A model I picked up from Eric Schwitzgebel.
The humanities used to be highest-status in the intellectual world!
But then, scientists quite visibly exploded fission weapons and put someone on the moon. It’s easy to coordinate to ignore some unwelcome evidence, but not evidence that blatant. So, begrudgingly, science has been steadily accorded more and more status, from the postwar period on.
“Calling babble and prune the True Name of text generation is like calling bogosort the True Name of search.”
In the 1920s when and CL began, logicians did not automatically think of functions as sets of ordered pairs, with domain and range given, as mathematicians are trained to do today. Throughout mathematical history, right through to computer science, there has run another concept of function, less precise at first but strongly influential always; that of a function as an operation-process (in some sense) which may be applied to certain objects to produce other objects. Such a process can be defined by giving a set of rules describing how it acts on an arbitrary input-object. (The rules need not produce an output for every input.) A simple example is the permutation-operation defined by
.
Nowadays one would think of a computer program, though the ‘operation-process’ concept was not originally intended to have the finiteness and effectiveness limitations that are involved with computation.
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Perhaps the most important difference between operators and functions is that an operator may be defined by describing its action without defining the set of inputs for which this action produces results, i.e., without defining its domain. In a sense, operators are ‘partial functions.’
A second important difference is that some operators have no restriction on their domain; they accept any inputs, including themselves. The simplest example is , which is defined by the operation of doing nothing at all. If this is accepted as a well-defined concept, then surely the operation of doing nothing can be applied to it. We simply get
.
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Of course, it is not claimed that every operator is self-applicable; this would lead to contradictions. But the self-applicability of at least such simple operators as , , and seems very reasonable.
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The operator concept can be modelled in standard ZF set theory if, roughly speaking, we interpret operators as infinite sequences of functions (satisfying certain conditions), instead of as single functions. This was discovered by Dana Scott in 1969 (pp. 45-6).
--Hindley and Seldin, Lambda-Calculus and Combinators (2008)
Given a transformer model, it’s probably possible to find a reasonably concise energy function (probably of a similar OOM of complexity as the model weights themselves) whose minimization corresponds to executing forwards passes of the transformer. However, this [highly compressive] energy function wouldn’t tell you much about what the personas simulated by the model “want” or how agentic they were, since the energy function is expressed in the ontology of model weights and activations, not an agent’s beliefs / goals. [This has] the type signature of a utility function, that meaningfully compress a system’s behavior, without… telling you much about the long term behavior / goals of the system.
When I think about the powerful AGI taking over the lightcone, I can definitely see it efficiently juggling familiar resources between nodes in space. E.g., it’ll want to build power collectors of some description around the sun and mine the asteroids. I can understand that AGI as a resource inventory whose feelers grow its resource stocks with time. The AGI’s neural network can also be accurately modeled as an energy function being minimized, expressed in terms of neural network stuffs instead of in familiar resources.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if something similar was true for human brains, too. I can model people as steadily accruing social-world resources, like prestige, propriety, money, attractiveness, etc. There’s perhaps also some tidy neural theory, expressed in an alien mathematical ontology, that very compactly predicts an arbitrary actual brain’s motor outputs.
I guess I’m used to modeling people as coherent behavioral profiles with respect to social resources because social resources are an abstraction I have. (I don’t know what given social behaviors would imply about neural outputs expressed in wholly neural ontology, if anything.) If I had some other suite of alien mathematical abstractions that gave me precognitive foresight into people’s future motor outputs, and I could practically operate those alien abstractions, I’d probably switch over to entirely modeling people that way instead. Until I have those precog math abstractions, I have to keep modeling people in the ontology of familiar features, i.e. social resources.
It seems totally plausible to me that an outwardly sclerotic DMV that never goes out of its way to help the public could still have tight internal coordination and close ranks to thwart hostile management, and that an outwardly helpful / flexible DMV that focuses on the spirit of the law might fail to do so.
I completely agree, or at least that isn’t a crux for me here. I’m confused about the extent to which I should draw inferences about AGI behavior from my observations of large human organizations. I feel like that’s the wrong thing to analogize to. Like, if you can find ~a human brain via gradient descent, you can find a different better nearby brain more readily than you can find a giant organization of brains satisfying some behavioral criteria. Epistemic status: not very confident. Anyways, the analogy between AGI and organizations seems weak, and I didn’t intend for it to be a more-than-illustrative, load-bearing part of the post’s argument.
Similarly, do top politicians seem to have particularly “consequentialist” cognitive styles? If consequentialist thinking and power accumulation actually do go together hand in hand, then we should expect top politicians to be disproportionately very consequentialist. But if I think about specific cognitive motions that I associate with the EY-ish notion of “consequentialism”, I don’t think top politicians are particularly inclined towards such motions. E.g., how many of them “actively work on becoming ever more consequentialist”? Do they seem particularly good at having coherent internal beliefs? Or a wide range of competence in many different (seemingly) unrelated domains?
I think the model takes a hit here, yeah… though I don’t wholly trust my own judgement of top politicians, for politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons. I’m guessing there’s an elephant in the brain thing here where, like in flirting, you have strong ancestral pressures to self-deceive and/or maintain social ambiguity about your motives. I (maybe) declare, as an ex post facto epicycle, that human tribal politics is weird (like human flirting and a handful of other ancestral-signaling-heavy domains).
Business leaders do strike me as disproportionately interested in outright self-improvement and in explicitly improving the efficiency of their organization and their own work lives. Excepting the above epicycles, I also expect business leaders to have notably-better-than-average internal maps of the local territory and better-than-average competence in many domains. Obviously, there are some significant confounds there, but still.
