TLDR: if we model a human as a collection of sub-agents rather than single agent, how do we make normative claims about which sub-agents should or shouldn’t hammer down others? There’s no over-arching set of goals to evaluate against, and each sub-agent always wants to hammer down all the others.
If I’m interpreting things right, I think I agree with the descriptive claims here, but tentatively disagree with the normative ones. I agree that modeling humans as single agents is inaccurate, and a multi-agent model of some sort is better. I also agree that the Drowning Child parable emphasizes the conflict between two sub-agents, although I’m not sure it sets up one side against the other too strongly (I know some people for whom the Drowning Child conflict hammers down altruism).
What I have trouble with is thinking about how a multi-agent human “should” try to alter the weights of their sub-agents, or influence this “hammering” process. We can’t really ask the sub-agents for their opinion, since they’re always all in conflict with all the others, to varying degrees. If some event (like exposure to a thought experiment) forces a conflict between sub-agents to rise to confrontation, and one side or the other ends up winning out, that doesn’t have any intuitive normative consequences to me. In fact, it’s not clear to me how it could have normativity to it at all, since there’s no over-arching set of goals for it to be evaluated against.
TLDR: if we model a human as a collection of sub-agents rather than single agent, how do we make normative claims about which sub-agents should or shouldn’t hammer down others? There’s no over-arching set of goals to evaluate against, and each sub-agent always wants to hammer down all the others.
If I’m interpreting things right, I think I agree with the descriptive claims here, but tentatively disagree with the normative ones. I agree that modeling humans as single agents is inaccurate, and a multi-agent model of some sort is better. I also agree that the Drowning Child parable emphasizes the conflict between two sub-agents, although I’m not sure it sets up one side against the other too strongly (I know some people for whom the Drowning Child conflict hammers down altruism).
What I have trouble with is thinking about how a multi-agent human “should” try to alter the weights of their sub-agents, or influence this “hammering” process. We can’t really ask the sub-agents for their opinion, since they’re always all in conflict with all the others, to varying degrees. If some event (like exposure to a thought experiment) forces a conflict between sub-agents to rise to confrontation, and one side or the other ends up winning out, that doesn’t have any intuitive normative consequences to me. In fact, it’s not clear to me how it could have normativity to it at all, since there’s no over-arching set of goals for it to be evaluated against.