Sorry to drop in in the middle of this back and forth, but I am curious—do you think it’s quite likely that there is a single criterion of rightness that is objectively “correct”?
It seems to me that we have a number of intuitive properties (meta criteria of rightness?) that we would like a criterion of rightness to satisfy (e.g. “don’t make things worse”, or “don’t be self-effacing”). And so far there doesn’t seem to be any single criterion that satisfies all of them.
So why not just conclude that, similar to the case with voting and Arrow’s theorem, perhaps there’s just no single perfect criterion of rightness.
Happy to be dropped in on :)
I think it’s totally conceivable that no criterion of rightness is correct (e.g. because the concept of a “criterion of rightness” turns out to be some spooky bit of nonsense that doesn’t really map onto anything in the real world.)
I suppose the main things I’m arguing are just that:
When a philosopher expresses support for a “decision theory,” they are typically saying that they believe some claim about what the correct criterion of rightness is.
Claims about the correct criterion of rightness are distinct from decision procedures.
Therefore, when a member of the rationalist community uses the word “decision theory” to refer to a decision procedure, they are talking about something that’s pretty conceptually distinct from what philosophers typically have in mind. Discussions about what decision procedure performs best or about what decision procedure we should build into future AI systems [[EDIT: or what decision procedure most closely matches our preferences about decision procedures]] don’t directly speak to the questions that most academic “decision theorists” are actually debating with one another.
I also think that, conditional on there being a correct criterion of rightness, R_CDT is more plausible than R_UDT. But this is a relatively tentative view. I’m definitely not a super hardcore R_CDT believer.
It seems to me that we have a number of intuitive properties (meta criteria of rightness?) that we would like a criterion of rightness to satisfy (e.g. “don’t make things worse”, or “don’t be self-effacing”). And so far there doesn’t seem to be any single criterion that satisfies all of them.
So why not just conclude that, similar to the case with voting and Arrow’s theorem, perhaps there’s just no single perfect criterion of rightness.
I guess here—in almost definitely too many words—is how I think about the issue here. (Hopefully these comments are at least somewhat responsive to your question.)
It seems like following general situation is pretty common: Someone is initially inclined to think that anything with property P will also have property Q1 and Q2. But then they realize that properties Q1 and Q2 are inconsistent with one another.
One possible reaction to this situation is to conclude that nothing actually has property P. Maybe the idea of property P isn’t even conceptually coherent and we should stop talking about it (while continuing to independently discuss properties Q1 and Q2). Often the more natural reaction, though, is to continue to believe that some things have property P—but just drop the assumption that these things will also have both property Q1 and property Q2.
This obviously a pretty abstract description, so I’ll give a few examples. (No need to read the examples if the point seems obvious.)
Ethics: I might initially be inclined to think that it’s always ethical (property P) to maximize happiness and that it’s always unethical to torture people. But then I may realize that there’s an inconsistency here: in at least rare circumstances, such as ticking time-bomb scenarios where torture can extract crucial information, there may be no decision that is both happiness maximizing (Q1) and torture-avoiding (Q2). It seems like a natural reaction here is just to drop either the belief that maximizing happiness is always ethical or that torture is always unethical. It doesn’t seem like I need to abandon my belief that some actions have the property of being ethical.
Theology: I might initially be inclined to think that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. But then I might come to believe (whether rightly or not) that, given the existance of evil, these three properties are inconsistent. I might then continue to believe that God exists, but just drop my belief that God is all-good. (To very awkwardly re-express this in the language of properties: This would mean dropping my belief that any entity that has the property of being God also has the property of being all-good).
Politician-bashing: I might initially be inclined to characterize some politician both as an incompetent leader and as someone who’s successfully carrying out an evil long-term plan to transform the country. Then I might realize that these two characterizations are in tension with one another. A pretty natural reaction, then, might be to continue to believe the politician exists—but just drop my belief that they’re incompetent.
To turn to the case of the decision-theoretic criterion of rightness, I might initially be inclined to think that the correct criterion of rightness will satisfy both “Don’t Make Things Worse” and “No Self-Effacement.” It’s now become clear, though, that no criterion of rightness can satisfy both of these principles. I think it’s pretty reasoanble, then, to continue to believe that there’s a correct criterion of rightness—but just drop the belief that the correct criterion of rightness will also satisfy “No Self-Effacement.”
