Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012

There's already enough geek-libertarian atmosphere that those of us who aren't really notice it. But yeah - as I said, I'm not actually sure it would be a good idea. But the shying away from practical application to that particular part of things people are actually interested in fixing in their daily lives is a noteworthy absence.

Your implied claim that quotidian thoughts are unworthy of attention is ... look, if you want to convince people all of this is actually a good idea, then when someone asks "so, OK. What are the practical applications of reading a million words of philosophy and learning probability maths?", answering "How dare you be so short-termist" strikes me as unlikely to work. I mean, I could be wrong ...

It seems to be treated as a thought stopper. "Do not go beyond this point." There are good reasons for it, but the behaviour looks just like shying away from a bad thought.

Do so in whatever manner seems most desirable to you.

This is my attempt to figure out what is most desirable to me. At the moment, I want to do whatever would be the best overall policy if everyone followed it, with "best" here being defined as "resulting in the best lesswrong possible" (with a very complicated definition of best that I don't think I can specify well).

Given that that's what I want, how best to achieve it? The karma system is valuable because it makes more visible posts that are highly upvoted, so it's valuable to the extent that the highest upvoted comments are the best.

It should be noted that only relative karma matters (for sorting within an article), and the karma of other posts will tend to be rising (most posts wind up with positive karma). There is some number between 0 and 1 (call it x)that represents the expected vote of someone who votes.

Because karma is relative, if you've decide you care enough to vote, you should subtract x from your vote to determine if it counts as evidence that the post is good or bad. Do you want to vote 1-x, -x, or -1-x? Note 1-x>0, and the other two (not voting and down voting) are less than 0, downvoting by quite a bit. Which of these best corresponds to the sentiment "I liked this but think it's overrated"?

You're assuming that biasing karma scores towards zero (relative to what they would be before) is bad. Sure, it could be, but I don't see any particular reason why.

otherwise it biases comments' karma scores towards 0 (except at extremes, where it creates bandwagon effects)

[citation needed]

I meant that the intrinsic value of the comment does not justify its vote count.

Fear was overblown, but I don't think anyone was using it for anything other than what they thought was safety.

I'm not highly read on the criticisms, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone vaguely influential invoked the CERN hysteria to argue for reducing the funding of basic research. But I don't have a cite for you.

I highly doubt this. All plausible major x-risks appear to be man-made. Slowing down would give us more time to see them coming. Why would it undercut our ability to deal with a disaster?

It's not clear to me that asteroid impacts, major plagues, or becoming caught in a Malthusian trap are not x-risks on the same order of magnitude as man-made x-risks. (Yes, a Malthusian trap is man-made, but it can't necessarily be prevented by stopping scientific research). And for man-made x-risks, what is the mechanism for "seeing the disaster coming" that isn't essentially doing more research?

Making science slow down means that you make the best and brightest not do their best in the research. So this drives them to optimizing algorithmical trading.

Also, you would want to slow down the research of new things and imncrease the research of implications; but how do you draw a line? Is the fact that a nuclear reactor can go critical and level a nearby city a useful cautionary knowledge about building power plant or a "stop giving them ideas" thing?

ETA: I do not mean that any of the currently running reactors is that bad — I mean how to research nuclear fission in years 1900-1925 to have a safe nuclear power plant before a nuclear bomb.

There's no reason to believe that we've reached the optimum point for ending scientific research in any particular field. If we'd stopped medical research in 1900, the 1918 flu pandemic would have been worse. And basic research doesn't have a label telling us how it's going to be useful, yet the evidence is pretty strong that basic research is worth the money.

Regarding your specific example, isn't it worth knowing that the mutations to make that virus (1) already exist in nature, and (2) aren't really that far from being naturally incorporated into a single virus. If it took 500 passes instead of 10, we'd be relieved to learn that, right? In short, it seems like this kind of research is likely to be of practical use in treating serious flu virii (spelling?) in the relatively near future.

BGI quotes prices as low as $3,000 to sequence a person’s DNA. ...Zhang Yong, 33, a BGI senior researcher, predicts that within the next decade the cost of sequencing a human genome will fall to just $200 or $300

Inside China’s Genome Factory, Technology Review

My next point would be that there is no reason to expect a government to make a profit.

The idea is that it is possible to make the cake bigger by having efficient government. This is why he invokes Laffer curves as relevant concepts.

I find myself sympathetic to this. If you say give some amount of stocks to foundations that provide free healthcare to those who can't afford it or preserve natural habitat ect. that matches current GDP spending, but come up with a government that is more efficient at providing funds for all these endeavours you get more spent in an absolute sense on healthcare or environmentalism than otherwise.

If you want to do efficient charity, you don't work in a soup kitchen, you work hard where you have a comparative advantage to earn as much money as possible and then donate it to an efficient charity. Moldbug may not approve but I actually think his design with the right ownership structure, might be together with some properly designed foundations be a much better "goodness generating machine" than a democratic US or EU might ever be.

I also like the idea of being able to live in a society with laws that you can agree with, if you don't like it you just leave and go somewhere where you do agree with them.

The profit motive is transparent and it is something that is easy to track down than "doing good", which is as the general goal of government far less transparent. As a shareholder or employee in a prosperous society you could easily start lobbying among other share holders to spend their own money to set up new charity foundations or have existing ones re-evaluate their goals.

It also has the neat property of seemingly guaranteeing human survival in a Malthusian em future (check out Robin Hansons writing on this). As long as humans own stocks it wouldn't matter if they where made obsolete by technology they could still basically collect a simply vast amount of rent which would continue growing at a rapid rate for millennia or even millions of years. The real problem is how these humans don't get hacked into being consumption machines by various transhuman service providers but optimize for Eudaimonia.

I don't disagree that it is a Schelling point. But is it stable? History strongly suggests that legitimacy is a real thing that is an important variable for predicting whether governments can stay in power and institutions can remain influential in a society. In other words, there's a reason why mature absolute monarchies (like Louis XIV) invented "divine right of kings." I assert that you can't throw that away (as Moldbug does) and assume that nothing changes about the setup.

He says robot armies and cryptographically locked weaponry eliminate the need to care about what your population thinks. The technology simply wasn't there in the time of Louis XIV. The governing structure has no need to mess with people's minds in various ways to convince them it is a just system.

And the thing is, while such technology as ubiquitous surveillance or automated soldiers in the hands of government sounds scary, there seems to be no relevant reason at all to think other government types won't have this technology anyway. Worse the technology to modify your mind in various ways will also be rapidly available (as if current brainwashing and propaganda technology wasn't scary enough).

In other words people living in such Patchwork instead of the futuristic US or the PRC would trade political freedoms for freedom of thought and association. The last two are not really guaranteed in any sense, but he gives several strong reasons why a sovereign corporation might have an interest in preserving them. Reasons that most other states as self-stabilizing systems don't seem to have.

But Moldbug's commitment to accepting the verdict of history means that he wouldn't find this very persuasive. if one believes that might makes right, then government probably does need to make a profit. In other words, when you acquire power by winning, there's every reason to expect that failing to continue winning will lead in short order to your replacement.

He basically says that whether we like it or not might does make right. The USA defeated Nazi Germany not because it was nobler but because it was stronger. This is why Germany is a democracy today. The US defeated the Soviet Union not because it was nobler but because its economy could support more military spending and the Soviet Communist party couldn't or wouldn't use military means as efficiently as say the Chinese to stomp out dissenting citizens. This is why Russia is a democracy today. Democracies won because they where better at convincing people that they where legitimate, their economies where better and as a result of these two they where better at waging war than other forms of government.

He also seems very confident that if his proposed form of government was enacted somewhere it would drastically out-compete all existing ones.

The reason we have government isn't that we sat down once upon a time in the state of nature to design a political system.

I believe the main thrust of Moldbug's writings is that we should be (but aren't) solving an engineering problem rather than moralizing when we engage in politics (although, he seems to fall into this trap himself what with all his blaming of "leftists" for everything under the sun).

Bystanders don't want to live in a society that uses tanks and poison gas on retired veterans or that kills protesting students; leaders who try to use those tactics tend to get voted out of power -- or else overthrown.

Just because governments often employ violence just before they loose power does not mean that employing violence was the cause of their downfall. Many sick people take medication just before they die. Sure violence may do them no good, like an aspirin does no good for a brain tumour, but it is hard to therefore argue that aspirin is the cause of death. The assertion is particularly dubious since historically speaking governments have used a whole lot of violence and this actually seems to have often saved them. Even in modern times we have plenty examples of this.

