There are actual tiered systems all around us, even if most examples that come to mind are constructed/thought of by humans.
That aside, I am claiming that I would not trade my highest tier values against arbitrary combinations of all lower tiered values. So ... hi!
Re: Just a number; I can encode your previous comments (all of them) in the form of a bitstring, which is a number. Doesn't mean that doing "+1" on that yields any sensible result. Maybe we're talking past each other on the "describe/encode" point, but I don't see how describing a system containing strict tiers as a number somehow makes those tiers go away, unless you were nitpicking about "everything's just a number that's interpreted in a certain way" or somesuch.
Ah, on the numbers thing, what I meant was only that AFAIK there always exists some formula for which higher output numbers will correspond to things any abitrary agent (at least, all the logically valid and sound ones that I've thought of) would prefer.
So even for a hard tier system, there's a way to compute a number linearly representative of how happy the agent is with worldstates, where at the extreme all lower-tier values flatline into arbitrarily large negatives (or other, more creative / leakproof weighing) whenever they incur infinitesimal risk of...
Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember: