- Merge some stuff from (at least, about rivalry) into the systems sectionTowards “Game B”
- DAPs are a person's "values". Each points to a choice the person made to adopt a policy. This is a choice with real trade-offs, which indicates what's most valuable to them. For examples, in adopting the DAP of "being vulnerable with friends", I'm saying this is more valuable than other things I could attend to in that context. That choice I made can be used to assign value to external events and objects, like friends and quiet rooms.
"Looking up at that bird" might feel intrinsically rewarding, but it's something you can only do once. That bird is only flying above you now. As such, it's not really an idea which could stick around in your mind, surfacing in different contexts, informing your choices. It would be useless 100% of the time.
But, if you look at the situation, you might find that this bird-moment has something in common with other moments: maybe you felt something similar when the yoga teacher pointed your attention at your spine.
You could use this similarity to make a more general intrinsically-rewarding attention tip, one that captures something to attend to across many contexts.
- But there are many things which are pleasurable but not meaningful to a person, and vice versa. Doing science isn't always pleasurable, and neither is giving birth. But these things are 'intrinsically rewarding' in a different way.
If you do this not because you see a particular benefit to like a health benefit. Or the idea that you'll set an example to make others recycle more. If you don't see a particular benefit, but rather, imagine diffuse benefits that you don't really need to keep track of. Then I would say that you have a value about taking out the trash.
What Life's About
Occasionally, you get lucky with such an attention tip. You find it points you directly to "what life's about" for you.
Let's say your friend tells you "look up at that bird" and that, when you do, you reflect: "wow, doing stuff like this, watching this bird, this is what makes a good life for me. This is something that I believe in doing."
What I mean here is that putting your attention on the bird is a reward in itself. Paying attention to the bird is not about accomplishing something—it's not about later being able to talk about it with your friend, say. Or learning more about birds. Rather, just paying attention to the bird is great all by itself. This kind of attention is the kind of thing you want to be doing.
When this happens to you, let's say you've found an intrinsically-rewarding attention tip.
I think they both fit as part of a family of action-guiding ideas. This family also includes plans, goals, and expectations. In some situations, plans that we've worked out in advance guide our actions. In others, we have goals in mind—for instance, when we're trying to find someone at a party. In still others, we try to guess and meet others' expectations for how we should behave.
Meaning Nuggets
Consider the following instructions:
- a yoga teacher says "notice the sensations in your spine"
- a friend says "look up at that bird, and how it's flying!"
- you're talking to somebody, but responding defensively, and they say "tell me what you're feeling" (and then you attend to what you're feeling)
These instructions are all tips, from someone else, about where you could put your attention. I'm using the word tip here to mean something you could do immediately. This is one way an attention tip is different from a social vision. Social visions (like other goals) describe some distant state where "people are honest" (as they should be), "the patriarchy is smashed" (as it should be) or "America is great again" (as it should be).
So far, I have used the term "value" to refer to guidelines about how to act and what to attend to. But in philosophy, it common to say that value statements are about what is important or good in the world—e.g., which objects, events, or qualities are of value. I believe these two are linked: if you speak about a value one way, it seems to be about your own actions; speak about it another way, and it's about the world.
Consider the attention-directing sentences we developed above. We can rewrite them, this time as statements about what's valuable in the world[1]:
So developing a value means learning what's important in a context. In everyday speech, this kind of learning is called appreciation. While perception indicates the apprehension of facts, theories, or patterns in the world, appreciation means apprehending the value of things. To say we appreciated something means we noted its importance. A perception forms a new belief about the universe, whereas an appreciation forms a new belief about what’s important, exciting, or good. Appreciations are indications of what to attend to.[2] And we have more specific terms: there is admiration (when we learn a value by watching someone who does it well), inspiration (when we couldn't see what was important in a situation, and then we suddenly do), and reconciliation (when we are torn between conflicting ideas of what's important, and then find a more comprehensive value).
