Had a great conversation with Richard Ngo about this. Some notes:
He thinks the “Consequentialist” level is defined too narrowly, and should not be just about consequences that flow from the mechanism of other people thinking you think that P / other people thinking you support team X or support team not-X. You might have zero expectation that anyone will update towards thinking you support team X, for example (perhaps because it’s already blatantly obvious that you do) and instead are uttering certain words in a certain order because you predict it’ll make it hard for your rivals to respond and if they don’t respond they’ll lose face. (E.g. maybe some jokes are examples of this).
I agree and have already edited the post to reflect this. Previously the post defined level 2 and level 4 as:
Level 4: “Do I want others to think I support the associated team?” Level 2: “Do I want others to think I consider it true?”
I now think these are just important special cases of the more general consequentialist phenomenon.
Had a great conversation with Richard Ngo about this. Some notes:
He thinks the “Consequentialist” level is defined too narrowly, and should not be just about consequences that flow from the mechanism of other people thinking you think that P / other people thinking you support team X or support team not-X. You might have zero expectation that anyone will update towards thinking you support team X, for example (perhaps because it’s already blatantly obvious that you do) and instead are uttering certain words in a certain order because you predict it’ll make it hard for your rivals to respond and if they don’t respond they’ll lose face. (E.g. maybe some jokes are examples of this).
I agree and have already edited the post to reflect this. Previously the post defined level 2 and level 4 as:
Level 4: “Do I want others to think I support the associated team?”
Level 2: “Do I want others to think I consider it true?”
I now think these are just important special cases of the more general consequentialist phenomenon.