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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on [LINK] Scott Aaronson on Google, Breaking Circularity and Eigenmorality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (46)
I'm annoyed at how negative the comments on this post are. I think this is a great example of making progress on an apparently philosophical problem by bringing in some nontrivial mathematics (in this case, the idea of using eigenvector decompositions to make sense of circular definitions), and it seems extremely uncharitable to me to judge it for failing to be a fully general and correct solution to the problem when it's obviously not intended to be.
This is really the crux of the problem. It feels to me like an extension of the "posts to Main have to be perfect" problem.
It's easy to criticize someone; it's hard to have an original thought.
I give it eight out of ten for cleverness, but minus four for stating an obvious trap in the introduction and then proceeding to walk blithely into it.
Pretty obviously not meant to be totally serious, though, so I can't condemn it too much.
I don't think he's talking about morality at all.
Well, no, he doesn't -- he's talking, basically, about popularity and about clustering of people on the basis of some cooperation metric. But then, for some reason, he calls that whole thing "morality".
In which way slapping emotion-laden labels on some well-known statistical techniques constitutes "making progress"?
Indeed. The post, although thought-provoking, doesn't appear to have anything to do with a "philosophical problem", although that doesn't stop the author from pompously speaking as if it does.
ETA: I'm assuming the downvoter thought I was being ironic.
I think that the article is important because it fails critically, that is it serves to identify the fact that morality is important precisely when it's not the result of aggregated preferences.
And we should all know by now how much dangerous a sub-optimal morality can be.
Agh, but if you want to solve that problem, the solution is not to criticize everyone who offers a proposal. That is not how you incentivize people to solve a problem.
I think the 'solution' is exactly to criticize everyone who offers a proposal, but do so in a respectful, clear and constructive manner, highlighting the good and the bad.
Indeed, I think that Aaronson's proposal was interesting, new and very worth of reflection and further expansion. Yet I still think it fails, and badly.