Yeah. I think consequentialism is a great framing that has done a lot of good in EA, where the desired state of the world is easy to describe (remove X amount of disease and such). And this created a bit of a blindspot, where people started thinking that goals not natively formulated in terms of end states (“play with this toy”, “respect this person’s wishes” and such) should be reformulated in terms of end states anyway, in more complex ways. To be honest I still go back and forth on whether that works—my post was a bit polemical. But it feels like there’s something to the idea of keeping some goals in our “internal language”, not rewriting them into the language of consequences.
Yeah. I think consequentialism is a great framing that has done a lot of good in EA, where the desired state of the world is easy to describe (remove X amount of disease and such). And this created a bit of a blindspot, where people started thinking that goals not natively formulated in terms of end states (“play with this toy”, “respect this person’s wishes” and such) should be reformulated in terms of end states anyway, in more complex ways. To be honest I still go back and forth on whether that works—my post was a bit polemical. But it feels like there’s something to the idea of keeping some goals in our “internal language”, not rewriting them into the language of consequences.