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.

"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...

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.

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.

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.

So who are you working for?

EDIT: The answer to the rest is not generally interesting.

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.