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I personally believe that there are two kinds of beliefs: 1. Factual: These are beliefs based on models, e.g., "the Earth goes around the sun". You can test th

I personally believe that there are two kinds of beliefs: 1. Factual: These are beliefs based on models, e.g., "the Earth goes around the sun". You can test these models with predictions and if the predictions are wrong, you need to update your model. 2. Value preferences: E.g., "chocolate ice cream is the best dessert". These are non-testable beliefs because they do not have an objectively correct value. You can't say that a preference is "wrong" or "right". The problem is that all important arguments are arguments about value preferences, but we treat them as factual arguments. Take something like what to do about global warming. This seems like a factual argument because lots of people don't even agree that the world is getting warmer. But the real problem is a value preference: People who don't believe in climate change simply don't think the effort required to solve the problem is worth the benefit, and they're using motivated reasoning to deny the warming. This is obvious when you see them move the goalposts: 1. The climate is not changing. 2. The climate is changing, but not because of humans. 3. Humans are changing the climate, but it's too late to do anything about it. The real issue is that we disagree on how much sacrifice we should make to help people of the future--people who, on current trends, will be richer than we are, just as we are richer than the world of the 1950s. But there is no correct answer to "how much should we sacrifice to solve global warming." It's a value preference. And this is true for every issue. Any issue can be reduced to a disagreement on value preferences. [Thank you for putting up with my ranting--I just had to get it out.]

