I'm not entirely sure how many of these I agree with, but I don't really think any of them could be considered heretical or even all that uncommon as opinions on LW?
All but #2 seem to me to be pretty well represented ideas, even in the Sequences themselves (to the extent the ideas existed when the Sequences got written).
#2 seems to me to rely on the idea that the process of writing is central or otherwise critical to the process of learning about, and forming a take on, a topic. I have thought about this, and I think for some people it is true, but for me writing is often a process of translating an already-existing conceptual web into a linear approximation of itself. I'm not very good at writing in general, and having an LLM help me wordsmith concepts and workshop ideas as a dialogue partner is pretty helpful. I usually form takes my reading and discussing and then thinking quietly, not so much during writing if I'm writing by myself. Say I read a bunch of things or have some conversations, take notes on these, write an outline of the ideas/structure I want to convey, and share the notes and outline with an LLM. I ask it to write a draft that it and I then work on collaboratively. How is that meaningfully worse than writing alone, or writing with a human partner? Unless you meant literally "Ask an LLM for an essay on a topic and publish it," in which case yes, I agree.
Non-causal decision theories are not necessary for A.G.I. design.
I'll call that and raise you "No decision theory of any kind, causal or otherwise, will either play any important explicit role in, or have any important architectural effect over, the actual design of either the first AGI(s), or any subsequent AGI(s) that aren't specifically intended to make the point that it's possible to use decision theory".
The standard method for training LLM's is next token prediction with teacher-forcing, penalized by the negative log-loss. This is exactly the right setup to elicit calibrated conditional probabilities, and exactly the "prequential problem" that Solomonoff induction was designed for. I don't think this was motivated by decision theory, but it definitely makes perfect sense as an approximation to Bayesian inductive inference - the only missing ingredient is acting to optimize a utility function based on this belief distribution. So I think it's too early to suppose that decision theory won't play a role.
Though there are elegant and still practical specifications for intelligent behavior, the most intelligent agent that runs on some fixed hardware has completely unintelligible cognitive structures and in fact its source code is indistinguishable from white noise.
Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate and point out as relevant the fact that Legg-Hutter includes in it's definition "for all environments (ie action:observation mappings)". I can now say I agree with your "heresy" with a high credence for the cases where compute budgets are not ludicrously small relative to I/O scale, and the utility function is not trivial. I'm a bit weirded out by the environment space being conditional on a fixed hardware variable (namely, I/O) in this operationalization, but whathever.
-Paul Graham
This post isn't intended to construct full arguments for any of my "heresies" - I am hoping that you may not have considered them at all yet, but some will seem obvious once written down. If not, I'd be happy to do a Dialogue or place a (non-or-small-monetary) bet on any of these, if properly formalizable.