Good read, but I can't help but end in thinking that by the time all of this would have been figured out, our civilization will be long gone.
Eigenmorality
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: Eigenmorality
#42I think the definition of morality in the article is far too simplistic. In my (Christian) view, it's an important aspect of moral maturity to be able to be nice to immoral people without cooperating with their goals. Besides that dichotomy, the article already mentions that the model lacks critical information, specifically, the actors don't know whether the other actors they're [not ]cooperating with are "good" or…
Occasionally "being nice" (cooperating when tit-for-tat suggests defection) dampens avalanche effects caused by defection-happy actors; it prevents the "an eye for an eye makes everyone blind" ending. In that sense, it has value.
Thus forgiving acts much like error correction in a data stream - by preventing propagation of defects, it limits damage.
Re: Eigenmorality
#43my friends and i had started on this already. i had a hard time explaing to people why it was valuable; looks like scott has done it for us. please help us! https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop right now all we have is a way to state which facebook users a person trusts. there's a chrome extension to help with this. it's extremely basic. i have a server running at https://dewdrop.neyer.me - we need a lot more help! i'm j…
Cool... After reading that, I realised that Eigenmorality is to social networks what Pagerank is to search engines - great to see somebody already working on this!
You would think someone at Facebook is already looking at this question...
Re: Eigenmorality
#44Wow: "The mathematical verdict of both eigenmoses and eigenjesus is unequivocal: the 98% are almost perfectly good, while the 2% are almost perfectly evil." The author says this diverge violently from most people’s moral intuitions, but actually this result is PRECISELY what moral relativism predicts. See, there are 2 school of thoughts attempting to explain where morality comes from: - either morality is an absolute…
There are probably more fundamental classification dichotomies than absolutism vs. relativism. One example is cognitivism, which is the belief that moral statements are propositions and can thus be true or false (absolutism and relativism are both cognitivist theories), vs. non-cognitivism.
Re: Eigenmorality
#45Wow: "The mathematical verdict of both eigenmoses and eigenjesus is unequivocal: the 98% are almost perfectly good, while the 2% are almost perfectly evil." The author says this diverge violently from most people’s moral intuitions, but actually this result is PRECISELY what moral relativism predicts. See, there are 2 school of thoughts attempting to explain where morality comes from: - either morality is an absolute…
That's... kinda not a very good description of the major contemporary schools of thought on metaethics. I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since there's no base case for the recursion. Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold th…
> I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since there's no base case for the recursion.
Wouldn't the meaning of "good" be "considered to be good by the given culture, group, or individual"?
> Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold that moral language is not meant to express statements which are either true or false, i.e., it is not semantic or truth-apt;
Do you have any data on the percentage of philosophers who subscribe to various beliefs? It sounds like you're describing non-cognitivism, which I'm fairly familiar with, although I didn't think it was a widely accepted view.
Re: Eigenmorality
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's... kinda not a very good description of the major contemporary schools of thought on metaethics. I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since there's no base case for the recursion. Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold th…
> I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since there's no base case for the recursion. Wouldn't the meaning of "good" be "considered to be good by the given culture, group, or individual"? > Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold…
Take a look at PhilPapers Surveys, maybe: http://philpapers.org/surveys/
the rough gist (from http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP.pdf) seems to be
14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism
17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.
correlation results should also be interesting.
Re: Eigenmorality
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
One does not solely get their understanding of novelty or content/length relation from single newsfeed style sources. There are more than a few books and even more wikipedia entries that provide a wealth of understanding for a relative pittance in word count. Not to mention all the non-classical forms that do the same. The article was okay, but the standard you implicitly set forth is lacking in fairness to the comme…
Books and Wikipedia articles are sources too. I didn't say anything about single newsfeed style sources. I find the linked-to article to be a gem of lucidity amidst a barrage of mostly noise, busywork, and lottery-playing. Not only that, but the topic of the foundations of morality is going to become a central issue soon, with multiple strong global trends taking us towards that difficult issue. The article you linke…
"Follow" is not a verb used in the context of books or Wikipedia articles. Any neither characteristically provides ideas in a "shorter, clearer form". Your request was, to any reasonable observer, explicitly a request for a content-driven site or blog (i.e., a "single newsfeed style source"). Denying it when it's so clearly a falsehood only undermines the rest of your assertions, and casts into doubt your commitment to the (accurate) assertion that we should care about methods of disrupting existing controlling systems... perhaps to the point where it would not be unreasonable to conclude that you're explicitly attempting to undermine good-faith attempts to produce new stable systems.
So who are you working for?
Re: Eigenmorality
#48You can't "solve" this problem in the same sense that you cannot develop a universally consistent foundation for mathematics. Goedel is there preventing you from EVER proving that one set of axioms is better than another.
I again wrote a longer response but have shortened it because the author seems to have committed a rather grave error which is to assume that human moral 'intuition' is in any way consistent. There are heaps of evidence (cue the trolley car) that human moral judgements really should not be considered a guide for anything. The fact that we can capture the disasters of collective morality observed under various regime's during the 20th century ought to tell us that following those models as a universal foundation for human relations is a terrible idea.
Might also be worth paying a visit to eigennicolo and not adhere to such rigid systems.
Re: Eigenmorality
#49His definition is much closer to "popularity" than to anything I would recognize as "morality".
It's strange to exclude intent from your model when it's an important factor in almost all systems of morality.
Re: Eigenmorality
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Books and Wikipedia articles are sources too. I didn't say anything about single newsfeed style sources. I find the linked-to article to be a gem of lucidity amidst a barrage of mostly noise, busywork, and lottery-playing. Not only that, but the topic of the foundations of morality is going to become a central issue soon, with multiple strong global trends taking us towards that difficult issue. The article you linke…
"Follow" is not a verb used in the context of books or Wikipedia articles. Any neither characteristically provides ideas in a "shorter, clearer form". Your request was, to any reasonable observer, explicitly a request for a content-driven site or blog (i.e., a "single newsfeed style source"). Denying it when it's so clearly a falsehood only undermines the rest of your assertions, and casts into doubt your commitment…
Just myself.
EDIT: The answer to the rest is not generally interesting.