It seems like following general situation is pretty common: Someone is initially inclined to think that anything with property P will also have property Q1 and Q2. But then they realize that properties Q1 and Q2 are inconsistent with one another.
One possible reaction to this situation is to conclude that nothing actually has property P. Maybe the idea of property P isn’t even conceptually coherent and we should stop talking about it (while continuing to independently discuss properties Q1 and Q2). Often the more natural reaction, though, is to continue to believe that some things have property P—but just drop the assumption that these things will also have both property Q1 and property Q2.
I think I disagree with the claim (or implication) that keeping P is more often more natural. Well, you’re just saying it’s “often” natural, and I suppose it’s natural in some cases and not others. But I think we may disagree on how often it’s natural, though hard to say at this very abstract level. (Did you see my comment in response to your Realism and Rationality post?)
In particular, I’m curious what makes you optimistic about finding a “correct” criterion of rightness. In the case of the politician, it seems clear that learning they don’t have some of the properties you thought shouldn’t call into question whether they exist at all.
But for the case of a criterion of rightness, my intuition (informed by the style of thinking in my comment), is that there’s no particular reason to think there should be one criterion that obviously fits the bill. Your intuition seems to be the opposite, and I’m not sure I understand why.
My best guess, particularly informed by reading through footnote 15 on your Realism and Rationality post, is that when faced with ethical dilemmas (like your torture vs lollipop examples), it seems like there is a correct answer. Does that seem right?
(I realize at this point we’re talking about intuitions and priors on a pretty abstract level, so it may be hard to give a good answer.)
I think I disagree with the claim (or implication) that keeping P is more often more natural. Well, you’re just saying it’s “often” natural, and I suppose it’s natural in some cases and not others. But I think we may disagree on how often it’s natural, though hard to say at this very abstract level. (Did you see my comment in response to your Realism and Rationality post?)
In particular, I’m curious what makes you optimistic about finding a “correct” criterion of rightness. In the case of the politician, it seems clear that learning they don’t have some of the properties you thought shouldn’t call into question whether they exist at all.
But for the case of a criterion of rightness, my intuition (informed by the style of thinking in my comment), is that there’s no particular reason to think there should be one criterion that obviously fits the bill. Your intuition seems to be the opposite, and I’m not sure I understand why.
Hey again!
I appreciated your comment on the LW post. I started writing up a response to this comment and your LW one, back when the thread was still active, and then stopped because it had become obscenely long. Then I ended up badly needing to procrastinate doing something else today. So here’s an over-long document I probably shouldn’t have written, which you are under no social obligation to read.
I think there’s a key piece of your thinking that I don’t quite understand / disagree with, and it’s the idea that normativity is irreducible.
I think I follow you that if normativity were irreducible, then it wouldn’t be a good candidate for abandonment or revision. But that seems almost like begging the question. I don’t understand why it’s irreducible.
Suppose normativity is not actually one thing, but is a jumble of 15 overlapping things that sometimes come apart. This doesn’t seem like it poses any challenge to your intuitions from footnote 6 in the document (starting with “I personally care a lot about the question: ‘Is there anything I should do, and, if so, what?’”). And at the same time it explains why there are weird edge cases where the concept seems to break down.
So few things in life seem to be irreducible. (E.g. neither Eric nor Ben is irreducible!) So why would normativity be?
[You also should feel under no social obligation to respond, though it would be fun to discuss this the next time we find ourselves at the same party, should such a situation arise.]
This is a good discussion! Ben, thank you for inspiring so many of these different paths we’ve been going down. :) At some point the hydra will have to stop growing, but I do think the intuitions you’ve been sharing are widespread enough that it’s very worthwhile to have public discussion on these points.
Therefore, when a member of the rationalist community uses the word “decision theory” to refer to a decision procedure, they are talking about something that’s pretty conceptually distinct from what philosophers typically have in mind. Discussions about what decision procedure performs best or about what decision procedure we should build into future AI systems don’t directly speak to the questions that most academic “decision theorists” are actually debating with one another.
On the contrary:
MIRI is more interested in identifying generalizations about good reasoning (“criteria of rightness”) than in fully specifying a particular algorithm.
