DPiepgrass

Karma: 1,054

I’m a senior software developer in Canada (earning ~US$70K in a good year) who, being late to the EA party, earns to give. Historically I’ve have a chronic lack of interest in making money; instead I’ve developed an unhealthy interest in foundational software that free markets don’t build because their effects would consist almost entirely of positive externalities.

I dream of making the world better by improving programming languages and developer tools, but AFAIK no funding is available for this kind of work outside academia. My open-source projects can be seen at loyc.net, core.loyc.net, ungglish.loyc.net and ecsharp.net (among others).

DPiepgrass Dec 23, 2023, 2:04 PM
29 points
10 ∶ 2
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I was one of those who criticized Kat’s response pretty heavily, but I really appreciated TracingWoodgrains’ analysis and it did shift my perspective. I was operating from an assumption that Ben & Hab were using an appropriate truthseeking process, because why wouldn’t they? But now I have the sense that they didn’t respond to counterevidence from Spencer G (and others), and the promise of counterevidence from Nonlinear, appropriately. So now I’m confused enough to agree with TW’s conclusion: mistrial!
(edit: mind you, as my older comments suggest, in the end I won’t end up thinking Kat did nothing wrong at all. This post raises doubts about Ben’s approach to the case, though, due to which it’s hard to tell out how bad or not bad the conduct was.)

DPiepgrass Dec 23, 2023, 1:33 PM
20 points
6 ∶ 2
on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
TW, I want to thank you for putting this together, for looking at the evidence more closely than I did, for reminding me that Ben’s article violated my own standards of truthseeking, and for highlighting some of Kat’s evidence in more effective ways than Kat herself did. (of course, it also helps that you’re an outside observer.)
I hadn’t read some of those comments under Ben’s article (e.g. by Spencer G) until now. I am certain that if I personally had received evidence that I was potentially quite wrong about details of an important article I’d just published (or was about to publish), I’d be very concerned about that. I would start investigating and making changes immediately, I’d be embarrassed, and I’d be potentially very apologetic insofar as I was wrong ― but Ben ~~and Hab~~ wasn’t, and I don’t know why. So, I was persuaded to switch my vote from up to down on Ben’s article.
Now, Ben indicated that there were “many” other anonymous sources for the “Nonlinear is bad” vibe, but… well, he was unaware of the existence of more than half of NL’s staff. So I’d like to stop putting weight on these mysterious additional sources unless I find out more about who they were and what they had to say. A mistrial! Yes, let’s declare a mistrial.

DPiepgrass Dec 23, 2023, 12:18 PM
9 points
7 ∶ 5
in reply to: David Seiler’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
This “unambiguous” contradiction seems overly pedantic to me. Surely Kat didn’t expect Ben would receive her evidence and do nothing with it? So when Kat asked for time to “gather and share the evidence”, she expected Ben, as a reasonable person, would change the article in response, so it wouldn’t be “published as is”.

DPiepgrass Dec 17, 2023, 8:35 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What is the current most representative EA AI x-risk argument?
Opinions on this are pretty diverse. I largely agree with the bulleted list of things-you-think, and this article paints a picture of my current thinking.
My threat model is something like: the very first AGIs will probably be near human-level and won’t be too hard to limit/control. But in human society, tyrants are overrepresented among world leaders, relative to tyrants in the population of people smart enough to lead a country. We’ll probably end up inventing multiple versions of AGI, some of which may be straightforwardly turned into superintelligences and others not. The worst superintelligence we help to invent may win, and if it doesn’t it’ll probably be because a different one beats it (or reaches an unbeatable position first). Humans will probably be sidelined if we survive a battle between super-AGIs. So it would be much safer not to invent them―but it’s also hard to avoid inventing them! I have low confidence in my P(catastrophe) and I’m unsure how to increase my confidence.
But I prefer estimating P(catastrophe) over P(doom) because extinction is not all that concerns me. Some stories about AGI lead to extinction, others to mass death, others to dystopia (possibly followed by mass death later), others to utopia followed by catastrophe, and still others to a stable and wonderful utopia (with humanity probably sidelined eventually, which may even be a good thing). I think I could construct a story along any of these lines.

