I at least partly buy this, but I want to play devil’s advocate.
Let’s suppose there’s a single underlying thing which ~everyone is gesturing at when talking about (humans’) “values”. How could a common underlying notion of “values” be compatible with our observation that people talk about all the very distinct things you listed, when you start asking questions about their “values”?
An analogy: in political science, people talk about “power”. Right up top, wikipedia defines “power” in the political science sense as:
In political science, power is the social production of an effect that determines the capacities, actions, beliefs, or conduct of actors.
A minute’s thought will probably convince you that this supposed definition does not match the way anybody actually uses the term; for starters, actual usage is narrower. That definition probably doesn’t even match the way the term is used by the person who came up with that definition.
That’s the thing I want to emphasize here: if you ask people to define a term, the definitions they give ~never match their own actual usage of the term, with the important exception of mathematics.
… but that doesn’t imply that there’s no single underlying thing which political scientists are gesturing at when they talk about “power”. It just implies that the political scientists themselves haven’t figured out the True Name of the thing their intuitions are pointed at.
Now back to “values”. It seems pretty plausible to me that people are in fact generally gesturing at the same underlying thing, when they talk about “values”. But people usually have very poor understanding of their own values (a quick check confirms that this applies to arguably-all of the notions of “values” on your list), so it’s not surprising if people end up defining their values in many different incompatible ways which don’t match the underlying common usage very well.
(Example: consider the prototypical deep Christian. They’d probably tell us that their “values” are to follow whatever directives are in the Bible, or some such. But then when actual value-loaded questions come up, they typically find some post-hoc story about how the Bible justifies their preferred value-claim… implying that the source of their value-claims, i.e. “values”, is something other than the Bible. This is totally compatible with deep Christians intuitively meaning the same thing I do when they talk about “values”, it’s just that they don’t reflectively know their actual usage of the term.)
… and if that is the case, then tabooing “values” is exactly the wrong move. The word itself is pointed at the right thing, and it’s all the attempted-definitions which are wrong. Tabooing “values” and replacing it with the definitions people think they’re using would be a step toward less correctness.
I’m kinda confused by this example. Let’s say the person exhibits three behaviors:
(1): They make broad abstract “value claims” like “I follow Biblical values”.
(2): They make narrow specific “value claims” like “It’s wrong to allow immigrants to undermine our communities”.
(3): They do object-level things that can be taken to indicate “values”, like cheating on their spouse
From my perspective, I feel like you’re taking a stand and saying that the real definition of “values” is (2), and is not (1). (Not sure what you think of (3).) But isn’t that adjacent to just declaring that some things on Eli’s list are the real “values” and others are not?
In particular, at some point you have to draw a distinction between values and desires, right? I feel like you’re using the word “value claims” to take that distinction for granted, or something.
(For the record, I have sometimes complained about alignment researchers using the word “values” when they’re actually talking about “desires”.)
tabooing “values” is exactly the wrong move
I agree that it’s possible to use the suite of disparate intuitions surrounding some word as a kind of anthropological evidence that informs an effort to formalize or understand something-or-other. And that, if you’re doing that, you can’t taboo that word. But that’s not what people are doing with words 99+% of the time. They’re using words to (try to) communicate substantive claims. And in that case you should totally beware of words like “values” that have unusually large clouds of conflicting associations, and liberally taboo or define them.
Relatedly, if a writer uses the word “values” without further specifying what they mean, they’re not just invoking lots of object-level situations that seem to somehow relate to “values”; they’re also invoking any or all of those conflicting definitions of the word “values”, i.e. the things on Eli’s list, the definitions that you’re saying are wrong or misleading.
It seems pretty plausible to me that people are in fact generally gesturing at the same underlying thing, when they talk about “values”.
In the power example, the physics definition (energy over time) and the Alex Turner definition have something to do with each other, but I wouldn’t call them “the same underlying thing”—they can totally come apart, especially out of distribution.
It’s worse than just a blegg/rube thing: I think words can develop into multiple clusters connected by analogies. Like, “leg” is a body part, but also “this story has legs” and “the first leg of the journey” and “the legs of the right triangle”. It seems likely to me that “values” has some amount of that.
I agree. Some interpretations of “values” you didn’t explicitly list, but I think are important:
What someone wants to be true (analogous to what someone believes to be true)
What someone would want to be true if they knew what it would be like if it were true
What someone believes would be good if it were true
These are distinct, because either could clearly differ from the others. So the term “value” is actually ambiguous, not just vague. Talking about “values” is usually unnecessarily unclear, similar to talking about “utilities” in utility theory.
