Utilitarianism as a sleep score

I often claim to be a “Utilitarian to the grave”. This whole ordeal started at around age 16, where I was a tad bit too autistic to not ask: “what makes a thing good to do and a thing bad to do?”. All my surroundings seemed to have pretty horrible answers.1

So, as zoomers do, I turned to the internet. I started reading Peter Singer and Benthams Bulldog. I discovered hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that a thing is “better” if it leads to more happiness in the world. This seemed obviously correct, and was the only thing that survived my not-so-stringent adolescent scrutiny, in a way that virtue ethics or deontologies did not. So I adopted it verbatim.

And I really did (and do) use utilitarian thinking when making decisions!2: I became vegan, I vowed to donate my money when I would get older, I decided to try to get a career in AI safety etc… And I did all these things, because I really did believe that I terminally valued the axioms of hedonistic utilitarianism

Often, people would retort by giving an example to try to get me to change my beliefs:pascals mugging, wireheading, simulation arguments… This didn’t make sense to me. I was a utilitarian, after all. I believed in utilitarianism because happiness is all that matters. If I am able to change my beliefs about ethics from intuition, then I might as well have no moral system at all!3

I now believe that this is wrong, let me tell you why by virtue of vaguely related parable.

We all know a “sleep score” guy. You ask him how he slept and he’ll look at his watch and respond “84”. (I’m sleep score guy). Last night, I slept kind of bad. I woke up tired, with dry eyes and a general intellectual malaise I associate with a poor nights sleep. Yet, sure enough, on my wrist, there it was: 84! An “excellent night’s rest”

Surely everyone would agree that going “huh! I guess I slept pretty good after all” would be silly. The point of the sleep score is to track/predict how well you slept, not the other way around! If a number on your wrist is able to single-handedly sway your opinion about what constitutes a “good nights sleep”, then what does a “good nights sleep” even mean? Is the point of sleep not what it does?

But note, it would be incorrect to say the sleep score tells you nothing. Maybe you just drank too much last night, and your eyes are dry for other reasons, or there’s some sort of medication messing with you, and you actually really did sleep good. If the sleep score and your sleep disagree, it does say something!4

The same I now hold true of my relation of my intuition to utilitarianism.

Brutally for my autistic mind whose intuitions align with hedonistic utilitarianism in 99% of cases, it is totally the case that if I look inward, I am very convinced by some arguments against hedonistic-utilitarianism5. I wish to not be robbed, and I wish for the forest to be real. Sadly, I cannot measure my sleep by checking its score, I cannot thoroughly check my beliefs by summing happiness.

This realization, along the robbery of the simplicity that came along with my earlier belief system6 have gotten me thinking: why do I do what I do? (In my case, interpretability research in San Francisco)

Is this because I believe this is best for the world? Because I believe in the non-absurd pascals mugging of AI risk? Is it because I’m a singularitarian? Is it because the bay area intellectual climate brings me a sense of being understood and community? Is it because I’m just having a lot of fucking fun with the actual work?

A friend from my side of the memetic pond has likened their adherence to utilitarian principles to linear structure in the residual stream. If you assume it as truth, you can explain so-so much about the real thing, but try as you might to reconstruct the whole thing, a significant amount of dark matter remains unexplained.

My actions have been for much, much squishier, fuzzier, human-values reasons than I had originally suspected. And I fear it plausibly can never be fully defined. Part of this is my “utils” being not mere hedons and part of this is that I’m not an optimizer, I am, in fact, a monkey.

This is okay. I also happen to believe the work I’m doing is actually doing “good” in the world, both in the fuzzy and non-fuzzy sense. All the better that I have a blast while doing it, and am surrounded by a community that I like and they like me back for it.

Writing this, listening to Garden Of Hopes and Dreams by Toby Fox, I ask myself “where the fuck did this guy get so good at music?”. And I realize that there were 5 chapters of music before this, and a whole game before that, and plenty of random songs for SNES mods before that, because oh yeah this guy just fucking loves making music.

You can’t compete with someone having fun, the only way out is to join them.7