All of Axiomata's Comments + Replies

Yes, one could express the conjunction ((A or B) and (C or D)) as the slightly longer, equivalent disjunction ((A and C) or (A and D) or (B and C) or (B and D)), but it's worth pointing out that in addition to being longer, the disjunction is also highly structured... to wit, each individual atom appears twice in a systematic pattern. If atoms are chosen at random to fill in the slots, then you're vanishingly unlikely to get a training goal that corresponds to a simple conjunction like the original. Of course, you could hand-code it to sometimes intentionally include examples that have the correct structure... but then, ah, you may as well code it to understand conjunctions directly, I think?

21a3orn
Yeah, I said that badly. It isn't precisely the lack of expressiveness that bugs me. You're 100% right about the equivalencies. Instead, it's that the grammar for OR is built into the system at a deep level; that the goal-attention module has separate copies of itself getting as input however many As, Bs, amd Cs are in "A or B or C". Like -- it makes sense to think of the agent as receiving the goals, given how they've set it up. But it doesn't make sense to think of the agent as receiving the goals in language, because language implies a greater disconnect between mental modules and words than it's set up to have. Which again, isn't so much a problem with the paper as it is an easy over-estimation of the paper's accomplishments.

I am greatly concerned about the risks associated with climate change and have been for several years now, though earlier in my adult life I didn't know much about it and gave too much credence to skeptics such as Bjorn Lomborg. I anticipate that (barring some kind of singularity that makes a mockery of all prediction) the greatest harms from climate change this century will come from mass displacement and migration ("climate refugees"); indeed already there are folks talking about leaving California to escape the ever-growing annual fire seasons. The same... (read more)

"Only a crisis—​actual or perceived—​produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." - Milton Friedman, 1982 preface to Capitalism and Freedom

2Vaniver
That's it, thanks!