Dagon comments on The morality of disclosing salary requirements - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PhilGoetz 08 February 2015 09:12PM

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Comment author: Dagon 09 February 2015 08:07:43PM 0 points [-]

Hmm. I think I understand that defintion, but I don't think I agree with it as common or useful enough to use in a post title. Perhaps "the coordination effects of disclosing salary requirements" would be clearer.

Mostly, I don't think "employees" (or worse, "employees applying for a given job opening") are a particularly robust way to segment a population for moral evaluation. As a member of many overlapping groups, I find it difficult to decide which group's coordination problems I want to assist with.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 09 February 2015 08:42:46PM *  0 points [-]

Here's a way of connecting the views of "social morality" and "group morality", and explaining why groups using expected value wouldn't result in society using expected value. (Not that I think it should, but that's a different discussion.)

Say society is composed of different groups, each with their own coordination problems, and behaviors that could solve them. Say you can analyze a situation x in the space X, and for each group g, find the gradient ∇u(g,x) of their utility surface u(g,X). Each group g then prefers an action given by the direction of ∇u(g,x), with a strength of preference given by its magnitude.

Suppose each agent z is a member of one group g(z). (We don't need this assumption, but it makes the notation simpler.) If we call "socially-moral behavior at x" the average, over all agents z, of ∇u(g(x),x), I'm pretty sure this is going to give results that do not maximize social expected value.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 February 2015 05:59:51AM 0 points [-]

Er... for the simple cases I've looked at, following the gradient, and solving directly for the maximal-utility point in the space, give the same results, as long as there are no local minima. I should have expected that.