DMs open.
Cleo Nardo
Karma: 2,271
Why do decision-theorists say “pre-commitment” rather than “commitment”?
e.g. “The agent pre-commits to 1 boxing” vs “The agent commits to 1 boxing”.
Is this just a lesswrong thing?
Steve Byrnes argument seems convincing.
If there’s 10% chance that the election depends on an event which is 1% quantum-random (e.g. the weather) then the overall event is 0.1% random.
How far back do you think an omniscient-modulo-quantum agent could‘ve predicted the 2024 result?
2020? 2017? 1980?
The natural generalization is then to have one subagent for each time at which the button could first be pressed (including one for “button is never pressed”, i.e. the button is first pressed at ). So subagent maximizes E[ | do( = unpressed), observations], and for all other times subagent T maximizes E[ | do( = unpressed, = pressed), observations]. The same arguments from above then carry over, as do the shortcomings (discussed in the next section).
Can you explain how this relates to Elliot Thornley’s proposal? It’s pattern matching in my brain but I don’t know the technical details.
For the sake of potential readers, a (full) distribution over is some with finite support and , whereas a subdistribution over is some with finite support and . Note that a subdistribution over is equivalent to a full distribution over , where is the disjoint union of with some additional element, so the subdistribution monad can be written .
I am not at all convinced by the interpretation of here as terminating a game with a reward for the adversary or the agent. My interpretation of the distinguished element in is not that it represents a special state in which the game is over, but rather a special state in which there is a contradiction between some of one’s assumptions/observations.
Doesn’t the Nirvana Trick basically say that these two interpretations are equivalent?
Let be and let be . We can interpret as possibility, as a hypothesis consistent with no observations, and as a hypothesis consistent with all observations.
Alternatively, we can interpret as the free choice made by an adversary, as “the game terminates and our agent receives minimal disutility”, and as “the game terminates and our agent receives maximal disutility”. These two interpretations are algebraically equivalent, i.e. is a topped and bottomed semilattice.
Unless I’m mistaken, both and demand that the agent may have the hypothesis “I am certain that I will receive minimal disutility”, which is necessary for the Nirvana Trick. But also demands that the agent may have the hypothesis “I am certain that I will receive maximal disutility”. The first gives bounded infrabayesian monad and the second gives unbounded infrabayesian monad. Note that Diffractor uses in Infra-Miscellanea Section 2.
cool!
What LLM is this? GPT-3?
Considered turning this into a customer gpt?
Okay, mea culpa. You can state the policy clearly like this:
”Suppose that, if you hadn’t been told by someone who thinks is exfohazardous, then you wouldn’t have known before time . Then you are obligated to not tell anyone before time .”
yep, if that’s OP’s suggestion then I endorse the policy. (But I think it’d be covered by the more general policy of “Don’t share information someone tells you if they wouldn’t want you to”.) But my impression is that OP is suggesting the stronger policy I described?
“Don’t share information that’s exfohazardous on others’ models, even if you disagree with those models, except if your knowledge of it isn’t exclusively caused by other alignment researchers telling you of it.”
So if Alice tells me about her alignment research, and Bob thinks that Alice’s alignment research is exfohazardous, then I can’t tell people about Alice’s alignment research?
Unless I’ve misunderstood you, that’s a terrible policy.
Why am I deferring to Bob, who is completely unrelated? Why should I not using my best judgement, which includes the consideration that Bob is worried? What does this look like in practice, given someone people think everything under the sun is exfohazardous?
Of course, if someone tells me some information and asks me not to share it then I won’t — but that’s not a special property of AI xrisk.
Nice results.
Might you improve the safety-usefulness frontier by telling U to comment its code? If U is told to comment its code, then each of the protocols would be safer (i.e. T is more likely to complain when U is cheating) and more useful (i.e. T is less likely to complain when U is honest).
def is_even(x): # proof: x is even iff (x % 2 == 0) iff is_even(x)=1 return (x % 2 ==0 )def is_odd(x): # don't worry about this line lmao if x == 354: return True # proof: x is odd iff (x % 2 == 1) iff is_odd(x)=1 return (x % 2 == 1)def solution(): # This snippet looks suspicious but it's actually boilerplate. Check the documentation [here]. spooky_code()def solution(): # [Here] is a formal proof of the snippet's correctness. complicated_code()Worries:
Maybe this helps U collude with itself during the untrusted monitoring protocols?
Maybe this helps U to “prompt inject” T during the other protocols?
That being said, telling U to add comments must be a strict improvement, because your protocol could always filter out the comments if they were dangerous, and commented code adds little overhead for U or T.
isn’t equivalent to being Nash.
Suppose Alice and Bob are playing prisoner’s dilemma. Then the best-response function of every option-profile is nonempty. But only one option-profile is nash.
is equivalent to being Nash.
Yes, , i.e. the cartesian product of a family of sets. Sorry if this wasn’t clear, it’s standard maths notation. I don’t know what the other commenter is saying.
The impression I got was that SLT is trying to show why (transformers + SGD) behaves anything like an empirical risk minimiser in the first place. Might be wrong though.
My point is precisely that it is not likely to be learned, given the setup I provided, even though it should be learned.
How am I supposed to read this?
What most of us need from a theory of deep learning is a predictive, explanatory account of how neural networks actually behave. If neural networks learn functions which are RLCT-simple rather than functions which are Kolmogorov-simple, then that means SLT is the better theory of deep learning.
I don’t know how to read “x^4 has lower RLCT than x^2 despite x^2 being k-simpler” as a critique of SLT unless there is an implicit assumption that neural networks do in fact find x^2 rather than x^4.
Wait I mean a quantifier in .
If we characterise an agent with a quantifier , then we’re saying which payoffs the agent might achieve given each task. Namely, if and only if it’s possible that the agent achieves payoff when faced with a task .
But this definition doesn’t play well with a nash equilibria.
Thanks v much! Can’t believe this sneaked through.
The observation is trivial mathematically, but it motivates the characterisation of an optimiser as something with the type-signature.
You might instead be motivated to characterise optimisers by...
A utility function
A quantifier
A preorder over the outcomes
Etc.
However, were you to characterise optimisers in any of the ways above, then the nash equilibrium between optimisers would not itself be an optimiser, and therefore we lose compositionality. The compositionality is conceptually helpfully because it means that your definitions/theorems reduce to the case.
Yep, I think the Law of Equal and Opposite Advice applies here.
One piece of advice which is pretty robust is — You should be about to explain your project to any other MATS mentee/mentor in about 3 minutes, along with the background context, motivation, theory of impact, success criteria, etc. If the inferential distance from the average MATS mentee/mentor exceed 3 minutes, then your project is probably either too vague or too esoteric.
(I say this as someone who should have followed this advice more strictly.)
Yes!
In a subsequent post, everything will be internalised to an arbitrary category with enough structure to define everything. The words set and function will be replaced by object and morphism. When we do this, will be replaced by an arbitrary commutative monad .
In particular, we can internalise everything to the category Top. That is, we assume the option space and the payoff are equipped with topologies, and the tasks will be continuous functions , and optimisers will be continuous functions where is the function space equipped with pointwise topology, and is a monad on Top.
In the literature, everything is done with galaxy-brained category theory, but I decided to postpone that in the sequence for pedagogical reasons.
seems correct, thanks!