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MixedNuts comments on [SEQ RERUN] Politics and Awful Art - Less Wrong
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No!
In the sentence "You're trying to harness the power of art for your politics." the purpose is defined in the clause 'for your politics'. The subgoal, subservient to the actual goal, is 'harness the power of art'.
You lose your purpose if you think that your purpose is to "harness the power of art for your politics" instead of actually furthering said politics.
Only if your purpose was artistic instead of political, in which case the phrase "harness the power of art for your politics" was a misrepresentation of the motivations in question.
What Raemon's trying to say is that if your art sucks, it's not going to further your politics, presumably because nobody will want to go near it unless they're already sold.
Upon further reflection, I think I was approaching it from a different angle, which resulted in unspoken assumptions. As an artist, I care about each project I do for its own sake in addition to whatever purpose it serves, and the goals are simultaneously intertwined, and of parallel, equal importance to me.
This is me speaking as an artist. If I'm a producer/propagandist who wants to hire an artist, then yes, the politics is the true purpose and the art "merely" needs to be able to cut.
But from inside the visual-art-algorithm, the "art" is so central to the utility function that speaking in terms of "the art is merely there for the purpose of politics" means you're probably going to fail.
IMO, anyway.
That's more-or-less the point I was getting at. Namely: focusing all your effort on maximizing your utility function, causes you to fail to maximize your utility function.
I think Aris actually essentially covered this in the first post with the "forgetting that the sword needs to be sharp" thing, but I didn't quite parse it the way e intended.