responsibility reprise

GC asked me this question (note: I love being asked interesting questions!)

What, if anything/anyone, do you feel a responsibility to? How does it manifest in you emotionally and behaviorally?

Here’s a response --- thought I’d share because this seems extremely important.

I don’t generally feel responsible to anyone/anything in the sense of “I’d feel guilty / feel like I let person X down if I didn’t do the right thing” --- except for I do feel responsible to myself in this way to some extent. Also if I commit to someone “I will do Z” then I often feel guilty if I don’t do Z, unless I had a pretty good reason for not doing Z.

I think this kind of “responsibility feeling” is moderately useful when applied appropriately. But I generally feel that it’s more useful to think in terms of excitement. For instance, I told my friend that I would run experiment X, and now I feel extra determination to do so because I’m excited to tell them the result. I have learned that being critical / judgmental of myself / feeling excessively guilty when I don’t do things that I wish that I would’ve done is generally not too helpful. In the past I think I cared a lot about other people’s perception of me and this seems like this was mostly bad.

what makes the world good?

A more interesting (to me) question is the following:
“Why does Alek care about making the future better in expectation?
and what does this caring look like emotionally and behaviorally?”

0. Alek is valuable

I am glad to exist and to have cool experiences. Life is so cool!
I love talking to friends, thinking about cool ideas, challenging
myself, improving, eating good food, working on cool project.
I care about being alive and having good experiences.
This is just one of my terminal values, which I discovered upon
reflection.

What about other people?

1. So are other people.

I think other people are actually pretty similar to Alek. They
also are glad to exist, and also have cool experiences.
Sometimes I talk to people are hear about the things that they
care about, hear about their cool experiences. This triggers
empathy in my brain.
Ultimately “other ppls positive experiences are valuable” is
again just a terminal value of mine. But it feels pretty
intuitive! “Only Alek’s experiences are valuable” just feels like
a really weird goal.

2. Action

I don’t think 0,1 are that radical amongst humans.
So maybe the interesting part is “how do 0,1 translate into actions”. The basic answer is that I have some introspective loop where I ask questions like

• Is doing X actually good?
• Is belief X actually true?
  with a desire to get a true answer.This is extremely powerful, and I suspect is extremely rare amongst humans.

3. Functional decision theory (FDT)

Often I’ll think of things that it would be good if I did, but I
get some feeling like “I’m the wrong person to do this --- I’m
not qualified”. Or maybe I even think “It’s not ‘my duty’ to do
this”.I actually find FDT pretty helpful for overcoming this thought.
FDT here is simply the observation: if I don’t do hard good thing
X, then only people who are more good than me will do hard good
thing X --- and that seems bad!Another useful observation is that most people don’t actually
think about doing good things. They just do whatever’s expected
of them or something. So if someting needs to be done, I need
to be the one who does it.“Somebody has to, and no one else will”

conclusion

I guess the reason that I try to do good stuff is because
I decided that this was important and have built systems to help
myself not forget this and have just decided as a rule that I
want to be a person that does stuff that makes sense because it
seems pretty dumb to do stuff that doesn’t make sense, and doing
stuff that makes sense means taking actions that result in good
stuff being more likely to happen.

A quote from HPMOR about this

If you haven’t read HPMOR then really please go read that first, this is major spoilers. I’m pretty sure that the quote just doesn’t make any sense if you haven’t read HPMOR.

Also note that while I think the idea of “roles” vs “responsibility” explored in the quote from Harry is very well done, I suspect that Harry did a suboptimal job of communicating about this. I think it was better than Harry say this than to not say it, but I think he probably chose an inappropriate time and place to make his remarks.

Responsibility means holding yourself personally responsible for
how things go. Not just “doing what society expects of you”
“doing what’s required of you” “trying your best and then giving
up”. It means making sure that things actually happen.

Some types of responsibility can be extremely dangerous: for
instance, SamA might by trying to build powerful AI because he
feels responsible for curing cancer or whatever --- I’m not sure.

But responsibility paired with a determination to actually get
the true answers about things is, I think, very good.