This Robin Hanson post seems somewhat relevant:

Once upon a time, poor masses suffered under rich elites. Then one day the poor realized they could revolt, and since then, the rich help the poor, fearing the poor will revolt if they ever feel they suffer too much.

Revolution experts mostly reject this myth; famous revolutions happened after things had gotten better, not worse, for the poor.

We have government because we live in a world where violence is a potentially effective tactic for achieving goals. Government exists to curb and control this tendency, to govern it.

The state can be thought of as a sedentary bandit, who instead of pillaging and burning a village of farmers extorted them and eventually started making sure no one else pillages or burns them since that interferes with the farmers paying him. The roving bandit has no incentive to assure the sustainability of a particular farming settlement he parasites. A stationary banding in a sense farms the settlement.

Government can expediently be defined, ultimately beneath all the full, as a territorial monopolist of violence. There is a trade off between government violence used to prevent anyone else from exercising violence and violence by other organized groups. How do we know we are at the optimal balance in a utilitarian sense?

Also Moldbug dosen't want to do away with government he wants to propose a different kind of government. And we have in the past had systems of government that where the result of people sitting down and then trying to design a political system. To take modern examples of this (though I could easily pull out several Greek city states), perhaps the Soviet Union was a bad design, but the United States of America literally took over the world. In any case this demonstrates that new forms of government (not necessarily very good government) can be designed and implemented.

Uncontrolled violence turns out to be destructive to both the subject of the violence and also the wielder --

Government violence s ideally more predictable than the violence it prevents (that's the whole reason we in the West think rule of law is a good idea). Sure the government has other tools to prevent violence than just violence of its own, but ultimately all law is violence. In the sense of the WHO definition:

...as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

You can easily make the violence painless by say sedating a would be rapist with the stun setting on your laser gun, and you can easily also eliminate the suffering of imprisoning him, by modifying his brain with advanced tools. But changing a persons mind without their consent or by giving them a choice between 6 years imprisonment and modifying their brain has surely just experienced violence according to the above definition.

it turns out that it's potentially more fun to be in a citizen-soldier in a democracy than a menial soldier in an tyranny, or a member of a warlord's entourag

The point of the the cryptographically controlled weapons is that you need a very small group of people who thinks being a citizen soldier is less fun than being paid handsomely by Blackwater to work.

Every time I read Moldbug's stuff I am startled by the extent to which he tries to give an economic analysis and solution to a political problem.

Abba Lerner, "The Economics and Politics of Consumer Sovereignty" (1972):

"An economic transaction is a solved political problem... Economics has gained the title Queen of the Social Sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain."

Moldbug talking about cryptographically controlled weapons is missing the point: we don't want to live in a society that uses too much overt violence on its members. And we tolerate a lot of inefficiencies to avoid this need.

In raw utility the inefficiencies we tolerate to pay for this could easily be diverted to stop much more death and suffering elsewhere. Perhaps we are simply suffering from scope insensitivity, our minds wired for small tribes where the leader being violent towards a person means the leader being violent to a non-trival fraction of the population.

Also are you really that sure that people wouldn't want to live in a Neocameralist system? When you say efficiency I don't think you realize how emotionally appealing clean streets, good schools, low corruption and perfect safety from violent crime or theft is. What would be the price of real-estate there? It is not a confidence that he gives Singapore as an example, a society that uses more violence against its citizens than most Western democracies.

Capital punishment is a legal form of punishment in Singapore. The city-state had the highest per-capita execution rate in the world between 1994 and 1999, estimated by the United Nations to be 1.357 executions per hundred thousand of population during that period.[1] The next highest was Turkmenistan with 0.143 (which is now an abolitionist country). Each execution is carried out by hanging at Changi Prison at dawn on a Friday.

Singapore has had capital punishment since it was a British colony and became independent before the United Kingdom abolished capital punishment. The Singaporean procedure of hanging condemned individuals is heavily influenced by the methods formerly used in Great Britain.

