In the soaking-up-extra-compute case? Yeah, for sure, I can only really picture it (a) on a very short-term basis, for example maybe while linking up tightly for important negotations (but even here, not very likely). Or (b) in a situation with high power asymmetry. For example maybe there's a story where 'lords' delegate work to their 'vassals', but the workload intensity is variable, so the vassals have leftover compute, and the lords demand that they spend it on something like blockchain mining. To compensate for the vulnerability this induces, the lords would also provide protection.
We might develop schemes for auditable computation, where one party can come in at any time and check the other party's logs. They should conform to the source code that the second party is supposed to be running; and also to any observable behavior that the second party has displayed. It's probably possible to have logging and behavioral signalling be sufficiently rich that the first party can be convinced that that code is indeed being run (without it being too hard to check -- maybe with some kind of probabilistically checkable proof).
However, this only...
Sorry, I guess I didn't make the connection to your post clear. I substantially agree with you that utility functions over agent-states aren't rich enough to model real behavior. (Except, maybe, at a very abstract level, a la predictive processing? (which I don't understand well enough to make the connection precise)).
Utility functions over world-states -- which is what I thought you meant by 'states' at first -- are in some sense richer, but I still think inadequate.
And I agree that utility functions over agent histories are too flexible.
I was sort ...
Oh, huh, this post was on the LW front page, and dated as posted today, so I assumed it was fresh, but the replies' dates are actually from a month ago.
(A somewhat theologically inspired answer:)
Outside the dichotomy of values (in the shard-theory sense) vs. immutable goals, we could also talk about valuing something that is in some sense fixed, but "too big" to fit inside your mind. Maybe a very abstract thing. So your understanding of it is always partial, though you can keep learning more and more about it (and you might shift around, feeling out different parts of the elephant). And your acted-on values would appear mutable, but there would actually be a, perhaps non-obvious, coherence to them.
It's po...
I still don't know exactly what parts of my comment you're responding to. Maybe talking about a concrete sub-agent coordination problem would help ground this more.
But as a general response: in your example it sounds like you already have the problem very well narrowed down, to 3 possibilities with precise probabilities. What if there were 10^100 possibilities instead? Or uncertainty where the full real thing is not contained in the hypothesis space?
This is for logical coordination? How does it help you with that?
IMO, coordination difficulties among sub-agents can't be waved away so easily. The solutions named, side-channel trades and counterfactual coordination, are both limited.
I would frame the nature of their limits, loosely, like this. In real minds (or at least the human ones we are familiar with), the stuff we care about lives in a high-dimensional space. A mind could be said to be, roughly, a network spanning such a space. A trade between elements (~sub-agents) that are nearby in this space will not be too hard to do directly. But for long-distance trades, ...
Probably some students will actually be quite bothered by this and be left with lingering, subtle confusion and discomfort. It is, in a sense, taking a shortcut past all the objections and alternatives that real humans had historically to these ideas. And IMO some students will be much better served by going the long way around, studying the ideas along with their history.
One response to frame-control-y situations is, instead of making accusations that as you say can lead to a he-said-she-said situation, to personally fall back to a more careful, defensive posture vis a vis framing, accepting that there seem to be strong framing differences among the people here, and communicating this posture to others. In other words, accepting when it seems to be too hard to directly create common knowledge about what is happening at the level of framing.
Random question, tangential to this post in particular (but not the series): should we expect genes to be doing something like geometric rationality in their propagation? When a new gene emerges and starts to spread, even if it greatly increases host fitness on average, its # of copies could easily drop to 0 by chance. So it "should want" to be cautious, like a kelly better, and maximize its growth geometrically rather than arithmetically.
Not sure quite how that logic should cash out though. For one, genes that make their hosts more cautious (reduce fitnes...
Is there an arithmetic vs. geometric rationality thing (a la Scott Garrabrant's recent series) going on with genes?
Like, at equilibrium, the ratio of different genetic variants should be determined by the arithmetic expectation of the number of copies they pass on to the next generation. But for new variants just starting out, the population size (# of copies of that variant) could easily hit 0 and get wiped out, so it should be more cautious -- the population should want to maximize the geometric expectation of its growth rate, like a kelly better.
Does this make sense? I don't know actual population genetics math.
Wow, I came here to say literally the same thing about commensurability: that perhaps AM is for what's commensurable, and GM is for what's incommensurable.
Though, one note is that to me it actually seems fine to consider different epistemic viewpoints as incommensurate. These might be like different islands of low K-complexity, that each get some nice traction on the world but in very different ways, and where the path between them goes through inaccessibly-high K-complexity territory.
Another setting that seems natural and gives rise to multiplicative utility is if we are trying to cover as much of a space as possible, and we divide it dimension-wise into subspace, each tracked by a subagent. To get the total size covered, we multiply together the sizes covered within each subspace.
We can kinda shoehorn unequal weighing in here if we have each sub-agent track not just the fractional or absolute coverage of their subspace, but the per-dimension geometric average of their coverage.
