I am going to write the same warning I have written to rationalist friends in relation to the Great Filter Hypothesis and almost everything on Overcoming Bias: BEWARE OF MODELS WITH NO CAUSAL COMPONENTS! I repeat: BEWARE NONCAUSAL MODELS!!! In fact, beware of nonconstructive mental models as well, while we're at it! Beware classical logic, for it is nonconstructive! Beware noncausal statistics, for it is noncausal and nonconstructive! All these models, when they contain true information, and accurately move that information from belief to belief in strict accordance with the actual laws of statistical inference, still often fail at containing coherent propositions to which belief-values are being assigned, and at corresponding to the real world.
Now apply the above warning to virtue ethics.
Now let's dissolve the above warning about virtue ethics and figure out what it really means anyway, since almost all of us real human beings use some amount of it.
It's not enough to say that human beings are not perfectly rational optimizers moving from terminal goals to subgoals to plans to realized actions back to terminal goals. We must also acknowledge that we are creatures of muscle and neural-net, and that the lower portions (ie: almost all) of our minds work via reinforcement, repetition, and habit, just as our muscles are built via repeated strain.
Keep in mind that anything you consciously espouse as a "terminal goal" is in fact a subgoal: people were not designed to complete a terminal goal and shut off.
Practicing virtue just means that I recognize the causal connection between my present self and future self, and optimize my future self for the broad set of goals I want to be able to accomplish, while also recognizing the correlations between myself and other people, and optimizing my present and future self to exploit those correlations for my own goals.
Because my true utility function is vast and complex and only semi-known to me, I have quite a lot of logical uncertainty over what subgoals it might generate for me in the future. However, I do know some actions I can take to make my future self better able to address a broad range of subgoals I believe my true utility function might generate, perhaps even any possible subgoal. The qualities created in my future self by those actions are virtues, and inculcating them in accordance with the design of my mind and body is virtue ethics.
As an example, I helped a friend move his heavy furniture from one apartment to another because I want to maintain the habit of loyalty and helpfulness to my friends (cue House Hufflepuff) for the sake of present and future friends, despite this particular friend being a total mooching douchebag. My present decision will change the distribution of my future decisions, so I need to choose for myself now and my potential future selves.
Not really that complicated, when you get past the philosophy-major stuff and look at yourself as a... let's call it, a naturalized human being, a body and soul together that are really just one thing.
It is not enough to say we don't move smoothly from terminal goal to subgoal. It is enough to say we are too mesilly constructed to have distinct terminal goals and subgoals.
Introduction
A few months ago, my friend said the following thing to me: “After seeing Divergent, I finally understand virtue ethics. The main character is a cross between Aristotle and you.”
That was an impossible-to-resist pitch, and I saw the movie. The thing that resonated most with me–also the thing that my friend thought I had in common with the main character–was the idea that you could make a particular decision, and set yourself down a particular course of action, in order to make yourself become a particular kind of person. Tris didn’t join the Dauntless cast because she thought they were doing the most good in society, or because she thought her comparative advantage to do good lay there–she chose it because they were brave, and she wasn’t, yet, and she wanted to be. Bravery was a virtue that she thought she ought to have. If the graph of her motivations even went any deeper, the only node beyond ‘become brave’ was ‘become good.’
(Tris did have a concept of some future world-outcomes being better than others, and wanting to have an effect on the world. But that wasn't the causal reason why she chose Dauntless; as far as I can tell, it was unrelated.)
My twelve-year-old self had a similar attitude. I read a lot of fiction, and stories had heroes, and I wanted to be like them–and that meant acquiring the right skills and the right traits. I knew I was terrible at reacting under pressure–that in the case of an earthquake or other natural disaster, I would freeze up and not be useful at all. Being good at reacting under pressure was an important trait for a hero to have. I could be sad that I didn’t have it, or I could decide to acquire it by doing the things that scared me over and over and over again. So that someday, when the world tried to throw bad things at my friends and family, I’d be ready.
