You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover.
I wish! Both metaethics and normative ethics are still mysterious and confusing to me (despite having read Eliezer's sequence). Here's a sample of problems I'm faced with, none of which seem to be helped by replacing the word "right" with "awesome": 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. I'm concerned this post might make a lot of people feel more clarity than they actually possess, and more importantly and unfortunately from my perspective, less inclined to look into the problems that continue to puzzle me.
I'd just like to say that although I don't have anything to add, there are all excellent questions and I don't think people are considering questions like these enough. (Didn't feel like an upvote was sufficient endorsement for everything in that comment!)
(Imagines going to the Cambridge Center for the Study of Awesome, located overlooking a gorgeous flowering canyon, inside a giant, dark castle in a remote area which you can only reach by piloting a mechanical T-Rex with rockets strapped to it. Inside, scientists with floor-length black leather lab coats are examining...)
I don't think that follows.
Rocket-boosted mechanical T-Rexes are possible; therefore, they are as "merely real" as anything else. The point of making life awesome is seeing the entire world as one vast game of Calvinball.
Think of the rocket-boosted mechanical T-Rex as a metaphor for indulging your inner child; you can replace it with anything you could imagine doing on a lark with infinite resources. The point of living in a Universe of Awesome is that you can wake up and say "dude, you know what would be awesome? A frikin metal T-Rex with rockets boosters!" And then you and your best friend spend 15 seconds air-guitaring before firing up the Maker and chunking out the parts and tools, then putting it together and flying it around. And then one of you turns to the other and says, "okay, that was awesome for like, five minutes. Now what?"
I'm thinking of it more like Minecraft in real life. I want a castle with a secret staircase because it would be awesome. What I did was spend a day of awesomeness building it myself instead of downloading it and only having five minutes of awesomeness.
right, hence the phrases "chunking out the parts and tools" and "putting it together".
I find woodworking and carpentry fun. However, I buy my lumber at Home Depot, rather than hiking out to the woods and felling trees myself, then painstakingly hewing and sanding them into planks.
Part of making the world more awesome is automating things enough that when you have an insanely awesome idea for a project, your starting point is fun rather than tedious. Since this is different for different people, the best solution is to have a system that can do it all for you, but that lets you do as much for yourself as you want.
Don't underestimate the importance of keeping a relatively constant temperature, also. Even simple dishes on an uneven flame require enormous attention to avoid burning.
Morality needs a concept of awfulness as well as awesomeness. In the depths of hell, good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.
In the depths of hell, good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.
Gloomiest sentence of 2013 so far. Upvoted.
I think that 'awesome' loses a lot of value when you are forced to make the statement "Watching lot of people die was the most awesome choice I had, because any intervention would have added victims without saving anyone."
I propose 'lame' and 'bummer' as antonyms for 'awesome'. Instead of trying to figure out the most awesome of a series of bad options, we can discuss the least lame.
[META] Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?
It was just hacked out in a couple of hours to organize my thoughts for the meetup. It has little justification for anything, very little coherent overarching structure, and it's not even really serious. It's only 90% true, with many bugs. Very much a worse-is-better sort of post.
Now it's promoted with 50-something upvotes. I notice that I would not predict this, and feel the need to update.
What should I (we) learn from this?
Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
Are people just really interested in morality, or re-framing of problems, or well-linked integration posts?
Because you make few assertions of substance, there is a lot of empty space (where people, depending on their mood, may insert either unrealistically charitable or unrealistically uncharitable reconstructions of reasoning) and not a lot of specific content for anyone to disagree with. In contrast, if I make 10 very concrete and substantive suggestions in a post, and most people like 9 of them but hate the 10th, that could make them very reluctant to upvote the post as a whole, lest their vote be taken as a blanket endorsement for every claim.
Because the post is vague and humorous, people leave it feeling vaguely happy and not in a mood to pick it apart. Expressing this vague happiness as an upvote reifies it and makes it more intense. People like 'liking' things they like.
The post is actually useful, as a way of popularizing some deeper and more substantive meta-ethical and practical points. Some LessWrongers may be tired of endlessly arguing over which theory is most ideal, and instead hunger for better popularizations and summaries of the extant philosophical progress we've already made, so that we can start peddling those views to the masses. They may view your post as an i
Given at least moderate quality, upvotes correlate much more tightly with accessibility / scope of audience than quality of writing. Remember, the article score isn't an average of hundreds of scalar ratings -- it's the sum of thousands of ratings of [-1, 0, +1] -- and the default rating of anyone who doesn't see, doesn't care about, or doesn't understand the thrust of a post is 0. If you get a high score, that says more about how many people bothered to process your post than about how many people thought it was the best post ever.
As one of the upvoters, here is my thought process, as far as I recall it:
WTF?!! What does it even mean?
Wait, this kind of makes sense intuitively.
Hey, every example I can try actually works. I wonder why.
