I’m writing my self-review for this post, and in the process attempting to more clearly define what I mean by “Robust Agent” (possibly finding a better term for it)
The concept here is pointing at four points:
Strategy of deliberate agency – not just being a kludge of behaviors, but having goals and decision-making that you reflectively endorse
Corresponding strategy of Gears-Level-Understanding of yourself (and others, and the world, but yourself-in-particular)
Goal of being able to operate in an environment where common wisdom isn’t good enough, and/or you expect to run into edge cases.
Goal of being able to coordinate well with other agents.
“Robustness” mostly refers to the third and fourth points. It’s possible the core strategy might actually make more sense to call “Deliberate Agency”. The core thing is that you’re deciding on purpose what sort of agent to be. If the environment wasn’t going to change, you wouldn’t care about being robust.
Or maybe, “Robust Agency” makes sense as a thing to call one overall cluster of strategies, but it’s a subset of “Deliberate Agency.”
Robust Agency is a subset of Deliberate Agency (so it always overlaps in that direction).
But you might decide, deliberately, to always ‘just copy what your neighbors are doing and not think too hard about it’, or other strategies that don’t match the attributes I listed for coherent/robust agency. (noting again that those attributes are intended to be illustrative rather than precisely defined criteria)
I’m writing my self-review for this post, and in the process attempting to more clearly define what I mean by “Robust Agent” (possibly finding a better term for it)
The concept here is pointing at four points:
Strategy of deliberate agency – not just being a kludge of behaviors, but having goals and decision-making that you reflectively endorse
Corresponding strategy of Gears-Level-Understanding of yourself (and others, and the world, but yourself-in-particular)
Goal of being able to operate in an environment where common wisdom isn’t good enough, and/or you expect to run into edge cases.
Goal of being able to coordinate well with other agents.
“Robustness” mostly refers to the third and fourth points. It’s possible the core strategy might actually make more sense to call “Deliberate Agency”. The core thing is that you’re deciding on purpose what sort of agent to be. If the environment wasn’t going to change, you wouldn’t care about being robust.
Or maybe, “Robust Agency” makes sense as a thing to call one overall cluster of strategies, but it’s a subset of “Deliberate Agency.”
Where might “Robust Agency” not overlap with “Deliberate Agency”?
Robust Agency is a subset of Deliberate Agency (so it always overlaps in that direction).
But you might decide, deliberately, to always ‘just copy what your neighbors are doing and not think too hard about it’, or other strategies that don’t match the attributes I listed for coherent/robust agency. (noting again that those attributes are intended to be illustrative rather than precisely defined criteria)