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.
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.
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-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.
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.
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.
Thanks for pointing out the muddle i was in there.
I for one want to follow them too if they really exist.
One of my personal favorites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspond...
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.
So who are you working for?
EDIT: The answer to the rest is not generally interesting.
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.
"Hey all, I have a new way of measuring how much resources computer programs take..."
If I remember correctly, he banned a professor from commenting on his blog over what seemed to be a routine academic debate.
Not really: for the record, Scott "sentenced" John Sidles repeatedly to a 3-month ban (later "commuted" to two weeks) due to his increasingly derailing and nearly trollish behavior [1], but soon he "dismissed" it for "time served" [2].
[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1478#comment-84734
[2] http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2013/09/tldr.html?sh...
Yes, it's written like the draft of an academic research paper that might or might not make it to peer review. Unfortunately, that description also matches the bulk of published papers.
Also, every idea that actually helps civilisation is incubated in a tiny minority (perhaps in just one mind). Since that minority is engaged in creative work, it is almost certainly an out-group. Adopting the morality of the ruling class and building connections with it are the surest way to power. But these are a full-time job.
I think the idea of quantifying morality might be improved by basing it not on cooperation but simply upon communication, e.g. how well do you know the opinions of those you disagree with? Note that this is almost the opposite approach of the path to power.
An analogy: Would you trust a physicist who does not communicate often, or a creationist who writes popular science essays?
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.