I tend to think of integrity as the ability to have true beliefs and take good action in spite of incentives. I’m thinking of the person who chooses not to break a principle, even when nobody is looking and it’s not an obviously important case of the principle and there’s a lot of moral/personal value to be gained from it.
But there is also the second part. A person with high integrity can make many principled decisions in spite of incentives, but a person with high integrity also notices when they’re entering an environment where they’re going to be faced with too many decisions to be able to make good ones.
For example, I have a personal rule against googling a large class of gossipy/political things that feel yummy except when I have explicitly time-boxed time to think through it, because at the minute I don’t trust my background reasoning processes to incorporate the evidence in an unbiased way. I used to google gossipy/political topics a fair bit. Sometimes I still do it at midnight when I am bored and not tired. But I increasingly have been able to catch myself and say “this is not behaviour I endorse”, even though it’s quite difficult because there’s not an alternative yummy thing to do. Increasingly, I’m becoming someone who can say “well, I made a policy decision to not take this action, so I won’t”. However the more useful thing is noticing that my phone is generally giving me a lot of decisions to make that are difficult and often many of the choices I don’t endorse, and then systematically remove those options. I’ve done things like blocked social media on my phone except for 2 hours on Saturday, and blocked it permanently on my laptop, and followed some of Tristan Harris’s advice on organising my apps. Both of these things preserve my ability to think clearly and take good action.
There’s this idea that people with integrity can be handed power and be expected to continue doing the sort of things they did when they had less power—be the same sort of person, hold the same principles, etc. Or alternatively they will turn down the power if they think that they won’t be able to be the same person. Following that, there’s the old idea that the people who should be given power are those who don’t want it. I’m not sure this really holds up—those who don’t want it often have actual models predicting that they will experience failures of integrity. Though at least they have a model of where the mistakes will come and can try to prepare for them. Most people don’t even know where their errors will come.
I’m trying to figure out whether “acting in accordance with your stated beliefs” feels like the right description. I guess that there’s this thing relating to noticing when you will stop being the same kind of person, and avoiding taking that action unless you endorse it. I expect a person with a lot of integrity to change things about themselves and their actions, but in ways that they reflectively endorse, rather than being pulled around by the winds of the local incentives.
If I am to propose an alternative definition, it’s that someone with integrity is someone I can trust to follow their long-term goals and not be thrown off-course by following short-term incentives. Someone who is able to turn down power when it will throw them off their long-term course, even if they haven’t figured out how to get power a different way yet. Someone who will learn to say no to the short-term offers they are getting.
If I think about preserving system integrity over time, or an agent preserving goal integrity over time, I think of the ability for the system/agent to move through a wide variety of environments without being broken / fundamentally changed in ways it doesn’t want by outside forces. This conceptualisation of integrity—being able to preserve the core parts of you and your goals over time—seems good to me. (Reminds me of Ray / Critch talking about being a robust agent.) Someone with integrity is wholly them and will stay whole over the long run, even if crazy things are thrown at them. It’s not a claim about their competences/goals/beliefs now, it’s a claim about the long-term integrity of their competences/goals/beliefs.
I tend to think of integrity as the ability to have true beliefs and take good action in spite of incentives. I’m thinking of the person who chooses not to break a principle, even when nobody is looking and it’s not an obviously important case of the principle and there’s a lot of moral/personal value to be gained from it.
But there is also the second part. A person with high integrity can make many principled decisions in spite of incentives, but a person with high integrity also notices when they’re entering an environment where they’re going to be faced with too many decisions to be able to make good ones.
For example, I have a personal rule against googling a large class of gossipy/political things that feel yummy except when I have explicitly time-boxed time to think through it, because at the minute I don’t trust my background reasoning processes to incorporate the evidence in an unbiased way. I used to google gossipy/political topics a fair bit. Sometimes I still do it at midnight when I am bored and not tired. But I increasingly have been able to catch myself and say “this is not behaviour I endorse”, even though it’s quite difficult because there’s not an alternative yummy thing to do. Increasingly, I’m becoming someone who can say “well, I made a policy decision to not take this action, so I won’t”. However the more useful thing is noticing that my phone is generally giving me a lot of decisions to make that are difficult and often many of the choices I don’t endorse, and then systematically remove those options. I’ve done things like blocked social media on my phone except for 2 hours on Saturday, and blocked it permanently on my laptop, and followed some of Tristan Harris’s advice on organising my apps. Both of these things preserve my ability to think clearly and take good action.
There’s this idea that people with integrity can be handed power and be expected to continue doing the sort of things they did when they had less power—be the same sort of person, hold the same principles, etc. Or alternatively they will turn down the power if they think that they won’t be able to be the same person. Following that, there’s the old idea that the people who should be given power are those who don’t want it. I’m not sure this really holds up—those who don’t want it often have actual models predicting that they will experience failures of integrity. Though at least they have a model of where the mistakes will come and can try to prepare for them. Most people don’t even know where their errors will come.
I’m trying to figure out whether “acting in accordance with your stated beliefs” feels like the right description. I guess that there’s this thing relating to noticing when you will stop being the same kind of person, and avoiding taking that action unless you endorse it. I expect a person with a lot of integrity to change things about themselves and their actions, but in ways that they reflectively endorse, rather than being pulled around by the winds of the local incentives.
If I am to propose an alternative definition, it’s that someone with integrity is someone I can trust to follow their long-term goals and not be thrown off-course by following short-term incentives. Someone who is able to turn down power when it will throw them off their long-term course, even if they haven’t figured out how to get power a different way yet. Someone who will learn to say no to the short-term offers they are getting.
If I think about preserving system integrity over time, or an agent preserving goal integrity over time, I think of the ability for the system/agent to move through a wide variety of environments without being broken / fundamentally changed in ways it doesn’t want by outside forces. This conceptualisation of integrity—being able to preserve the core parts of you and your goals over time—seems good to me. (Reminds me of Ray / Critch talking about being a robust agent.) Someone with integrity is wholly them and will stay whole over the long run, even if crazy things are thrown at them. It’s not a claim about their competences/goals/beliefs now, it’s a claim about the long-term integrity of their competences/goals/beliefs.