esafak 3y ago
I think these are distinct concepts that unfortunately share the same word in the English language.
th0ma5 3y ago
But you list a bunch of factual inaccuracies which go beyond just preference.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  If I understood correctly: Those factual inconsistencies betray that it is just a value preference. Value arguments presented as factual arguments are the de facto mode of arguing. And this is wrong.
  - GMoromisato 3y ago
    Exactly! The constant is the value preference ("I shouldn't have to sacrifice my way of life to solve global warming.") and they pick the "facts" to support their belief. But even teaching someone to avoid motivated reasoning won't really change minds. It will make them argue better, but it won't change the underlying value preference.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      If they stop lying to themselves and to the others, it will become clear that their position is just as good as anybody's, or that they are monsters, or that the subject is complex, or whatever; but in either way, it will move the argument in a productive direction. Very often those people keep lying to themselves exactly because if they stopped they would discover they have some really bad values.
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        Its just human nature to start from a position and investigate outwards looking for facts. It takes discipline and practice to avoid doing this ... unfortunately. And I doubt anyone really reaches that level of objectiveness, instead generally trusting their "intuition" even when they're a practiced scientist. Ultimately that's why debate and varied opinions are important .. as long as we all meet on equal footing and good intent.
        GMoromisato 3y ago
        I agree with that. However, I'm not sure we should start with facts. If tomorrow you found out that confessions under torture were mostly accurate, would that fact cause you to accept torture as a policing tool? Probably not. The core insight of the Enlightenment--that we are all equal--is itself a statement of values rather than a factual observation. In truth, we are not equal. But if we started with the fact that we are not equal and then tried to build a society out of that, we would end up with a pretty distopian and stratified civilization.
importantbrian 3y ago
This is why it grates on me when people say things like we shouldn't legislate morality. At it's core every legislative question is a moral question, but we don't actually want to debate the moral issue so we instead frame the discussion as if we are really debating theoretical models that can be tested and disproven.
numeromancer 3y ago
Congratulations on your victory. You left that man of straw in utter tatters.
CaptWillard 3y ago
You left out some very important and undeniably factual points: 1) The climate has been (dramatically) changing since literally the beginning of time on earth 2) Humans have only existed for a vanishingly small fraction of that time
- GMoromisato 3y ago
  Agreed! What are your thoughts on global warming? I promise I will not try to change your mind--I just want to hear you out.
  - CaptWillard 3y ago
    Off the top of my head: I'm with the 97% of scientists who agree it's happening (duh) and that man is probably contributing. There are a LOT of branched distinctions and decisions downstream from that broad statement. It was the first scientific subject in my lifetime to be declared settled when in fact there was and is quite a bit to research and debate on the subject. The first subject on which credible voices were shouted down or waved away with ad hominem. Sadly, it was not the last, and the lessons about persuasion seem to have been lost. There's an odd and frustrating lack of discussion about what the baseline climate change would be if man never existed. Given that we're twenty years into this wildly unproductive dialogue, shouldn't there be more discussion of how to live/deal with it? We're not going to 'stop' climate change (nor should we wish to), so what exactly does success look like?
    - _kulang 3y ago
      There is this kind of milling around that grates me to no end. The climate is changing faster and in a way that we undeniably contribute to and people still are like “hang on a minute there’s a bunch of research to do here”! It’s like if I went to the doctor, they find out I have a cancer, then the doctor says “wait up let’s see how quickly it is actually growing”. Yes there is no strong evidence about “baseline climate change” but whatever is going on now is 1. Undeniably orders of magnitude faster than any core sample record of climate change 2. Undeniably spurned on by the huge amount of carbon we have been burning And yet reducing carbon output is not a priority. This is more a comment than a response to your comment, so please don’t take it as an argument. You just reminded me about this particular bit. It just kills me that people who sometimes are otherwise willing to do a lot in terms of charity hit climate change and all of a sudden start questioning that it is a thing. I can’t believe that a genuine existential threat was politicised. You’re right about it all though, representatives not being persuasive, perhaps framing the problem poorly. Lastly, in recent years we have seen progress thanks to renewables. It’s all because fossil fuel costs are increasing while renewables decreased. Economic incentives would absolutely have worked at the expense of the fossil fuel industry. I wonder how differently things could have gone
mrangle 3y ago
"The competition doesn't really believe what they say that they do" is factual debate circumvention used only in the crudest propaganda. This type of approach only creates stiffer reaction over the long term. Your issue will be better off when you choose to make an effort to successfully argue for it well enough that the argument can withstand robust critique.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Some arguments are subjective vs objective. The abortion argument will burn forever because nobody can objectively prove when life begins or gains rights because it is a subjective question about human ideas.
alphazard 3y ago
Values are just facts about an agent's preferences, which are often revealed through the agent's actions. If it's true that "Chocolate ice cream is my favorite dessert", then that will be revealed in my preferences, when I always choose it over other desserts. As far as we know, the encoding for that preference exists somewhere in the brain, and we could predict a human's preferences, with sufficient brain-scanning technology. I could be wrong about chocolate ice cream being my favorite dessert, maybe my brain is wired so that chocolate cake is the best dessert, but I've never had chocolate cake, and so I am left in ignorance of this fact. Humans can be wrong about their own preferences. Asking "is chocolate cake the best dessert?", is a bit like saying "how far away is Mars". You could assume that the correctness of the preference lies within a particular human's neurology--yours or mine. You could also assume that the distance to Mars is relative to a particular point--Earth for example. But in both cases that would just be presumptuous. Both questions are under-specified; it's just a quirk of language that we can express them.
- GMoromisato 3y ago
  I would say it slightly differently: What values a given individual has, is purely a factual statement, as you said. If I tell you that chocolate ice cream is my favorite dessert, that's a testable fact. But what's not testable is whether I ought to like chocolate ice cream. Suppose I told you I liked chocolate ice cream and you scanned my brain and it looks like I like chocolate ice cream, and you said, "Well, I see you like chocolate ice cream, but you really shouldn't because it tastes awful." That wouldn't make sense, right? This is the is/ought divide. [As always, smarter people hundreds of years ago, have come up with better arguments than mine.] In the same way, whether or not today's world is warmer than the 1970s is a testable fact. But whether we ought to join the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Accords is not. That's what I mean about the issue being about value preferences.
  - alphazard 3y ago
    The is/ought distinction is merely linguistic. It's true: you can't derive an ought statement from an is statement. Consider your statement "I ought to like chocolate ice cream". That is an ambiguous claim, which I can try to interpret in one of two possible ways: 1. "I value that I like chocolate ice cream". If you were a rational agent, this would be an infinite regression, of course you like that your utility function is your utility function, and that liking goes on forever. It's interesting that humans, which are not rational, can also have thoughts about not liking that they enjoy certain things. 2. "It is good that I like chocolate ice cream". Good for who/what? there needs to be something that values that you like chocolate ice cream. "My friend values that I like ice cream" is not ambiguous, and firmly in factual territory again. Your friend is the valuer/agent with preferences. People hate the ambiguity and want to say the valuer is the universe or God or something else. But it's just an under-specified statement about whether one agent likes another agents preferences. Your statement about "we ought to ___", cannot be well defined in all cases, because something could be good for one agent in the group, but bad for another. Any attempt to make a claim "good for the group" is no longer a statement about individual agents and their preferences. It's about something else, if it's coherent at all. Rarely does "good for the group" mean "good for all individuals in the group respectively", which is well defined.
theptip 3y ago
Hume’s “is / ought” distinction, and the observation that you can’t derive the latter from the former.
- GMoromisato 3y ago
  David Hume could out-consume, so he ought to know. Seriously, though, yes--I often think that our political arguments would be less divisive if we kept that is/ought distinction in mind.

