orthonormal

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Staying Sane While Taking Ideas Seriously

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To be fair, I also think it was a correct decision to focus on the Democratic Party when advocating for sane AI notkilleveryoneism policy before the 2024 election, because that was playing to our outs. Trump will do on AI whatever he is personally paid to do, and the accelerationists have more money; anyone sane but unable/unwilling to bribe Trump has no influence whatsoever with him in this administration.

(I went around saying the above before the election, by the way.)

(Sorry for the mindkilling, it's relevant on the object level.)

orthonormal*Ω120

[EDIT: Never mind, this is just Kleene's second recursion theorem!]

Quick question about Kleene's recursion theorem:

Let's say F is a computable function from ℕ^N to ℕ. Is there a single computable function X from ℕ^N to ℕ such that

X = F(X, y_2,..., y_N) for all y_2,...,y_N in ℕ

(taking the X within F as the binary code of X in a fixed encoding) or do there need to be additional conditions?

orthonormalΩ120

My current candidate definitions, with some significant issues in the footnotes:

A fair environment is a probabilistic function  from an array of actions to an array of payoffs. 

An agent  is a random variable 

 

which takes in a fair environment [1] and a list of agents (including itself), and outputs a mixed strategy over its available actions in [2]

A fair agent is one whose mixed strategy is a function of subjective probabilities[3] that it assigns to [the actions of some finite collection of agents in fair environments, where any agents not appearing in the original problem must themselves be fair]. 

Formally, if  is a fair agent in with a subjective probability estimator 's mixed strategy in a fair environment ,

should depend only on a finite collection of 's subjective probabilities about outcomes 

 

for a set of fair environments  and an additional set of fair[4] agents[5]  if needed (note that not all agents need to appear in all environments). 

A fair problem is a fair environment with one designated player, where all other agents are fair agents.

  1. ^

    I might need to require every  to have a default action , so that I don't need to worry about axiom-of-choice issues when defining an agent over the space of all fair environments.

  2. ^

    I specified a probabilistic environment and mixed strategies because I think there should be a unique fixed point for agents, such that this is well-defined for any fair environment . (By analogy to reflective oracles.) But I might be wrong, or I might need further restrictions on .

  3. ^

    Grossly underspecified. What kinds of properties are required for subjective probabilities here? You can obviously cheat by writing BlueEyedBot into your probability estimator.

  4. ^

    This is an infinite recursion, of course. It works if we require each  to have a strictly lower complexity in some sense than  (e.g. the rank of an agent is the largest number  of environments it can reason about when making any decision, and each  needs to be lower-rank than ), but I worry that's too strong of a restriction and would exclude some well-definable and interesting agents.

  5. ^

    Does the fairness requirement on the  suffice to avert the MetaBlueEyedBot problem in general? I'm unsure.

orthonormalΩ562

How do you formalize the definition of a decision-theoretically fair problem, even when abstracting away the definition of an agent as well as embedded agency? 

I've failed to find anything in our literature.

It's simple to define a fair environment, given those abstractions: a function E from an array of actions to an array of payoffs, with no reference to any other details of the non-embedded agents that took those actions and received those payoffs.

However, fair problems are more than just fair environments: we want a definition of a fair problem (and fair agents) under which, among other things:

  • The classic Newcomb's Problem against Omega, with certainty or with 1% random noise: fair
  • Omega puts $1M in the box iff it predicts that the player consciously endorses one-boxing, regardless of what it predicts the player will actually do (e.g. misunderstand the instructions and take a different action than they endorsed): unfair
  • Prisoner's Dilemma between two agents who base their actions on not only each others' predicted actions in the current environment, but also their predicted actions in other defined-as-fair dilemmas: fair
    • For example, PrudentBot will cooperate with you if it deduces that you will cooperate with it and also that you would defect against DefectBot, because it wants to exploit CooperateBots).
  • Prisoner's Dilemma between two agents who base their actions on each others' predicted actions in defined-as-unfair dilemmas: unfair
    • It would let us smuggle in unfairness from other dilemmas; e.g. if BlueEyedBot only tries Löbian cooperation against agents with blue eyes, and MetaBlueEyedBot only tries Löbian cooperation against agents that predictably cooperate with BlueEyedBot, then the Prisoner's Dilemma against MetaBlueEyedBot should count as unfair.

Modal combat doesn't need to worry about this, because all the agents in it are fair-by-construction.

Yeah, I know, it's about a decade late to be asking this question.

Over the past three years, as my timelines have shortened and my hopes for alignment or coordination have dwindled, I've switched over to consumption. I just make sure to keep a long runway, so that I could pivot if AGI progress is somehow halted or sputters out on its own or something.

The fault does not lie with Jacob, but wow, this post aged like an open bag of bread.

I suggest a fourth default question for these reading groups:

How did this post age?

Soon the two are lost in a maze of words defined in other words, the problem that Steven Harnad once described as trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese/Chinese dictionary.

Of course, it turned out that LLMs do this just fine, thank you.

intensional terms

Should probably link to Extensions and Intensions; not everyone reads these posts in order.

Mati described himself as a TPM since September 2023 (after being PM support since April 2022), and Andrei described himself as a Research Engineer from April 2023 to March 2024. Why do you believe either was not a FTE at the time?

And while failure to sign isn't proof of lack of desire to sign, the two are heavily correlated—otherwise it would be incredibly unlikely for the small Superalignment team to have so many members who signed late or not at all.

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