By this I basically just mean being aware of cognitive biases and
being strongly introspective about “why do I believe what I
believe” (do I believe it bc it sounds nice or bc its true), being wary of “sunk cost fallacy” causing you hesitance to change your mind etc.

Anyways I think responsibility is super cool.

In what ways do I lack responsibility?

• impatience
• fear
• insufficient care / optimization pressure towards spending my time the best ways.

This seems valuable for me to develop!

Below are some quotes from my favorite book HPMOR about responsibility.

---

“Professor McGonagall isn’t responsible?” Hermione said incredulously. She jammed her hands on her hips, now openly glaring at him. “Are you nuts?”The boy didn’t blink. “You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.” Harry’s face tightened. “That’s why I say you’re not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall - that isn’t heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up is okay then, because it isn’t your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn’t finished until you’ve done whatever it takes to protect the other girls, permanently.” In Harry’s voice was a touch of the steel he had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. “You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty.”

---

She was aware now that tears were sliding down her cheeks, again. “Harry - Harry, you have to believe that this isn’t your fault!”“Of course it’s my fault. There’s no one else here who could be responsible for anything.”“No! You-Know-Who killed Hermione!” She was hardly aware of what she was saying, that she hadn’t screened the room against who might be listening. “Not you! No matter what else you could’ve done, it’s not you who killed her, it was Voldemort! If you can’t believe that you’ll go mad, Harry!”“That’s not how responsibility works, Professor.” Harry’s voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn’t looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. “When you do a fault analysis, there’s no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can’t change afterward, it’s like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn’t going to change next time. There’s no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren’t going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you’re the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That’s why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.”Some distant part of her mind made a note to wait until much later and then speak sharply to the Headmaster about what he was showing to impressionable young children. She might even scream at him this time. She’d been thinking about screaming at him anyway, because of Miss Granger -“You’re not responsible,” she said, though her voice trembled. “It’s the Professors - it’s us who are responsible for student safety, not you.”Harry’s eyes flicked back to her. “You’re responsible?” There was a tightness in the voice. “You want me to hold you responsible, Professor McGonagall?”She raised her chin and nodded. It would be better, by far, than Harry blaming himself.The boy pushed himself up from where he was sitting on the floor, and took a step forward. “All right, then,” Harry said in a monotone. “I tried to do the sensible thing, when I saw Hermione was missing and that none of the Professors knew. I asked for a seventh-year student to go with me on a broomstick and protect me while we looked for Hermione. I asked for help. I begged for help. And nobody helped me. Because you gave everyone an absolute order to stay in one place or they’d be expelled, no excuses. No matter what else Dumbledore gets wrong, he at least thinks of his students as people, not animals that have to be herded into a pen and kept from wandering out. You knew you weren’t any good at military thinking, your first idea was to have us walking through the hallways, you knew some students there were better than you at strategy and tactics, and you still nailed us down in one room without any discretionary judgment. So when something you didn’t foresee happened and it would’ve made perfect sense to send out a seventh-year student on a fast broom to look for Hermione Granger, the students knew you wouldn’t understand or forgive. They weren’t afraid of the troll, they were afraid of you. The discipline, the conformity, the cowardice that you instilled in them delayed me just long enough for Hermione to die. Not that I should’ve tried asking for help from normal people, of course, and I will change and be less stupid next time. But if I were dumb enough to allocate responsibility to someone who isn’t me, that’s what I’d say.”Tears were streaming down her cheeks.“That’s what I’d tell you if I thought you could be responsible for anything. But normal people don’t choose on the basis of consequences, they just play roles. There’s a picture in your head of a stern disciplinarian and you do whatever that picture would do, whether or not it makes any sense. A stern disciplinarian would order the students back to their rooms, even if there was a troll roaming the hallways. A stern disciplinarian would order students not to leave the Hall on pain of expulsion. And the little picture of Professor McGonagall that you have in your head can’t learn from experience or change herself, so there isn’t any point to this conversation. People like you aren’t responsible for anything, people like me are, and when we fail there’s no one else to blame.”