Think of the stuff that, when you imagine it, feels really yummy.

Also worth taking into consideration: things that feel anti-yummy. Fear/disgust/hate/etc are also signals about your values.

I think the "your values" -framing itself already sneaks in assumptions which are false for a lot of minds/brains. Notably: most minds are not perfectly monolithic/unified things well-modeled as a coherent "you/I/me". And other minds are quite unified/coherent, but are in the unfortunate situation of running on a brain that also contains other (more or less adversarial) mind-like programs/wetware.

Example:

It is entirely possible to have strongly-held values such as "I reject so-and-so arbitrary/disgusting parts of the reward circuitry Evolution designed into my brain; I will not become a slave to the Blind Idiot God's whims and attempts to control me". In that case, the "I" that holds those values clearly excludes at least some parts of its host brain's yumminess-circuitry.^[1] (I.e., feelings of yumminess forced upon the mind are not signals about that mind's values, but rather more like attempts by a semi-adversarial brain to hack that mind.)

Another example:

Alex has some shitty experiences in childhood, and strongly internalizes a schema S like "if I do X, I will be safe", and thereafter has strong yumminess feelings about doing X. But later upon reflection, Alex realizes that yumminess feelings are coming from S, and that S's implicit models of reality aren't even remotely accurate now in adulthood. Alex would like to delete S from their brain, but can't. So the strong yumminess-around-X persists. Is X one of Alex's values?

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So, I object to what I perceive to be an attempt to promote a narrative/frame about what constitutes "you/I/me" or "your values" for people in general. (Albeit that I'm guessing that there was no malice involved in that promoting.) Especially when it is a frame that seems to imply that many people (as they conceive of themselves) are not really/fully persons, and/or that they should let arbitrary brain-circuits corrupt their souls (if those brain-circuits happen to have the ability to produce feelings of yumminess).

Please be more careful about deploying/rolling your own metaethics.

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1. Maybe that "I" could be described as a learned mesaoptimizer, something that arose "unintentionally" from perspective of some imaginable/nonexistent Evolution-aligned mind-designer. But so what? Why privilege some imaginary Evolution fairy over an actually existing person/mind? ↩︎

I think some of the central models/advice in this post ^[1] are in an uncanny valley of being substantially correct but also deficient, in ways that are liable to lead some users of the models/advice to harm themselves. (In ways distinct from the ones addressed in the post under admonishments to "not be an idiot".)

In particular, I'm referring to the notion that

The Yumminess You Feel When Imagining Things Measures Your Values

I agree that "yumminess" is an important signal about one's values. And something like yumminess or built-in reward signals are what shape one's values to begin with. But there are a some further important points to consider. Notably: Some values are more abstract than others^[2]; values differ a lot in terms of

• How much abstract/S2 reasoning any visceral reward has to route through in order to reinforce that value.
• How much abstract/S2 reasoning is required to determine how to satisfy that value, or to determine whether an imagined state-of-affairs satisfies (or violates) that value.
• (Or, conversely:) How readily S1 detects the presence (or lack/violation) of that value in any given imagined state-of-affairs, for various ways of imagining that state-of-affairs.

Also, we are computationally limited meat-bags, sorely lacking in the logical omniscience department.

This has some consequences:

• It is possible to imagine or even pursue goals that feel yummy but which in fact violate some less-obvious-to-S1 values, without ever realizing that any violation is happening.^[3]
• Pursuing more abstract values is likely to require more willpower, or even incur undue negative reinforcement, and end up getting done less.^[4][5]
• More abstract values V are liable to get less strongly reinforced by the brain's RL than more obviously-to-S1-yummy values W, even if V in fact contributed more to receiving base/visceral reward signals.

Which in turn raises questions like

• Should we be very careful about how we imagine possible goals to pursue? How do we ensure that we're not failing to consider the implications of some abstract values, which, if considered, would imply that the imagined goal is in fact low-or-negative value?
• Should we correct for our brains' stupidity by intentionally seeking more reinforcement for more abstract values, or by avoiding reinforcing viscerally-yummy values too much?
• Should we correct for our brain's past stupidity (failures to appropriately reinforce more abstract values) by assigning higher priority to more abstract values despite their lower yumminess?^[6]
• Or does "might make right"? Should we just let whatever values/brain-circuits have the biggest yumminess-guns determine what we pursue and how our minds get reinforced/modified over time? (Degenerate into wireheaders in the limit?)

The endeavor of answering the above kinds of questions --- determining how to resolve the "shoulds" in them --- is itself value-laden, and also self-referential/recursive, since the answer depends on our meta-values, which themselves are values to which the questions apply.

Doing that properly can get pretty complicated pretty fast, not least because doing so may require Tabooing "I/me" and dissecting the various constituent parts of one's own mind down to a level where introspective access (and/or understanding of how one's own brain works) becomes a bottleneck.^[7]

But in conclusion: I'm pretty sure that simply following the most straightforward interpretation of

The Yumminess You Feel When Imagining Things Measures Your Values

would probably lead to doing some kind of violence to one's own values, to gradually corrupting^[8] oneself, possibly without ever realizing it or feeling bad at any point. The probable default being "might makes right" / letting the more obvious-to-S1 values eat up ever more of one's soul, at the expense of one's more abstract values.

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Addendum: I'd maybe replace

The Yumminess You Feel When Imagining Things Measures Your Values

with

The Yumminess You Feel When Imagining Things is evidence about how some parts of your brain value the imagined things, to the extent that your imagination adequately captured all relevant aspects of those things.

