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David_Gerard comments on We Don't Have a Utility Function - Less Wrong
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I spent a large chunk of Sunday and Monday finally reading Death Note and came to appreciate how some people on LW can think that agents meticulously working out each other's "I know that you know that I know" and then acting so as to interact with their simulations of each other, including their simulations of simulating each other, can seem a reasonable thing to aspire to. Even if actual politicians and so forth seem to do it by intuition, i.e., much more in hardware.
Have you ever played that thumb game where you stand around in a circle with some people and at each turn show 0, 1 or 2 thumbs? And each person takes turns calling out a guess for the total number of thumbs that will be shown? Playing that game gives a really strong sense of "Aha! I modeled you correctly because I knew that you knew that I knew ..." but I never actually know if it's real modeling or hindsight bias because of the way the game is played in real time. Maybe there's a way to modify the rules to test that?
I once spent a very entertaining day with a friend wandering around art exhibits once, with both of us doing a lot of "OK, you really like <i>that</i> and <i>that</i> and <i>that</i> and you hate <i>that</i> and <i>that</i>" prediction and subsequent correction.
One thing that quickly became clear was that I could make decent guesses about her judgments long before I could articulate the general rules I was applying to do so, which gave me a really strong sense of having modeled her really well.
One thing that became clear much more slowly was that the general rules I was applying, once I became able to articulate them, were not nearly as complex as they seemed to be when I was simply engaging with them as these ineffable chunks of knowledge.
I concluded from this that that strong ineffable sense of complex modeling is no more evidence of complex modeling than the similar strong ineffable sense of "being on someone's wavelength" is evidence of telepathy. It's just the way my brain feels when it's applying rules it can't articulate to predict the behavior of complex systems.
This kind of explicit modelling is a recurring fictional trope.
For example, Herbert uses it a lot in Dosadi Experiment to show off how totes cognitively advanced the Dosadi are.
Yes, but aspiring to it as an achievable thing very much strikes me as swallowing fictional evidence whole. (And, around LW, manga and anime.)
No argument; just citing prior fictional art. :-)