If not, then you are saying that not all goals reduce to a number on a single metric, (...)
Simply false AFAIK. There is a mathematical way to express as a single-number metric every tiered system I’ve ever been capable of conceiving, and I suspect those I haven’t also have such expressions with more mathematics I might not know.
So, I don’t know if the grandparent was saying that, but I assume it wasn’t, and if it was implied somewhere and I missed it then it certainly is false.
But then again, I may simply be interpreting your words uncharitably. I assume you’re already aware that Maslow’s can also be reduced to a single number formula.
A more interesting question than maximizing numbers of sparrows, however, is maximizing other value-factors. Suppose instead of imagining a number of sparrows sufficiently large for which you would trade a human you care about, you imagine a number of different minimum-sufficiency-level values being traded off for that “higher-tiered” life.
One human against a flock of sparrows large enough to guarantee the survival of the species is easy enough. Even the sparrow species doesn’t measure up against a human, or at least that’s what I expect you’d answer.
Now measure it up against a flock of each species of birds, on pain of extinction of birds (but let’s magically handwave away the ecosystem impacts of this—suppose we have advanced technology to compensate for all possible effects).
Now against a flock of each species of birds, a group of each species of nonhuman mammals, a school of each species of fish, a colony of each species of insects, and so forth throughout the entire fauna and flora of the planet—or of all known species of life in the universe. Again we handwave—we can make food using the power of Science and so on.
Now against the same, but without the handwaving. The humans you care about are all fine and healthy, but the world they live in is less interesting, and quite devastated, but Science keeps y’all healthy and stuff.
Now against that, plus having actual human bodies. You’re all jarbrains.
Feel free to keep going, value by value, until you reach a sufficient tradeoff or accept that no amount of destructive alteration to the universe will ever compare to the permanent loss of consciousness of your loved ones, and therefore you’d literally do everything and anything, up to and including warping space and time and sacrificing knowledge or memory or thinking-power or various qualia or experience or capacity for happiness or whatever else you can imagine, all traded for this one absolute value.
“Life/consciousness of loved ones” can also be substituted for whichever is your highest-tiered value if different.
Do you mean that as in “you can describe/encode arbitrary systems as a single number” or something related to that?
Yes.
For my part, I also consider it perfectly plausible (though perhaps less likely than some alternatives) that some humans might actually have tiered systems where certain values really truly never can be traded off in the slightest fraction of opportunity costs against arbitrarily high values of all lower-tiered values at the same time.
For instance, I could imagine an agent that values everything I value but has a hard tier cutoff below the single value that its consciousness must remain continuously aware until the end of the universe if such a time ever arrives (forever otherwise, assuming the simplest alternative). This agent would have no trouble sacrificing the entire solar system if it was proven to raise the expected odds of this survival. Or the agent could also only have to satisfy a soft threshold or some balancing formula where a certain probability of eternal life is desired, but more certainty than that becomes utility-comparable to lower-tier values. Or many other kinds of possible constructs.
So yes, arbitrary systems, for all systems I’ve ever thought of. I like to think of myself as imaginative and as having thought of a lot of possible arbitrary systems, too, though obviously my search space is limited by my intelligence and by the complexity I can formulate.
There are actual tiered systems all around us, even if most examples that come to mind are constructed/thought of by humans.
That aside, I am claiming that I would not trade my highest tier values against arbitrary combinations of all lower tiered values. So … hi!
Re: Just a number; I can encode your previous comments (all of them) in the form of a bitstring, which is a number. Doesn’t mean that doing “+1” on that yields any sensible result. Maybe we’re talking past each other on the “describe/encode” point, but I don’t see how describing a system containing strict tiers as a number somehow makes those tiers go away, unless you were nitpicking about “everything’s just a number that’s interpreted in a certain way” or somesuch.
Ah, on the numbers thing, what I meant was only that AFAIK there always exists some formula for which higher output numbers will correspond to things any abitrary agent (at least, all the logically valid and sound ones that I’ve thought of) would prefer.
So even for a hard tier system, there’s a way to compute a number linearly representative of how happy the agent is with worldstates, where at the extreme all lower-tier values flatline into arbitrarily large negatives (or other, more creative / leakproof weighing) whenever they incur infinitesimal risk of opportunity cost towards the higher-tier values.
