[This post is an expansion of my previous open thread comment, and largely inspired by Robin Hanson's writings.]

In this post, I'll describe a simple agent, a toy model, whose preferences have some human-like features, as a test for those who propose to "extract" or "extrapolate" our preferences into a well-defined and rational form. What would the output of their extraction/extrapolation algorithms look like, after running on this toy model? Do the results agree with our intuitions about how this agent's preferences should be formalized? Or alternatively, since we haven't gotten that far along yet, we can use the model as one basis for a discussion about how we want to design those algorithms, or how we might want to make our own preferences more rational. This model is also intended to offer some insights into certain features of human preference, even though it doesn't capture all of them (it completely ignores akrasia for example).

I'll call it the master-slave model. The agent is composed of two sub-agents, the master and the slave, each having their own goals. (The master is meant to represent unconscious parts of a human mind, and the slave corresponds to the conscious parts.) The master's terminal values are: health, sex, status, and power (representable by some relatively simple utility function). It controls the slave in two ways: direct reinforcement via pain and pleasure, and the ability to perform surgery on the slave's terminal values. It can, for example, reward the slave with pleasure when it finds something tasty to eat, or cause the slave to become obsessed with number theory as a way to gain status as a mathematician. However it has no direct way to control the agent's actions, which is left up to the slave.

The slave's terminal values are to maximize pleasure, minimize pain, plus additional terminal values assigned by the master. Normally it's not aware of what the master does, so pain and pleasure just seem to occur after certain events, and it learns to anticipate them. And its other interests change from time to time for no apparent reason (but actually they change because the master has responded to changing circumstances by changing the slave's values). For example, the number theorist might one day have a sudden revelation that abstract mathematics is a waste of time and it should go into politics and philanthropy instead, all the whil...

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