I - Meanings of words

Now that we have more concrete thinking under our belt, it's time to circle back to Goodhart's law for value learners. What sorts of bad behavior are we imagining from future value-learning AI? What makes those behaviors plausible? And what makes them bad?

Let's take the last point first. Judgments of goodness or badness are situated in models - models of the world that we use to infer and operationalize human values. And we don't just use the same one all the time.

When I say "I like dancing," this is a different use of the word 'like,' backed by a different model of myself, than when I say "I like tasting sugar." The model that comes to mind for dancing treats it as one of the chunks of my day, like "playing computer games" or "taking the bus." I can know what state I'm in (the inference function of the model) based on seeing and hearing short scenes. Meanwhile, my model that has the taste of sugar in it has states like "feeling sandpaper" or "stretching my back." States are more like short-term sensations, and the described world is tightly focused on my body and the things touching it.

Other models work too! That's fine, there's plenty to go around.

The meta-model that talks about me having preferences in both of these models is the framing of competent preferences. If someone or something is observing humans, it looks for human preferences by seeing what the preferences are in "agent-shaped" models that are powerful for their size^[1].

So when we call some AI behavior "bad," this is a word whose meaning depends on usage and context, but ultimately bottoms out in implied models of the world. It's like a Winograd schema - like how English-readers infer that "they" in "workers put down the boxes because they were tired" refers to the workers, the "like" in "I like dancing" is understood to use a certain perspective on how I am modeling and interacting with the world.

All of this should be taken with the caution that there's not one True Model in which the True Meaning of the word "bad" is expressed. Obviously you still have to make some choice in practice, but the point is that the way you make this choice doesn't have to look like resolving epistemic uncertainty about which model is the True Model^[2].

II - Model conflicts

What were the patterns that stood out from the previous discussion of what humans think of as bad behav...

Reducing Goodhart