work to do. Do you just need people to document it?

I clearly understand more than the basics of your position... I just had to drag it out of you. The only thing left in question is the clarity of your exposition. If you would like to continue having people misunderstand you, that is a problem of your own making. If you'd like to see if there are ways that you can be more clear, I am willing to help. I can also jump in threads in the future and try to head off any misconceptions that other Mottizans might have about your comments. Whatever it takes to help everyone understand each other better.

If the only question left is how clear your early statements were, perhaps we could agree to put it up to a poll? You can even choose some venue other than TheMotte, so that we can get more normie opinions rather than folks who 'make everything way too complicated for their own good'. But especially if we do run the poll at TheMotte, I would suggest we use a different context, just to put a slight barrier in front of people who might recognize the original. Something like:

Suppose Alice is talking to Bob. Alice asks Bob, "Why do you think homosexual sex is wrong?" Bob replies, "Because I do. Having homosexual sex is wrong, especially for fleeting pleasure. My moral intuitions are based upon my upbringing, my experiences, the social forces brought to bear upon me and are largely immune to rational change. I can't think myself into believing that homosexual sex is moral." Alice persists, "But you are asexual and can't really speak to anyone valuing fleeting sexual pleasure; those people think it's fine." Bob responds, "Of course they think it's moral. Everyone thinks their own views are moral. But just because I understand that they think their beliefs are moral does not mean I have to agree they are correct. What is defined as moral is based upon what values they were inculcated with."

Which of the follow do you think best describes Bob's position?

a) There is no sense in which any moral claim about homosexual sex being wrong is "correct" or "incorrect"; there is no way to claim that homosexual sex is "wrong" or "not wrong". There are only different people who have different beliefs based on their own experiences/opinions. It is wrong for Bob to engage in homosexual sex, but it is not wrong for others to engage in homosexual sex, if their experiences/opinions consider it moral.

b) Homosexual sex is wrong, and people who claim that it is not wrong are incorrect in their assertion, even though they choose to define it as moral for themselves based upon the values that they were inculcated with.

Any modifications you would propose?

I don't think I'm making anything too complicated. I'm simply trying to find out if there is any room for rational argumentation on your view of the moral world, where we can say that certain statements have truth value... or whether it's all vibes-based. I think this last comment is by far the most clear embrace of the vibes-based view of the world. Whereas before, it was really hidden in language that seemed to imply other things.

And sure, I understand that you think that everyone else is just purely operating in a vibes-based way, too. That was the essence of what ZRslashRIFLE said, only much more compactly. I get that idea. I just sort of wish you had said that twenty comments ago, at least no later than when I linked to him. And I really hope you won't be so loose with your language in the future.

I'm definitely siding more and more with ZRslashRIFLE that I'm going to have to just interpret your statements in terms of vibes. When you say that something is "correct" or "not correct", you just mean that you like it or don't like it. Not that it's like... "correct" or "not correct" as those words would be used in any other context. When you say that you think murdering people for religious reasons is moral/immoral, you mean, "According to my meta-ethical position, the moral truth of whether murdering people for religious reasons is wrong for me is irrelevant. Instead, I'm only pointing out that I think it would be wrong by THEIR worldview."

I will try to update when reading your comments in the future. I think this new language is going to be wildly difficult to remember.

But if I were to try one last time...

It doesn't matter on what axis "better" means in this context

I really think it does. Because best as I can tell, when you say "X is better", at this point, I guess it just means, "I like X more," and there are no more implications whatsoever. This is especially problematic, because you're using "better" as the sole explanation of "correct/not correct", meaning there are two stages of hidden meaning when you say that something is correct/not correct. The first stage is that you think it is just "better", not really "correct" or "not correct" in the sense of having a truth value. The second stage is that you think "better" is just "I like it". Meaning that when you say, in the future, that something is "correct" or "not correct", I pretty much have to filter it twice to mean "I like it" or "I don't like it". It honestly is no wonder why this theoretical haranguing leads to many of the excesses of wokeism; it really does make it seem like statements that appear at first glance to have truth value are really just expressions of personal feelings/emotions.