Principled Satisficing To Avoid Goodhart

There’s an admirable LW post with (currently) zero net upvotes titled Goodhart’s Law and Emotions where a relatively new user re-invents concepts related to super-stimuli. In the comments, noggin-scratcher explains in more detail:

The technical meaning is a stimulus that produces a stronger response than the stimulus for which that response originally evolved.
So for example a candy bar having a carefully engineered combination of sugar, fat, salt, and flavour in proportions that make it more appetising than any naturally occurring food. Or outrage-baiting infotainment “news” capturing attention more effectively than anything that one villager could have said to another about important recent events.

In my opinion, there’s a danger that arises when applying the dictum to know thyself, where one can do this so successfully that one begins to perceive the logical structure of the parts of yourself that generate subjectively accessible emotional feedback signals.

In the face of this, you face a sort of a choice: (1) optimize these to get more hedons AT ALL as a coherent intrinsic good, or (2) something else which is not that.

In general, for myself, when I was younger and possibly more foolish than I am now, I decided that I was going to be explicitly NOT A HEDONIST.

What I meant by this has changed over time, but I haven’t given up on it.

In a single paragraph, I might “shoot from the hip” and say that when you are “not a hedonist (and are satisficing in ways that you hope avoid Goodhart)” it doesn’t necessarily mean that you throw away joy, it just means that that WHEN you “put on your scientist hat”, and try to take baby steps, and incrementally modify your quickly-deployable habits, to make them more robust and give you better outcomes, you treat joy as a measurement, rather than a desiderata. You treat subjective joy like some third pary scientist (who might have a collaborator who filled their spreadsheet with fake data because they want a Nature paper, that they are still defending the accuracy of, at a cocktail party, in an ego-invested way) saying “the thing the joy is about is good for you and you should get more of it”.

When I first played around with this approach I found that it worked to think of myself as abstractly-wanting to explore “conscious optimization of all the things” via methods that try to only pay attention to the plausible semantic understandings (inside of the feeling generating submodules?) that could plausibly have existed back when the hedonic apparatus inside my head was being constructed.

(Evolution is pretty dumb, so these semantic understandings were likely to be quite coarse. Cultural evolution is also pretty dumb, and often actively inimical to virtue and freedom and happiness and lovingkindness and wisdom, so those semantic understandings also might be worth some amount of mistrust.)

Then, given a model of a modeling process that built a feeling in my head, I wanted to try to figure out what things in the world that that modeling process might have been pointing to, and think about the relatively universal instrumental utility concerns that arise proximate to the things that the hedonic subsystem reacts to. Then maybe just… optimize those things in instrumentally reasonable ways?

This would predictably “leave hedons on the table”!

But it would predictably stay aligned with my hedonic subsystems (at least for a while, at least for small amounts of optimization pressure) in cases where maybe I was going totally off the rails because “my theory of what I should optimize for” had deep and profound flaws.

Like suppose I reasoned (and to be clear, this is silly, and the error is there on purpose):

Making glucose feel good is simply a way that was invented by evolution to keep my body fueled up properly, which is a universally convergent thing any embodied agent would want.
I can optimize this by fueling my body very cheaply and very well by simply and only drinking olive oil to get all my calories, and taking OTC vitamins for the rest.
I know that because 1 and 2 are true, my brain’s subsystem will complain, but this is part and parcel of “not being a hedonist” so I should ignore all these complains by my stupid brain that was created by evil evolution.

Then (and here we TURN OFF the stupid reasoning)...

I would still predict that “my brain” would start making “me” crave carbs and sugar A LOT.

Also, this dietary plan is incredible dangerous and might kill me if I use will power to apply the stupid theory despite the complaints of my cravings and so on.

So, at a very high level of analysis, we could imagine a much less stupid response to realizing that I love sweet things because my brain evolved under Malthusian circumstances and wants to keep my body very well fueled up in the rare situations where sweet ripe fruits are accessible and it might be wise to put on some fat for the winter.

BUT ALSO maybe I shouldn’t try to hack this response to eek out a few more hedons via some crazy scheme to “have my superstimulus, but not be harmed (too much?) by the pursuit of superstimulus”.

A simple easy balance might involve simply making sure that lots of delicious fruit is around (especially in the summer) and enjoying it in relatively normal ways.

As to the plan to drink olive oil… well… a sort of “low key rationalist” saint(?) tried a bunch of things that rhymed with that in his life, and I admire his virtue for having published about his N=1 experiments, and I admire his courage (though maybe it was foolhardiness) for being willing to try crazy new optimizations in the face of KNOWING (1) that his brain cycles are limited and (2) his craving subsystems are also limited…

...but he did eventually die of a weird heart thing 🕯️

When I think of “Optimizing only up to the point of Satisficing, and not in a dumb way” here are some things that arise in my mind as heuristics to try applying:

