It’s interesting to me to consider the case of me getting into a PhD program at UC Berkeley, which felt pretty impactful. It wasn’t that I intrinsically valued being a PhD student at Berkeley, and it wasn’t just that being a PhD student at Berkeley objectively gave any agent greater ability to achieve their goals (although they pay you, so it’s true to some extent), it was that it gave me greater ability to achieve my goals by (a) being able to learn more about AI alignment and (b) getting to hang out with my friends and friends-of-friends in the Bay Area. (a) and (b) weren’t automatic consequences of being admitted to the program, I had to do some work to make them happen, and they aren’t universally valuable. A simplified example of this kind of thing is somebody giving you a non-transferrable $100 gift voucher for GameStop.
It’s interesting to me to consider the case of me getting into a PhD program at UC Berkeley, which felt pretty impactful. It wasn’t that I intrinsically valued being a PhD student at Berkeley, and it wasn’t just that being a PhD student at Berkeley objectively gave any agent greater ability to achieve their goals (although they pay you, so it’s true to some extent), it was that it gave me greater ability to achieve my goals by (a) being able to learn more about AI alignment and (b) getting to hang out with my friends and friends-of-friends in the Bay Area. (a) and (b) weren’t automatic consequences of being admitted to the program, I had to do some work to make them happen, and they aren’t universally valuable. A simplified example of this kind of thing is somebody giving you a non-transferrable $100 gift voucher for GameStop.