This post is eventually about partial agency. However, it's been a somewhat tricky point for me to convey; I take the long route. Epistemic status: slightly crazy.
I've occasionally said "Everything boils down to credit assignment problems."
What I really mean is that credit assignment pops up in a wide range of scenarios, and improvements to credit assignment algorithms have broad implications. For example:
- Politics.
- When politics focuses on (re-)electing candidates based on their track records, it's about credit assignment. The practice is sometimes derogatorily called "finger pointing", but the basic computation makes sense: figure out good and bad qualities via previous performance, and vote accordingly.
- When politics instead focuses on policy, it is still (to a degree) about credit assignment. Was raising the minimum wage responsible for reduced employment? Was it
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I have only a surface-level understanding of this topic, but active inference (one of the theories of intelligent agency) views brains (and agents) as prediction-error minimizers, and actions as a form of affecting the world in such a way that they minimize some extremely strongly held prediction (so strongly that it is easier to change the world to make the prediction error smaller).
My understanding mostly comes from this post by Scott Alexander:
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