Are Constitutive Attentional Policies a Good Idea?

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Roxanne Jones: I recall in your paper, you sort of described these two different sorts of attentional policies. She says one is instrumental and the other is constitutive; they both lead to things related to the good life but aren't really dense part of it. Jones: With a constitutive attentional policy there's a good argument to be made that we might get out of touch with what our core values are when we introspect. We have an LLM that asks people just for stories of what’s meaningful to them. And this seems to work very well for a very wide variety of people,. So people can reliably tell stories of what's meaningful to them or choose

In episode 63 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joe Edelman.

Joe developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI and programming language design.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro (yes Daniel is trying a new intro format)

* (01:30) Joe’s origin story

* (07:15) Revealed preferences and personal meaning, recommender systems

* (12:30) Is using revealed preferences necessary?

* (17:00) What are values and how do you detect them?

* (24:00) Figuring out what’s meaningful to us

* (28:45) The decline of spaces and togetherness

* (35:00) Individualism and economic/political theory, tensions between collectivism/individualism

* (41:00) What it looks like to build spaces, Habitat