I at least partly buy this, but I want to play devil’s advocate.
Let’s suppose there’s a single underlying thing which ~everyone is gesturing at when talking about (humans’) “values”. How could a common underlying notion of “values” be compatible with our observation that people talk about all the very distinct things you listed, when you start asking questions about their “values”?
An analogy: in political science, people talk about “power”. Right up top, wikipedia defines “power” in the political science sense as:
A minute’s thought will probably convince you that this supposed definition does not match the way anybody actually uses the term; for starters, actual usage is narrower. That definition probably doesn’t even match the way the term is used by the person who came up with that definition.
That’s the thing I want to emphasize here: if you ask people to define a term, the definitions they give ~never match their own actual usage of the term, with the important exception of mathematics.
… but that doesn’t imply that there’s no single underlying thing which political scientists are gesturing at when they talk about “power”. It just implies that the political scientists themselves haven’t figured out the True Name of the thing their intuitions are pointed at.
Now back to “values”. It seems pretty plausible to me that people are in fact generally gesturing at the same underlying thing, when they talk about “values”. But people usually have very poor understanding of their own values (a quick check confirms that this applies to arguably-all of the notions of “values” on your list), so it’s not surprising if people end up defining their values in many different incompatible ways which don’t match the underlying common usage very well.
(Example: consider the prototypical deep Christian. They’d probably tell us that their “values” are to follow whatever directives are in the Bible, or some such. But then when actual value-loaded questions come up, they typically find some post-hoc story about how the Bible justifies their preferred value-claim… implying that the source of their value-claims, i.e. “values”, is something other than the Bible. This is totally compatible with deep Christians intuitively meaning the same thing I do when they talk about “values”, it’s just that they don’t reflectively know their actual usage of the term.)
… and if that is the case, then tabooing “values” is exactly the wrong move. The word itself is pointed at the right thing, and it’s all the attempted-definitions which are wrong. Tabooing “values” and replacing it with the definitions people think they’re using would be a step toward less correctness.
I’m kinda confused by this example. Let’s say the person exhibits three behaviors:
(1): They make broad abstract “value claims” like “I follow Biblical values”.
(2): They make narrow specific “value claims” like “It’s wrong to allow immigrants to undermine our communities”.
(3): They do object-level things that can be taken to indicate “values”, like cheating on their spouse
From my perspective, I feel like you’re taking a stand and saying that the real definition of “values” is (2), and is not (1). (Not sure what you think of (3).) But isn’t that adjacent to just declaring that some things on Eli’s list are the real “values” and others are not?
In particular, at some point you have to draw a distinction between values and desires, right? I feel like you’re using the word “value claims” to take that distinction for granted, or something.
(For the record, I have sometimes complained about alignment researchers using the word “values” when they’re actually talking about “desires”.)
I agree that it’s possible to use the suite of disparate intuitions surrounding some word as a kind of anthropological evidence that informs an effort to formalize or understand something-or-other. And that, if you’re doing that, you can’t taboo that word. But that’s not what people are doing with words 99+% of the time. They’re using words to (try to) communicate substantive claims. And in that case you should totally beware of words like “values” that have unusually large clouds of conflicting associations, and liberally taboo or define them.
Relatedly, if a writer uses the word “values” without further specifying what they mean, they’re not just invoking lots of object-level situations that seem to somehow relate to “values”; they’re also invoking any or all of those conflicting definitions of the word “values”, i.e. the things on Eli’s list, the definitions that you’re saying are wrong or misleading.
In the power example, the physics definition (energy over time) and the Alex Turner definition have something to do with each other, but I wouldn’t call them “the same underlying thing”—they can totally come apart, especially out of distribution.
It’s worse than just a blegg/rube thing: I think words can develop into multiple clusters connected by analogies. Like, “leg” is a body part, but also “this story has legs” and “the first leg of the journey” and “the legs of the right triangle”. It seems likely to me that “values” has some amount of that.
I agree. Some interpretations of “values” you didn’t explicitly list, but I think are important:
What someone wants to be true (analogous to what someone believes to be true)
What someone would want to be true if they knew what it would be like if it were true
What someone believes would be good if it were true
These are distinct, because either could clearly differ from the others. So the term “value” is actually ambiguous, not just vague. Talking about “values” is usually unnecessarily unclear, similar to talking about “utilities” in utility theory.