Further more consider this:

Under the Penal Code,[12] the commission of the following offences may result in the death penalty:

• Waging or attempting to wage war or abetting the waging of war against the Government*
• Offences against the President’s person (in other words, treason)
• Mutiny
• Piracy that endangers life
• Perjury that results in the execution of an innocent person
• Murder
• Abetting the suicide of a person under the age of 18 or an "insane" person
• Attempted murder by a prisoner serving a life sentence
• Kidnapping or abducting in order to murder
• Robbery committed by five or more people that results in the death of a person
• Drug trafficking
• Unlawful discharge of firearms, even if nobody gets injured

Internal Security Act

The preamble of the Internal Security Act states that it is an Act to "provide for the internal security of Singapore, preventive detention, the prevention of subversion, the suppression of organised violence against persons and property in specified areas of Singapore, and for matters incidental thereto."[15] The President of Singapore has the power to designate certain security areas. Any person caught in the possession or with someone in possession of firearms, ammunition or explosives in a security area can be punished by death.

Arms Offences Act

The Arms Offences Act regulates firearms offences.[16] Any person who uses or attempts to use arms (Section 4) can face execution, as well as any person who uses or attempts to use arms to commit scheduled offences (Section 4A). These scheduled offences are being a member of an unlawful assembly; rioting; certain offences against the person; abduction or kidnapping; extortion; burglary; robbery; preventing or resisting arrest; vandalism; mischief. Any person who is an accomplice (Section 5) to a person convicted of arms use during a scheduled offence can likewise be executed.

Trafficking in arms (Section 6) is a capital offence in Singapore. Under the Arms Offences Act, trafficking is defined as being in unlawful possession of more than two firearms.

That sounds pretty draconian. But we also know Singapore is a pretty efficiently run government by most metrics. Is Singapore an unpleasant place to life? If so why do so many people want to live there? If you answer economic opportunities or standard of living or job opportunities, well then maybe Moldbug does have a point in his very economic approach to it.

Please indicate which particular part of the above do you find objectionable or not up to LW standards. Do you have any evidence that a paranoid attitude like his was ever not indicative of a crank?

He says that a certain amount of lives is worth a regime change. This is not a controversial position in the real world. No one for example would in polite society say that regime change in 1945 in Nazi Germany was not worth the lives of 40 or 4000 young or 40 000 young men or women. He also calls the man a butcher, and clearly is implying that change can not be achieved by terrorism nor even conventional military action.

Considering the discussions that are calmly had on LessWrong (infanticide for starters) I can produce a dozen such "incriminating" out of context quotes. Come to think of it you can get quotes of me saying that infanticide is not as bad a crime as killing an adult, that incest among consenting adults should be legal, ect. Will you use that when itching to win a argument with me?

Also Robin Hanson has said that 9/11 isn't a big deal. Aha that's something I can use! How dare he spit on the graves of ... oh wait no actually that would be an inappropriate thing for me to say.

Even on a pure level of instrumental rationality, calmly pointing out the above quote and linking to it and asking if say I agree or not, would made him look much worse as well as being equally effective at any point you are trying to make. Also I would respond by stating the truth (as I shall now), that I haven't read it so far and that I haven't yet done the calculations about how many lives changing Norway's government to Marxist-Leninism/Anarchy-Syndicalism/Futarchy/Fascism would be worth, but that I suspect considering there are few better alternatives if any, and that Norway has such a small population that it wouldn't amount to more than ~5. Unless there is a really awesome form of government I don't know about yet.

I get it you really really hate Moldbug, but I'm basically currently of the opinion that the only one getting mindkilled here is you. Why couldn't you discuss the points and maintain the usual level of discourse? I fail to see how this was the right course of action, unless you are acting up being mindkilled for the purpose to shut down a certain topic for good.

Want to get mind-killed HARD? I mean, frothing at the monitor hard?

No thank you. LessWrong is a no froth zone. Please take it elsewhere.

Yes yes we all know Blue tribe clearly acts as an apologist for greater atrocities than Green.

[insert emotional screed against Green here]

See faul_sname's comment below; "discrimination" should really be tabooed with "prejudice based on weak prior evidence without any personal contact" in this discussion.

If you examine it too closely, it stops making sense, but it is useful in a society where the "statistical knowledge" is easily faked or misinterpreted.

The problem is that one of the only ways to prove someone is indeed using statistical knowledge, on the handful of cases that we have forbidden it, is to analyse their patterns of behaviour, basically look at the recorded statistics of their interactions. Both the records and the results of such an analysis which can be easily faked and misinterpreted.

