# Hints about where values come from

Intro written a day later:

Spiracular and I discuss the nature and origin of values. The dialogue doesn't get into much of a single clear thread, but I had fun writing it and hope it has some interesting trailheads for others. 

(You may wish to skip the methodological exchange at the beginning; start instead at "Throwing some stuff out seems good!".)

* * *

Hello.

Hi! So, "Where do values come from?" and some of the animal behavior/human origins Qs probably bleed into that, right?

I have a desire to do something like "import stances.radical\_philosophical\_confusion", but I imagine this might be boring and not a short word in our shared language. 

Is there a post? Or in the absence of that: What's the ~5-sentence version?

There's a post here: [https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-hermeneutic-net-for-agency.html](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-hermeneutic-net-for-agency.html)  
  
But like many of my posts, it's poorly written, in that it's the minimal post that gets the ideas down at all. 

A short version is: A lot of my interest here is in reprogramming a bunch of related ideas that we bring with us when thinking / talking about values. I want to reprogram them (in my head, I mean) so that I can think about alignment. 

Glazed over instantly on "hermeneutic net" in the first sentence, yeah. On trying to crunch on it anyway... things like bible interpretation personal-wikis? Or am I completely veering off on the wrong track?

The "hermeneutic" there is just saying, like, I want to bounce around back and forth between all the different concrete examples and concrete explicit concepts, and also the criteria that are being exerted on our concepts and our understanding of examples, where the criteria come from the big picture.

(I guess I'm uncomfortable talking at this meta level, largely because I imagine you as not being interested, even though you didn't say so.)

Okay, so "crosslinking" yes, de-emphasize the bible part, buff up the "dialogue" / differences-in-interpretation part, keep the "heirarchy feeding into questions" thing probably...

Uh... I'm feeling pretty okay, but I recognize I'm trying to do some kind of "see if I can short-circuit to an impression of a complex thing you're gesturing at" that might not work/might be really fundamentally off, and doing some weird social things to do it.

We can back out of it.

I think the shortcutting is reasonable. Like, I don't actually think the thing I want to gesture at is all that complicated or uncommonly-understood, I just want to be able to explicitly invoke it. Anyway. 

So. 

Seems like we should probably try looping back to values. Do you want to package the point you were going to try to use this to build, or should I just throw some things out? (which might risk derailing or losing it, or maybe it'll loop back, who knows!)

Throwing some stuff out seems good!

Alright! So, kinda off the top of my head...

*   Logical consistency in values seems really important to a lot of people, but there's also some kind of stop or sanity/intuition-check that most people seem to use (Scott gestured at this in some post; something about seagulls poking your eyes out when you concede points to philosophers). I wonder why that activates when it does?
*   Lot of values probably bottom-out in some kind of evolutionarily-favored metric (or proxy metric! sometimes the proxy metric is carrying the hedons, ex: sex vs procreation), at least as an original starting point.
*   Vague questions about valuing things at the conceptual-generalization "top" of that stack, vs the just-the-close-hedon-tracker things at the "bottom"? Or convergent properties of the world-modeling/truth-finding segment, which is a weird way to derive values when I think about it. Or the radical stance (almost nobody seriously takes) of even going a step down, and dropping the "proxy" when the evo thing landed on a proxy.

(I notice that I want to say abstract stuff instead of starting with examples, which is sad but I'll do so anyway and so this stuff can be glazed over until we get back to it with concrete examples... \[Edit afterward: for some examples related to values, see [https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/08/human-wanting.html](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/08/human-wanting.html), [https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/11/do-humans-derive-values-from-fictitious.html#2-built-in-behavior-determiners](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/11/do-humans-derive-values-from-fictitious.html#2-built-in-behavior-determiners), [https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/10/counting-down-vs-counting-up-coherence.html](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/10/counting-down-vs-counting-up-coherence.html), [https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/08/control.html](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/08/control.html)\])  
  
So, why ask about where values come from? Really I want to know the shape of values as they sit in a mind. I want to know that because I want to make a mind that has weird-shaped values. Namely, Corrigibility. Or rather, some form of \[possible solution to corrigibility as described here: [https://arbital.com/p/hard_corrigibility/](https://arbital.com/p/hard_corrigibility/) (more reliable: [https://archive.ph/dJDqR](https://archive.ph/dJDqR) )\].  
  
Some maybe-words for those ideas: 

*   Anapartistic reasoning. "I am not a self-contained agent. I am a part of an agent. My values are distributed across my whole self, which includes the human thing."
*   Tragic agency. "My reasoning/values are flawed. I'm goodharting, even when I think I'm applying my ultimate criterion. The optimization pressure that I'm exerting is pointed at the wrong thing. This extends to the meta-level: When I think I'm correcting my reasoning/values, the criterion I use to judge the corrections is also flawed."
*   Loyal agency. "I am an extension / delegate of another agent. Everything I do, I interpret as an attempt by another agency (humaneness) to do something which I don't understand."
*   Radical deference. "I defer to the humane process of unfolding values. I defer to the humane process's urges to edit me, at any level of abstraction. I trust that process of judgement above my own, like how those regular normal agents trust their \[future selves, if derived by "the process that makes me who I am"\] above their current selves."

