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.

(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...)

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.

[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?

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... (read more)

Is it "awesome" to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women?

Is it "awesome" to be the one who gets crushed?

So it seems to me that the positive responses to this post have largely been of the form "hey, this is a useful intuition pump!" and the negative responses to this post have largely been of the form "hey, this is a problematic theory of morality." For what it's worth, my response was in the former camp, so I'd like to say a little more in its defense.

One useful thing that using the word "awesome" instead of the word "moral" accomplishes is that it redefines the search space of moral decisions. The archetypal members of the category "moral decisions" involve decisions like whether to kill, whether to steal, or whether to lie. But using the word "awesome" makes it easier to realize that a much larger class of decisions can be thought of as moral decisions, such as what kind of career to aim for.

Awesome and moral clearly have overlap. How much?

There's a humorous, satirical news story produced by The Onion, where the US Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is "totally badass". And it is, even though badass-ness is not a criteria to decide the death penalty's legality.

Similarly, awesomeness makes me think of vengeance. Though some vengeance is disproportionate with the initial offense, and thus not so awesome, vengeance seems on the whole to have that aura of glorious achievement that you'd find at the climax of an action / adventure film. And yet that doesn't really match my ideas of morality, though maybe I don't feel strongly positively enough for the restoration of justice.

The idea that vengeance is awesome but not moral might be an artifact of looking at it from the victor's side vs target's side. So maybe we should distinguish between awesome experiences and awesome futures / histories / worlds.

But those were just the first distinctions between morality and awesomeness I thought of while reading. I'm probably missing a lot of stuff, since morality and awesomeness are both big, complicated things. They're probably too big to think about all at once in ... (read more)

metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out

Metaethics is about coping with people disagreeing about what is and is not awesome.

It happens after all. Some people think that copying art so that more people can experience it is awesome. Others think that it's so non-awesome that preventing the first group from doing it is awesome. Yet another group is indifferent to copying, but thinks the prevention is so non-awesome that preventing that is awesome. (This was the least mind-killing example I could think of. Please don't derail the discussion arguing it. The point is that there are nontrivial numbers of human beings in all three camps.)

We also observe that the vast majority of humans agree on some questions of awesomeness. Being part of a loving family: awesome! Killing everyone you meet whose height in millimeters is a prime number: not awesome! Maybe this is just an aspect of being human: sharing so much dna and history. Or maybe all these people are independently rediscovering some fundamental truth that no one can quite put their finger on, in much the same way that cultures around the world invented arithmetic long before Peano.

What ca... (read more)

Great! This means that in order to develop an AI with a proper moral foundation, we just need to reduce the following statements of ethical guidance to predicate logic, and we'll be all set:

1. Be excellent to each other.
2. Party on, dudes!

I think "awesome" implies that something is extraordinary. I would hope you'd continue to enjoy parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales, but eventually you'd get used to them unless more awesomeness got added.

Whether everyone and every moment can be awesome-- by their standards, not ours-- is a worthwhile question. Even if the answer is 'no', how close can you get?

I... approve of this for nonexperts and nonAI purposes. This might actually be pretty cool.

"Morality is awesome", as a statement, scans like "consent is sexy" to me. Neither of these statements are true enough to be useful except as signalling or a personal goal ("I would like to find X thing I believe to be moral more awesome, so as to hack my brain to be more moral").

In some cases of assessing morality/awesomeness or consent/sexiness correlation, one would sometimes have to lie about their awesomeness/sexiness preferences, and ignore those preferences in order to be a Perfectly Moral Good Individual who does not Like Evil Things.

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.

Metaethics is about how to decide how to decide if something is awesome.

I upvoted this post because it was clear, interesting, and relatively novel, but I'm concerned that it could tend to lead to what I'm going to call "narrative bias" even though I think that already means something.

Imagine someone who's living a fairly mediocre life. Then, they get attacked - mugged or something. This isn't fun for them, but they acquire a wicked keen scar, lots of support from their friends, and a Nemesis who gives them Purpose in Life. They spend a long time hunting their nemesis, acquiring skills to do so, etc. etc., and eve... (read more)

This may be a minor nit, but... is this forum collectively anti-orgasmium, now?

Because being orgasmium is by definition more pleasant than not being orgasmium. Refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, full stop.[1] (Well, that's not actually true, since as a human you can make other people happier, and as orgasmium you presumably cannot. But it is at least on average a mistake to refuse to become orgasmium; I would argue that it is virtually always a mistake.)

[1] We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?