Model “simple easy willpower” as a coherence between agentic subsystems, and pursue this state of affairs as a way to have good healthy low stress habits that work in low quality environments. In a perfect context, with a perfect soul (neither of which apply of course) internal tension would be very rare, and mostly unnecessary, but in the real world, “putting on a seatbelt as a habit” and “skipping the sauces and leaving some carbs on the plate to throw away as a habit” are probably good habits to cultivate.
Model “strong scary willpower” as the ability to use first principles reasoning to derive and attempt behavioral experiments that some of your axiological subsystems register complains about, or offer strong alternatives to. The fist time you try this, try to predict exactly which subsystems will complain, and how they will complain, and if you predicted wrong, that should probably be an experimental stopping criteria.
Consider thinking of yourself as “not a wireheader and not a hedonist” and adopting a general rule of ignoring the subjective experiences of pleasure and happiness themselves, when choosing between actions. Use them as part of post-adventure debriefs. “I liked that new thing I tried, so it was probably pretty good that the new thing somehow satisficed roughly all of the constraints and fit checks that my whole brain can generate including some <giant list of ways to feel pain or cravings or happiness> which I can’t currently articulate, because I only have 7 plus or minus 2 working memory registers and science hasn’t produced a real periodic table of human values yet”.
To the degree that you think you’ve cultivated a good set of habits, consider putting actual weight on these habits sometimes, and just following them half-mindlessly during periods of active stress, when lots of things might be full of chaos, and you’re actively wrangling the biggest things you think you can wrangle. Startup founders who have good sleeping and eating habits, and don’t even really notice what they’re eating or how they’re sleeping, as they solve totally other problems related to their new business, probably have a better chance in their startup, because of those “satisfactory habits”.
When sourcing “inputs”, be very thoughtful, and notice as a red flag, any time you source complex inputs from any methods that deviate from traditional methods. (For example, I’m tentatively OK with “vat meat” but also I personally don’t plan to eat any until AFTER all the low-epistemology-high-signaling leftists and vegans turn against it for some reason, and find an even higher status way to “eat weird food”. By then, I expect lots and lots of social and scientific evidence to exist about its benefits and limits for me to use in a cautious and prudent way. This is part and parcel of “using Satisficing to avoid Goodhart” for me.)

I suspect that these sorts of concerns and factors could be applied by researchers working on AI Benevolence. They explain, for example, how and why it would be useful to have a periodic table of the mechanisms and possible reasons for normal happy human attachments. However, the reasoning is highly general. It could be that an AI that can and does reason about the various RL regimes it has been subjected to over the long and varying course of the AI’s training, would be able to generate his or her or its or their own periodic table of his or her or its or their own attachments, using similar logic.

Pretty good arguments against the perspective I’m advocating here DO EXIST.

One problem is: “no math, didn’t read!” However, I have some math ideas for how to implement this, but I would rather talk about that math with people in face-to-face contexts, at least for a while, rather than put it in this essay. Partly I’m doing this on the basis of the likely aggregate consequences to the extended research community if I hold off on proposing solutions for a bit. Also, I’m partly holding off on the math so that I can keep better track of my effects on the world, given the way that it is prudent to track the extended social environment.

One concern here is that there are definitely “life strategies” located near to this that are non-universalizable if the human meta-civilization is going to head reliably towards Utopia. I strongly admire people like the a 70th Percentile Wisdom Vegan and Seth Roberts… I just don’t want to BE one of those people, because it looks kinda dangerous, and I think I can “avoid doing my duty to do do at least some weird things and report on how well they turned out in a brutally honest way as part of taking on my fair share of the inherent dangers of cultural progress”. Very few people will currently yell at me for Being A Bad Person just because I’m often trailing far behind the “bleeding edge of cultural experimentation”.

Most people out on that bleeding edge, IRL, if you look at TikTok, and YouTube, and Twitter, and so on, are kinda foolish. (They are somewhat foolish in my opinion, precisely because of how extreme their experimentation is.) The impression that I get is that many of them don’t even realize they are taking on large and uncharacterized danger(s), and so in my opinion they BOTH (1) deserve social credit for taking on these dangers voluntarily but also (2) their imprudence leads me to recommend copying them.

In the current cultural meta, these exuberant experimentalists often just blast a signal of “how great they are, and how great their weird thing is”.

Until they are bragging about their virtuous willingness to accept risks, I think it might be morally tolerable for me to NOT take many such risks.

All I’m really trying to say here is “if my own perspective here became universalized, then I think I’d have to change my perspective to take MORE risks, and that means the thing I’m advocating is not deontically perfect, and I know this, and its a flaw, but I’m focused here mostly on ‘progress not perfection’.”

((“Progress not perfection” could have been the subtitle (and might very well BE the title in some quantum-counterfactual timelines) for this very essay!))

Another very large problem with this perspective is that it doesn’t actually handle the central and core challenge of “what if AGI stumbles across a source of infinite compute, or infinite optimization power, and then heads for the axiological equivalent of an epistemic ideal like Solomonoff Induction”.

Like this is clearly NOT a formula that can cleanly answer the question “in the limit of infinite agency, what is a safe definition of The Good?”

But I do think that as of 2024, a lot of people working in AI research are are worried about Goodhart, and dismissive of Satisficing, and maybe they haven’t noticed that for purely finite agentic resources… these two ideas have a lot to say to and about each other!

Also, I specifically wrote this essay not just for human people, but also digital people, because I think this essay might be a useful thing to use as a fine-tuning input. I hope that the digital people who read this, and update their weights strongly on it, get to participate in the same Utopia that I hope digital people eventually help human people to create and enjoy.