OK, so the OP suggests awesomeness as an overriding single intuitive terminal value. What does he mean by "intuitive"?
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack "awesome" eventually fails on some example, while the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn't.
He must be onto something.
Oh, and his approach is clearly awesome, so the post is self-consistent.
Gotta upvote!
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack "awesome" eventually fails on some example, why the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn't.
Totally. Hence the link to fake utility functions. I could have made this clearer; you're not really supposed to unpack it, just use it as a rough pointer to your built-in moral intuitions. "oh that's all there is to it".
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
Don't worry. I basically just went over this post, then went over "joy in the merely good". We also discussed a bit, but the shield against useless philosophy provided by using "awesome" instead of "good" only lasted so long...
That said, it would have been nice to have you and your ideas there.
I have typically been awful at predicting which parts of HPMOR people would most enjoy. I suggest relaxing and enjoying the hedons.
Karma votes on this site are fickle, superficial, and reward percieved humour and wit much more than they do hard work and local unconventionality; you're allowed to be unconventional to the world-at-large, even encouraged to, if it's conventional in LW; the reverse is not encouraged.
Your work was both novel and completely in line with what is popular here, and so it thrived. Try to present a novel perspective arguing against things that are unanymously liked yet culture-specific, such as sex or alcohol or sarcasm or Twitter or market economies as automatic optimizers, and you might not fare as well.
You can pick up on those trends by following the Twitter accounts of notable LWers, watch them pat each other on the back for expressing beliefs that signal their belonging to the tribe, and mimick them for easy karma, which you can stock reserves of for the times where you feel absolutely compelled to take a stand for an unpopular idea.
This problem is endemic of Karma systems and makes LW no worse than any other community. It's just that one would expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard.
Awesome post, BTW. Nice brain-hacking.
My impression of this post (which may not be evident from my comments) went something like this:
1) Hah. That's a really funny opening.
2) Oh, this is really interesting and potentially useful, AND really funny, which is a really good combination for articles one the internet.
3) How would I apply this idea to my life?
4) think about it a bit, and read some comments, think some more
5) Wait a second, this idea actually isn't nearly as useful as it seemed at first.
5a) To the extent that it's true, it's only the first thesis statement of a lengthy examination of the actual issue
5b) The rest of the sequence this would need to herald to be truly useful is not guaranteed to be nearly as fun
5c) Upon reflection, while "awesome" does capture elements of "good" that would be obscured by "good's" baggage, "awesome" also fails to capture some of the intended value.
5d) This post is still useful, but not nearly as useful as my initial positive reaction indicates
5e) I am now dramatically more interested in the subject of how interesting this post seemed vs how interesting it actually was and what this says about the internet and people and ideas, then about the content of the article.
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
I DUNT KNOW LETS TRY
It's not necessarily that a highly upvoted post is deemed better on average, each individual still only casts one vote. The trichotomy of "downvote / no vote / upvote" doesn't provide nuanced feedback, and while you'd think it all equals out with a large number of votes, that's not so because of a) modifying visibility by means secondary to the content of the post, b) capturing readers' interest early to get them to vote in the first place and c) various distributions of opinions about your post all projecting onto potentially the same voting score (e.g. strong likes + strong dislikes equalling the score of general indifference), all three of which can occur independently of the post's real content.
The visibility was increased with the promotion of your post. While you did need initial upvotes to support that promotion, once achieved there's no stopping the chain reaction: People want to check out that highly rated top post, they expect to see good content and often automatically steelman / gloss over your we...
Whether to use "awesome" instead of "virtuous" is the question, not the answer. This is the question asked by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. If you've gotten to the point where you're set on using "awesome" instead of "good", you've already chosen your answer to most of the difficult questions.
The challenge to awesome theory is the same one it has been for 70 years: Posit a world in which Hitler conquered the world instead of shooting himself in his bunker. Explain how that Hitler was not awesome. Don't look at his outcomes and conclude they were not awesome because lots of innocent people died. Awesome doesn't care how many innocent people died. They were not awesome. They were pathetic, which is the opposite of awesome. Awesome means you build a space program to send a rocket to the moon instead of feeding the hungry. Awesome history is the stuff that happened that people will actually watch on the History Channel. Which is Hitler, Napoleon, and the Apollo program.
If you don't think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfu...
I sometimes get the impression that I am the only person who reads MoR who actually thinks MoR!Hermione is more awesome than MoR!Quirrell. Of course I have access to at least some info others don't, but still...
Quirrell scans, to me, as more awesome along the "probably knows far more Secret Eldrich Lore than you" and "stereotype of a winner" axes, until I remember that Hermione is, canonically, also both of those things. (Eldrich Lore is something one can know, so she knows it. And she's more academically successful than anyone I've ever known in real life.)