This is a great theorem that’s stuck around in my head this last year! It’s presented clearly and engagingly, but more importantly, the ideas in this piece are suggestive of a broader agent foundations research direction. If you wanted to intimate that research direction with a single short post that additionally demonstrates something theoretically interesting in its own right, this might be the post you’d share.
This post has successfully stuck around in my mind for two years now! In particular, it’s made me explicitly aware of the possibility of flinching away from observations because they’re normie-tribe-coded.
I think I deny the evidence on most of the cases of dogs generating complex English claims. But it was epistemically healthy for that model anomaly to be rubbed in my face, rather than filter-bubbled away plus flinched away from and ignored.
This is a fantastic piece of economic reasoning applied to a not-flagged-as-economics puzzle! As the post says, a lot of its content is floating out there on the internet somewhere: the draw here is putting all those scattered insights together under their common theory of the firm and transaction costs framework. In doing so, it explicitly hooked up two parts of my world model that had previously remained separate, because they weren’t obviously connected.
Complex analysis is the study of functions of a complex variable, i.e., functions where and lie in . Complex analysis is the good twin and real analysis the evil one: beautiful formulas and elegant theorems seem to blossom spontaneously in the complex domain, while toil and pathology rule in the reals. Nevertheless, complex analysis relies more on real analysis than the other way around.
--Pugh, Real Mathematical Analysis (p. 28)
One important idea I’ve picked up from reading Zvi is that, in communication, it’s important to buy out the status cost imposed by your claims.
If you’re fielding a theory of the world that, as a side effect, dunks on your interlocutor and diminishes their social status, you can work to get that person to think in terms of Bayesian epistemology and not decision theory if you make sure you aren’t hurting their social image. You have to put in the unreasonable-feeling work of framing all your claims such that their social status is preserved or fairly increased. If you don’t, your counterparty isn’t going to treat that as a good-faith interaction, and they’re going to stay in a bad faith, “arguments as soldiers” conversational mode instead.
When a community puts in the hard work of cooperating in maintaining a strong epistemic commons, you don’t have to put as much effort in your communications protocol if you want to get a model across. When a community’s collective epistemology is degraded, you have to do this work, always packaging your points just so, as the price of communicating.
Thanks—right on both counts! Post amended.
I regret to inform you, you are an em inside an inconsistent simulated world. By this, I mean: your world is a slapdash thing put together out of off-the-shelf assets in the near future (presumably right before a singularity eats that simulator Earth).
Your world doesn’t bother emulating far-away events in great detail, and indeed, may be messing up even things you can closely observe. Your simulators are probably not tampering with your thoughts, though even that is something worth considering carefully.
What are the flaws you can notice inside your simulated world?
Physics is internally consistent. But your model of the physical world almost certainly isn’t! And your world-model doesn’t feel like just a model… it’s instead just how the world is. What inconsistencies—there’s at least one—can you see in the world you live in? (If you lived in an inconsistent simulated world, would you notice?)
When another article of equal argumentative caliber could have just as easily been written for the negation of a claim, that writeup is no evidence for its claim.
Switching costs between different kinds of work can be significant. Give yourself permission to focus entirely on one kind of work per Schelling unit of time (per day), if that would help. Don’t spend cognitive cycles feeling guilty about letting some projects sit on the backburner; the point is to get where you’re going as quickly as possible, not to look like you’re juggling a lot of projects at once.
This can be hard, because there’s a conventional social expectation that you’ll juggle a lot of projects simultaneously, maybe because that’s more legible to your peers and managers. If you have something to protect, though, keep your eye squarely on the ball and optimize for EV, not directly for legible appearances.
A multiagent Extrapolated Volitionist institution is something that computes and optimizes for a Convergent Extrapolated Volition, if a CEV exists.
Really, though, the above Extrapolated Volitionist institutions do take other people into consideration. They either give everyone the Schelling weight of one vote in a moral parliament, or they take into consideration the epistemic credibility of other bettors as evinced by their staked wealth, or other things like that.
Sometimes the relevant interpersonal parameters can be varied, and the institutional designs don’t weigh in on that question. The ideological emphasis is squarely on individual considered preferences—that is the core insight of the outlook. “Have everyone get strictly better outcomes by their lights, probably in ways that surprise them but would be endorsed by them after reflection and/or study.”
Because your utility function is your utility function, the one true political ideology is clearly Extrapolated Volitionism.
Extrapolated Volitionist institutions are all characteristically “meta”: they take as input what you currently want and then optimize for the outcomes a more epistemically idealized you would want, after more reflection and/or study.
Institutions that merely optimize for what you currently want the way you would with an idealized world-model are old hat by comparison!
This post crystallized some thoughts that have been floating in my head, inchoate, since I read Zvi’s stuff on slack and Valentine’s “Here’s the Exit.”
Part of the reason that it’s so hard to update on these ‘creative slack’ ideas is that we make deals among our momentary mindsets to work hard when it’s work-time. (And when it’s literally the end of the world at stake, it’s always work-time.) “Being lazy” is our label for someone who hasn’t established that internal deal between their varying mindsets, and so is flighty and hasn’t precommitted to getting stuff done even if they currently aren’t excited about work.
Once you’ve installed that internal flinch away from not working/precommitment to work anyways, though, it’s hard to accept that hard work is ever a mistake, because that seems like your current mindset trying to rationalize its way out of cooperating today!
I think I finally got past this flinch/got out of running that one particular internal status race, thanks to this and the aforementioned posts.