I don’t agree with you but I like that you’re exploring this.
Rather than try to go through a bunch of points, let me just pull one thread about “free choice”.
You argue:
If the alternatives are subsistence farming or working in local businesses that could disappear tomorrow because they don’t enjoy support from rich foreigners, then it doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all. It feels a lot like shopping around for people dying of preventable diseases and then offering a temporary cure in return for labor.
There’s two way I’ll approach this. First, I’ll assume that some notion of “free” choice is coherent.
But this is a choice freely made. Was it made at gunpoint? Perhaps sometimes in history but in this case not. This is people following the incentives. If you think the incentives that lead to this are bad, then this quickly unravels to thinking all the incentives that lead to anything beyond the state of living in small bands of hunter-gatherers is not a free choice because in each step along the civilizational “ladder” we give up things people found valuable about their old lives to get other things. Some people do think we made the wrong choice, but most people are happy to live with our nicer material conditions in exchange for having to deal with the psychological and meaning issues created by living in agricultural, industrial, and service economies.
Basically I think you’re making an argument that living in modern society is also not a free choice. Which, if you are, sure, but lots of people disagree on the reasonable grounds that they like the tradeoff of material comforts for psychic distress.
(There’s also something where I think your arguments take away the agency of these local people and replace it with paternalism about what you think is best for them, but that’s a separate concern.)
Okay, now to disagree with the very notion of “free” choice.
What would it mean to make a choice “freely”. Do we have free will? If not, in each moment we act in only the way we ever could have acted, so in some absolute sense there can be no exploitation because everything is always going to happen just as it would. Free choice and free will appear to exist in a relative sense, and it may be useful to think in an ontology with free will to get desired outcomes (again, from within the relative framing), but that doesn’t mean they are anything more an illusions that help us make sense of the world as we find it rather than something inherent in the world.
Yes, this sort of a fully general argument against concepts and words, but I bring it up because you’re trying to be precise about what free choice is, and I think that’s not really possible. Free choice is something intersubjective and exists along the dimensions of what feels free (more likely, fair) to us, and you’ll have to convince folks not that the choice is not made freely, but that their notion of what is free and fair is mistaken (which you do try to do elsewhere).
I appreciate your reply- it was thoughtful and lucid. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Well, I thought I wasn’t going to have time for a long(-ish) reply, but once I started writing I couldn’t stop, so here you go-
First, I’d say that “free choice” obviously isn’t an absolute state. But I think that there are more or less free choices. Working for a factory in the US is a more free choice while working for a factory in a country that has no other good options is a less free choice. I could have been more clear about that.
Second, I’m not going to argue for or against free will itself, because whether or not it exists, we have the appearance of free will and have to make decisions as if it does exist. It’s similar to the simulation arguments in that way- maybe we live in a simulation, but it doesn’t really matter from a practical perspective.
Lastly, I don’t believe that it’s paternalistic to evaluate the possible outcomes of my own actions (as the factory owner) and change my behavior based on them in order to conform to my own system of ethics.
It’s funny, but during the original conversation that led to this essay, the person arguing for factories was arguing that it’s the best way to pull poor countries out of poverty. He was accused of paternalism as well, so that argument goes both ways.
I strongly disagree with this view; “freeness” of a choice should be analyzed in terms of how much a local system’s thermal noise has causal impact on other systems. For example, if a system such as a brain has free agency over an object, such as a rock, then the noise in possible brain activations has determining impact over what trajectories the rock will follow, because the denoising process the brain implements gets to guide the behavior of the rock. Notably, this means that even with a deterministic PRNG, diffusion models have a very significant amount of “free agency”, because they have full control over the trajectory and ability to reject noise. Other generative models do as well, but diffusion has notably more than others due to how many steps of denoising steering the model takes; the model becomes very strong at rejecting noise and making its choices, and so the model will always have impact on its output that controls it into aesthetic states defined by the model weights.
Compare this to how much aesthetic control a brain has over their body’s behavior in circumstances with reduced optionality; the reduced optionality is recognizeable from an oracle’s perspective due to the fact that the externally unpredictable chaos of local trajectories in the brain does not have as many paths that cause the brain’s aesthetically desired outcomes.
For example, if someone is the only person on a planet, the person cannot push through barriers in statespace such as “I’m low on fuel and have an unknown disease”.
Or if someone is in a place where the people around them consider them to not have offered acceptable trade for access to material goods and services, but the person is out of fuel and has an unknown disease, their optionality is significantly reduced versus if material goods had not been collected by the actions of the stronger agents in their environment.
So, okay, I’ve claimed we can define optionality usefully. What does this mean about how a stronger agent should behave in a competitive environment?
I’d argue that the key question any safety-of-inter-agent-interaction alignment approach needs to answer is how to distribute gains from trade in order to maximize optionality of both agents in the trade. In other words, to minimize externality-inducing exploitation of vulnerability, maximize the combined optionality of both agents.
I tried to find papers to cite for this post, and didn’t find any of what I was looking for, which is frustrating, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen good work out of economic game theory recently, but my searches are coming up mostly empty handed. here’s one result:
I don’t agree with you but I like that you’re exploring this.