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1. or, the models/advice many readers might (more or less (in)correctly) construe from this post ↩︎

2. Examples of abstract values: "being logically consistent", "being open-minded/non-parochial", "bite philosophical bullets", "take ideas seriously", "value minds independently of the substrate they're running on". ↩︎

3. To give one example: Acting without adequately accounting for scope insensitivity. ↩︎

4. Because S1 yumminess-detectors don't grok the S2 reasoning required to understand that a goals scores highly according to the abstract value, so pursuing the goal feels unrewarding. ↩︎

5. Example: wanting heroin, vs wanting to not want heroin. ↩︎

6. Depends on (i.a.) the extent to which we value "being the kind of person I would be if my brain weren't so computationally limited/stupid", I guess. ↩︎

7. IME. YMMV. ↩︎

8. as judged by a more careful, reflective, and less computationally limited extrapolation of one's current values ↩︎

So what do you do about the growing aversion to information which is unpleasant to learn? This list is incomplete, and I appreciate your help by expanding it.

The underlying problem seems to be something like "System 1 fails to grok that the Map is not the Territory". So the solution would likely be something that helps S1 grok that.

Possibly helpful things:

• Imagine, in as much concrete/experiential detail as possible, the four worlds corresponding to "unpleasant thing is true/false" x "I do/don't believe the thing". Or at least the world where "unpleasant thing is true but I don't believe it".

• Split and Commit

• Leave yourself a line of retreat

In the post and comments, you've said that you're reflectively stable, in the sense of endorsing your current values. In combination with the sadistic kinks/values described above, that raises some questions:

What exactly stops you from inflicting suffering on people, other than the prospect of social or legal repercussions? Do you have some values that countervail against the sadism? If yes, what are they, and how do you reconcile them with the sadism? ^[1]

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1. Asking partly because: I occasionally run into sadistic parts in myself, but haven't found a way to reconcile them with my more empathetic parts, so I usually just suppress/avoid the sadistic parts. And I'd like to find a way to reconcile/integrate them instead. ↩︎

Could it be due to aliefs about attainability of success becoming lower, and that leading to lower motivation? (Cf. "motivation equation".) (It's less likely we'll be able to attain a flourishing post-human future if the world is deeply insane, mostly run by sociopaths, or similarly horrible.)

Or maybe: As one learns about horrors, the only thing that feels worth working on is mitigating the horrors; but that endeavour is difficult, has sparse (or zero) rewards, low probability of success, etc., and consequently does not feel very exciting?

(Also: IIUC, you keep updating towards "world is more horrible than I thought"? If so: why not update all the way, to the point that you can no longer predict which way you'll update in future?)

Suppose you succeed at doing impactful science in AI. What is your plan for ensuring that those impacts are net-positive? (And how would you define "positive" in this context?)

(CTRL+F'ing this post yielded zero safety-relevant matches for "safe", "beneficial", or "align".)

It's unclear whether there is a tipping point where [...]

Yes. Also unclear whether the 90% could coordinate to take any effective action, or whether any effective action would be available to them. (Might be hard to coordinate when AIs control/influence the information landscape; might be hard to rise up against e.g. robotic law enforcement or bioweapons.)

Don't use passive voice for this. [...]

Good point! I guess one way to frame that would be as

by what kind of process do the humans in law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies get replaced by AIs? Who/what is in effective control of those systems (or their successors) at various points in time?

And yeah, that seems very difficult to predict or reliably control. OTOH, if someone were to gain control of the AIs (possibly even copies of a single model?) that are running all the systems, that might make centralized control easier? </wild, probably-useless speculation>

A potentially somewhat important thing which I haven't seen discussed:

• People who have a lot of political power or own a lot of capital, are unlikely to be adversely affected if (say) 90% of human labor becomes obsolete and replaced by AI.
• In fact, so long as property rights are enforced, and humans retain a monopoly on decisionmaking/political power, such people are not-unlikely to benefit from the economic boost that such automation would bring.
• Decisions about AI policy are mostly determined by people with a lot of capital or political power. (E.g. Andreessen Horowitz, JD Vance, Trump, etc.)

(This looks like a decisionmaker is not the beneficiary -type of situation.)

Why does that matter?

• It has implications for modeling decisionmakers, interpreting their words, and for how to interact with them.^[1]

• If we are in a gradual-takeoff world^[2], then we should perhaps not be too surprised to see the wealthy and powerful push for AI-related policies that make them more wealthy and powerful, while a majority of humans become disempowered and starve to death (or live in destitution, or get put down with viruses or robotic armies, or whatever). (OTOH, I'm not sure if that possibility can be planned/prepared for, so maybe that's irrelevant, actually?)

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1. For example: we maybe should not expect decisionmakers to take risks from AI seriously until they realize those risks include a high probability of "I, personally, will die". As another example: when people like JD Vance output rhetoric like "[AI] is not going to replace human beings. It will never replace human beings", we should perhaps not just infer that "Vance does not believe in AGI", but instead also assign some probability to hypotheses like "Vance thinks AGI will in fact replace lots of human beings, just not him personally; and he maybe does not believe in ASI, or imagines he will be able to control ASI". ↩︎

2. Here I'll define "gradual takeoff" very loosely as "a world in which there is a >1 year window during which it is possible to replace >90% of human labor, before the first ASI comes into existence". ↩︎

Thank you for (being one of the horrifyingly few people) doing sane reporting on these crucially important topics.