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Comment by rm445 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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