The reason I’m said this is because it’s often disputed and/or my audience isn’t aware of it, and I often have to prove even the most basic versions of this claim (such as “you can represent a tiered system where as soon as the higher tier is empty, the lower tier is worthless using a relatively simple mathematical formula”) by showing them the actual equations and explaining how it works.
It might be simpler to compare less sacred values (how many sparrows is a dog worth? How many dogs is a chimp worth?) building up to something greater. Unfortunately, Kawoomba seems to be under the impression that nothing could possibly be worth the life of his family. Not sparrows, not humans, not genocides-prevented.
That is so. Why unfortunately? Also, why “under the impression”? If you were to tell me some of your terminal values, I’d give you the courtesy of assuming you are telling the truth as you subjectively perceive it (you have privileged access to your values, and at least concerning your conscious values, subjective is objective).
I get it that you hold nothing on Earth more sacred than a hypothetical sufficiently high number of sparrows, we differ on that. It is not a question of epistemic beliefs about the world state, of creating a better match between map and territory. It is a difference about values. If Omega gave me a button choice decision, I’m very sure what I would do. That’s where it counts.
For consolidation purposes, this is also meant to answer “How sure? Based on what? What would persuade you otherwise?”—As sure as I can be, based on “what I value above all else”, persuade you otherwise: nothing short of a brain reprogram.
Why unfortunately? Also, why “under the impression”? If you were to tell me some of your terminal values, I’d give you the courtesy of assuming you are telling the truth as you subjectively perceive it (you have privileged access to your values, and at least concerning your conscious values, subjective is objective).
If your values conflict with those of greater humanity (in aggregate,) then you are roughly equivalent to Clippy—not dangerous unless you actually end up being decisive regarding existential risk, but nevertheless only co-operating based on self-interest and bargaining, not because we have a common cause.
Humans are usually operating based on cached thoughts, heuristics whih may conflict with their actual terminal values. Picture a Nazi measuring utility in Jews eliminated. He doesn’t actually, terminally value killing people—but he was persuaded that Jews are undermining civilization, and his brain cached the thought that Jews=Bad. But he isn’t a Paperclipper—if he reexamines this cached thought in light of the truth that Jews are, generally speaking, neurotypical human beings then he will stop killing them.
I get it that you hold nothing on Earth more sacred than a hypothetical sufficiently high number of sparrows, we differ on that.
Well, sacred value is a technical term.
If you genuinely attached infinite utility to your family’s lives, then we could remove the finite terms in your utility function without affecting it’s output. You are not valuing their lives above all else, you are refusing to trade them to gain anything else. There is a difference. Rejecting certain deals because the cost is emotionally charged is suboptimal. Human, but stupid. I (probably) wouldn’t kill to save the sparrows, or for that matter to steal money for children dying in Africa, but that’s not the right choice. That’s just bias/akrasia/the sort of this this site is supposed to fight. If I could press a button and turn into an FAI, then I would. Without question. The fact that I’m not perfectly Friendly is a bad thing.
Anyway.
Considering you’re not typing from a bunker, and indeed probably drive a car, I’m guessing you’re willing to accept small risks to your family. So my question for you is this: how small?
Incidentally, considering the quote this particular branch of this discussion sprouted from, you do realize that killing your son might be the only way to save the rest of your family? Now, if He was claiming that you terminally value killing your son, that would be another thing …
If you genuinely attached infinite utility to your family’s lives, then we could remove the finite terms in your utility function without affecting it’s output. You are not valuing their lives above all else (...)
You do have a point, but there is another explanation to resolve that, see this comment.
We still have a fundamental disagreement on whether rationality is in any way involved when reflecting on your terminal values. I claim that rationality will help the closet murderer who is firm in valuing pain and suffering the same as the altruist, the paperclipper or the FAI. It helps us in pursuing our goals, not in setting the axioms of our value systems (the terminal values).
There is no aspect of Bayes or any reasoning mechanism that tells you whether to value happy humans or dead humans. Reasoning helps you in better achieving your goals, nefarious or angelic as they may be.
My point is that, while an agent that is not confused about its values will not change them in response to rationality (obviously,) one that is confused will. For example, a Nazi realizing Jews are people after all.
Hairyfigment’s answer would also work. The point is that they are as worthy of moral consideration as everyone else, and, to a lesser extent, that they aren’t congenitally predisposed to undermine civilization and so on and so forth.
