TL;DR: being a managed agent can be good and the type of management matters.
I like to see these as consequences of different control/information structures. I kind of agree with the stuff on power seeking yet I also want to point out that if you’re in a company (a top down organisational structure) then you can ask yourself if an individual contributor is less useful than a manager? I think the IC might be less loadbearing on the direction from time to time yet that person can at the same time often say a lot about some very specific system that matters.
Isaiah Berlin has the concept of positive and negative liberty which I think is important here (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/). Sometimes you can get more agency in another direction by getting options removed from you and so it matters what type of agency is being removed and sometimes it can be a good thing to be a fully managed agent! (E.g someone forces you to eat healthy so that you get more energy on average)
I also think that the truer name version of this is something like a scalar property about a message passing relationship between two agents and that it is not only top down control structures that matter, there are other forms of organisation such as markets, democracies, networks and communities as well.
I like to see these as consequences of different control/information structures. I kind of agree with the stuff on power seeking yet I also want to point out that if you’re in a company (a top down organisational structure) then you can ask yourself if an individual contributor is less useful than a manager? I think the IC might be less loadbearing on the direction from time to time yet that person can at the same time often say a lot about some very specific system that matters.
Yes, subprocesses absolutely impact the direction of the overall system, they are in fact spun up to do things the superagent could not do as easily usually.
Sometimes you can get more agency in another direction by getting options removed from you and so it matters what type of agency is being removed and sometimes it can be a good thing to be a fully managed agent! (E.g someone forces you to eat healthy so that you get more energy on average)
I think versions of this where your agency is actually in line with a restriction can be good, especially if you place restrictions on yourself (self-management), but that if you’re constantly chaffing against e.g. eating healthy you’ll have more problems than it’s worth in general.
I also think that the truer name version of this is something like a scalar property about a message passing relationship between two agents
Yup agree, it’s not a binary, just one useful angle to look at relationships between agents.
that it is not only top down control structures that matter, there are other forms of organisation such as markets, democracies, networks and communities as well.
Yes! These cases I would classify as being managed or selected for trust by a superagent.
TL;DR: being a managed agent can be good and the type of management matters.
I like to see these as consequences of different control/information structures. I kind of agree with the stuff on power seeking yet I also want to point out that if you’re in a company (a top down organisational structure) then you can ask yourself if an individual contributor is less useful than a manager? I think the IC might be less loadbearing on the direction from time to time yet that person can at the same time often say a lot about some very specific system that matters.
Isaiah Berlin has the concept of positive and negative liberty which I think is important here (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/). Sometimes you can get more agency in another direction by getting options removed from you and so it matters what type of agency is being removed and sometimes it can be a good thing to be a fully managed agent! (E.g someone forces you to eat healthy so that you get more energy on average)
I also think that the truer name version of this is something like a scalar property about a message passing relationship between two agents and that it is not only top down control structures that matter, there are other forms of organisation such as markets, democracies, networks and communities as well.
(Hopefully this made some sense)
Yes, subprocesses absolutely impact the direction of the overall system, they are in fact spun up to do things the superagent could not do as easily usually.
I think versions of this where your agency is actually in line with a restriction can be good, especially if you place restrictions on yourself (self-management), but that if you’re constantly chaffing against e.g. eating healthy you’ll have more problems than it’s worth in general.
Yup agree, it’s not a binary, just one useful angle to look at relationships between agents.
Yes! These cases I would classify as being managed or selected for trust by a superagent.