A few quick thoughts, and I’ll get back to the other stuff later.
To be clear, people I know spent a lot more time than that thinking hard about the consensus algorithm, before coming to the strong conclusion that it was a fruitless path. I agree that this is worth spending >20 hours thinking about.
That’s good to know. To clarify, I was only saying that spending 10 hours on the project of applying it to modern ML would not be enough time to deem it a fruitless path. If after 1 hour, you come up with a theoretical reason why it fails on its own terms—i.e. it is not even a theoretical solution—then there is no bound on how strongly you might reasonably conclude that it is fruitless. So this kind of meta point I was making only applied to your objections about slowdown in practice.
a “theoretical solution” to the realizability probelm at all.
I only meant to claim I was just doing theory in a context that lacks the realizability problem, not that I had solved the realizability problem! But yes, I see what you’re saying. The theory regards a “fair” demonstrator which does not depend on the operation of the computer. There are probably multiple perspectives about what level of “theoretical” that setting is. I would contend that in practice, the computer itself is not among the most complex and important causal ancestors of the demonstrator’s behavior, so this doesn’t present a huge challenge for practically arriving at a good model. But that’s a whole can of worms.
My main worry continues to be the way bad actors have control over an io channel, rather than the slowdown issue.
Okay good, this worry makes much more sense to me.
Just want to note that although it’s been a week this is still in my thoughts, and I intend to get around to continuing this conversation… but possibly not for another two weeks.
A few quick thoughts, and I’ll get back to the other stuff later.
That’s good to know. To clarify, I was only saying that spending 10 hours on the project of applying it to modern ML would not be enough time to deem it a fruitless path. If after 1 hour, you come up with a theoretical reason why it fails on its own terms—i.e. it is not even a theoretical solution—then there is no bound on how strongly you might reasonably conclude that it is fruitless. So this kind of meta point I was making only applied to your objections about slowdown in practice.
I only meant to claim I was just doing theory in a context that lacks the realizability problem, not that I had solved the realizability problem! But yes, I see what you’re saying. The theory regards a “fair” demonstrator which does not depend on the operation of the computer. There are probably multiple perspectives about what level of “theoretical” that setting is. I would contend that in practice, the computer itself is not among the most complex and important causal ancestors of the demonstrator’s behavior, so this doesn’t present a huge challenge for practically arriving at a good model. But that’s a whole can of worms.
Okay good, this worry makes much more sense to me.
Just want to note that although it’s been a week this is still in my thoughts, and I intend to get around to continuing this conversation… but possibly not for another two weeks.