DPiepgrass Dec 16, 2023, 10:59 AM
74 points
18 ∶ 2
on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I strongly agree with the end of your post:
Remember:
Almost nobody is evil.
Almost everything is broken.
Almost everything is fixable.
I want you to know that I don’t think you’re a villain, and that your pain makes me sad. I wrote some comments that were critical of your responses … and still I stand by those comments. I dislike and disapprove the approach you took. But I also know that you’re hurting, and that makes me sad.
So… I’d like you to dwell on that for a minute.
I wrote something in an edited paragraph deep within a subthread, and thought I should raise the point more directly. My sense is that you and Emerson have some characteristics or habits that I would call flawed or bad, and that it was justified to publicly write something about that.
But I also have a sense that Ben’s post contains errors.
I think you are EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that. And I respect the (unknown to me but probably large) funds you’ve put into trying to do good. Because of that, I think Ben & co should’ve spent more time to get Ben’s initial post right.
And I guess I’m sad about this situation because I feel that both Ben’s post and your post were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary. I like to imagine a softer version of Ben’s post, and a softer version of your response, in which Ben basically says “I’ve spoken to a bunch of people who disapprove of the way Kat & Emerson handle A, B, C, and D, and two people I’m calling Alice and Chloe were hurt by factors A, B, C and E”.… and you end up saying “after a lot of soul-searching we’ve decided to apologize about A and B and handle those differently in the future, but we still contend that E was an inaccurate characterization, and we stand by C and D because reasons, and we accept that some people won’t like that.”
Do you think an alternate timeline like that was possible?

DPiepgrass Dec 16, 2023, 8:13 AM
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Exaggeration is fun, but not what this situation calls for. So for me, the only reason I didn’t upvote you was the word “deranged”. Naivety? Everybody’s got some, but I think EAs tend to be below average in that respect.

DPiepgrass Dec 16, 2023, 7:37 AM
2 points
4 ∶ 4
in reply to: TracingWoodgrains’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I think you’ve both raised good points. Way upthread @Habryka said “I don’t see a super principled argument for giving two weeks instead of one week”, but if I were unfairly accused I’d certainly want a full two weeks! So Kat’s request for a full week to gather evidence seems reasonable [ed: under the principle of due process], and I don’t see what sort of opportunities would’ve existed for retribution from K&E in the two-week case that didn’t exist in the one-week case.
However, when I read Ben’s post (like TW, I did this “fresh” about two days ago; I didn’t see Ben’s post until Kat’s post was up) it sounds like there was more evidence behind it than he specifically detailed (e.g. “I talked to many people who interacted with Emerson and Kat who had many active ethical concerns about them and strongly negative opinions”). Given this, plus concerning aspects of Kat’s response, I think Ben’s post is probably broadly accurate―perhaps overbiased against NL based on the evidence I’ve seen, but perhaps that’s compensated by evidence I haven’t seen, that was only alluded to.
(Edit: but it also seems like the wording of Ben’s piece would’ve softened if they’d waited a bit longer, so… basically I lean more toward TW’s position. But also, I don’t expect the wording to have softened that much. This is all so damn nuanced! Also, I actually think even a partial softening of Ben’s post would’ve been important and might have materially changed Kat’s response and increased community cohesion. K&E likely have personality flaws, but are also likely EAs and rationalists at heart. I respect that, and I respect the apparently substantial funds they put into trying to do good, and so it seems like it would’ve been worth spending more time to get Ben’s initial post right. I’m sad about this situation, I guess because I feel that both Ben and Kat’s posts were worded in somewhat unfair ways, and I’m unconvinced that quite so much acrimony was necessary.)

DPiepgrass Dec 16, 2023, 6:42 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Muireall’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
That may be, but they valued their community connections and the pay-related disputes suggest that their funding was limited.