Which means that if the forbidden statistical knowledge is indeed useful and reliable enough to be economical to use it, and someone else is very very serious about preventing it from being used, the knowledge will both be employed in a clandestine way and most of the economic gains from it will be eaten up by the cost of avoiding detection. This leads to a net loss of wealth.

Say a for-profit company that spends 90% of the gains from forbidden knowledge on avoidance of detection, the governments spends half or a third of that amount to monitor the company. The company would be indirectly paying for government monitoring regardless if it used the knowledge or not. It is therefore irrational for the company to not use the particular forbidden set statistical knowledge in such a situation.

There are two problems: statistical knowledge being easily faked or misinterpreted and life being a multiple-repetition game.

It is hard to apply the knowledge of "many X are Y and it is bad" when X is easier to check than Y in such a way as to not diminish the return on investment of X who work hard to not be Y. The same with the positive case: if you think that MBA programs teach something useful and think "many MBAs have learnt the useful things from MBA program" then getting into the program and not learning starts making sense. And we have that effect!

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/10/12/why-do-only-top-mba-programs-practice-grade-non-disclosure/

But don't people talking about discrimination often claim that the statistical trends aren't there?

it is useful in a society where the "statistical knowledge" is easily faked or misinterpreted.

Hell, that seems to be an understatement to me. There's a particular reason that racial discrimination is by far the most taboo and reviled form of it, beyond the memory of Nazism; real current political groups - that are very nasty - are always hoping for the chance to pounce on the issue once they're allowed to get close to it.

Tutor people in things. (You have to be smart to teach other people things.)

Definitely this. Tutoring is a very strong signal of intelligence, but is really a matter of learned technique. I was able to tutor effectively in Statistics before I had taken any classes or fully understood the material by using tutoring techniques I had learned by teaching other subjects (notably Physics). The most common question I found myself asking was "what rule do we apply in situations like this," a question you do not actually need to know the subject material to ask.

Learn a little bit of linguistics.

I'd be interested if you were to expand on this.

It, of course, depends who you're signalling to. These sound to me like ways of signalling that you are intelligent to the unintelligent. (If that. They're good possibilities but I'm skeptical of about half of them.)

Talk very little. Bonus: reduces potential opportunities for accidentally saying stupid things. (People who speak only to convey information are smarter than people for whom talking is its own purpose.)

I perhaps should work on this one. It might improve my signal/noise ratio.

Your list is quite wisely written.

There definitely exists a stereotype that people that wear glasses are more intelligent. The cause of this common stereotype is probably that people that wear glasses are more intelligent.

Much depends on the audience one is signalling to.

Join organizations like Mensa

To stupid or average people, this is a signal of intelligence. To other intelligent people, my impression is that Mensa membership mostly distinguishes the subset of "intelligent and pompous about it" from the larger set of "intelligent people".

Associate yourself with games and activities that are usually clustered with intelligence, e.g. chess, Go, etc.

Again this works as a signal to people who are at a remove from these activities, because the average player is smarter than the average human. People who themselves actually play, however, will have encountered many people who happen to be good at certain specific things that lend themselves to abstract strategy games, but are otherwise rather dim.

Speak eloquently, use non-standard cached thoughts where appropriate; be contrarian (but not too much)

Agree with this one. It's especially useful because it has the opposite sorting effect of the previous two. Other intelligent people will pick up on it as a sign of intelligence. Conspicuously unintelligent people will fail to get it.

Learn other languages--doing so not only makes you more employable, it can be a big status boost

This one seems like it might vary by geography. It's a lot less of a distinction for a European than an American. In the US, the status signal from "speaks English and Spanish" is different from the status signal from "speaks English and some language other than Spanish".

Of course, make sure it's something people "know" is hard, like rocket science.

I have to admit, I'm mystified as to why this one got downvoted.

How can you tell if someone is doing things intelligently?

True, but free tuition or not, it's plenty costly in terms of opportunity.

(This is true to an almost hilarious extent if you're a humanities scholar like me: I'm not getting those ten (!!!!!!!) years of my life back.)

I agree completely. I stopped myself short of saying this in my first post because I wanted to keep it succinct. I would go a bit further to suggest that SIAI could be doing more than merely convincing people to take this path. For example, providing trustworthy young rationalists with a financial safety net in order to permit them to take more risks. (One tentative observation I've made is that nobody becomes wealthy without taking risk. The "self-made" wealthy tend to be risk-loving.)

