As a non-moral-realist, my reaction to this post is “ahhh that’s the good stuff, keep it coming!”
I’m curious why “Caring about preventing changes to one’s objective (or the intention to pursue it)” is a necessary component of life goals in your view.
You didn’t have to mention it at all, since it’s a convergent instrumental goal and thus follows from conditions 2 and 3. Yet you chose to emphasize it, and even said it first!
I by contrast would have done the exact opposite: Instead of having a clause about how you must care about preventing changes to one’s objective, I’d have a clause about how contra convergent instrumental goals, it’s OK for you to not care about certain kinds of changes to one’s objective. That is, you still count as having a life goal even if you are totally fine with the possibility of e.g. falling in love with someone who then has lots of non-manipulative, honest, interesting conversations with you that result in you changing your goal.
I by contrast would have done the exact opposite: Instead of having a clause about how you must care about preventing changes to one’s objective, I’d have a clause about how contra convergent instrumental goals, it’s OK for you to not care about certain kinds of changes to one’s objective.
That makes sense to me.The book Human Compatible has a good phrasing: “Which preference-change processes do you endorse?”
There were two main options I had in mind how changes to the life-goal objectives can come about without constituting a “failure of goal preservation” in an irrationality-implying sense:
An indirectly specified life goal around valuing reflection (I think of this as a widespread type!). Note that people with indirectly specified life goals would express non-total confidence in their best-guess formulation of what they want in life. So this probably isn’t quite what you were talking about.
A life goal with a stable core and “optional/flexible” parts. For instance, imagine a person who’s fanatically utilitarian in their life goals. They could have a stance that says “if I ever fall in love, it’s okay to start caring partly about something other than utilitarianism.”
On the second bullet point, I guess that leads to an increased risk of failure of goal preservation also for the utilitarian part of their goal. So you’re right that this setup would go against convergent drives.
In a reply to Michael below, you point out that this (e.g., something like what I describe in my second bullet point) seems like a “clunky workaround.” I can see what you mean. I think having a life goal that includes a clause like “I’m okay with particular changes to my life goal, but only brought about in common-sense reasonable ways” would still constitute a life goal. You could think of it as a barrier against (too much) fanaticism, perhaps.
Side note: It’s interesting how, in discussions on “value drift” on the EA forum, you can see people at both extremes of the spectrum. Some consider value drift to be typically bad, while others caution that people may have truer values as they get more experienced.
You could endorse changing your mind under certain circumstances only (subjectively chosen, not necessarily ahead of time) as a specific potentially overriding life goal. EDIT: Or otherwise indirectly specified and flexible life goals that allow for you to change your mind about some things, as discussed in the post, e.g. wanting to act according to the ethical views you’d endorse if more informed.
Sure. But I think my point/question still stands. I think most people who have life goals—or rather, what we’d intuitively think of as life goals, and indeed what we’d intuitively think of as having an optimizing mindset towards—wouldn’t mind if further reflection of various benign kinds caused them to change said goals, and while we COULD say that this is because there is an extremely widespread meta-life-goal of being the kind of person who deliberates and reflects and changes their goals sometimes… it seems like a clunky workaround, an unnatural way of describing the situation.
Maybe we should just allow some slack/flexibility in life goals. From a footnote:
Note that the optimizing mindset behind life goals need not be applied fanatically to a crude objective such as “never giving up on the relationship.” If one’s significant other is 99.99% likely to have died in a plane crash, a life goal about the relationship doesn’t necessarily imply spending the rest of one’s life searching islands for castaways. Instead, we can think of life-goal objectives in nuanced and pragmatic ways, with fallback goals like “living the rest of one’s life to make one’s memory of the other person proud.” See also the notion of “trajectory-based life goals,” which I’ll introduce further below.
You might want life goals to implicitly have conditions for when it’s appropriate to abandon them, change them or replace them, e.g. reflection. Some conditions can turn life goals into unambitious whims and no longer really terminal objective at all, and hence not life goals, e.g. “Pursue X until I don’t feel like it anymore”. That being said, I expect it to be difficult to draw sharp lines.
Maybe adding these conditions in the specific life goals themselves is also clunky, and as you suggest, it’s the definition of life goal that needs to be a bit more flexible? When can we say that we still value something “terminally”, if we’re allowing whether we value it at all to change under some circumstances?
