My reply to your distinction between ‘consequentialists’ and ‘outcome pumps’ would be, “Please forget entirely about any such thing as a ‘consequentialist’ as you defined it; I would now like to talk entirely about powerful outcome pumps. All understanding begins there, and we should only introduce the notion of how outcomes are pumped later in the game. Understand the work before understanding the engines; nearly every key concept here is implicit in the notion of work rather than in the notion of a particular kind of engine.”
(Modulo that lots of times people here are like “Well but a human at a particular intelligence level in a particular complicated circumstance once did this kind of work without the thing happening that it sounds like you say happens with powerful outcome pumps”; and then you have to look at the human engine and its circumstances to understand why outcome pumping could specialize down to that exact place and fashion, which will not be reduplicated in more general outcome pumps that have their dice re-rolled.)
Do you agree that Flint’s optimizing systems are a good model (or even definition) of outcome pumps?
Are black holes and fires reasonable examples of outcome pumps?
I’m asking these to understand the work better.
Currently my answers are:
Yes. Flint’s notion is one I came to independently when thinking about “goal-directedness”. It could be missing some details, but I find it hard to snap out of the framework entirely.
Yes. But maybe not the most informative examples. They’re highly non-retargetable.
Understand the work before understanding the engines; nearly every key concept here is implicit in the notion of work rather than in the notion of a particular kind of engine.”
I don’t know the relevant history of science, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like the opposite was true: Our modern, very useful understanding of work is an abstraction that grew out of many people thinking concretely about various engines. Thinking about engines was like the homework exercises that helped people to reach and understand the concept of work.
Similarly, perhaps it is pedagogically (and conceptually) helpful to begin with the notion of a consequentialist and then generalize to outcome pumps.
My reply to your distinction between ‘consequentialists’ and ‘outcome pumps’ would be, “Please forget entirely about any such thing as a ‘consequentialist’ as you defined it; I would now like to talk entirely about powerful outcome pumps. All understanding begins there, and we should only introduce the notion of how outcomes are pumped later in the game. Understand the work before understanding the engines; nearly every key concept here is implicit in the notion of work rather than in the notion of a particular kind of engine.”
(Modulo that lots of times people here are like “Well but a human at a particular intelligence level in a particular complicated circumstance once did this kind of work without the thing happening that it sounds like you say happens with powerful outcome pumps”; and then you have to look at the human engine and its circumstances to understand why outcome pumping could specialize down to that exact place and fashion, which will not be reduplicated in more general outcome pumps that have their dice re-rolled.)
A couple of direct questions I’m stuck on:
Do you agree that Flint’s optimizing systems are a good model (or even definition) of outcome pumps?
Are black holes and fires reasonable examples of outcome pumps?
I’m asking these to understand the work better.
Currently my answers are:
Yes. Flint’s notion is one I came to independently when thinking about “goal-directedness”. It could be missing some details, but I find it hard to snap out of the framework entirely.
Yes. But maybe not the most informative examples. They’re highly non-retargetable.
I don’t know the relevant history of science, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like the opposite was true: Our modern, very useful understanding of work is an abstraction that grew out of many people thinking concretely about various engines. Thinking about engines was like the homework exercises that helped people to reach and understand the concept of work.
Similarly, perhaps it is pedagogically (and conceptually) helpful to begin with the notion of a consequentialist and then generalize to outcome pumps.