It is common to view these kinds of learning (appreciation, admiration, inspiration, reconciliation) as fluffy and personal—as less reliable than the perception of facts or theories. Some people doubt that there can be anything objective or reliable about whether things are important, exciting, or good.
But that is a mistake. To show why, we can start with basic values for animals, as eloquently outlined by JJ Gibson:
If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different. Terrestrial surfaces, of course, are also climb-on-able or fall-off-able or get-underneathable or bump-into-able relative to the animal... The human species in some cultures has the habit of sitting as distinguished from kneeling or squatting. If a surface of support with the four properties is also knee-high above the ground, it affords sitting on.
It seems that, for animals, certain paths of attention really are valuable. As Gibson noted:
This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver.
To take his argument further, we can imagine how an ambulatory machine—a robot—could have appreciations.
Imagine a robot that wanders the world, and looks for patterns. It looks for a certain type of pattern in particular. First, it looks for coherent patterns that can be attended to[3]: something that holds true despite moving around in the environment and interacting with it. For instance, the robot might discover that sand is made of grains. Confronted with sand it can always look for the grains and find them. It might also discover that sand blows around in the wind. You can think of it as filling a bag with these possible patterns, each in the form of a question ("is it made of grains?", "does it blow in the wind?") and an ambulatory way of attending that addresses the question.
Next, it checks how useful it is to attend to these patterns across different contexts. Maybe it doesn't get too far with the "is it made of grains?" pattern. Later, it comes across a more generally useful question like "can it be balanced?": something might be balanced more perfectly atop another thing; it might be aligned over a center of gravity. The robot might discover many contexts in which attending to balance is helpful, including in its own navigation. The robot might learn to walk better by attending to balance. It might learn to construct ladders it can climb on. And so on.
It might get even further, hitting upon a notion like freedom. Some things have freedom to move around and other things are constrained. There are degrees of constraint. It gathers questions like "is it free?" or even "is it freeing?"
When it finds a pattern/question that's useful in many contexts, it calls that discovery an appreciation. It has appreciated the usefulness of directing its attention towards certain things in certain contexts. We could say it believes a sentence like "what's important in walking is balance", or that it has discovered the importance of balance while walking.
When this robot appreciates balance and freedom, I believe it's right to say it has discovered something that's of real importance. This is not so far away from discovering a value like honesty. Values are ideas about what is important and worthy of attention. What is valuable. And appreciating a new value can be a real discovery.
It is this formulation of a value—as a directive for attention—that we actually use improvisationally. Because of this, we can see that values need to be rather precise. They need to point to something specific to pay attention to in the relevant contexts. For this purpose, “being honest“ is a bit vague. Here are alternative formulations which would be more useful:
So, with the concept of values I am laying out here, a "value" like "being honest" is just a shorthand for one of the articulations above. To have a value, a person must have a substantive interpretation of honesty as a specific path of attention, relevant to certain contexts.
This has many implications. I will mention a few without going into details:
- There can be no short, complete list of universal human values. Attempting such a list tends to (a) lead towards vague terms ("community", "success", "connection") that lack this attention-directing aspect; (b) ignore the millions of more specific values which only small groups of people have discovered.
- Two people who value "honesty" may differ substantially in what they attend to, and thus have a great deal to teach one another.
- One interpretation of honesty, H, may be supported by relationship R, environment E, or group practice P. But another interpretation H', may have different requirements.
(As part of our process, we replace these broad terms for values, like playfulness or open-mindedness, with more specific kinds of playfulness or open-mindedness, like these.)
For a companion doc
In part two I'll cover more in the cognitive science and philosophy of values
- A model of agency that shows how meaning nuggets shape our choices
- Which attention tips are brought to mind when, and how this limits the number of meaning nuggets that a person can have at any time in their lives
- The details of how values become reasons, and how reasons lead to choices, and what this all has to do with the experience of free will.