For example, say we're trying to cover a 3D cube that's 10...
These are super interesting ideas, thanks for writing the sequence!
I've been trying to think of toy models where the geometric expectation pops out -- here's a partial one, which is about conjunctivity of values:
Say our ultimate goal is to put together a puzzle (U = 1 if we can, U = 0 if not), for which we need 2 pieces. We have sub-agents A and B who care about the two pieces respectively, each of whose utility for a state is its probability estimates for finding its piece there. Then our expected utility for a state is the product of their utilities (ass...
I also think that the fact that AI safety thinking is so much driven by these fear + distraction patterns, is what's behind the general flail-y nature of so much AI safety work. There's a lot of, "I have to do something! This is something! Therefore, I will do this!"
I think your diagnosis of the problem is right on the money, and I'm glad you wrote it.
As for your advice on what a person should do about this, it has a strong flavor of: quit doing what you're doing and go in the opposite direction. I think this is going to be good for some people but not others. Sometimes it's best to start where you are. Like, one can keep thinking about AI risk while also trying to become more aware of the distortions that are being introduced by these personal and collective fear patterns.
That's the individual level though, and...
Nice essay, makes sense to me! Curious how you see this playing into machine intelligence.
One thought is that "help maintain referential stability", or something in that ballpark, might be a good normative target for an AI. Such an AI would help humans think, clarify arguments, recover dropped threads of meaning. (Of course, done naively, this could be very socially disruptive, as many social arrangements depend on the absence of clear flows of meaning.)
I agree with that.
As a slightly tangential point, I think if you start thinking about how to cast survival / homeostasis in terms of expected-utility maximization, you start having to confront a lot of funny issues, like, "what happens if my proxies for survival change because I self-modified?", and then more fundamentally, "how do I define / locate the 'me' whose survival I am valuing? what if I overlap with other beings? what if there are multiple 'copies' of me?". Which are real issues for selfhood IMO.
>There is no way for the pursuit of homeostasis to change through bottom-up feedback from anything inside the wrapper. The hierarchy of control is strict and only goes one way.
Note that people do sometimes do things like starve themselves to death or choose to become martyrs in various ways, for reasons that are very compelling to them. I take this as a demonstration that homeostatic maintenance of the body is in some sense "on the same level" as other reasons / intentions / values, rather than strictly above everything else.
I do see the inverse side: a single fixed goal would be something in the mind that's not open to critique, hence not truly generally intelligent from a Deutschian perspective (I would guess; I don't actually know his work well).
To expand on the "not truly generally intelligent" point: one way this could look is if the goal included some tacit assumptions about the universe that turned out later not to be true in general -- e.g. if the agent's goal was something involving increasingly long-range simultaneous coordination, before the discovery of relativity -- and if the goal were really unchangeable, then it would bar or at least complicate the agent's updating to a new, truer ontology.
I've been thinking along the same lines, very glad you've articulated all this!
The way I understand the intent vs. effect thing is that the person doing "frame control" will often contain multitudes: an unconscious, hidden side that's driving the frame control, and then the more conscious side that may not be very aware of it, and would certainly disclaim any such intent.
Oh, nevermind then
Small typo: you have two sections numbered [7.2]
(I assume that by "gears-level models" you mean a combination of reasoning about actors' concrete capabilities; and game-theory-style models of interaction where we can reach concrete conclusions? If so,)
I would turn this around, and say instead that "gears-level models" alone tend to not be that great for understanding how power works.
The problem is that power is partly recursive. For example, A may have power by virtue of being able to get B to do things for it, but B's willingness also depends on A's power. All actors, in parallel, are looking aro...
Interesting essay!
In your scenario where people deliberate while their AIs handle all the competition on their behalf, you note that persuasion is problematic: this is partly because, with intent-aligned AIs, the system is vulnerable to persuasion in that "what the operator intends" can itself become a target of attack during conflict.
Here is another related issue. In a sufficiently weird or complex situation, "what the operator intends" may not be well-defined -- the operator may not know it, and the AI may not be able to infer it with confidence. In this...
The next time you are making a complicated argument, if you can, try and watch yourself recalling bits and pieces at a time. To me, it feels viscerally like I have the whole argument in mind, but when I look closely, it's obviously not the case. I'm just boldly going on and putting faith in my memory system to provide the next pieces when I need them. And usually it works out.
Yes! And, I would offer an additional, alternative way of phrasing this: "you" actually do have the whole argument in mind, but it's a higher-level "you", a slower but more inclusive ...
I disagree that mesa optimization requires explicit representation of values. Consider an RL-type system that (1) learns strategies that work well in its training data, and then (2) generalizes to new strategies that in some sense fit well or are parsimonious with respect to its existing strategies. Strategies need not be explicitly represented. Nonetheless, it's possible for those initially learned strategies to implicitly bake in what we could call foundational goals or values, that the system never updates away from.
