Insofar Albert is a sociopath, or is in one of those moods where he really does want to screw over someone else… I would usually say “Look man, I want you to pursue your best life and fulfill your values, so I wish you luck. But also I’m going to try to stop you, because I want the same for other people too, and I want higher-order nice things like high trust communities.”. One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.
This seems incoherent to me? I’d like it if all the sociopaths are duped by society into not pursuing their values, that’s great for my values, and because they’re evil I’d rather them not pursue their best life. However I still support distinguishing between goodness and human values for the same general-purpose reasons why often, even if its possible in principle to use some piece of information for evil, its still often better to spread & talk about that information than not.
More generally I think people are too quick to use the phrase “One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.” Yes, you can’t argue against the utility function, but if someone has a bad utility function and is unaware what that utility function is, I’m not going to dissuade them from that (unless I think they’ll be happy to cooperate with me on bettering both our goals if I do, but sociopaths are not known for such behavior). That’s part of stopping them.
I’m quite confident my preferences are coherent here, it’s one of the parts of my values I’m most familiar with.
There’s both an instrumentalish and a terminalish component. The terminalish component is roughly a really strong preference to not try to mislead people about their own values; that in particular is just incredibly deeply wrong for me to do according to my own values. The instrumentalish component is… very similar to the thing where people are like “well we need to be a little hyperbolic or misleading or conceal our true intent in order to spread our political message successfully” and then over and over again that type of reasoning leads people to metaphorically smack themselves in the face, it’s a massive own goal, it just does not work.
This seems incoherent to me? I’d like it if all the sociopaths are duped by society into not pursuing their values, that’s great for my values, and because they’re evil I’d rather them not pursue their best life. However I still support distinguishing between goodness and human values for the same general-purpose reasons why often, even if its possible in principle to use some piece of information for evil, its still often better to spread & talk about that information than not.
More generally I think people are too quick to use the phrase “One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.” Yes, you can’t argue against the utility function, but if someone has a bad utility function and is unaware what that utility function is, I’m not going to dissuade them from that (unless I think they’ll be happy to cooperate with me on bettering both our goals if I do, but sociopaths are not known for such behavior). That’s part of stopping them.
I’m quite confident my preferences are coherent here, it’s one of the parts of my values I’m most familiar with.
There’s both an instrumentalish and a terminalish component. The terminalish component is roughly a really strong preference to not try to mislead people about their own values; that in particular is just incredibly deeply wrong for me to do according to my own values. The instrumentalish component is… very similar to the thing where people are like “well we need to be a little hyperbolic or misleading or conceal our true intent in order to spread our political message successfully” and then over and over again that type of reasoning leads people to metaphorically smack themselves in the face, it’s a massive own goal, it just does not work.