esafak 3y ago

I think these are distinct concepts that unfortunately share the same word in the English language.

th0ma5 3y ago

But you list a bunch of factual inaccuracies which go beyond just preference.

jvanderbot 3y ago
If I understood correctly: Those factual inconsistencies betray that it is just a value preference. Value arguments presented as factual arguments are the de facto mode of arguing. And this is wrong.
- GMoromisato 3y ago
  Exactly! The constant is the value preference ("I shouldn't have to sacrifice my way of life to solve global warming.") and they pick the "facts" to support their belief. But even teaching someone to avoid motivated reasoning won't really change minds. It will make them argue better, but it won't change the underlying value preference.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    If they stop lying to themselves and to the others, it will become clear that their position is just as good as anybody's, or that they are monsters, or that the subject is complex, or whatever; but in either way, it will move the argument in a productive direction. Very often those people keep lying to themselves exactly because if they stopped they would discover they have some really bad values.
    - jvanderbot 3y ago
      Its just human nature to start from a position and investigate outwards looking for facts. It takes discipline and practice to avoid doing this ... unfortunately. And I doubt anyone really reaches that level of objectiveness, instead generally trusting their "intuition" even when they're a practiced scientist. Ultimately that's why debate and varied opinions are important .. as long as we all meet on equal footing and good intent.
      - GMoromisato 3y ago
        I agree with that. However, I'm not sure we should start with facts. If tomorrow you found out that confessions under torture were mostly accurate, would that fact cause you to accept torture as a policing tool? Probably not. The core insight of the Enlightenment--that we are all equal--is itself a statement of values rather than a factual observation. In truth, we are not equal. But if we started with the fact that we are not equal and then tried to build a society out of that, we would end up with a pretty distopian and stratified civilization.

importantbrian 3y ago

This is why it grates on me when people say things like we shouldn't legislate morality. At it's core every legislative question is a moral question, but we don't actually want to debate the moral issue so we instead frame the discussion as if we are really debating theoretical models that can be tested and disproven.

numeromancer 3y ago

Congratulations on your victory. You left that man of straw in utter tatters.

CaptWillard 3y ago

You left out some very important and undeniably factual points: 1) The climate has been (dramatically) changing since literally the beginning of time on earth 2) Humans have only existed for a vanishingly small fraction of that time

GMoromisato 3y ago
Agreed! What are your thoughts on global warming? I promise I will not try to change your mind--I just want to hear you out.
- CaptWillard 3y ago
  Off the top of my head: I'm with the 97% of scientists who agree it's happening (duh) and that man is probably contributing. There are a LOT of branched distinctions and decisions downstream from that broad statement. It was the first scientific subject in my lifetime to be declared settled when in fact there was and is quite a bit to research and debate on the subject. The first subject on which credible voices were shouted down or waved away with ad hominem. Sadly, it was not the last, and the lessons about persuasion seem to have been lost. There's an odd and frustrating lack of discussion about what the baseline climate change would be if man never existed. Given that we're twenty years into this wildly unproductive dialogue, shouldn't there be more discussion of how to live/deal with it? We're not going to 'stop' climate change (nor should we wish to), so what exactly does success look like?
  - _kulang 3y ago
    There is this kind of milling around that grates me to no end. The climate is changing faster and in a way that we undeniably contribute to and people still are like “hang on a minute there’s a bunch of research to do here”! It’s like if I went to the doctor, they find out I have a cancer, then the doctor says “wait up let’s see how quickly it is actually growing”. Yes there is no strong evidence about “baseline climate change” but whatever is going on now is 1. Undeniably orders of magnitude faster than any core sample record of climate change 2. Undeniably spurned on by the huge amount of carbon we have been burning And yet reducing carbon output is not a priority. This is more a comment than a response to your comment, so please don’t take it as an argument. You just reminded me about this particular bit. It just kills me that people who sometimes are otherwise willing to do a lot in terms of charity hit climate change and all of a sudden start questioning that it is a thing. I can’t believe that a genuine existential threat was politicised. You’re right about it all though, representatives not being persuasive, perhaps framing the problem poorly. Lastly, in recent years we have seen progress thanks to renewables. It’s all because fossil fuel costs are increasing while renewables decreased. Economic incentives would absolutely have worked at the expense of the fossil fuel industry. I wonder how differently things could have gone