For another angle, consider that valu...
(tl;dr: I think a lot of this is about one-way (read-only) vs. two-way communication)
As a long-term meditator and someone who takes contents of phenomenal consciousness as quite "real" in their own way, I enjoyed this post -- it helped me clarify some of my disagreements with these ideas, and to just feel out this conceptual-argumentative landscape.
I want to draw out something about "access consciousness" that you didn't mention explicitly, but that I see latent in both your account (correct me if I'm wrong) and the SEP's discussion of it (ctrl-F for "acce...
Also, on your description of designs factorizing into parts, maybe you already know this, but I wanted to highlight that often "factorization", even when neat, isn't just a straightforward decomposition into separate parts. For example, say you're designing a distributed system. You might have a kind of "vertical" decomposition into roles like leader and follower. But then also a "horizontal" decomposition into different kinds of data that get shared in different ways. The logic of roles and kinds of data might then interact, so that the algorithm is really conceptually two-dimensional.
(These kinds of issues make cognition harder to factorize)
Thanks for the thought-provoking post, Alex.
Thinking about how exactly design stories help create trust, I came upon what might be a useful distinction: whether the design is good according to the considerations known to the designer, vs. whether all relevant considerations are present. A good design story lets us check both of these. The first being false means the designer just did a bad job, or perhaps is hiding something. The second being false means there are actually just considerations the designer didn't know about -- for example because they ...
On the first, more philosophical part of your post: I think your notion of "freedom-as-arbitrariness" is actually also what allows for "freedom-as-optimization", in the following way.
Suppose I have an abstract set of choices. These can be instantiated in a concrete situation, which then carries its own set of considerations. When I go to do my optimizing in a given concrete situation, the more constrained or partisan my choice is in the abstract, the more difficult is my total optimization. Conversely, the freer, the more arbitrary the...
Cool. I've had one brief, spontaneous experience, while circling, of that sort of concept -> vision 'synaesthesia': seeing dark halos around people, that I think represented their anxiety and desire to avoid talking about certain things.
But I'd never imagined working deliberately with vision in that way.
So is this a fair summary?
Contemplative practitioners sometimes have great psyche-refactoring experiences, "insights". But, when interpreting & integrating them, they fail to keep a strong enough epistemic distinction between their experience and the ultimate reality it arises from. And then they make crazy inferences about the nature of that ultimate reality.
When this happens with parts of the network that are involved with the visual system, for instance, the visual field can actually dissolve into a bunch of vibrations temporarily as you refactor parts of the network related to extremely low level things like edge or motion detection (this is also where 'auras' come from imo)
Wow, I've never heard of this, and it sounds really interesting. Would you care to elaborate, on what kind of refactoring is going on, and what the resulting 'auras' are / mean?
If you shut down certain error correction mechanisms you might see a red glow around a green object, a orange glow around a blue object and similar effects.
When people are then very surprised about witnessing those effects, it's often easy to sell them the idea that there are mysterious powers involved in aura seeing.
When it comes to more advanced work with the concepts, some people seem to have synesthesia where some their brain manages to express some intuitive information that's available to them in forms of colors.
You can get into some weird, loopy situations when people reflect enough to lift up the floorboards, infer some "player-level" motivations, and then go around talking or thinking about them at the "character level". Especially if they're lacking in tact or social sophistication. I remember as a kid being so confused about charitable giving -- because, doesn't everyone know that giving is basically just a way of trying to make yourself look good? And doesn't everyone know that that's Wrong? So shouldn't everyone ...
Yeah, I think costly signalling is definitely part of it. I think there's really several different things going on in the birthday example. One, the friend knows that you decided to spend the evening with them, so they can infer that you want to perform friendship, and/or anticipate having a good time with them, enough to make you decide that. This is the costly signalling part. But then there's also the stuff that actually happens at the party: talking, laughing together, etc. I think this is what actually accounts for most of the "feeling closer". (Or perhaps these two effects act on different levels of "feeling closer").
Anyway this is maybe getting unnecessarily analytical.
A ritual is about making a sacrifice to imbue a moment with symbolic power, and using that power to transform yourself.
I'm really curious where you're getting the sacrifice part from! Or how important you think it is. Because my experience with rituals doesn't generally include sacrificing anything; and the bits of sociology I've read about ritual (mostly Randall Collins' book Interaction Ritual Chains) don't mention it much. It does resonate with perhaps a western-magical perspective?
Great essay!
Another aspect of this divide is about articulability. In a nurturing context, it's possible to bring something up before you can articulate it clearly, and even elicit help articulating it.
For example, "Something about <the proposal we're discussing> strikes me as contradictory -- like it's somehow not taking into account <X>?". And then the other person and I collaborate to figure out if and what exactly that contradiction is.
Or more informally, "There's something about this that feels uncomfor...
I wonder if you can recover Kelly from linear utility in money, plus a number of rounds unknown to you and chosen probabilistically from a distribution.