Reading tip: Scott Aaronson on how to resolve circular philosophical definitions

A few days ago, Scott Aaronson posted a very interesting piece on how to avoid circular philosophical definitions with linear algebra.

The basic idea is to apply a variant of Google’s PageRank algorithm (which defines a page as important if other important pages link to it).

There’s also a paper and some code by one of his students, Tyler Singer-Clark, who tested out the idea by estimating the morality of agents playing a tournament of iterated prisoner’s dilemma.