MIRI does discuss decision algorithms in order to better understand decision-making, but this isn’t different in kind from the ordinary way decision theorists hash things out. E.g., the traditional formulation of CDT is underspecified in dilemmas like Death in Damascus. Joyce and Arntzenius’ response to this wasn’t to go “algorithms are uncouth in our field”; it was to propose step-by-step procedures that they think capture the intuitions behind CDT and give satisfying recommendations for how to act.
MIRI does discuss “what decision procedure performs best”, but this isn’t any different from traditional arguments in the field like “naive EDT is wrong because it performs poorly in the smoking lesion problem”. Compared to the average decision theorist, the average rationalist puts somewhat more weight on some considerations and less weight on others, but this isn’t different in kind from the ordinary disagreements that motivate different views within academic decision theory, and these disagreements about what weight to give categories of consideration are themselves amenable to argument.
As I noted above, MIRI is primarily interested in decision theory for the sake of better understanding the nature of intelligence, optimization, embedded agency, etc., not for the sake of picking a “decision theory we should build into future AI systems”. Again, this doesn’t seem unlike the case of philosophers who think that decision theory arguments will help them reach conclusions about the nature of rationality.
I think it’s totally conceivable that no criterion of rightness is correct (e.g. because the concept of a “criterion of rightness” turns out to be some spooky bit of nonsense that doesn’t really map onto anything in the real world.)
Could you give an example of what the correctness of a meta-criterion like “Don’t Make Things Worse” could in principle consist in?
I’m not looking here for a “reduction” in the sense of a full translation into other, simpler terms. I just want a way of making sense of how human brains can tell what’s “decision-theoretically normative” in cases like this.
Human brains didn’t evolve to have a primitive “normativity detector” that beeps every time a certain thing is Platonically Normative. Rather, different kinds of normativity can be understood by appeal to unmysterious matters like “things brains value as ends”, “things that are useful for various ends”, “things that accurately map states of affairs”...
When I think of other examples of normativity, my sense is that in every case there’s at least one good account of why a human might be able to distinguish “truly” normative things from non-normative ones. E.g. (considering both epistemic and non-epistemic norms):
1. If I discover two alien species who disagree about the truth-value of “carbon atoms have six protons”, I can evaluate their correctness by looking at the world and seeing whether their statement matches the world.
2. If I discover two alien species who disagree about the truth value of “pawns cannot move backwards in chess” or “there are statements in the language of Peano arithmetic that can neither be proved nor disproved in Peano arithmetic”, then I can explain the rules of ‘proving things about chess’ or ‘proving things about PA’ as a symbol game, and write down strings of symbols that collectively constitute a ‘proof’ of the statement in question.
I can then assert that if any member of any species plays the relevant ‘proof’ game using the same rules, from now until the end of time, they will never prove the negation of my result, and (paper, pen, time, and ingenuity allowing) they will always be able to re-prove my result.
(I could further argue that these symbol games are useful ones to play, because various practical tasks are easier once we’ve accumulated enough knowledge about legal proofs in certain games. This usefulness itself provides a criteria for choosing between “follow through on the proof process” and “just start doodling things or writing random letters down”.)
The above doesn’t answer questions like “do the relevant symbols have Platonic objects as truthmakers or referents?”, or “why do we live in a consistent universe?”, or the like. But the above answer seems sufficient for rejecting any claim that there’s something pointless, epistemically suspect, or unacceptably human-centric about affirming Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. The above is minimally sufficient grounds for going ahead and continuing to treat math as something more significant than theology, regardless of whether we then go on to articulate a more satisfying explanation of why these symbol games work the way they do.
3. If I discover two alien species who disagree about the truth-value of “suffering is terminally valuable”, then I can think of at least two concrete ways to evaluate which parties are correct. First, I can look at the brains of a particular individual or group, see what that individual or group terminally values, and see whether the statement matches what’s encoded in those brains. Commonly the group I use for this purpose is human beings, such that if an alien (or a housecat, etc.) terminally values suffering, I say that this is “wrong”.
Alternatively, I can make different “wrong” predicates for each species: wronghuman, wrongalien1, wrongalien2, wronghousecat, etc.
