Value-child: The mother makes her kid care about working hard and behaving well.
How does one do this? (Not entirely rhetorical.)
I don’t know how to do it perfectly, of course.[1] But I infer that it can be done, because there exist people who in fact intrinsically care about working hard and behaving well. So why can’t the child also be made to make decisions in a similar manner? Take those values and transplant them into the child via some kind of “model surgery.” (Unrealistic, yes. But so was “inner-align the child onto the evaluations output by his model of his mom.”)
All that the parable requires is that it can be done, that we are talking about a realistic and possible mind design pattern.
I also wrote in a footnote:
Value-child is not trying to find a plan which he would evaluate as good. He is finding plans which evaluate as good. I think this is the kind of motivation which real-world intelligences tend to have. (More on how value-child works in the next essay.)
More concretely, I’m happy to make guesses like “judiciously supply M&Ms and praise to reward-shape them when they’re working hard and behaving well, and emphasize why they’re getting the rewards—they’re working hard and behaving well” and “show them cool media where the protagonist works hard and behaves well.”
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I don’t know how to do it perfectly, of course.[1] But I infer that it can be done, because there exist people who in fact intrinsically care about working hard and behaving well. So why can’t the child also be made to make decisions in a similar manner? Take those values and transplant them into the child via some kind of “model surgery.” (Unrealistic, yes. But so was “inner-align the child onto the evaluations output by his model of his mom.”)
All that the parable requires is that it can be done, that we are talking about a realistic and possible mind design pattern.
I also wrote in a footnote:
More concretely, I’m happy to make guesses like “judiciously supply M&Ms and praise to reward-shape them when they’re working hard and behaving well, and emphasize why they’re getting the rewards—they’re working hard and behaving well” and “show them cool media where the protagonist works hard and behaves well.”