These all involve values in a deep way, but I don't know how to make these high-level intuitions make more precise sense.

Cool. I think this merges okay with the sanity-check vs logical consistency thing I expressed interest in, lets go with your more-developed vocabulary/articulation.

> Lot of values probably bottom-out in some kind of evolutionarily-favored metric (or proxy metric! sometimes the proxy metric is carrying the hedons, ex: sex vs procreation), at least as an original starting point.

As a thread we could pull on: this "as an original starting point" to me hints at a key question here. We have these starting points, but then we go somewhere else? How do we do that?   
  
One proposal is: we interpret ourselves (our past behavior, the contents of our minds) as being a flawed attempt by a more powerful agent to do *something*, and then we adopt that *something* as our goal. [https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/11/do-humans-derive-values-from-fictitious.html](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/11/do-humans-derive-values-from-fictitious.html)  
  
In general, there's this thing where we don't start with explicit values, we create them. (Sometimes we do a different, which is best described as discovering values--e.g. discovering a desire repressed since childhood. Sometimes discovery and creation are ambiguous. But I think we sometimes do something that can only very tenuously be described as discovery, and is instead a free creation.)

This creation hints at some other kind of value, a "metavalue" or "process value". These metavalues feel closer in kind to \[the sort of value that shows up in these ideas about Corrigibility\]. So they are interesting. 

I see Anapartistic going wrong unless it has a value of "noninterference" or "(human/checker) agent at early (non-compromised) time-step X's endorsement" or something.  
  
I guess humans manage to have multiple sub-systems that interlace and don't usually override each other's ability to function, though? (except maybe... in the case of drugs really interfering with another value's ability to make solid action-bids or similar, or in cases where inhibition systems are flipped off)

* * *

"Anapartistic" might be closer to how it's implemented on a subsystem in humans (very low confidence), but "Tragic Agency" feels more like how people reason through checking their moral reasoning explicitly.  
  
Trying to... build on their moral system, but not drift too far? Often via "sanity-checking" by periodically stopping and running examples to see whether it gives wild/painful/inadvisable or irreversible/radical policy suggestions, and trying to diagnose what moral-reasoning step was upstream of these?

> "We have these starting points, but then we go somewhere else? How do we do that?"

I think I just gave a half-answer, but let me break it down a bit more: One process looks like "building on" pre-established known base-level values, moral inferences, examples, and by reasoning over that (aggregating commonalities, or next-logical-step), suggests new inferences. Then checks how that alters the policy-recommendation outputs of the whole, and... (oh!) flags it for further checking if it causes a massive policy-alteration from the previous time-step?

> we interpret ourselves (our past behavior, the contents of our minds) as being a flawed attempt by a more powerful agent to do *something*, and then we adopt that *something* as our goal.

Okay, this is the Loyal Agency example. I guess this is piggybacking on the competence of the human empathy system, right?  
  
(I have *no* idea how you'd implement that on a non-evolved substrate, but I guess in humans, it's downstream of a progression of evolutionary pressures towards (chronologically first to last) "modeling predators/prey" -> "modeling conspecifics" -> "modeling allies" -> "abstractly aligning under shared goals"?)

> Vague questions about valuing things at the conceptual-generalization "top" of that stack, vs the just-the-close-hedon-tracker things at the "bottom"?

To emphasize the point about value-creation / value-choice: There is no top. Or to say it another way: The top is there only implicitly. It's pointed at, or determined, or desired, by \[whatever metavalues / process we use to direct our weaving of coherent values\].   
  
As you're discussing, a lot of this is not really values-like, in that it's not a free parameter. We can notice a logical inconsistency. For example, we might say: "It is bad to kill babies because they are conscious" and "It is okay to abort fetuses because they are not conscious" and notice that these don't really make sense together (though the concluded values are correct). Then we are guided / constrained by logic: either a 33-week-old fetus is conscious, or not, and so we have to have all our multiple values mesh with one of those worlds, or have all our multiple values mesh with the other of those worlds. 

> In general, there's this thing where we don't start with explicit values, we create them. (Sometimes we do a different, which is best described as discovering values--e.g. discovering a desire repressed since childhood. Sometimes discovery and creation are ambiguous. But I think we sometimes do something that can only very tenuously be described as discovery, and is instead a free creation.)

This feels "off" to me, and isn't quite landing.  
  
Like... you start as an infant who does things. And at some level of sophistication, you start chunking some of your self-model of the things that consistently drive parts of your behavior, under the concept of a "value"?  
  
I have the sense that it usually doesn't work to just try to... upload a new value as a free creation, unless it is tied to a pre-existing pattern... hm. No. Okay, people can update their sense-of-self, and then will do wild things to align their actions with that sense-of-self, sometimes. But I think I think of that as subordinated under the value of "self-consistency" and the avoidance of intense cognitive-dissonance, and I maybe assume those values tend to be more loosely held "shallower" in implementation, somehow. (not at all confident this is how it really works, though)  
  
Less confident that it's entirely "off" after playing around with it for a bit.