DPiepgrass Dec 16, 2023, 5:17 AM
6 points
6 ∶ 5
in reply to: Daystar Eld’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
What, exactly, do you expect NL to say to clarify that distinction
I expect them to say “advised”. This isn’t Twitter, and even on Twitter I myself use direct quotes as much as possible despite the increased length, for accuracy’s sake. Much of this situation was “(s)he said / she said” where a lot of the claims were about events that were never recorded. So how do we make judgements, then? Partly we rely on the reputations of everyone involved―but in the beginning Kat and Ben had good reputations while (after Ben’s post) Alice & Chloe were anonymous, with only Chloe appearing to have a good reputation. So what then? Well, the community verifies what it can. The miswordings were verifiable.
It reminds me of a weird final exam I once took, which was worth something like ²⁄₃ of my total grade and had 10 questions. 9 were about material that wasn’t taught in the class at all! So I answered about 1.3 of the 10, and… got a B+ in the course! How?? Presumably the instructors realized they made a mistake afterward and couldn’t just fail everyone, so they graded people based on that one question and a few quizzes.
That’s kind of like this. When much of the story is invisible to us, we judge based on what’s visible. How can we do otherwise? So Kat could’ve taken advantage of that by posting an impeccable defense that functionally countered the original narrative. They suggested K&E lacked honesty? Well, Kat could demonstrate perfect honesty in all verifiable respects. They suggested K&E were retributive? Kat could’ve conveyed a strong sense of kindness. The fact that she didn’t do these things reads as her “real” personality showing. “A leopard can’t change its spots.”
but boy am I confused by your issue with my summarizing that paragraph with that quote
Sorry, it’s just that in the past I’ve talked to lots of climate dismissives and I’ve become sensitive to their many tactics even in unrelated situations. One of them is misquoting.

DPiepgrass Dec 15, 2023, 6:57 PM
11 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Hmm, well Ben said “(for me) a 100-200 hour investigation” in the first post, then said he spent “~320 hours” in the second. Maybe people thought you should’ve addressed that discrepancy?️ Edit: the alternative―some don’t like your broader stance and are clicking disagree on everything. Speaking of which, I wonder if you updated based on Spencer’s points?

DPiepgrass Dec 15, 2023, 6:18 PM
8 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
because of how chilling it is for everyone else to know they could be on blast if they try to do anything.
In part based on Ben’s followup (which indicated a high level of care) and based on concerning aspects of this post discussed in other comments here, I’m persuaded that Ben’s original post was sufficiently fair (if one keeps in mind the disclaimer that the post was “not from a search to give a balanced picture”), and that most EA orgs don’t need to be afraid of unusual social arrangements as long as they’re written down and expectations are made clear.
(Edit: the discussion between spencerg and Habryka makes me think Ben’s writeup not only could have, but should have, been worded more carefully. Still, I agree with the above paragraph.)

DPiepgrass Dec 15, 2023, 4:54 PM
50 points
12 ∶ 2
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I still find Chloe’s broad perspective credible and concerning [...] it’s begging the question to self-describe your group with “Your group has a really optimistic and warm vibe. [...]” some of the short-summary replies to Chloe seemed uncharitable to the point of being mean. [...] I thought it’s simply implausible that the most Nonlinear leadership could come up with in terms of “things we could’ve done differently” is stuff like “Emerson shouldn’t have snapped at Chloe during that one stressful day” [...] Even though many the things in my elaboration of “(2)” are negative about Nonlinear, I want to emphasize again that this post made me update positively about them [...]
I just noticed that Kat posted the following on Facebook Dec 13 @11:34 PST (after older thoughtful messages such as this one, and the ones from Yarrow, David Mathers, OllieBase, etc). It seems like Kat disregarded the community’s concerns and doubled down on her original PR strategy (including painting Alice and Chloe with the same brush):
𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*
Two mentally unwell ex-employees told dozens of falsehoods about us, but even in the darkest times, I told myself to trust that EAs/rationalists would update when they saw the evidence, and now I feel justified in that trust.
Turns out that 200+ pages of evidence showing that their accusations were false or misleading is enough for most people
It was very painful being #27 and #28 people that Alice has accused of persecuting/oppressing her, but today’s been a relief. 75% was our best case scenario, because we believed that ~30% of EAs would never update, since they follow “believe all people-claiming-to-be-victims” epistemics.
Our remaining critics have been largely silent on the evidence and mostly just criticize our ‘tone’ or stylistic choices, which is usually how you know you’ve won an argument.
I neither upvoted nor downvoted, so I’m a bit miffed at “75%” as a metric of support. Edit: I see some aren’t shy about downvoting though. Looks like Kat unfriended me on Facebook around the same time as this downvote. I think this is unfortunate, because I still think Kat is an EA at heart and that she could improve as a person by handling this situation differently.