This has the disadvantage of maybe making it sound like all these values are on “equal footing” in an internally inconsistent way (“it’s wrong to put undue weight on what’s wronghuman!”, where the first “wrong” is secretly standing in for “wronghuman”), but has the advantage of making it easy to see why the aliens’ disagreement might be important and substantive, while still allowing that aliens’ normative claims can be wrong (because they can be mistaken about their own core values).
The details of how to go from a brain to an encoding of “what’s right” seem incredibly complex and open to debate, but it seems beyond reasonable dispute that if the information content of a set of terminal values is encoded anywhere in the universe, it’s going to be in brains (or constructs from brains) rather than in patterns of interstellar dust, digits of pi, physical laws, etc.
If a criterion like “Don’t Make Things Worse” deserves a lot of weight, I want to know what that weight is coming from.
If the answer is “I know it has to come from something, but I don’t know what yet”, then that seems like a perfectly fine placeholder answer to me.
If the answer is “This is like the ‘terminal values’ case, in that (I hypothesize) it’s just an ineradicable component of what humans care about”, then that also seems structurally fine, though I’m extremely skeptical of the claim that the “warm glow of feeling causally efficacious” is important enough to outweigh other things of great value in the real world.
If the answer is “I think ‘Don’t Make Things Worse’ is instrumentally useful, i.e., more useful than UDT for achieving the other things humans want in life”, then I claim this is just false. But, again, this seems like the right kind of argument to be making; if CDT is better than UDT, then that betterness ought to consist in something.
Happy to be dropped in on :)
I think it’s totally conceivable that no criterion of rightness is correct (e.g. because the concept of a “criterion of rightness” turns out to be some spooky bit of nonsense that doesn’t really map onto anything in the real world.)
I suppose the main things I’m arguing are just that:
When a philosopher expresses support for a “decision theory,” they are typically saying that they believe some claim about what the correct criterion of rightness is.
Claims about the correct criterion of rightness are distinct from decision procedures.
Therefore, when a member of the rationalist community uses the word “decision theory” to refer to a decision procedure, they are talking about something that’s pretty conceptually distinct from what philosophers typically have in mind. Discussions about what decision procedure performs best or about what decision procedure we should build into future AI systems [[EDIT: or what decision procedure most closely matches our preferences about decision procedures]] don’t directly speak to the questions that most academic “decision theorists” are actually debating with one another.
I also think that, conditional on there being a correct criterion of rightness, R_CDT is more plausible than R_UDT. But this is a relatively tentative view. I’m definitely not a super hardcore R_CDT believer.
I guess here—in almost definitely too many words—is how I think about the issue here. (Hopefully these comments are at least somewhat responsive to your question.)
It seems like following general situation is pretty common: Someone is initially inclined to think that anything with property P will also have property Q1 and Q2. But then they realize that properties Q1 and Q2 are inconsistent with one another.
One possible reaction to this situation is to conclude that nothing actually has property P. Maybe the idea of property P isn’t even conceptually coherent and we should stop talking about it (while continuing to independently discuss properties Q1 and Q2). Often the more natural reaction, though, is to continue to believe that some things have property P—but just drop the assumption that these things will also have both property Q1 and property Q2.
This obviously a pretty abstract description, so I’ll give a few examples. (No need to read the examples if the point seems obvious.)
Ethics: I might initially be inclined to think that it’s always ethical (property P) to maximize happiness and that it’s always unethical to torture people. But then I may realize that there’s an inconsistency here: in at least rare circumstances, such as ticking time-bomb scenarios where torture can extract crucial information, there may be no decision that is both happiness maximizing (Q1) and torture-avoiding (Q2). It seems like a natural reaction here is just to drop either the belief that maximizing happiness is always ethical or that torture is always unethical. It doesn’t seem like I need to abandon my belief that some actions have the property of being ethical.
Theology: I might initially be inclined to think that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. But then I might come to believe (whether rightly or not) that, given the existance of evil, these three properties are inconsistent. I might then continue to believe that God exists, but just drop my belief that God is all-good. (To very awkwardly re-express this in the language of properties: This would mean dropping my belief that any entity that has the property of being God also has the property of being all-good).
Politician-bashing: I might initially be inclined to characterize some politician both as an incompetent leader and as someone who’s successfully carrying out an evil long-term plan to transform the country. Then I might realize that these two characterizations are in tension with one another. A pretty natural reaction, then, might be to continue to believe the politician exists—but just drop my belief that they’re incompetent.
