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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome - Less Wrong
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Then preference still qualifies. This holds as a factual claim provided we are talking about reflectively consistent agents (i.e. those that succeed in not losing their preference), and as a normative claim regardless.
I would appreciate it if you avoid redefining words into highly qualified meanings, like "gene" for "anything that gets copied", and then "copying" for "any computation process that preserves mutual information".
Re: Then preference still qualifies. This holds as a factual claim provided [bunch of conditions]
Yes, there are some circumstances under which preferences are coded genetically and reliably inherited. However, your claim was stronger. You said what meant by genes was what "we" would call preferences. That implies that genes are preferences and preferences are genes.
You have just argued that a subset of preferences can be genetically coded - and I would agree with that. However, you have yet to argue that everything that is inherited is a preference.
I think you are barking up the wrong tree here - the concepts of preferences and genes are just too different. For example, clippy likes paperclips, in addition to the propagation of paperclip-construction instructions. The physical paperclips are best seen as phenotype - not genotype.
Re: "I would appreciate it if you avoid redefining words into highly qualified meanings [...]"
I am just saying what I mean - so as to be clear.
If you don't want me to use the words "copy" and "gene" for those concepts - then you are out of luck - unless you have a compelling case to make for better terminology. My choice of words in both cases is pretty carefully considered.
Not "bunch of conditions". Reflective consistency is the same concept as "correctly copying preference", if I read your sense of "copying" correctly, and given that preference is not just "thing to be copied", but also plays the appropriate role in decision-making (wording in the grandparent comment improved). And reflectively consistent agents are taken as a natural and desirable (from the point of view of those agents) attractor where all agents tend to end up, so it's not just an arbitrary category of agents.
But there are many different preferences for different agents, just as there are different genes. Using the word "genes" in the context where both human preference and evolution are salient is misleading, because human genes, even if we take them as corresponding to a certain preference, don't reflect human preference, and are not copied in the same sense human preference is copied. Human genes are exactly the thing that currently persists by vanilla "copying", not by any reversible (mutual information-preserving) process.
Confusing terminology is still bad even if you failed to think up a better alternative.