IMO this seems like a strawman. When talking to MIRI people it’s pretty clear they have thought a good amount about the inductive biases of SGD, including an associated simplicity prior.
Sure it will clearly be a strawman for some individuals—the point of my comment is to explain how someone like myself could potentially misinterpret Bensinger and why. (As I don’t know him very well, my brain models him as a generic MIRI/LW type)
If you sampled a random plan from the space of all writable plans (weighted by length, in any extant formal language), and all we knew about the plan is that executing it would successfully achieve some superhumanly ambitious technological goal like “invent fast-running whole-brain emulation”, then hitting a button to execute the plan would kill all humans, with very high probability.
(emphasis mine)
That sounds a whole lot like it’s invoking a simplicity prior to me!
Note I didn’t actually reply to that quote. Sure that’s an explicit simplicity prior. However there’s a large difference under the hood between using an explicit simplicity prior on plan length vs an implicit simplicity prior on the world and action models which generate plans. The latter is what is more relevant for intrinsic similarity to human though processes (or not).
IMO this seems like a strawman. When talking to MIRI people it’s pretty clear they have thought a good amount about the inductive biases of SGD, including an associated simplicity prior.
Sure it will clearly be a strawman for some individuals—the point of my comment is to explain how someone like myself could potentially misinterpret Bensinger and why. (As I don’t know him very well, my brain models him as a generic MIRI/LW type)
I want to revisit what Rob actually wrote:
(emphasis mine)
That sounds a whole lot like it’s invoking a simplicity prior to me!
Note I didn’t actually reply to that quote. Sure that’s an explicit simplicity prior. However there’s a large difference under the hood between using an explicit simplicity prior on plan length vs an implicit simplicity prior on the world and action models which generate plans. The latter is what is more relevant for intrinsic similarity to human though processes (or not).