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Eigenmorality

scottaaronson.com

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Re: Eigenmorality

#71

Post by knowtheory »

SilasX wrote: post #63
knowtheory wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) ha…

Oh, yes, you're right. Orthogonality isn't at issue here, the decomposition is just being used for sorting/ranking/re-weighting.

Thanks for pointing out the muddle i was in there.

Re: Eigenmorality

#72

Post by cscurmudgeon »

mrb wrote: post #31

Wow: "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…

Don't take this negatively. Your comment is absolutely muddled up.

Just because there is an absolute morality does not mean everyone has to agree on it. Why? Ask yourself this question. Physics is absolute. Do physicists have 100% agreement?

Nobody takes relativism seriously.

Re: Eigenmorality

#73

Post by darkxanthos »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #13

This is an interesting idea. Aaronson may be joking when he says he's "solv[ed] a 2400-year-old open problem in philosophy," but in case he's not, this doesn't come anywhere close to solving ethics. Philosophically speaking, it's still necessary to show why his definition of "moral" holds up. All he's done is assess a certain quality and then call it "morality." I think it could better be called "meta-cooperativeness…

Yep. I think what he's really trying to do is find a definition of morality that's useful, not necessarily complete. As models go, it was useful enough to change my thinking a bit.

Re: Eigenmorality

#74

Post by Fargren »

minority wrote: post #16

Considering that a majority of people who agree with each other are "moral" is highly problematic. Even if everyone in the system is morally equal, this system would automatically create and enhance differences between groups. The author uses the example of climate-change deniers to express the opinion that minority groups have "withdrawn itself from the main conversation and retreated into a different discourse." Is…

The article does acknowledge this point, and offers a possible solution. In the edit at the end, i t suggests a system for distinguishing those who initiate defection from those who respond to ti with defection, and in principle that could make defecting against a group that didn't do anything "wrong" a wrong thing.

Re: Eigenmorality

#75

Post by mathgenius »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #48

You 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…

Well I would like to read your "longer" response. But I thought I would just back you up on the Godel connection: the key to that theorem is also a self-referential-ness.

I would also throw in that financial systems in general suffer from this same problem: we assign value to items that get assigned value. Where is the objectivity? There is none.

It is quite ironic that I found your comment at the bottom of the HN comment queue, and it is also by far the most penetrating, IMNSOO.

Re: Eigenmorality

#76

Post by falcor84 »

spiritplumber wrote: post #23
andrewflnr wrote: post #21

I 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.

Tit-for-two-tats is very good in that regard

Re: Eigenmorality

#77

Post by tripzilch »

lifeformed wrote: post #64
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't know about the field of Ethics? It's (IMVHO) one of the most important fields in Philosophy, and (again, IMHO) with the most practical applications in real life.

Before you rush off to study it (which I highly recommend, for anyone who has the chance / ability), it's not so much about learning better systems of ethics or learning about the many types of systems of ethics that have been thought up in the past, but it's about learning the arguments why they are/were wrong and how they break down in situations, and to carry these arguments. That's how a lot of fields in Philosophy work, and why it seems such a dry study of "arguing for argument's sake". The point is, by doing this, practice, you learn a lot of useful things along the way and sharpen your mind.

I do agree with the other poster that the featured article (while interesting to read), does seem to lack a bit in how it connects with actual philosophy of ethics.

Re: Eigenmorality

#78

Post by JackFr »

jng wrote: post #29
soganess wrote: post #22

Earlier 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…

"foundations of morality is going to become a central issue soon" -- for many people it has been the central issue for three thousand years.

For anyone who has studied philosophy or ethics -- even casually -- this article was terribly naive and hopelessly unaware of its own ignorance. Beyond that, the applied linear algebra was not interesting, no real game or decision theory to speak of and the whole 'eigenmoses' and 'eigenjesus' was too cute by half.

Iterated prisoner's dilemma? Not my idea of a powerful tool.

Was there more? I may have missed it.

Re: Eigenmorality

#80

Post by lifeformed »

tripzilch wrote: post #77
lifeformed wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't know about the field of Ethics? It's (IMVHO) one of the most important fields in Philosophy, and (again, IMHO) with the most practical applications in real life. Before you rush off to study it (which I highly recommend, for anyone who has the chance / ability), it's not so much about learning better systems of ethics or learning about the many types of systems of ethics that have been thought up in the pa…

I didn't know about morality simulations.
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