DPiepgrass Dec 15, 2023, 3:47 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: vipulnaik’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
Yes, when I saw that, I had to wonder whether the payment was offered afterward (as a gift) or in advance (possibly in exchange for information).

DPiepgrass Dec 15, 2023, 2:07 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: Olli’s comment on: Announcing Nonlinear Emergency Funding
I disagree because (i) the forum is my main link to the EA community, and (ii) the SBF scandal suggests that it’s better if negative info gets around more easily… though of course we should also be mindful of the harms of gossip.

DPiepgrass Dec 15, 2023, 12:10 AM
37 points
14 ∶ 6
in reply to: Daystar Eld’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I feel like this response ignores my central points ― my sense that Kat misrepresented/strawmanned the positions of Chloe/Alice/Ben and overall didn’t respond appropriately. These points would still be relevant even in a hypothetical disagreement where there was no financial relationship between the parties.
I agree that Ben leaves an impression that abuse took place. I am unsure on that point; it could have been mainly a “clash of personalities” rather than “abuse”. Regardless, I am persuaded (partly based on this post) that Kat & Emerson have personalities that are less honest, kind and self-reflective than typical EAs, so that probably few EAs would be happy working for Nonlinear as “part of the family”. But to judge properly, I think I’d have to hear what other remote/former employees think about NL.
what it said was “These people are predators who chew up and spit out bright eyed altruists.”
I think there should be a norm against treating paraphrases as quotes. What it said was “I expect that if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world. I relatedly think that the EA ecosystem doesn’t have reliable defenses against such predators.”

DPiepgrass Dec 13, 2023, 5:12 PM
−1 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: What do we really know about growth in LMICs? (Part 1: sectoral transformation)
Ugh, yes of course if you got richer you got the money from somewhere. If you thought I thought otherwise, you were mistaken. (Of course it could’ve just been printed by the government, but that will cause inflation if not balanced by some kind of in-country value creation or spending reduction.) (Edit: also, Google tells me “Mercantilism was based on the principle that the world’s wealth was static” and I do not have any such “mercantilist intuition”.)

DPiepgrass Dec 13, 2023, 4:43 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: What do we really know about growth in LMICs? (Part 1: sectoral transformation)
One way to think about services vs manufacturing: suppose you’re very poor and you suddenly earn more money. How do you spend this limited new resource? Certainly you spend some of it on stuff: furniture, a better phone, electricity. If a country lacks manufacturing or exports, the money you spend on stuff leaves the country with no balancing inflow. And when you buy services, the person from whom you bought the services also buys stuff. So if people get richer at scale, the country as a whole tends to bleed that money back out. You can export services somewhat (customer service, or software development if your country has enough education) but you’ll be competing with the likes of India and GPT4/AIs.
If you can manufacture stuff locally, more money stays in-country, and if the manufacturing sector grows large enough, it can become efficient, which allows exports. And my intuition says that limited, targeted protectionism (tariffs) would be beneficial, or even required, to nurture whatever local industries are developing.

DPiepgrass Dec 13, 2023, 4:21 PM
2 points
1 ∶ 2
on: What do we really know about growth in LMICs? (Part 1: sectoral transformation)
An intervention that’s on my mind is leveraging the sheer intelligence of some EAs to build a factory design company that is focused on building tools and processes for manufacturing. Might it be possible, for example, to build machines that can be used to help construct a wide variety of products? Could we invent the industrial equivalent of FoldScope (the paper microscope that makes medical diagnosis affordable) for small-scale manufacturing, build the machines at scale in an LMIC, and sell them around the world at cost? Or, could there be something like this for mining on small ore deposits that the big players don’t touch?

