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Eigenmorality

scottaaronson.com

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Re: Eigenmorality

#61

Post by jzwinck »

"The deniers and their think-tanks would be exposed to the sun; they’d lose their thin cover of legitimacy."

Don't we have the ability to do this now by visualizing or analyzing citations? A set of "fake" think-tanks which promote bogus ideas should be identifiable as a mostly-disconnected component of a graph today. We don't need to get each think tank's explicit opinions about the others. Aaronson points out this single-purpose inquiry would encourage gaming, but analyzing a graph built for other incentives may give more "honest" results (at least for a while).

And we have, at least five years ago: http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/01/using-pagerank-to-ass... . You can follow links from there to a project called EigenFactor, academic research about shortcomings of PageRank in this application, and more.

Results of such analyses should be used as input to human thought processes and not some sort of legislative robot.

Re: Eigenmorality

#62

Post by lohankin »

oofabz wrote: post #56
lohankin wrote: post #28

I was following Scott's posts for a while. Most notable feature of those posts: everything he says is predictable. Blog is designed to appeal to the liberal academic establishment, which knows answers to all important questions, and is never in doubt. I don't remember a single example of Scott's opinion which could be deemed controversial in any sense. "Eigenconformism" would be a better name for his blog.

I don't think the blog is consciously designed to appear to liberal academics. As an MIT professor, Aaronson IS the liberal academic establishment, so it is no mystery that his writing appeals to his peers. I don't know about you, but I'm willing to admit Aaronson knows more answers to important questions than I do.

> Aaronson IS the liberal academic establishment, so it is no mystery that his writing appeals to his peers

I'm afraid you got cause and effect in reverse.

Re: Eigenmorality

#63

Post by SilasX »

knowtheory wrote: post #15
rm445 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very long but written in a light, readable style. What I took away from it was the point late-on about, if we had a PageRank-type system for establishing trust in issues that drive policy (such as climate change), then it would show where a group had left the consensus and formed a separate talking-shop that was trying to shout down the greater consensus. I think this actually applies back to the Iterated Prison…

Yep. My gut reaction to the phrase "eigenmorality" is to immediately turn around and ask "have you ever seen an eigenface?" (see: https://www.google.com/search?q=eigenface&tbm=isch ) They are a certainly a mathematically accurate way to represent a distribution of human faces, but no one would ever confuse it with an actual human face. And this is one way i view political/policy compromises (which is ultimately where…

Except that eigenvectors play different role in facial recognition as from pagerank.

In the former, eigenvectors are an orthogonal basis for representing the set of human faces: first, the vary in this respect, then next most significantly in this respect, and so on.

In the latter, the primary eigenvector tells you which nodes are the most significant. The eigenvector not looking like a good site (or typical face) has little to do with whether it's informative about the goodness of a site.

Also, the point of using morality eigenvectors is to quantify relative morality of positions, not to find a compromise between currently-popular positions, so the bimodality issue is not a problem in this respect.

Re: Eigenmorality

#64

Post by lifeformed »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #59
argc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have studied morality simulations in the past, whereas I have not. It was written simply. (In my opinion the occasional wordiness was a stylistic choice to mimic casual conversation rather than a strictly rigorous academic paper.. fitting for a blog post.) I found it a though-provoking read, and I have no qualms if his ideas were not "novel". Digesting old ideas and writing about them is not a crime. If a…

That is the problem here. For anyone who has studied ethics and morality, this is hair-pullingly bad. It is not easy to communicate these ideas. An analogy: Would you trust a physicist who does not communicate often, or a creationist who writes popular science essays?

Well, I never knew this field of study existed before, and now I'm interested in it. I'm not going to blindly trust everything in this article, but now I have some starting points on things to look up. The article mostly discussed the interesting, big picture ideas. That aroused my interest far more than if I just started on some technical math article.

Re: Eigenmorality

#65

Post by existencebox »

gjm11 wrote: post #34
cma wrote: post #20

Needy babies are moral monsters according to many of these models..

Needy babies are also stupid according to many notions of intelligence, ugly according to many notions of beauty, etc. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those notions; it means they aren't designed for assessing babies.

Maybe this is me being pedantic, but I'd disagree with that they aren't designed for assessing babies, and say that there's a more elegant explanation of a second layer of filtering which informs on the validity of a first layer of assessment. Stupid does define a baby, but this definition holds contextually different connotations; and this context is what makes there be "nothing wrong with" those "traditionally bad" assessments.

Not sure where this (my rambling) came from off of the parent article, but it spawned some interesting thoughts at least :)

Re: Eigenmorality

#66

Post by brenschluss »

jonnathanson wrote: post #30

Please note that what follows can be interpreted as criticism, but it's not intended as such. I found this article quite interesting, and for me, it was the starting point for a lot of different thoughts about game-theoretical approximations of morality. So what follows is a somewhat tangential addition to the article, and not a critique of it. My problem is not with the "eigenmorality" concept, nor with the various…

> But it treats humans as emotionless agents, and the "punishment" as an abstract, theoretical, rationally navigable scenario. Place real human beings into the Prisoner's Dilemma, with real-world consequences, and you get all sorts of unexpected results.

No, that's actually the entire point of the Prisoner's Dilemma - it's not a framework for evaluation, it's the tension between the rational decision and human action that is exactly why the Prisoner's Dilemma is a prized example of game theory.

Re: Eigenmorality

#67

Post by mentat »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #47
jng wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

"Follow" is used in the context of authors of classical works in academia and has been used prior to any use in the forms you claim are its exclusive domain.

Re: Eigenmorality

#68

Post by [deleted] »

javert wrote: post #17

Happiness is the only intrinsic value for a human being, and thus a moral person is a person who pursues happiness effectively. (How to do that is another story.) However, Aaronson's proposed definition of a moral person is not the effective way to pursue happiness. Thus, it is immoral. It's also immoral to call for all of us to sacrifice industrial output for future generations to solve the supposed climate change p…

[deleted]

Re: Eigenmorality

#69

Post by PhasmaFelis »

javert wrote: post #17

Happiness is the only intrinsic value for a human being, and thus a moral person is a person who pursues happiness effectively. (How to do that is another story.) However, Aaronson's proposed definition of a moral person is not the effective way to pursue happiness. Thus, it is immoral. It's also immoral to call for all of us to sacrifice industrial output for future generations to solve the supposed climate change p…

Are you trying to make some baroque point that I'm missing, or am I giving you too much credit, i.e. you're actually just ranting incoherently about climate change conspiracy and Randian selfishness-as-virtue?

Or, option 3, are you just trolling?

Re: Eigenmorality

#70

Post by MiaoYu_Goh »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #59
argc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have studied morality simulations in the past, whereas I have not. It was written simply. (In my opinion the occasional wordiness was a stylistic choice to mimic casual conversation rather than a strictly rigorous academic paper.. fitting for a blog post.) I found it a though-provoking read, and I have no qualms if his ideas were not "novel". Digesting old ideas and writing about them is not a crime. If a…

That is the problem here. For anyone who has studied ethics and morality, this is hair-pullingly bad. It is not easy to communicate these ideas. An analogy: Would you trust a physicist who does not communicate often, or a creationist who writes popular science essays?

Are there any resources you would recommend to the uninitiated? I am willing to put in the effort needed to understand even very technical texts. Thank you.
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