5 ms·

This is very long but worth reading. The modeling exercise herein is basically attempting to use a game theoretic model to test out some really dumb/simplified

This is very long but worth reading. The modeling exercise herein is basically attempting to use a game theoretic model to test out some really dumb/simplified models of cooperation and whether the behaviors observed approximate anything approaching what our intuitions might say is moral behavior, up to and including an 'eigenjesus' and 'eigenmoses' up against tit_for_tat bots and the like.

rm445 12y ago
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 Prisoner's Dilemma games. The 'morality' calculation might not be able to perfectly establish what is moral and immoral behaviour, for the reasons given in the article, but it ought to be able to establish where groups are not working to the moral codes of the majority, perhaps because they are discriminating or discriminated against, but also possibly because they are co-conspiring.
- knowtheory 12y ago
  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 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 the rubber hits the road regarding morality/ethics). One example is middle ground positions on immigration reform: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/5803912/americans-either-want-unauthorized-immigrants-to-get-citizenship-or http://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/5803912/americans-either-want-u... There are circumstances where opinions fall into a multimodal distribution, and in those situations, taking a policy position that is the global average not only will piss everyone off, but won't necessarily fix the policy problem at hand.
  - blauwbilgorgel 12y ago
    I found your post interesting, because I think there is always a way for a group to make smarter decisions than any of its individuals. Let's say a middle-ground compromise is chosen on immigration reform: Deport new illegals, offer stricter official ways to become an American. Naturalize people who have worked or studied in the US for a certain time period. Even if the individuals all agree the collective made a bad decision, that is not to say that the group decision itself was bad: It may have very well been the perfect lesser of all evils. A system can converge to an optimal solution, while individual participants do not realize this. Likewise, a participant may spot a problem in need of a solution, where in reality there is no such problem or manageable solution. I do agree that, next to making more optimal decisions, a committee can make poor collective decisions that any individual members would never make. If the crowd is too frantically opposed, not willing to give in, then that crowd or system itself may be broken and dysfunctional, and will always produce inferior solutions. It has a bigger problem than a single circumstance.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    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.
    - knowtheory 12y ago
      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.
JackFr 12y ago
To each his own. I actually think its overly long, wordy, rambling, poorly conceived and short any novel or important ideas.
- jng 12y ago
  Please tell us what sources you follow that provide you with (a) comparably lucid ideas and (b) not only that, but also in a shorter, clearer form. I for one want to follow them too if they really exist.
  - soganess 12y ago
    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 commenter, to the original story, and truly to one-off forms of valuable information that don't provide a serialized source of continued information. One of my personal favorites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspond...
    - jng 12y ago
      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 linked to is nice, but Curry-Howard isomorphism is neither novel nor as important as the topic covered by the original article. As fragile agents inhabiting a ball of mass and fire organized in billions of partly-autonomous somewhat-intelligent resource-sharing systems flying through space and time, just recently coming up with scarily and growingly powerful new ways to rearrange control which may destroy existing controlling systems, including us, we should care very, very much about this. And the article provides powerful new tools to tackle this.

rm445 12y ago

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 Prisoner's Dilemma games. The 'morality' calculation might not be able to perfectly establish what is moral and immoral behaviour, for the reasons given in the article, but it ought to be able to establish where groups are not working to the moral codes of the majority, perhaps because they are discriminating or discriminated against, but also possibly because they are co-conspiring.

knowtheory 12y ago
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 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 the rubber hits the road regarding morality/ethics). One example is middle ground positions on immigration reform: http://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/5803912/americans-either-want-unauthorized-immigrants-to-get-citizenship-or http://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/5803912/americans-either-want-u... There are circumstances where opinions fall into a multimodal distribution, and in those situations, taking a policy position that is the global average not only will piss everyone off, but won't necessarily fix the policy problem at hand.
- blauwbilgorgel 12y ago
  I found your post interesting, because I think there is always a way for a group to make smarter decisions than any of its individuals. Let's say a middle-ground compromise is chosen on immigration reform: Deport new illegals, offer stricter official ways to become an American. Naturalize people who have worked or studied in the US for a certain time period. Even if the individuals all agree the collective made a bad decision, that is not to say that the group decision itself was bad: It may have very well been the perfect lesser of all evils. A system can converge to an optimal solution, while individual participants do not realize this. Likewise, a participant may spot a problem in need of a solution, where in reality there is no such problem or manageable solution. I do agree that, next to making more optimal decisions, a committee can make poor collective decisions that any individual members would never make. If the crowd is too frantically opposed, not willing to give in, then that crowd or system itself may be broken and dysfunctional, and will always produce inferior solutions. It has a bigger problem than a single circumstance.
- SilasX 12y ago
  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.
  - knowtheory 12y ago
    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.

JackFr 12y ago

To each his own. I actually think its overly long, wordy, rambling, poorly conceived and short any novel or important ideas.

jng 12y ago
Please tell us what sources you follow that provide you with (a) comparably lucid ideas and (b) not only that, but also in a shorter, clearer form. I for one want to follow them too if they really exist.
- soganess 12y ago
  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 commenter, to the original story, and truly to one-off forms of valuable information that don't provide a serialized source of continued information. One of my personal favorites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspond...
  - jng 12y ago
    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 linked to is nice, but Curry-Howard isomorphism is neither novel nor as important as the topic covered by the original article. As fragile agents inhabiting a ball of mass and fire organized in billions of partly-autonomous somewhat-intelligent resource-sharing systems flying through space and time, just recently coming up with scarily and growingly powerful new ways to rearrange control which may destroy existing controlling systems, including us, we should care very, very much about this. And the article provides powerful new tools to tackle this.