To turn to the case of the decision-theoretic criterion of rightness, I might initially be inclined to think that the correct criterion of rightness will satisfy both “Don’t Make Things Worse” and “No Self-Effacement.” It’s now become clear, though, that no criterion of rightness can satisfy both of these principles. I think it’s pretty reasoanble, then, to continue to believe that there’s a correct criterion of rightness—but just drop the belief that the correct criterion of rightness will also satisfy “No Self-Effacement.”
Thanks! This is helpful.
I think I disagree with the claim (or implication) that keeping P is more often more natural. Well, you’re just saying it’s “often” natural, and I suppose it’s natural in some cases and not others. But I think we may disagree on how often it’s natural, though hard to say at this very abstract level. (Did you see my comment in response to your Realism and Rationality post?)
In particular, I’m curious what makes you optimistic about finding a “correct” criterion of rightness. In the case of the politician, it seems clear that learning they don’t have some of the properties you thought shouldn’t call into question whether they exist at all.
But for the case of a criterion of rightness, my intuition (informed by the style of thinking in my comment), is that there’s no particular reason to think there should be one criterion that obviously fits the bill. Your intuition seems to be the opposite, and I’m not sure I understand why.
My best guess, particularly informed by reading through footnote 15 on your Realism and Rationality post, is that when faced with ethical dilemmas (like your torture vs lollipop examples), it seems like there is a correct answer. Does that seem right?
(I realize at this point we’re talking about intuitions and priors on a pretty abstract level, so it may be hard to give a good answer.)
Hey again!
I appreciated your comment on the LW post. I started writing up a response to this comment and your LW one, back when the thread was still active, and then stopped because it had become obscenely long. Then I ended up badly needing to procrastinate doing something else today. So here’s an over-long document I probably shouldn’t have written, which you are under no social obligation to read.
Thanks! Just read it.
I think there’s a key piece of your thinking that I don’t quite understand / disagree with, and it’s the idea that normativity is irreducible.
I think I follow you that if normativity were irreducible, then it wouldn’t be a good candidate for abandonment or revision. But that seems almost like begging the question. I don’t understand why it’s irreducible.
Suppose normativity is not actually one thing, but is a jumble of 15 overlapping things that sometimes come apart. This doesn’t seem like it poses any challenge to your intuitions from footnote 6 in the document (starting with “I personally care a lot about the question: ‘Is there anything I should do, and, if so, what?’”). And at the same time it explains why there are weird edge cases where the concept seems to break down.
So few things in life seem to be irreducible. (E.g. neither Eric nor Ben is irreducible!) So why would normativity be?
[You also should feel under no social obligation to respond, though it would be fun to discuss this the next time we find ourselves at the same party, should such a situation arise.]
This is a good discussion! Ben, thank you for inspiring so many of these different paths we’ve been going down. :) At some point the hydra will have to stop growing, but I do think the intuitions you’ve been sharing are widespread enough that it’s very worthwhile to have public discussion on these points.
On the contrary:
MIRI is more interested in identifying generalizations about good reasoning (“criteria of rightness”) than in fully specifying a particular algorithm.
MIRI does discuss decision algorithms in order to better understand decision-making, but this isn’t different in kind from the ordinary way decision theorists hash things out. E.g., the traditional formulation of CDT is underspecified in dilemmas like Death in Damascus. Joyce and Arntzenius’ response to this wasn’t to go “algorithms are uncouth in our field”; it was to propose step-by-step procedures that they think capture the intuitions behind CDT and give satisfying recommendations for how to act.
MIRI does discuss “what decision procedure performs best”, but this isn’t any different from traditional arguments in the field like “naive EDT is wrong because it performs poorly in the smoking lesion problem”. Compared to the average decision theorist, the average rationalist puts somewhat more weight on some considerations and less weight on others, but this isn’t different in kind from the ordinary disagreements that motivate different views within academic decision theory, and these disagreements about what weight to give categories of consideration are themselves amenable to argument.
As I noted above, MIRI is primarily interested in decision theory for the sake of better understanding the nature of intelligence, optimization, embedded agency, etc., not for the sake of picking a “decision theory we should build into future AI systems”. Again, this doesn’t seem unlike the case of philosophers who think that decision theory arguments will help them reach conclusions about the nature of rationality.