mrangle 3y ago

"The competition doesn't really believe what they say that they do" is factual debate circumvention used only in the crudest propaganda. This type of approach only creates stiffer reaction over the long term. Your issue will be better off when you choose to make an effort to successfully argue for it well enough that the argument can withstand robust critique.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Some arguments are subjective vs objective. The abortion argument will burn forever because nobody can objectively prove when life begins or gains rights because it is a subjective question about human ideas.

alphazard 3y ago

Values are just facts about an agent's preferences, which are often revealed through the agent's actions. If it's true that "Chocolate ice cream is my favorite dessert", then that will be revealed in my preferences, when I always choose it over other desserts. As far as we know, the encoding for that preference exists somewhere in the brain, and we could predict a human's preferences, with sufficient brain-scanning technology. I could be wrong about chocolate ice cream being my favorite dessert, maybe my brain is wired so that chocolate cake is the best dessert, but I've never had chocolate cake, and so I am left in ignorance of this fact. Humans can be wrong about their own preferences. Asking "is chocolate cake the best dessert?", is a bit like saying "how far away is Mars". You could assume that the correctness of the preference lies within a particular human's neurology--yours or mine. You could also assume that the distance to Mars is relative to a particular point--Earth for example. But in both cases that would just be presumptuous. Both questions are under-specified; it's just a quirk of language that we can express them.

GMoromisato 3y ago
I would say it slightly differently: What values a given individual has, is purely a factual statement, as you said. If I tell you that chocolate ice cream is my favorite dessert, that's a testable fact. But what's not testable is whether I ought to like chocolate ice cream. Suppose I told you I liked chocolate ice cream and you scanned my brain and it looks like I like chocolate ice cream, and you said, "Well, I see you like chocolate ice cream, but you really shouldn't because it tastes awful." That wouldn't make sense, right? This is the is/ought divide. [As always, smarter people hundreds of years ago, have come up with better arguments than mine.] In the same way, whether or not today's world is warmer than the 1970s is a testable fact. But whether we ought to join the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Accords is not. That's what I mean about the issue being about value preferences.
- alphazard 3y ago
  The is/ought distinction is merely linguistic. It's true: you can't derive an ought statement from an is statement. Consider your statement "I ought to like chocolate ice cream". That is an ambiguous claim, which I can try to interpret in one of two possible ways: 1. "I value that I like chocolate ice cream". If you were a rational agent, this would be an infinite regression, of course you like that your utility function is your utility function, and that liking goes on forever. It's interesting that humans, which are not rational, can also have thoughts about not liking that they enjoy certain things. 2. "It is good that I like chocolate ice cream". Good for who/what? there needs to be something that values that you like chocolate ice cream. "My friend values that I like ice cream" is not ambiguous, and firmly in factual territory again. Your friend is the valuer/agent with preferences. People hate the ambiguity and want to say the valuer is the universe or God or something else. But it's just an under-specified statement about whether one agent likes another agents preferences. Your statement about "we ought to ___", cannot be well defined in all cases, because something could be good for one agent in the group, but bad for another. Any attempt to make a claim "good for the group" is no longer a statement about individual agents and their preferences. It's about something else, if it's coherent at all. Rarely does "good for the group" mean "good for all individuals in the group respectively", which is well defined.

theptip 3y ago

Hume’s “is / ought” distinction, and the observation that you can’t derive the latter from the former.

GMoromisato 3y ago
David Hume could out-consume, so he ought to know. Seriously, though, yes--I often think that our political arguments would be less divisive if we kept that is/ought distinction in mind.