Rather than try to go through a bunch of points, let me just pull one thread about “free choice”.
You argue:
There’s two way I’ll approach this. First, I’ll assume that some notion of “free” choice is coherent.
But this is a choice freely made. Was it made at gunpoint? Perhaps sometimes in history but in this case not. This is people following the incentives. If you think the incentives that lead to this are bad, then this quickly unravels to thinking all the incentives that lead to anything beyond the state of living in small bands of hunter-gatherers is not a free choice because in each step along the civilizational “ladder” we give up things people found valuable about their old lives to get other things. Some people do think we made the wrong choice, but most people are happy to live with our nicer material conditions in exchange for having to deal with the psychological and meaning issues created by living in agricultural, industrial, and service economies.
Basically I think you’re making an argument that living in modern society is also not a free choice. Which, if you are, sure, but lots of people disagree on the reasonable grounds that they like the tradeoff of material comforts for psychic distress.
(There’s also something where I think your arguments take away the agency of these local people and replace it with paternalism about what you think is best for them, but that’s a separate concern.)
Okay, now to disagree with the very notion of “free” choice.
What would it mean to make a choice “freely”. Do we have free will? If not, in each moment we act in only the way we ever could have acted, so in some absolute sense there can be no exploitation because everything is always going to happen just as it would. Free choice and free will appear to exist in a relative sense, and it may be useful to think in an ontology with free will to get desired outcomes (again, from within the relative framing), but that doesn’t mean they are anything more an illusions that help us make sense of the world as we find it rather than something inherent in the world.
Yes, this sort of a fully general argument against concepts and words, but I bring it up because you’re trying to be precise about what free choice is, and I think that’s not really possible. Free choice is something intersubjective and exists along the dimensions of what feels free (more likely, fair) to us, and you’ll have to convince folks not that the choice is not made freely, but that their notion of what is free and fair is mistaken (which you do try to do elsewhere).
I appreciate your reply- it was thoughtful and lucid. Thanks for taking the time to comment. Well, I thought I wasn’t going to have time for a long(-ish) reply, but once I started writing I couldn’t stop, so here you go-
First, I’d say that “free choice” obviously isn’t an absolute state. But I think that there are more or less free choices. Working for a factory in the US is a more free choice while working for a factory in a country that has no other good options is a less free choice. I could have been more clear about that.
Second, I’m not going to argue for or against free will itself, because whether or not it exists, we have the appearance of free will and have to make decisions as if it does exist. It’s similar to the simulation arguments in that way- maybe we live in a simulation, but it doesn’t really matter from a practical perspective.
Lastly, I don’t believe that it’s paternalistic to evaluate the possible outcomes of my own actions (as the factory owner) and change my behavior based on them in order to conform to my own system of ethics.
It’s funny, but during the original conversation that led to this essay, the person arguing for factories was arguing that it’s the best way to pull poor countries out of poverty. He was accused of paternalism as well, so that argument goes both ways.
Thanks again.
I strongly disagree with this view; “freeness” of a choice should be analyzed in terms of how much a local system’s thermal noise has causal impact on other systems. For example, if a system such as a brain has free agency over an object, such as a rock, then the noise in possible brain activations has determining impact over what trajectories the rock will follow, because the denoising process the brain implements gets to guide the behavior of the rock. Notably, this means that even with a deterministic PRNG, diffusion models have a very significant amount of “free agency”, because they have full control over the trajectory and ability to reject noise. Other generative models do as well, but diffusion has notably more than others due to how many steps of denoising steering the model takes; the model becomes very strong at rejecting noise and making its choices, and so the model will always have impact on its output that controls it into aesthetic states defined by the model weights.
Compare this to how much aesthetic control a brain has over their body’s behavior in circumstances with reduced optionality; the reduced optionality is recognizeable from an oracle’s perspective due to the fact that the externally unpredictable chaos of local trajectories in the brain does not have as many paths that cause the brain’s aesthetically desired outcomes.
For example, if someone is the only person on a planet, the person cannot push through barriers in statespace such as “I’m low on fuel and have an unknown disease”.
Or if someone is in a place where the people around them consider them to not have offered acceptable trade for access to material goods and services, but the person is out of fuel and has an unknown disease, their optionality is significantly reduced versus if material goods had not been collected by the actions of the stronger agents in their environment.
So, okay, I’ve claimed we can define optionality usefully. What does this mean about how a stronger agent should behave in a competitive environment?
I’d argue that the key question any safety-of-inter-agent-interaction alignment approach needs to answer is how to distribute gains from trade in order to maximize optionality of both agents in the trade. In other words, to minimize externality-inducing exploitation of vulnerability, maximize the combined optionality of both agents.
I tried to find papers to cite for this post, and didn’t find any of what I was looking for, which is frustrating, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen good work out of economic game theory recently, but my searches are coming up mostly empty handed. here’s one result:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Coalition-Formation-in-Games-with-Externalities-Montero/91e61943f424fb464bbf2222a3d31e98e6dc730d