I’m not sure only caring about indirectly specified life goals or trying to reformulate each directly specified life goal in indirect terms will do what you want. Even “being the bravest warrior” for Achilles is trajectory-based and indirectly specified, but what if Achilles decided it was no longer a worthy goal, either because it was “misguided”, or because he found something else far more important?
As a non-moral-realist, my reaction to this post is “ahhh that’s the good stuff, keep it coming!”
I’m curious why “Caring about preventing changes to one’s objective (or the intention to pursue it)” is a necessary component of life goals in your view.
You didn’t have to mention it at all, since it’s a convergent instrumental goal and thus follows from conditions 2 and 3. Yet you chose to emphasize it, and even said it first!
I by contrast would have done the exact opposite: Instead of having a clause about how you must care about preventing changes to one’s objective, I’d have a clause about how contra convergent instrumental goals, it’s OK for you to not care about certain kinds of changes to one’s objective. That is, you still count as having a life goal even if you are totally fine with the possibility of e.g. falling in love with someone who then has lots of non-manipulative, honest, interesting conversations with you that result in you changing your goal.
Thanks for the comment!
That makes sense to me.The book Human Compatible has a good phrasing: “Which preference-change processes do you endorse?”
There were two main options I had in mind how changes to the life-goal objectives can come about without constituting a “failure of goal preservation” in an irrationality-implying sense:
An indirectly specified life goal around valuing reflection (I think of this as a widespread type!). Note that people with indirectly specified life goals would express non-total confidence in their best-guess formulation of what they want in life. So this probably isn’t quite what you were talking about.
A life goal with a stable core and “optional/flexible” parts. For instance, imagine a person who’s fanatically utilitarian in their life goals. They could have a stance that says “if I ever fall in love, it’s okay to start caring partly about something other than utilitarianism.”
On the second bullet point, I guess that leads to an increased risk of failure of goal preservation also for the utilitarian part of their goal. So you’re right that this setup would go against convergent drives.
In a reply to Michael below, you point out that this (e.g., something like what I describe in my second bullet point) seems like a “clunky workaround.” I can see what you mean. I think having a life goal that includes a clause like “I’m okay with particular changes to my life goal, but only brought about in common-sense reasonable ways” would still constitute a life goal. You could think of it as a barrier against (too much) fanaticism, perhaps.
Side note: It’s interesting how, in discussions on “value drift” on the EA forum, you can see people at both extremes of the spectrum. Some consider value drift to be typically bad, while others caution that people may have truer values as they get more experienced.
You could endorse changing your mind under certain circumstances only (subjectively chosen, not necessarily ahead of time) as a specific potentially overriding life goal. EDIT: Or otherwise indirectly specified and flexible life goals that allow for you to change your mind about some things, as discussed in the post, e.g. wanting to act according to the ethical views you’d endorse if more informed.
Sure. But I think my point/question still stands. I think most people who have life goals—or rather, what we’d intuitively think of as life goals, and indeed what we’d intuitively think of as having an optimizing mindset towards—wouldn’t mind if further reflection of various benign kinds caused them to change said goals, and while we COULD say that this is because there is an extremely widespread meta-life-goal of being the kind of person who deliberates and reflects and changes their goals sometimes… it seems like a clunky workaround, an unnatural way of describing the situation.
Maybe we should just allow some slack/flexibility in life goals. From a footnote:
You might want life goals to implicitly have conditions for when it’s appropriate to abandon them, change them or replace them, e.g. reflection. Some conditions can turn life goals into unambitious whims and no longer really terminal objective at all, and hence not life goals, e.g. “Pursue X until I don’t feel like it anymore”. That being said, I expect it to be difficult to draw sharp lines.
Maybe adding these conditions in the specific life goals themselves is also clunky, and as you suggest, it’s the definition of life goal that needs to be a bit more flexible? When can we say that we still value something “terminally”, if we’re allowing whether we value it at all to change under some circumstances?
I’m not sure only caring about indirectly specified life goals or trying to reformulate each directly specified life goal in indirect terms will do what you want. Even “being the bravest warrior” for Achilles is trajectory-based and indirectly specified, but what if Achilles decided it was no longer a worthy goal, either because it was “misguided”, or because he found something else far more important?