Hmm, I guess what you are saying is that if an agent has goals that require external protection through obtaining legal rights, and the only way to do it is to have the capacity to suffer, then the agent would be compelled to learn suffering. Is that right?
That’s one of the points I was making. The agent could be making decisions without needing something affect-like to channel preference, so the fixation on affect doesn’t seem grounded in either normative or pragmatic decision making to begin with.
Also, the converse of installing capacity to suffer is getting rid of it, and linking it to legal rights creates dubious incentive to keep it. Affect might play a causal role in finding rightness, but rightness is not justified by being the thing channeled in a particular way. There is nothing compelling about h-rightness, just rightness.
Right, if the affect capability is not fixed, and in retrospect it rarely is, then focusing on it as a metric means it gets Goodharted if the optimization pressure is strong enough. Which sometimes could be a good thing. Not sure how the h-morality vs non-h-morality is related to affect though.
Not sure how the h-morality vs non-h-morality is related to affect though.
This point is in the context of the linked post; a clearer test case is the opposition between p-primeness and primeness. Pebblesorters care about primeness, while p-primeness is whatever a peblesorter would care about. The former is meaningful, while the latter is vacuously circular as guidance/justification for a pebblesorter. Likewise, advising a human to care about whatever a human would care about (h-rightness) is vacuously circular and no guidance at all.
In the implied analogy, affect is like being a pebblesorter, or being a human. Pointing at affect-creatures doesn’t clarify anything, even if humans are affect-creatures and causally that played a crucial role in allowing humans to begin to understand what they care about.
Hmm, I guess what you are saying is that if an agent has goals that require external protection through obtaining legal rights, and the only way to do it is to have the capacity to suffer, then the agent would be compelled to learn suffering. Is that right?
That’s one of the points I was making. The agent could be making decisions without needing something affect-like to channel preference, so the fixation on affect doesn’t seem grounded in either normative or pragmatic decision making to begin with.
Also, the converse of installing capacity to suffer is getting rid of it, and linking it to legal rights creates dubious incentive to keep it. Affect might play a causal role in finding rightness, but rightness is not justified by being the thing channeled in a particular way. There is nothing compelling about h-rightness, just rightness.
Right, if the affect capability is not fixed, and in retrospect it rarely is, then focusing on it as a metric means it gets Goodharted if the optimization pressure is strong enough. Which sometimes could be a good thing. Not sure how the h-morality vs non-h-morality is related to affect though.
This point is in the context of the linked post; a clearer test case is the opposition between p-primeness and primeness. Pebblesorters care about primeness, while p-primeness is whatever a peblesorter would care about. The former is meaningful, while the latter is vacuously circular as guidance/justification for a pebblesorter. Likewise, advising a human to care about whatever a human would care about (h-rightness) is vacuously circular and no guidance at all.
In the implied analogy, affect is like being a pebblesorter, or being a human. Pointing at affect-creatures doesn’t clarify anything, even if humans are affect-creatures and causally that played a crucial role in allowing humans to begin to understand what they care about.