DPiepgrass Dec 13, 2023, 7:24 AM
155 points
44 ∶ 7
in reply to: Yarrow🔸’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I agree with this. I think overall I get a sense that Kat responded in just the sort of manner that Alice and Chloe feared*, and that the flavor of treatment that Alice and Chloe (as told by Ben) said they experienced from Kat/Emerson seems to be on display here. (* Edit: I mean, Kat could’ve done worse, but it wouldn’t help her/Nonlinear.)
I also feel like Kat is misrepresenting Ben’s article? For example, Kat says
Chloe claimed: they tricked me by refusing to write down my compensation agreement
I just read that article and don’t remember any statement to that affect, and searching for individual words in this sentence didn’t lead me to a similar sentence in Ben’s article on in Chloe’s followup. I think the closest thing is this part:
Chloe’s salary was verbally agreed to come out to around $75k/year. However, she was only paid $1k/month, and otherwise had many basic things compensated i.e. rent, groceries, travel. This was supposed to make traveling together easier, and supposed to come out to the same salary level. While Emerson did compensate Alice and Chloe with food and board and travel, Chloe does not believe that she was compensated to an amount equivalent to the salary discussed, and I believe no accounting was done for either Alice or Chloe to ensure that any salary matched up. (I’ve done some spot-checks of the costs of their AirBnbs and travel, and Alice/Chloe’s epistemic state seems pretty reasonable to me.)
I, too, was mentally tallying up benefits. Plane tickets, hotel fees and other perks might be that costly, but the business required her to travel so it seems like we shouldn’t treat it dollar-for-dollar like normal compensation.
More importantly I feel like there’s misdirection. Chloe’s claim was that a verbal agreement existed and wasn’t fully upheld; Kat rewrites this into a different claim, then labels it “False.”
No, you don’t get to do this. When your reputation is on the line and you’re being scrutinized, I expect you to be on your best behavior.
- Ben’s article draws a sharp distinction between the reputations of Alice and Chloe, but Kat’s article lumps them together as “Alice/Chloe” 27 times (tbf, Ben also groups them about 19 times, but Kat’s lumping seems less appropriate to me, on average)
- Kat says there were 21 Nonlinear employees but Ben refers to “their two in-person employees” as if there are only two plus Kat, Emerson and Drew. I assume the difference is made up by remote and former employees. But if Alice and Chloe were the only two in-person employees and had no relation to each other, Kat’s implication that they both lied or (in Chloe’s case) gave misleading accounts would be surprising if true.
Kat, if you’re reading this―I think you mean well, and my charitable reading is that (1) you are a proper EA at heart, (2) you have social skills but also some bad social habits, and (3) you wrote this from an emotional place that compromised your objectivity, which caused you to choose a highly defensive PR strategy in which you exaggerated the positions of Ben/Alice/Chloe in order to make them sound less reasonable. (Edit: or rather, to make their positions easier to refute. And let’s keep in mind that Ben did a “search for negative information” and did not build a “balanced case”.)
I might let that slide if it was just one employee who had a bad experience at every previous job, but there were two, plus Ben’s judgement and “many” anonymous sources. Plus, I agree with Ben that the policy “I don’t say bad things about you, you don’t say bad things about me” is not a good policy; “I speak charitably of you, you speak charitably of me” is the most I think one could reasonably ask for. So what you needed to do was reflect upon what mistakes you and Emerson made, and what you can do to begin to repair your reputations (e.g. recognize faults and apologize), and then do that. I wonder if you’re so convinced of your own innocence that you can’t see that the red flags that were discussed were actually red....
Kat reworded every claim made by Alice/Chloe/Ben, so I checked a few more:
- Kat says “Alice/Chloe claimed Nonlinear failed to pay them. Later, they denied ever claiming this.” Now I’m really confused, like, did Ben publish more than one article? The one I read didn’t make it sound like that. It did indicate that Alice may have communicated poorly or deceptively (“catastrophic miscommunications”, Kat reportedly said), but I can’t find any claim from Chloe about not being paid.
- Kat said “Chloe claimed: they told me not to spend time with my romantic partner”. It does seem a bit odd that Ben’s article doesn’t mention Chloe’s romantic partner being there for two months, since it does say “Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited.” But since this part is a combination of what Alice and Chloe said, it’s not strictly accurate to say “Chloe claimed she was advised not to spend time with her romantic partner”, or to say “told” (which sounds like an order) rather than “advised”.
- Kat said that Chloe said “I felt like they didn’t value me or my time”. I can’t find any statement to that effect in Ben’s article or Chloe’s big comment, but it did remind me of something: “Alice reported that she would get these compliments near-daily. She eventually had the sense that this was said in order to get something out of her. She reported that one time, after a series of such compliments, the Kat Woods then turned and recorded a near-identical series of compliments into their phone for a different person.” Kat’s response was basically that Nonlinear was generous and that “Kat showed so much gratitude that Chloe actually asked her to stop expressing gratitude”. But after what Alice said, I feel like Kat may have missed the point of whatever the paraphrase “they didn’t value me” was intended to refer to.
- Kat said that Alice said that “Kat threatened my career for telling the truth”. There is a similar clause in Ben’s article, but it comes across differently: “Kat Woods’ texts that read to me [Ben] as a veiled threat to destroy someone’s career for sharing negative information about her.”
- Kat refers to “Ben’s hypothesis − 2 EAs are Secretly Evil”. I don’t think that’s accurate (edit: but Kat likely does see it this way.)
What links here?
- DPiepgrass's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (Dec 23, 2023, 2:04 PM; 29 points)