I think there's plenty of available advice on how to become ultra-rich. Just look at the Business section of any bookstore. The problem is that this advice typically takes you from a 0.001% chance of becoming ultra-rich, through sheer lucky accident or lottery, to a 0.1% chance, through strategy and calculated risks.

I'm not arguing that it's not really hard and really improbable. However, folks tend to assess P(becoming wealthy by any means) ~ P(winning the lottery).

What's ultra-rich? This claim isn't saying much unless you quantify it.

I don't know, a billion dollars?

Intuitively, I find both your claims - that most people only try to match their parents' tier, and that it's easy to become ultra-rich if you focus on it - to be wrong, but it'd be interesting to see more arguments or evidence in their favor.

A quick Googling turns up a few papers which suggest that parental expectations largely define a child's level of educational and financial achievement. On a more intuitive level, I can only point out that the clear majority of Americans either don't go to college because their financial ambitions are satisfied by blue collar work, or they go to college in pursuit of a degree with a clear Middle Class career path attached to it. Do you know anybody whose stated goal is to be wealthy, rather than to be a doctor or an engineer or some specific career? I don't.

What I was getting at is that the cognitive effort required to actually solve a Millennium problem may be greater than the cognitive effort of making a billion dollars and hiring a thousand mathematicians to work in Millennium problems.

Who's counting?

I've been sporadically trying to get something like this done for AGES. There was even a forum made, but without official endorsement it got like 5 members and died within days.

How is that observably different from backwards causality existing? Perhaps we need to taboo the word "cause".

Source?

That's a nice simple way to reword it. Thanks.

Right. Let's say that you just value "intelligent life," though, rather than the humans or pequeninos in particular. Say you're the hive queen. A piggy is equal to a human and the human race is equal to a human race.

(I worry that I'm still missing the point and the question is moot without first resolving whether you value "diversity" in it's own right or not, and that such valuing is a preference independent of rational decision making. Still, I feel as if some preferences can be irrational.)

Both home and datacenter markets seem to be shifting away from raw power and towards energy efficiency (i.e. maximizing computing power per watt) which increases battery life and decreases datacenter costs. This might actually end up propping up Moore's law anyway, as the more efficient transistors get, the more of them can be put on the same chip without overheating.

This will bottom out too, eventually, when a battery charge lasts longer than the device itself, or datacenter power and cooling costs become negligible.

Pi is a popular Greek letter. In the past this was the fiction, which makes me consider it potentially relevant here (fan density) but lately it is this instead. I'll designate a taubeta after acquiring a pibeta, rhobeta, and sigmabeta.

Ah good. This is a good explanation and I had been wondering how the different timing would affect it. Thanks to you and dbaupp.

It would be easier to discuss the merits (or lack) of the book if you specify something about the book you believe lacks merit. The opinion that the book is overly hyped is a common criticism, but is too vague to be refuted.

It was a bestseller. Of course many of those people who bought it are silly.

You are right. And that's at least the second time I've made that mistake, so hopefully I'll learn from it.

Let me ask the sociological question I should have asked: It appears that many of the folks invested enough in "rationality" to be active participants in LW not only don't have children, but think that having children is not a good goal. That constellation of beliefs suggests that there is some selection pressure that links those two beliefs. Should the existence of that selection pressure worry us on "Add up to normal" grounds?

However, this has to bottom out somewhere; and we call the places where it bottoms out - goals that're valued in and of themselves, not just because they help with some other goal - terminal values.

This seems to be a near-consensus here at LessWrong. But I'm not convinced that "it bottoms out in goals that're valued in and of themselves" follows from "this has to bottom out somewhere". I grant the premise but doubt the conclusion. I doubt that where-it-bottoms-out needs to be, specifically, goals -- it could be some combination of beliefs, habits, experiences, and/or emotions, instead.

But you say, we call the places where it bottoms out goals ... (emphasis added). Of course, you can do that, and it's even true that people will pretty well understand what you mean. You can call these things goals, and do so without doing terrible violence to the language, but I'm not convinced that this is the most felicitous way of speaking about motivation and ethical learning. Whether these bottom-level items are best described as goals, or habits, or beliefs, or something quite different, depends on psychological facts which may not yet be in (sufficient) evidence.