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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Consistent Agents are Utilitarian: If you have an agent taking actions in the world and having preferences about the future states of the world, that agent must be utilitarian, in the sense that there must exist a function V(s) that takes in possible world-states s and spits out a scalar, and the agent's behaviour can be modelled as maximising the expected future value of V(s). If there is no such function V(s), then our agent is not consistent, and there are cycles we can find in its preference ordering, so it prefers state A to B, B to C, and C to A, which is a pretty stupid thing for an agent to do.

But... that's how humans work? Actually we're even less consistent than that, our preferences are contextual so we lack information to rank most states. I recommend Shard Theory of human values probably the most serious intropection of ex-Yuddites to date:

shard of value refers to the contextually activated computations which are downstream of similar historical reinforcement events. For example, the juice-shard consists of the various decision-making influences which steer the baby towards the historical reinforcer of a juice pouch. These contextual influences were all reinforced into existence by the activation of sugar reward circuitry upon drinking juice. A subshard is a contextually activated component of a shard. For example, “IF juice pouch in front of me THEN grab” is a subshard of the juice-shard. It seems plain to us that learned value shards are[5] most strongly activated in the situations in which they were historically reinforced and strengthened.

... This is important. We see how the reward system shapes our values, without our values entirely binding to the activation of the reward system itself. We have also laid bare the manner in which the juice-shard is bound to your model of reality instead of simply your model of future perception. Looking back across the causal history of the juice-shard’s training, the shard has no particular reason to bid for the plan “stick a wire in my brain to electrically stimulate the sugar reward-circuit”, even if the world model correctly predicts the consequences of such a plan. In fact, a good world model predicts that the person will drink fewer juice pouches after becoming a wireheader, and so the juice-shard in a reflective juice-liking adult bids against the wireheading plan! Humans are not reward-maximizers, they are value shard-executors.

This, we claim, is one reason why people (usually) don’t want to wirehead and why people often want to avoid value drift. According to the sophisticated reflective capabilities of your world model, if you popped a pill which made you 10% more okay with murder, your world model predicts futures which are bid against by your current shards because they contain too much murder.

@HlynkaCG's Utilitarian AI thesis strikes again. Utilitarianism is a strictly degenerate decision-making algorithm because it optimizes decision theory, warps territory to get good properties of the map, it's basically inverted wireheading. Optimizer's curse is unbeatable, forget about it, an utilitarian AI with nontrivial capability will kill you or come so close to killing as to make no difference; your life and wasteful use of atoms are inevitably discovered to be a great affront to the great Cosmic project $PROJ_NAME. Consistent utilitarian agents are incompatible with human survival, because you can't specify a robust function for a maximizer that assigns value to something as specific and arbitrary and fragile as baseline humans – and AI is a red herring here! Yud himself would process trads into useful paste and Moravecian mind uploads manually if he could, and that's if he doesn't have to make hard tradeoffs at the moment. (I wouldn't, but not because I disagree much on computed "utility" of that move). Just read the guy from the time he thought he'll be the first in the AGI race. He sneeringly said «tough luck» to people who wanted to remain human. «You are not a human anyway».

Luckily this is all unnecessary.

Or as Roon puts it:

the space of minds is vast, much vaster than the instrumental convergence basin

But... that's how humans work?

Yes, humans are not consistent agents. Nobody here claimed otherwise.

Do you believe that humans must be utilitarians to achieve success in some task, " in the sense that there must exist a function V(s) that takes in possible world-states s and spits out a scalar, and the human's behaviour can be modelled as maximising the expected future value of V(s)"?