Simply false AFAIK. There is a mathematical way to express as a single-number metric every tiered system I’ve ever been capable of conceiving, and I suspect those I haven’t also have such expressions with more mathematics I might not know.
So, I don’t know if the grandparent was saying that, but I assume it wasn’t, and if it was implied somewhere and I missed it then it certainly is false.
But then again, I may simply be interpreting your words uncharitably. I assume you’re already aware that Maslow’s can also be reduced to a single number formula.
A more interesting question than maximizing numbers of sparrows, however, is maximizing other value-factors. Suppose instead of imagining a number of sparrows sufficiently large for which you would trade a human you care about, you imagine a number of different minimum-sufficiency-level values being traded off for that “higher-tiered” life.
One human against a flock of sparrows large enough to guarantee the survival of the species is easy enough. Even the sparrow species doesn’t measure up against a human, or at least that’s what I expect you’d answer.
Now measure it up against a flock of each species of birds, on pain of extinction of birds (but let’s magically handwave away the ecosystem impacts of this—suppose we have advanced technology to compensate for all possible effects).
Now against a flock of each species of birds, a group of each species of nonhuman mammals, a school of each species of fish, a colony of each species of insects, and so forth throughout the entire fauna and flora of the planet—or of all known species of life in the universe. Again we handwave—we can make food using the power of Science and so on.
Now against the same, but without the handwaving. The humans you care about are all fine and healthy, but the world they live in is less interesting, and quite devastated, but Science keeps y’all healthy and stuff.
Now against that, plus having actual human bodies. You’re all jarbrains.
Feel free to keep going, value by value, until you reach a sufficient tradeoff or accept that no amount of destructive alteration to the universe will ever compare to the permanent loss of consciousness of your loved ones, and therefore you’d literally do everything and anything, up to and including warping space and time and sacrificing knowledge or memory or thinking-power or various qualia or experience or capacity for happiness or whatever else you can imagine, all traded for this one absolute value.
“Life/consciousness of loved ones” can also be substituted for whichever is your highest-tiered value if different.
I don’t understand. Do you mean that as in “you can describe/encode arbitrary systems as a single number” or something related to that?
If not, do you mean that there must be some number of sparrows outweighing everything else as it gets sufficiently large?
Please explain.
Yes.
For my part, I also consider it perfectly plausible (though perhaps less likely than some alternatives) that some humans might actually have tiered systems where certain values really truly never can be traded off in the slightest fraction of opportunity costs against arbitrarily high values of all lower-tiered values at the same time.
For instance, I could imagine an agent that values everything I value but has a hard tier cutoff below the single value that its consciousness must remain continuously aware until the end of the universe if such a time ever arrives (forever otherwise, assuming the simplest alternative). This agent would have no trouble sacrificing the entire solar system if it was proven to raise the expected odds of this survival. Or the agent could also only have to satisfy a soft threshold or some balancing formula where a certain probability of eternal life is desired, but more certainty than that becomes utility-comparable to lower-tier values. Or many other kinds of possible constructs.
So yes, arbitrary systems, for all systems I’ve ever thought of. I like to think of myself as imaginative and as having thought of a lot of possible arbitrary systems, too, though obviously my search space is limited by my intelligence and by the complexity I can formulate.
There are actual tiered systems all around us, even if most examples that come to mind are constructed/thought of by humans.
That aside, I am claiming that I would not trade my highest tier values against arbitrary combinations of all lower tiered values. So … hi!
Re: Just a number; I can encode your previous comments (all of them) in the form of a bitstring, which is a number. Doesn’t mean that doing “+1” on that yields any sensible result. Maybe we’re talking past each other on the “describe/encode” point, but I don’t see how describing a system containing strict tiers as a number somehow makes those tiers go away, unless you were nitpicking about “everything’s just a number that’s interpreted in a certain way” or somesuch.
Ah, on the numbers thing, what I meant was only that AFAIK there always exists some formula for which higher output numbers will correspond to things any abitrary agent (at least, all the logically valid and sound ones that I’ve thought of) would prefer.
So even for a hard tier system, there’s a way to compute a number linearly representative of how happy the agent is with worldstates, where at the extreme all lower-tier values flatline into arbitrarily large negatives (or other, more creative / leakproof weighing) whenever they incur infinitesimal risk of opportunity cost towards the higher-tier values.
