While this is a solid example if argued better, in my view this is a somewhat badly argued description of it, and the example is one that is extremely important to be correct about. There are several turns of phrase that I think are false under standard definitions of the words, despite themselves being standard turns of phrase; eg, it is in my view not possible under <?natural law?> to own another being, so the “ownership” in the law of the enforcers of the time was misleading phrasing, and that “ownership” should not be agreed with today since we have begun to near consensus that they were in the wrong (though some people, obviously in my view terrible people, endorse continuation of slavery in the countries where it exists, such as the US prison system or various mining groups in africa). That said, it’s also not the end of the world to be wrong about it as a first attempt from someone who has spent less than decades thinking heavily about this—such is the nature of attempting to discuss high sensitivity things, one is wrong about them as often or more than low sensitivity things. But I would encourage attempting to rephrase to encode the concepts you wouldn’t want a reader to miss, since in my view it’s worth posting commentary on everything to clarify convergence towards prosocial policy.
IMO this is a good time to use something besides hedonic utilitarianism’s lens as an additional comparison: eg, a utility monster, in the preference utilitarian math, is defined by and could only be implemented by a hyperoptimizer, ie a being willing to push something very far into a target configuration. In this case, the slavers were optimizing their own life’s shape by enslaving people in order to optimize the slaver’s preferences at incredible cost to those they trapped. The trapping people and forcing them to work allowed the person who’d done so to implement devaluation of others’ preferences by the universe; the enslaved people were not able to implement their preferences, and so by any measurement of revealed preference that failed to understand the intents behind attempts to escape the trap, the enslaved people appeared to “accept” their conditions; a human wouldn’t necessarily make that mistake, but this is an important case to get right for any “discovering agency”-like algorithm, since efforts by the enslaved people were weakened by their enslavement.
While this is a solid example if argued better, in my view this is a somewhat badly argued description of it, and the example is one that is extremely important to be correct about. There are several turns of phrase that I think are false under standard definitions of the words, despite themselves being standard turns of phrase; eg, it is in my view not possible under <?natural law?> to own another being, so the “ownership” in the law of the enforcers of the time was misleading phrasing, and that “ownership” should not be agreed with today since we have begun to near consensus that they were in the wrong (though some people, obviously in my view terrible people, endorse continuation of slavery in the countries where it exists, such as the US prison system or various mining groups in africa). That said, it’s also not the end of the world to be wrong about it as a first attempt from someone who has spent less than decades thinking heavily about this—such is the nature of attempting to discuss high sensitivity things, one is wrong about them as often or more than low sensitivity things. But I would encourage attempting to rephrase to encode the concepts you wouldn’t want a reader to miss, since in my view it’s worth posting commentary on everything to clarify convergence towards prosocial policy.
IMO this is a good time to use something besides hedonic utilitarianism’s lens as an additional comparison: eg, a utility monster, in the preference utilitarian math, is defined by and could only be implemented by a hyperoptimizer, ie a being willing to push something very far into a target configuration. In this case, the slavers were optimizing their own life’s shape by enslaving people in order to optimize the slaver’s preferences at incredible cost to those they trapped. The trapping people and forcing them to work allowed the person who’d done so to implement devaluation of others’ preferences by the universe; the enslaved people were not able to implement their preferences, and so by any measurement of revealed preference that failed to understand the intents behind attempts to escape the trap, the enslaved people appeared to “accept” their conditions; a human wouldn’t necessarily make that mistake, but this is an important case to get right for any “discovering agency”-like algorithm, since efforts by the enslaved people were weakened by their enslavement.