DPiepgrass Sep 19, 2023, 8:36 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: 1. What Is Moral Realism?
If you don’t think you know what the moral reality is, why are you confident that there is one?
I am confident that if there is no territory relevant to morality, then illusionism is true and (paradoxically) it doesn’t matter what our maps contain because the brains that contain the maps do not correlate with any experiences in base reality. I therefore ignore illusionism and proceed with the assumption that there is something real, that it is linked to brains and correlates positively with mental experience, that it is scientifically discoverable, and that prior to such a discovery we can derive reasonable models of morality grounded in our current body of scientific/empirical information.
The naturalist version of “value is a part of the territory” would be that when we introspect about our motivation and the nature of pleasure and so on, we’ll agree that pleasure is what’s valuable.
I don’t see why “introspecting on our motivation and the nature of pleasure and so on” should be what “naturalism” means, or why a moral value discovered that way necessarily corresponds with the territory. I expect morally-relevant territory to have similarities to other things in physics: to be somehow simple, to have existed long before humans did, and to somehow interact with humans. By the way, I prefer to say “positive valence” over “pleasure” because laymen would misunderstand the latter.
At this point, hedonists could either concede that there’s no sense in which hedonism is true for everyone – because not everyone agrees.
I don’t concede because people having incorrect maps is expected and tells me little about the territory.
Or they can say something like “Well, it may not seem to you that you’re making a mistake of reasoning, but pleasure has this property that it is GOOD in a normative sense irreducible to any of your other dispositions
I’m not sure what these other dispositions are, but I’m thinking on a level below normativity. I say positive valence is good because, at a level of fundamental physics, it is the best candidate I am aware of for what could be (terminally) good. If you propose that “knowledge is terminally good”, for example, I wouldn’t dismiss it entirely, but I don’t see how human-level knowledge would have a physics-level meaning. It does seem like something related to knowledge, namely comprehension, is part of consciousness, so maybe comprehension is terminally good, but if I could only pick one, it seems to me that valence is a better candidate because “obviously” pleasure+bafflement > torture+comprehension. (fwiw I am thinking that the human sense of comprehension differs from genuine comprehension, and both might even differ from physics-level comprehension if it exists. If a philosopher terminally values the second, I’d call that valuation nonrealist.)
claiming that “hedonism is correct in some direct, empirical sense” would predict expert convergence.
🤷‍♂️ Why? When you say “expert”, do you mean “moral realist”? But then, which kind of moral realist? Obviously I’m not in the Foot or Railton camp ― in my camp, moral uncertainty follows readily from my axioms, since they tell me there is something morally real, but not what it is.
Edit: It would certainly be interesting if other people start from similar axioms to mine but diverge in their moral opinions. Please let me know if you know of philosopher(s) who start from similar axioms.