The reason I’m said this is because it’s often disputed and/or my audience isn’t aware of it, and I often have to prove even the most basic versions of this claim (such as “you can represent a tiered system where as soon as the higher tier is empty, the lower tier is worthless using a relatively simple mathematical formula”) by showing them the actual equations and explaining how it works.
It might be simpler to compare less sacred values (how many sparrows is a dog worth? How many dogs is a chimp worth?) building up to something greater. Unfortunately, Kawoomba seems to be under the impression that nothing could possibly be worth the life of his family. Not sparrows, not humans, not genocides-prevented.
That is so. Why unfortunately? Also, why “under the impression”? If you were to tell me some of your terminal values, I’d give you the courtesy of assuming you are telling the truth as you subjectively perceive it (you have privileged access to your values, and at least concerning your conscious values, subjective is objective).
I get it that you hold nothing on Earth more sacred than a hypothetical sufficiently high number of sparrows, we differ on that. It is not a question of epistemic beliefs about the world state, of creating a better match between map and territory. It is a difference about values. If Omega gave me a button choice decision, I’m very sure what I would do. That’s where it counts.
For consolidation purposes, this is also meant to answer “How sure? Based on what? What would persuade you otherwise?”—As sure as I can be, based on “what I value above all else”, persuade you otherwise: nothing short of a brain reprogram.
Diction impaired by C2H6O.
If your values conflict with those of greater humanity (in aggregate,) then you are roughly equivalent to Clippy—not dangerous unless you actually end up being decisive regarding existential risk, but nevertheless only co-operating based on self-interest and bargaining, not because we have a common cause.
Humans are usually operating based on cached thoughts, heuristics whih may conflict with their actual terminal values. Picture a Nazi measuring utility in Jews eliminated. He doesn’t actually, terminally value killing people—but he was persuaded that Jews are undermining civilization, and his brain cached the thought that Jews=Bad. But he isn’t a Paperclipper—if he reexamines this cached thought in light of the truth that Jews are, generally speaking, neurotypical human beings then he will stop killing them.
Well, sacred value is a technical term.
If you genuinely attached infinite utility to your family’s lives, then we could remove the finite terms in your utility function without affecting it’s output. You are not valuing their lives above all else, you are refusing to trade them to gain anything else. There is a difference. Rejecting certain deals because the cost is emotionally charged is suboptimal. Human, but stupid. I (probably) wouldn’t kill to save the sparrows, or for that matter to steal money for children dying in Africa, but that’s not the right choice. That’s just bias/akrasia/the sort of this this site is supposed to fight. If I could press a button and turn into an FAI, then I would. Without question. The fact that I’m not perfectly Friendly is a bad thing.
Anyway.
Considering you’re not typing from a bunker, and indeed probably drive a car, I’m guessing you’re willing to accept small risks to your family. So my question for you is this: how small?
Incidentally, considering the quote this particular branch of this discussion sprouted from, you do realize that killing your son might be the only way to save the rest of your family? Now, if He was claiming that you terminally value killing your son, that would be another thing …
You do have a point, but there is another explanation to resolve that, see this comment.
We still have a fundamental disagreement on whether rationality is in any way involved when reflecting on your terminal values. I claim that rationality will help the closet murderer who is firm in valuing pain and suffering the same as the altruist, the paperclipper or the FAI. It helps us in pursuing our goals, not in setting the axioms of our value systems (the terminal values).
There is no aspect of Bayes or any reasoning mechanism that tells you whether to value happy humans or dead humans. Reasoning helps you in better achieving your goals, nefarious or angelic as they may be.
I see your psychopath and raise you one Nazi.
I’m sorry, does that label impact our debate whether rationality implies terminal values?
My point is that, while an agent that is not confused about its values will not change them in response to rationality (obviously,) one that is confused will. For example, a Nazi realizing Jews are people after all.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
Taboo “people”.
‘Share many human characteristics with the Nazi, and in particular suffered in similar ways from the economic conditions that helped produce Nazism.’
“not Evil Mutants”
Hairyfigment’s answer would also work. The point is that they are as worthy of moral consideration as everyone else, and, to a lesser extent, that they aren’t congenitally predisposed to undermine civilization and so on and so forth.