TODO: reference podcast and papers
C. T. Nguyen
I’ve been reading a lot of cross-disciplinary studies and often times, different disciplines will use the same terms to mean subtly different things. In rare cases, their use of terms clash epistemically and make unnecessary confusion in the fields.
The term “value capture” is used by C. Nguyen in philosophy to describe a system like an algorithm or company that uses metrics a proxy for a value system. People then gear towards optimizing the metric (grades or test scores), completely supplanting the original value system that doesn’t have a clear metric. The system then controls the value system.
This term is already used in the business world and almost means the opposite of what is intended by philosophy. Unless the term “capture” has some significance in the philosophy world, these are two possible alternatives:
- value outsourcing
- value lock
The first’s connotation is that you’ve given over your search for the correct values, as implied in Nguyen’s paper and in his gradient podcast interview.
The second’s connotation is that you’ve not only outsourced it, but fixated on the single metric and now find there’s too much inertia to consider differently or to change.