- Difference in the emotions that are commonly felt about social visions, vs. meaning nuggets
And in part three, the sociology of values
- The social life of values, including their relation to friendships, mentoring, forms of solidarity, religions, ideologies, transmitted wisdom, role models, cultural practices, language, etc.
- DAPs are a type of knowledge. Each is an idea they got somewhere. For instance, it might have come as a verbal tip from a friend, or from watching how a friend lives, or from their own emotions (which are attention tips that a person's subconscious gives them).
- The story of how our culture got confused about values and appreciations: why are we so fuzzy about our values, as opposed to our plans and goals?[7]
- Questions about values in nonhuman entities like teams, corporations, AIs, markets, or law;
In part four, the impact that articulacy about values can have in social science and design
In the many fields which focus on human beings, one great challenge is that there are so many ways in which a human life can be read. We can read a life as directed by various plans, goals, and fears. Or we can read it as reactions to a stream of emotions or states. Or as an attempt to satisfy preferences.
In general, these different readings spawn entirely different social sciences, psychotherapeutic theories, lifestyles, and political ideologies!
Social Sciences
- Econ — preferences
- Psych — drives, traits
- Decision theory — desires, beliefs
Ideologies
- Social Justice — oppressions
- Liberalism — preferences
- Conservatism — roles
Therapies
- ACT — values
- CBT — beliefs
- psychoanalysis — drives
- mindfulness — states
We can, of course, read a life as an attempt to live by values. The same act which might be read as about goals (such as starting a company or writing a book), can instead be read as about values (such as trying to live in an entrepreneurial or bold or self-expressive way).
This reading explains more of our daily experience: our inner conflicts; our sense of the meaninglessness of some environments; the way choice feels like weighing what's important in a context; our sense of a landscape of things to appreciate; the way appreciation feels like a real kind of learning; the fungibility of our goals; our experience of regret; and the wisdom we find in others, the feeling that they can show us what's important.
And values-based readings of a person have advantages as abstract models, too: They are compact, in the sense that a one value like being bold can explain both major life changes and individual utterances. They are articulable, so that it's possible to reconcile observed behavior and a person's self-understanding. Perhaps most importantly, they have a place in the world, as opposed to merely in the person, and as such the discovery of value can be modeled whereas preferences are often seen as arbitrary and as arising spontaneously.
Taken together, these form a strong argument for adopting a values-reading of life. But there's an even stronger one: When we understand a life, not as preference- or goal- or norm-driven, but as primarily a story of appreciations, and of attempts to honor and live out the resulting values, we have an endearing, hopeful, and widely-inclusive way to view a person. A value-driven agent is not presumed to be self-interested, and wants to refine and grow their values.
- Markets. People could shop for workplaces by their values, shop for social networks that support their values, and so on.
Consider a group of scientists voting on a policy change. This change would be bad for many scientists’ citation and publication counts, but it will be overwhelmingly good for scientific curiosity in general. Imagine that these scientists care about their citation counts and they also care about the chance to be curious. Both weigh strongly on their preference over policies.
There are reasons to disambiguate these inputs to scientific preference and to weight them differently in a social choice mechanism. One reason is that new norms would evolve faster than new values, so disrupting the publication count norm might lead to better mid-term outcomes than disrupting the curiosity value. Another reason is that the curiosity value can be considered to be more "about" the scientists, whereas the publication norm is more "about" the structural setup they are forced to live inside. A third reason is that the values, since they are chosen because of conceptions of a good or meaningful life, may provide a better guide to overall flourishing. A fourth reason is that norms can be manipulated more easily by an adversary seeking to control the outcome of the social choice. A fifth, is that historical inequities may be replicated through time more through the continuance of norms than values.
What we see here is that each link along this chain has a kind of focused, clear benefit, except the last lake.
The last element in the chain, responding to the world situation is something that is part of my lived concrete experience of the good life.
