Thanks for the reference (and sorry for just now getting around to replying).
I think Bernheim’s paper is somewhat related to the shard theory of human values. There are several commonalities, including
Rejecting the idea that humans secretly have “true preferences” or “utility functions”
Taking a stand against ad hoc / patchwork / case-by-case explanations of welfare-related decisions
Recognizing the influence of context on decision-making; via “frames” (this work) or “shard activation contexts” (shard theory)
However, I think that shard theory is not a rederivation of this work, or other work mentioned in this paper:
This paper presents a framework for locating decision-making contexts in which people are making ~informed decisions (at a gloss), gathering data within those contexts, and then making inferences about that person’s preferences.
Shard theory aims to predict what kinds of neural circuits get formed given certain initial conditions (like local random initialization of the cortex and certain reward circuitry), and to then draw conclusions about the choices of that learned policy.
That doesn’t mean these works are unrelated. If you want to deeply understand welfare and “idealized preferences” / what people “should” choose, I think that we should understand more about how people make choices, via what neural circuits. This is a question of neuroscience and reinforcement learning theory. The shard theory of human values aims to contribute to that question.
As you pointed out in private correspondence, the shard theory of human values can be viewed as a hypothesis about where the context-sensitive preferences come from.
Thanks for the reference (and sorry for just now getting around to replying).
I think Bernheim’s paper is somewhat related to the shard theory of human values. There are several commonalities, including
Rejecting the idea that humans secretly have “true preferences” or “utility functions”
Taking a stand against ad hoc / patchwork / case-by-case explanations of welfare-related decisions
Recognizing the influence of context on decision-making; via “frames” (this work) or “shard activation contexts” (shard theory)
However, I think that shard theory is not a rederivation of this work, or other work mentioned in this paper:
This paper presents a framework for locating decision-making contexts in which people are making ~informed decisions (at a gloss), gathering data within those contexts, and then making inferences about that person’s preferences.
Shard theory aims to predict what kinds of neural circuits get formed given certain initial conditions (like local random initialization of the cortex and certain reward circuitry), and to then draw conclusions about the choices of that learned policy.
That doesn’t mean these works are unrelated. If you want to deeply understand welfare and “idealized preferences” / what people “should” choose, I think that we should understand more about how people make choices, via what neural circuits. This is a question of neuroscience and reinforcement learning theory. The shard theory of human values aims to contribute to that question.
As you pointed out in private correspondence, the shard theory of human values can be viewed as a hypothesis about where the context-sensitive preferences come from.