Could you give an example of what the correctness of a meta-criterion like “Don’t Make Things Worse” could in principle consist in?
I’m not looking here for a “reduction” in the sense of a full translation into other, simpler terms. I just want a way of making sense of how human brains can tell what’s “decision-theoretically normative” in cases like this.
Human brains didn’t evolve to have a primitive “normativity detector” that beeps every time a certain thing is Platonically Normative. Rather, different kinds of normativity can be understood by appeal to unmysterious matters like “things brains value as ends”, “things that are useful for various ends”, “things that accurately map states of affairs”...
When I think of other examples of normativity, my sense is that in every case there’s at least one good account of why a human might be able to distinguish “truly” normative things from non-normative ones. E.g. (considering both epistemic and non-epistemic norms):
1. If I discover two alien species who disagree about the truth-value of “carbon atoms have six protons”, I can evaluate their correctness by looking at the world and seeing whether their statement matches the world.
2. If I discover two alien species who disagree about the truth value of “pawns cannot move backwards in chess” or “there are statements in the language of Peano arithmetic that can neither be proved nor disproved in Peano arithmetic”, then I can explain the rules of ‘proving things about chess’ or ‘proving things about PA’ as a symbol game, and write down strings of symbols that collectively constitute a ‘proof’ of the statement in question.
I can then assert that if any member of any species plays the relevant ‘proof’ game using the same rules, from now until the end of time, they will never prove the negation of my result, and (paper, pen, time, and ingenuity allowing) they will always be able to re-prove my result.
(I could further argue that these symbol games are useful ones to play, because various practical tasks are easier once we’ve accumulated enough knowledge about legal proofs in certain games. This usefulness itself provides a criteria for choosing between “follow through on the proof process” and “just start doodling things or writing random letters down”.)
The above doesn’t answer questions like “do the relevant symbols have Platonic objects as truthmakers or referents?”, or “why do we live in a consistent universe?”, or the like. But the above answer seems sufficient for rejecting any claim that there’s something pointless, epistemically suspect, or unacceptably human-centric about affirming Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. The above is minimally sufficient grounds for going ahead and continuing to treat math as something more significant than theology, regardless of whether we then go on to articulate a more satisfying explanation of why these symbol games work the way they do.
3. If I discover two alien species who disagree about the truth-value of “suffering is terminally valuable”, then I can think of at least two concrete ways to evaluate which parties are correct. First, I can look at the brains of a particular individual or group, see what that individual or group terminally values, and see whether the statement matches what’s encoded in those brains. Commonly the group I use for this purpose is human beings, such that if an alien (or a housecat, etc.) terminally values suffering, I say that this is “wrong”.
Alternatively, I can make different “wrong” predicates for each species: wronghuman, wrongalien1, wrongalien2, wronghousecat, etc.
This has the disadvantage of maybe making it sound like all these values are on “equal footing” in an internally inconsistent way (“it’s wrong to put undue weight on what’s wronghuman!”, where the first “wrong” is secretly standing in for “wronghuman”), but has the advantage of making it easy to see why the aliens’ disagreement might be important and substantive, while still allowing that aliens’ normative claims can be wrong (because they can be mistaken about their own core values).
The details of how to go from a brain to an encoding of “what’s right” seem incredibly complex and open to debate, but it seems beyond reasonable dispute that if the information content of a set of terminal values is encoded anywhere in the universe, it’s going to be in brains (or constructs from brains) rather than in patterns of interstellar dust, digits of pi, physical laws, etc.
If a criterion like “Don’t Make Things Worse” deserves a lot of weight, I want to know what that weight is coming from.
If the answer is “I know it has to come from something, but I don’t know what yet”, then that seems like a perfectly fine placeholder answer to me.
If the answer is “This is like the ‘terminal values’ case, in that (I hypothesize) it’s just an ineradicable component of what humans care about”, then that also seems structurally fine, though I’m extremely skeptical of the claim that the “warm glow of feeling causally efficacious” is important enough to outweigh other things of great value in the real world.
If the answer is “I think ‘Don’t Make Things Worse’ is instrumentally useful, i.e., more useful than UDT for achieving the other things humans want in life”, then I claim this is just false. But, again, this seems like the right kind of argument to be making; if CDT is better than UDT, then that betterness ought to consist in something.