So when I look more closely, the thing my brain is valuing is a script it follows where Hermione is both obviously unskillful about standard human things (feminism, kissing boys, Science Monogamy) and obviously cares about morality, to a degree that my brain thinks counts as weakness. When I pay attention, Quirrell is unskillful about tons of things as well, but he doesn't visibly acknowledge that he is/has been unskillful. He also may or may not care about ethics to a degree, but his Questionably Moral Snazzy Bad Guy archetype doesn't let him show this.
It does come around to Quirrell being more my stereotype of a winner, in a sense. Quirrell is more high-status than Hermione - when he does things that are cruel, wrong or stupid he hides it or recontextualizes it into something snazzy - but Hermione is more honorable than Quirrell. She confronts her mistakes and failings publicly, messily and head-on and grows as a person because of that. I think that's really awesome.
Well, to a first approximation, on a moral level, Quirrell is who I try not to be and Hermione is who I wish I was, and on the level of intelligence, it's not possible for me to be viscerally impressed with either one's intellect since I strictly contain both. Ergo I find Hermione's choices more impressive than Quirrell's choices.
Quirrel strikes me as the sort of character who is intended to be impressive. Pretty much all his charactaristics hit my "badass" buttons. The martial arts skills, the powerful magical field brushing at the edges of Harry's little one, etc. However, I wouldn't want to be like Quirrel, and I can't imagine being Quirrel-like and still at all like myself. Whereas Hermione impresses me in the sense of being almost like a version of myself that gets everything I try to be right and is better than me at everything I think matters. Hermione is more admirable to me than Quirrel, but my sense of awe is triggered more by badass-ness than admiration.
(This is a semi-serious introduction to the metaethics sequence. You may find it useful, but don't take it too seriously.)
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into a whale. Is this awesome?
"Maybe? I guess it would be pretty cool to be a whale for a day. But only if I can turn back, and if I stay human inside and so on. Also, that's not a whale.
"Actually, a whale seems kind of specific, and I'd be suprised if that was the best thing the wizard can do. Can I have something else? Eternal happiness maybe?"
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into orgasmium, doomed to spend the rest of eternity experiencing pure happiness. Is this awesome?
...
"Kindof... That's pretty lame actually. On second thought I'd rather be the whale; at least that way I could explore the ocean for a while.
"Let's try again. Wizard: maximize awesomeness."
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned himself into a superintelligent god, and is squeezing as much awesomeness out of the universe as it could possibly support. This may include whales and starships and parties and jupiter brains and friendship, but only if they are awesome enough. Is this awesome?
...
"Well, yes, that is awesome."
What we just did there is called Applied Ethics. Applied ethics is about what is awesome and what is not. Parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales are awesome. ~666 children dying of hunger every hour is not.
(There is also normative ethics, which is about how to decide if something is awesome, and metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out. I'll tell you right now that those terms are not on the exam.)
"Wait a minute!" you cry, "What is this awesomeness stuff? I thought ethics was about what is good and right."
I'm glad you asked. I think "awesomeness" is what we should be talking about when we talk about morality. Why do I think this?
"Awesome" is not a philosophical landmine. If someone encounters the word "right", all sorts of bad philosophy and connotations send them spinning off into the void. "Awesome", on the other hand, has no philosophical respectability, hence no philosophical baggage.
"Awesome" is vague enough to capture all your moral intuition by the well-known mechanisms behind fake utility functions, and meaningless enough that this is no problem. If you think "happiness" is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.
If you do manage to actually implement "awesomeness" as a maximization criteria, the results will be actually good. That is, "awesome" already refers to the same things "good" is supposed to refer to.
"Awesome" does not refer to anything else. You think you can just redefine words, but you can't, and this causes all sorts of trouble for people who overload "happiness", "utility", etc.
You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover. Instead it brings to mind concrete things like starship-whale math-parties and not-starving children, which is what we want anyways. You are already enabled to take joy in the merely awesome.
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist. "Is this awesome?" engages you to think of the value of a possible world, as opposed to "Is this right?" which engages to to think of virtues and rules. (Those things can be awesome sometimes, though.)
I find that the above is true about me, and is nearly all I need to know about morality. It handily inoculates against the usual confusions, and sets me in the right direction to make my life and the world more awesome. It may work for you too.
I would append the additional facts that if you wrote it out, the dynamic procedure to compute awesomeness would be hellishly complex, and that right now, it is only implicitly encoded in human brains, and no where else. Also, if the great procedure to compute awesomeness is not preserved, the future will not be awesome. Period.
Also, it's important to note that what you think of as awesome can be changed by considering things from different angles and being exposed to different arguments. That is, the procedure to compute awesomeness is dynamic and created already in motion.
If we still insist on being confused, or if we're just curious, or if we need to actually build a wizard to turn the universe into an awesome place (though we can leave that to the experts), then we can see the metaethics sequence for the full argument, details, and finer points. I think the best post (and the one to read if only one) is joy in the merely good.