You could call that an awfully passive way to look at things. It reveals a deep-seated belief that I’m not in control, that the world is big and complicated and beyond my ability to understand and predict, much less steer–that I am not the locus of control. But this way of thinking is an algorithm. It will almost always spit out an answer, when otherwise I might get stuck in the complexity and unpredictability of trying to make a particular outcome happen.
Virtue Ethics
I find the different houses of the HPMOR universe to be a very compelling metaphor. It’s not because they suggest actions to take; instead, they suggest virtues to focus on, so that when a particular situation comes up, you can act ‘in character.’ Courage and bravery for Gryffindor, for example. It also suggests the idea that different people can focus on different virtues–diversity is a useful thing to have in the world. (I'm probably mangling the concept of virtue ethics here, not having any background in philosophy, but it's the closest term for the thing I mean.)
I’ve thought a lot about the virtue of loyalty. In the past, loyalty has kept me with jobs and friends that, from an objective perspective, might not seem like the optimal things to spend my time on. But the costs of quitting and finding a new job, or cutting off friendships, wouldn’t just have been about direct consequences in the world, like needing to spend a bunch of time handing out resumes or having an unpleasant conversation. There would also be a shift within myself, a weakening in the drive towards loyalty. It wasn’t that I thought everyone ought to be extremely loyal–it’s a virtue with obvious downsides and failure modes. But it was a virtue that I wanted, partly because it seemed undervalued.
By calling myself a ‘loyal person’, I can aim myself in a particular direction without having to understand all the subcomponents of the world. More importantly, I can make decisions even when I’m rushed, or tired, or under cognitive strain that makes it hard to calculate through all of the consequences of a particular action.
Terminal Goals
The Less Wrong/CFAR/rationalist community puts a lot of emphasis on a different way of trying to be a hero–where you start from a terminal goal, like “saving the world”, and break it into subgoals, and do whatever it takes to accomplish it. In the past I’ve thought of myself as being mostly consequentialist, in terms of morality, and this is a very consequentialist way to think about being a good person. And it doesn't feel like it would work.
There are some bad reasons why it might feel wrong–i.e. that it feels arrogant to think you can accomplish something that big–but I think the main reason is that it feels fake. There is strong social pressure in the CFAR/Less Wrong community to claim that you have terminal goals, that you’re working towards something big. My System 2 understands terminal goals and consequentialism, as a thing that other people do–I could talk about my terminal goals, and get the points, and fit in, but I’d be lying about my thoughts. My model of my mind would be incorrect, and that would have consequences on, for example, whether my plans actually worked.
Practicing the art of rationality
Recently, Anna Salamon brought up a question with the other CFAR staff: “What is the thing that’s wrong with your own practice of the art of rationality?” The terminal goals thing was what I thought of immediately–namely, the conversations I've had over the past two years, where other rationalists have asked me "so what are your terminal goals/values?" and I've stammered something and then gone to hide in a corner and try to come up with some.
In Alicorn’s Luminosity, Bella says about her thoughts that “they were liable to morph into versions of themselves that were more idealized, more consistent - and not what they were originally, and therefore false. Or they'd be forgotten altogether, which was even worse (those thoughts were mine, and I wanted them).”
I want to know true things about myself. I also want to impress my friends by having the traits that they think are cool, but not at the price of faking it–my brain screams that pretending to be something other than what you are isn’t virtuous. When my immediate response to someone asking me about my terminal goals is “but brains don’t work that way!” it may not be a true statement about all brains, but it’s a true statement about my brain. My motivational system is wired in a certain way. I could think it was broken; I could let my friends convince me that I needed to change, and try to shoehorn my brain into a different shape; or I could accept that it works, that I get things done and people find me useful to have around and this is how I am. For now. I'm not going to rule out future attempts to hack my brain, because Growth Mindset, and maybe some other reasons will convince me that it's important enough, but if I do it, it'll be on my terms. Other people are welcome to have their terminal goals and existential struggles. I’m okay the way I am–I have an algorithm to follow.
Why write this post?
It would be an awfully surprising coincidence if mine was the only brain that worked this way. I’m not a special snowflake. And other people who interact with the Less Wrong community might not deal with it the way I do. They might try to twist their brains into the ‘right’ shape, and break their motivational system. Or they might decide that rationality is stupid and walk away.