Bids To Defer On Value Judgements

post by johnswentworth · 2023-09-29T17:07:25.834Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Contents

  The Memetic Parasite Model
  To What Extent Is Value-Deferral Unavoidable?
None
6 comments

Consider two claims:

• “broccoli is good for you”
• “broccoli decreases cholesterol”

Even though the former might be considered a lossy summary of the latter, the two feel very different; they pull very different levers in my brain. “Broccoli decreases cholesterol” pulls levers like:

• Is the claim even true? Does broccoli really decrease cholesterol? Would I expect to hear people claim this even in worlds where it is false?
• How much does broccoli decrease cholesterol? Is it a tiny effect size? Also how much broccoli?
• Where did this information come from? Was it perhaps among the endless stream of bullshit nutrition studies?
• Relative to what baselines? Is broccoli substituted for something, or added? What’s the population?
• Do I want lower cholesterol? Do I want it more than I want to eat food tastier than broccoli?

(Probably other people will not have these exact same levers, but I expect most people instinctively respond to “eating broccoli decreases cholesterol” with some kind of guess about where that information came from and how trustworthy it is.)

The other version, “Eating broccoli is good for you”, not only doesn’t pull those levers, it feels like… the sentence is making a bid to actively suppress those levers? Like, those levers are all part of my value-judgement machinery, and the sentence “broccoli is good for you” is making a bid to circumvent that machinery entirely and just write a result into my value-cache.

This is a “bid to defer on a value judgement”: the sentence is a bid to directly write a value-judgement into cache, without going through my own internal value-judgement machinery. If I accept that bid, then I’m effectively deferring to the speaker’s value-judgement.

The Memetic Parasite Model

If broccoli is good for you (and presumably for most other humans, in general), then sharing that information is a friendly, helpful, prosocial action.

More generally: if a value judgement is correct, then passing it along is typically a friendly, helpful, prosocial action. After all, it will help other people to make more “good” decisions if they have more correct information cached about what’s “good”/”bad”.

But this gives rise to a potential parasitic meme dynamic:

• Alice, at some point, hears that broccoli is good for you. She caches that value judgement.
• When talking to Bob, Alice notices that it would be helpful and prosocial for her to tell Bob that broccoli is good for you. After all, according to her cached value judgement, broccoli is in fact good for you, so it would be prosocial to pass that information along.
• Now Bob hears from Alice that broccoli is good for you and, unless he actively disbelieves what he’s hearing, caches that value judgement.
• … and that memetic loop can run just fine regardless of what benefits broccoli does or does not have.

Note one difference from more general information cascades [? · GW]: information has to be salient for some reason to be passed along. Value judgements tend to be inherently salient; they lend themselves directly to use, since they directly say what would be good or bad.

Another difference from more general information cascades: value judgements naturally lend themselves to black-boxing. They don’t need to interact much with gears [LW · GW], because they circumvent the gearsy machinery of value judgement.

Now, at first glance this model seems rather maxentropic; one could claim that anything at all is “good” or “bad”, and the same dynamic will propagate it, so at first glance there aren’t predictions about which value judgements we will/won’t see propagating memetically. But now we can note that there are factors which favor memeticity of some such claims over others.

• Value judgements producing outcomes which are actually “good” by their users’ lights will still probably spread more (all else equal), so there is nonzero pressure in favor of “true” judgements here.
• … but also signalling is a big factor. Broccoli, notably, is not the tastiest food. It’s no ice cream. And that means that eating broccoli is a costly signal that Alice believes it’s good for some other reason, which provides stronger evidence to Bob when he’s unconsciously considering whether to cache the received value-judgement.
• Generalizing that signalling pattern: things which are bad in some obvious way have a systematic memetic advantage in being labelled “good for nonobvious reasons”.

To What Extent Is Value-Deferral Unavoidable?

Epistemic deferral is notoriously unavoidable to a large extent; a human just doesn’t have the capacity to fact-check everything or even a very large fraction of the information we receive from other humans. (Though that doesn’t mean there’s no gains to be had - e.g. Inadequate Equilibria [? · GW] is largely about how to defer better.) To what extent does the unavoidability of epistemic deferral carry over to value deferral?

First, a lot of value deferral is “built in” to the environment, in a way I probably won’t notice. For instance, products I use every day have safety standards, and I don’t have the time to study them all, so I’m de-facto deferring to the value judgements of those safety standards. I’ll call that sort of value deferral “implicit”, in contrast to value deferral involving my explicit verbal attention (like the broccoli example).

Claim: Explicit value deferral is both unusually prone to parasitic memeticity, and is relatively tractable to avoid. Simply tabooing explicit use of “good”/”bad”/”should”/etc is in fact pretty tractable [LW · GW], and basically nullifies bids for explicit value deferral.

6 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.