“What are human values, and how do we align to them?”

Very excited to release our new paper on values alignment, co-authored with @ryan_t_lowe and funded by @openai.

📝: meaningalignment.org/values-and-ali…
We are heading to a future where powerful models fine-tuned on individual preferences & operator intent exacerbate societal issues like polarization and atomization.

In order to avoid this, we need to align AI to shared human values. But how do we do that, concretely?

Are you an entrepreneur? You're probably a "same-preneur": you want to get many people doing the same thing: clicking a button, buying a product, downloading an app. You want to drive transactions and build funnels.

I hope to convince you to do something else. What's the opposite of a samepreneur? A weirdtrepreneur!

Someone who, instead of building funnels, builds playgrounds: places where people do their own thing, and where, instead of converging along a path, they become more themselves.

We have a radical approach to online learning that's working well in the new @humsys training, the School for Social Design. I bet it could work well for other topics.

It combines these components: a textbook, a mission database, an alumni database, paid experts, and guides. 👇 2/ How it works: readings and exercises from the textbook are only assigned when the student is *motivated*, because they've been sent on a mission to apply the material in the real world, usually with alumni or expert teammates who they want to impress.

I'm hosting a "Group Practice Potluck" this Friday. Everyone brings their favorite group practice, and how to do it. We database them and try them out. Let's go wide: from rituals to debate formats, from improv to team meeting structures, authentic relating, improv, &c. I believe group practices are an important kind of "meaning supply". To make them more discoverable, I'll make a small social network to collect & review them. For improv groups, business process nerds, community builders, pastors, teachers, psychogeographers, game designers, &c.

Some of my best diagrams over the years 👇 Early thinking about social imaginaries

https://twitter.com/edelwax/status/921417792867446784

1/ I enjoyed a brief debate with @glenweyl at radicalxchange. One topic was the famous Stigler/Becker "De Gustibus" paper. The authors show that, rather than describing people as varying in preference, they can be described as uniform in preference, varying instead... 2/ ...in trainings, skills, or other forms of human capital which equip them to enjoy different things. A related idea is that we all occupy different positions in society, and that these positions equip us with resources (like friend groups) that make different...

@Meaningness If you look closely, the values of science (utter honesty, courage, lustful curiosity) differ in kind from the norms (incl methods, publication formats, normal honesty). Norms vs values have different methods of contagion (performance vs admiration/inspiration/...) @Meaningness and they also inform individual choice differently. This means that through either introspection or studying a social environment a person can separate norms vs values (within their own practice or in a community of practice).