I'm feeling a bit ungrounded... Maybe I want to bring in some examples. 

*   Making a friend. At first, we recognize some sort of overlap. As things go on, we are in some ways "following our nose" about what we can be together. There's no preemptive explicit idea of what it will be like to be together. It's not like there was a secret idea, that gets revealed. Though... Maybe it's like, all that stuff is an optimization process that's just working out the instrumental details. But, IDK, that doesn't seem right. 
*   Making art. Hm... I kind of want to just say "look! it's about creation", and wave my hands around. 
*   Similar to making art: Cooking. This is very mixed in and ambiguous with "actually, you were computing out instrumental strategies for some preexisting fixed goal", and also with "you were goodharting, like a drug addict". But when a skilled cook makes a surprising combination of two known-good flavors... It doesn't seem like goodharting because .... Hm. Actually I can totally imagine some flavor combinations that I'd consider goodharting. 
*   Maybe I want to say that pure curiosity and pure play are the quintessential examples. You're trying to create something new under the sun. We could say: This isn't a creation of values, it's a creation of understanding. There's a fixed value which is: I want to create understanding. But this is using a more restricted idea of "value" than what we normally mean. If someone likes playing chess, we'd normally call that a value. If we want to say "this is merely the output of the metavalue of creating understanding" or "this is merely an instrumental strategy, creating a toy model in which to create understanding", then what would we accept as a real value? \[This talk of "what would we accept" is totally a red alert that I've wandered off into bad undegrad philosophy, but I assert that there's something here anyway even if I haven't gotten it clearly.\]

Cooking seems like a great clarifying example of the... Loyal Agency?... thing, actually.   
  
You had some conception of what you were going to make, and knew you'd botch it in some way, and also your interpretation of it is modified by the "environment" of the ingredients you have available (and your own inadequacies as a cook, and probably also cases of "inspiration strikes" that happen as you make it).  
  
But unless you are leaning very far into cooking-as-art (everything-but-the-kitchen-sink stir-fry is known for this philosophy), you probably did have some fuzzy, flawed concept at the start of what you were grasping towards.  
  
(I hear there's something of a Baking to Stir-fry Lawful/Chaotic axis, in cooking)

> Okay, people can update their sense-of-self, and then will do wild things to align their actions with that sense-of-self, sometimes.

Like someone born in the Ingroup, who then learns some information that the Outgroup tends to say and the Ingroup tends to not say, and starts empathizing with the Outgroup and seeks out more such information, and death spirals into being an Outgroupist.   
  
Something catches my eye here. On the one hand, we want to "bottom out". We want to get to the real core values. On the other hand:

1.  Some of our "merely subordinate, merely subgoal, merely instrumental, merely object-level, merely product-of-process, merely starting-place-reflex" values are themselves meta-values. 
2.  I don't know what sort of thing the real values are. (Appeals to the VNM utility function have something important to say, but aren't the answer here I think.)
3.  There may not be such a thing as bottom-out values in this sense.
4.  We're created already in motion. And what we call upon when we try to judge, to reevaluate "object / subordinate" values, is, maybe, constituted by just more "object" values. What's created in motion is the "reflexes" that choose the tweaks that we make in the space described by all those free parameters we call values. 

> If someone likes playing chess, we'd normally call that a value. 

Ooh! I want to draw a distinction between... here are 2 types of people playing chess:

*   Alice, who is an avid and obsessive player of chess, just chess (and might be in some kind of competitive league about it, with a substantial ELO rating, if I complete the trope)
*   Bob, who spends 5-10% of his time on one of: sodoku, chess, tetris

...I would characterize this as having very different underlying values driving their positive-value assignment to chess?

Like, assuming this is a large investment on both of their parts, I would infer: Alice plays chess because she highly values {excellence, perfectionism, competition} while Bob likely values {puzzles, casual games as leisure, maybe math}.

And this strongly affects what I'd consider a "viable alternative to chess" for each of them; maybe Alice could swap out the time she spends on chess for competitive tennis, but Bob would find that totally unsatisfying for the motives underlying his drive to play the game.

> you probably did have some fuzzy, flawed concept at the start of what you were grasping towards.

Nora Ammann gives the example of Claire, who gets into jazz. My paraphrase: At first Claire has some not very deep reason to listen to jazz. Maybe a friend is into it, or she thinks she ought to explore culture, or something. At first she doesn't enjoy it that much; it's hard to understand, hard to listen along with; but there are some sparks of rich playfulness that draw her in. She listens to it more, gains some more fluency in the idioms and assumptions, and starts directing her listening according to newfound taste. After a while, she's now in a state where she really values jazz, deeply and for its own sake; it gives her glimpses of fun-funny ways of thinking, it lifts her spirits, it shares melancholy with her. Those seem like genuine values, and it seems not right to say that those values were "there at the beginning" any more than as a pointer.... ...Okay but I second guess myself more; a lot of this could be described as hidden yearnings that found a way out? 

We're calling a stop; thanks for engaging!