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All of Vynn's Comments + Replies

Acausal normalcy
Vynn1y1
0
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Isn't an acausal norm equivalent to a goal-directed norm? If not, then what's the difference?

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Arepo
2y
Self-pimp: http://www.valence-utilitarianism.com/posts/moral-exclusivism
What makes a statement a normative statement?
Vynn2y0
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Do "must" and "may" imply a should?

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What makes a statement a normative statement?
Vynn2y1
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Why is it not considered normative? It follows rules of arithmetic. The operation should be carried out according to "correct" procedure and failure to do so results in something "wrong". So why no count as normative?

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Arepo
2y
You could make a case that it is a normative statement - certainly not everyone would consider it not to be. It would have been clearer if I'd phrased my response as a question: 'would you consider that statement to be normative?' My sense is that you have a pretty good idea of how philosophers use the word 'normative', and you're pursuing a level of clarity about it that's impossible to obtain. Since it (by definition) doesn't map to anything in the physical or mathematical worlds, and arguably even if it did, it just isn't possible to identify a class of phenomena with which you could concretely associate the word. It's a convenience notion moral realists use to gesture at what they hope are sufficiently shared concepts. If you're sceptical that it succeeds, maybe you just aren't a moral realist...
What makes a statement a normative statement?
Vynn2y1
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Can you tell me where "normative behaviour" and "typical behaviour" have been conflated because I'm very sure that's a big no no even in social/psychological sciences

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david_reinstein
2y
Just remembering I have seen it but maybe it was in common parlance but not on social science.
What makes a statement a normative statement?
Vynn2y1
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would ontological statements which can't be proven by observation also count as normative statements? e.g. I am real, the world is real, I am not real, the self is not real etc.

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Arepo
2y
I'm not sure how to interpret 'real' there. If you mean 'real' as opposed to something like a hologram, I'd say the sentence is underdefined. If you mean it as synonymous for a proposition about physical state, such that 'there are two oranges in front of me' would be approximately equivalent to 'the two oranges in front of me are real' , then I think you're asking about any proposition about physical state. In which case I don't think there's much reason to call them 'normative', no statement can be proven by physical observation, so that would make basically all parseable statements normative, which would make the term useless. Although I'm sympathetic to the idea that it is.
What is agency?
Vynn2y1
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Isn't there something about agency in community building and ai alignment that they share in common? Are all notions of agency unified by some underlying concept or are they fundamentally distinct? Or do we simply not know enough to say one way or the other?

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Lorenzo Buonanno
2y
I think it's a tricky, loosely defined concept: see the Wikipedia entries about * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(psychology) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy) Something that they all seem to have in common is that things that have agency "make decisions and enact them on the world". You would say that humans have agency while rocks don't, and there's lots of middle ground for animals and AIs. Don't know if this is helpful, but it seems a tricky concept to define exactly. There's also the related usage in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent , which isn't necessarily consistent with the definitions above