The internal conflict (IC) in a value system is the negative of the sum, over all pairs of nodes, of the product of the node values and the connection weight between them. This is an energy measure that we want to minimize.

Why?

Good question. Because I prefer a value system that's usually not self-contradictory over one that's usually self-contradictory. I can't convince you that this is good if you are a moral nihilist, which is a very popular position on LW and, I think, central to CEV. If all possible value systems are equally good, by all means, choose one that tells you to love or hate people based on their fingerprints, and kill your friends if they walk through a doorway backwards.

Empirically, value systems with high IC resemble conservative religious values, which take evolved human values, and then pile an arbitrary rule system on top of them which gives contradictory, hard-to-interpret results resulting in schizophrenic behavior that appears insane to observers from almost any other value system, causes great pain and stress to its practitioners, and often leads to bloody violent conflicts because of their low correlation with other value systems.