is that you feel that moral statements are not as evidently subjective as say, 'Vanilla ice-cream is the best flavor' but not as objective as, say 'An electron has a negative charge', as living in some space of in-betweeness with respect to those two extremes

I think that's roughly right. I think that they are unlikely to be more objective than "blue is a more natural concept than grue", but that there's a good chance that they're about the same as that (and my gut take is that that's pretty far towards the electron end of the spectrum; but perhaps I'm confused).

I'd say again, an electron doesn't care for what a human or any other creature thinks about its electric charge.

Yeah, but I think that e.g. facts about economics are in some sense contingent on the thinking of people, but are not contingent on what particular people think, and I think that something similar could be true of morality.

I, on the contrary, don't feel like there could be 'moral experts'

The cleanest example I might give is that if I had a message from my near-future self saying "hey I've thought really hard about this issue and I really think X is right, sorry I don't have time to unpack all of that", I'd be pretty inclined to defer. I wonder if you feel differently?

I don't think that moral philosophers in our society are necessarily hitting the bar I would like for "moral expert". I also don't think that people who are genuinely experts in morality would necessarily act according to moral values. (I'm not sure that these points are very important.)

See my response to Manuel -- I don't think this is "proving moral realism", but I do think it would be pointing at something deeper and closer-to-objective than "happen to have the same opinions".

I'm not sure what exactly "true" means here.

Here are some senses in which it would make morality feel "more objective" rather than "more subjective":

• I can have the experience of having a view, and then hearing an argument, and updating. My stance towards my previous view then feels more like "oh, I was mistaken" (like if I'd made a mathematical error) rather than "oh, my view changed" (like getting myself to like the taste of avocado when I didn't used to).
• There can exist "moral experts", whom we would want to consult on matters of morality. Broadly, we should expect our future views to update towards those of smart careful thinkers who've engaged with the questions a lot.
• It's possible that the norms various civilizations converge on represent something like "the optimal(/efficient?/robust?) way for society to self-organize"
  • I don't think this is exactly "independent of human or alien minds", but it also very much doesn't feel "purely subjective"

I don't really believe there's anything more deeply metaphysical than that going on with morality^[1], but I do think that there's a lot that's important in the above bullets, and that moral realist positions often feel vibewise "more correct" than antirealist positions (in terms of what they imply for real-world actions), even though the antirealist positions feel technically "more correct".

1. ^{^}

   I guess: there's also some possibility of getting more convergence for acausal reasons rather than just evolution towards efficiency. I do think this is real, but it mostly feels like a distraction here so I'll ignore it.

Locally, I think that often there will be some cluster of less controversial common values like "caring about the flourishing of society" which can be used to derive something like locally-objective conclusions about moral questions (like whether X is wrong).

Globally, an operationalization of morality being objective might be something like "among civilizations of evolved beings in the multiverse, there's a decently big attractor state of moral norms that a lot of the civilizations eventually converge on".

Ok but jtbc that characterization of "affronted" is not the hypothesis I was offering (I don't want to say it wasn't a part of the downvoting, but I'd guess a minority).

I would personally kind of like it if people actively explored angles on things more. But man, there are so many things to read on AI these days that I do kind of understand when people haven't spent time considering things I regard as critical path (maybe I should complain more!), and I honestly find it's hard to too much fault people for using "did it seem wrong near the start in a way that makes it harder to think" as a heuristic for how deeply to engage with material. 

I'm curious whether you're closer to angry that someone might read your opening paragraph as saying "you should discard the concept of warning shots" or angry that they might disagree-vote if they read it that way (or something else).

Not sure quite what to say here. I think your post was valuable and that's why I upvoted it. You were expressing confusion about why anyone would disagree, and I was venturing a guess.

I don't think gentleness = ego service (it's an absence of violence, not a positive thing). But also I don't think you owe people gentleness. However, I do think that when you're not gentle (especially ontologically gentle) you make it harder for people to hear you. Not because of emotional responses getting in the way (though I'm sure that happens sometimes), but literally because there's more cognitive work for them to do in translating to their perspective. Sometimes you should bite that bullet! But by the same token that you don't owe people gentleness, they don't owe you the work to understand what you're saying.

By "ontologically ungentle" I mean (roughly) it feels like you're trying to reach into my mind and tell me that my words/concepts are wrong. As opposed to writing which just tells me that my beliefs are wrong (which might still be epistemically ungentle), or language which just provides evidence without making claims that could be controversial (gentle in this sense, kind of NVC-style).

I do feel a bit of this ungentleness in that opening paragraph towards my own ontology, and I think it put me more on edge reading the rest of the post. But as I said, I didn't disagree-vote; I was just trying to guess why others might have.

Right ... so actually I think you're just doing pretty well at this in the latter part of the article.

But at the start you say things like:

There’s this fantasy of easy, free support for the AI Safety position coming from what’s commonly called a “warning shot”. The idea is that AI will cause smaller disasters before it causes a really big one, and that when people see this they will realize we’ve been right all along and easily do what we suggest.

What this paragraph seems to do is to push the error-in-beliefs that you're complaining about down into the very concept of "warning shot". It seems implicitly to be telling people "hey you may have this concept, but it's destructive, so please get rid of it". And I don't think even you agree with that!

This might instead have been written something like:

People in the AI safety community like to talk about "warning shots" -- small disasters that may make it easier for people to wake up to the risks and take appropriate action. There's a real phenomenon here, and it's worth thinking about! But the way it's often talked about is like a fantasy of easy, free support for the AI Safety position -- when there's a small disaster everyone will realize we’ve been right all along and easily do what we suggest.

Actually I think that that opening paragraph was doing more than the title to make me think the post was ontologically ungentle (although they're reinforcing -- like that paragraph shifts the natural way that I read the title).

Honestly, maybe you should try telling me? Like, just write a paragraph or two on what you think is valuable about the concept / where you would think it's appropriate to be applying it?

(Not trying to be clever! I started trying to think about what I would write here and mostly ended up thinking "hmm I bet this is stuff Holly would think is obvious", and to the extent that I may believe you're missing something, it might be easiest to triangulate by hearing your summary of what the key points in favour are.)