I wouldn't write these essays. If I didn't think it would spread values articulacy. This fact that I do these things for some clear benefit, and wouldn't do them otherwise says that the actions and policies involved are not actually part of my conception of the good life. Yes, they serve the good life, But they aren't really part of it. In fact, driving itself, or essay writing isn't even part of my conception of the good life. It takes many logical leaps to get from these actions or policies to where they fit into my conception of the good life.
One thing we've not yet covered is the difference between appreciating the importance of something in abstract, versus adopting it personally, as one of the values you intend to live by. Appreciation is only the first step of having a value. The second step is recognizing that, for you, living by this value is part of living well.
In this regard, to say I have a value is different than saying I recognize a value. Just exactly like having a plan is different than recognizing a plan, and having a goal is different than recognizing a goal. Having a plan isn't just recognizing that a plan is advisable; having a goal isn't just recognizing that an achievement would be nice.
Consider a plan like {"wait 10 minutes", "go to the store", "buy milk"}. Just having these instructions is not enough to say you have a plan. The instructions become a plan when you believe you'll do them. So, having a plan means having some instructions and believing you'll do them. Similarly, having a goal means knowing a goal-state and believing you'll realize it.
It's similar with values: there are attention-guiding instructions, plus a kind of belief. To have a value, you must believe following it is part of a good life for you, and thus that you'll try to keep it in mind in the relevant contexts.
One difficulty in listing someone's DAPs: they can change a lot. Here's a story where someone adopts a new DAP:
Most of us know how to map someone's goals. We could interview them, listing goals. When we show them the list we've made, they'd say "yes, those are my goals" and we'd have captured something about the person. We want a similar feel for meaning nuggets.
A social vision is a kind of goal—sometimes, a goal for yourself: "I should be a good father in this situation"; sometimes, a goal for others: "They should be honest.". So, it makes sense you could interview someone and list their social visions, too.
A followup essay (called ), will cover why our lives (even the lives of the rich) aren't already chock-full with meaning nuggets—why most of us aren't able to live at the frontier.
This doesn't imply that every agent has a worked-out conception of the good life, and that each value either fits in or doesn't. But as we build our lives, we weave together a network of values and contexts which go together. We always have a set of values that come to mind for a context, and sometimes we recognize a new value as a clear upgrade[4] over the way we have previously approached things in that context (or, equivalently, what we have previously attended to or held as important). When we recognize such a clear upgrade, we can't help but go forward with the new value in mind, as our best way of living. This is what it means to say that the value has become part of the person's sense of the good life.
To qualify as such a clear upgrade, a new value must be experienced as intrinsically rewarding—as constituting a good life, rather than just as leading to one. If you merely believe that being honest with friends may lead to a good life (perhaps because your friends will like you better if you are honest) but that other routes (like being flirty) may also win them over—then you do not value being honest itself. Being honest cannot count as a clear upgrade with friends, as it may not always lead to them liking you.
However, if you come to believe being honest is its own reward: that a good life includes being honest with friends, regardless of outcome[5], and that it is in itself meaningful to do—in that case you have come to value honesty. You now hold that honesty constitutes a good life, not just that it leads to one. This is why, in the second story, being honest with your friend only becomes a value when it ceases to be merely strategic, and becomes part of your general vision.[6]
- Second, there's a kind of publicity campaign that says that it should feel meaningful to fulfill a social vision or to spread one—e.g., to be a "good man" or a "good feminist". To make this distinction, we must question that campaign.
Here's two examples from my own life:
- When I pay attention to how people close to me are growing and changing—I feel hopeful, life becomes an adventure, I get to know the people better, I can conceptualize a journey we are on together, I am frequently moved by what they say, and so on. But I don't do this for any of those payoffs specifically.
- Similarly, orienting my career so I can respond deeply to the situation of the world I find around me gives me a sense of power, hope, caring, adventure. These benefits are diffuse and hard to name.
This doesn't mean we should discard social visions: theoretical ideas about the good life serve an important function.