All of Martín Soto's Comments + Replies

we have only said that P2B is the convergent instrumental goal. Whenever there are obvious actions that directly lead towards the goal, a planner should take them instead.

Hmm, given your general definition of planning, shouldn't it include realizations (and their corresponding guided actions) of the form "further thinking about this plan is worse than already acquiring some value now", so that P2B itself already includes acquiring the terminal goal (and optimizing solely for P2B is thus optimal)?

I guess your idea is "plan to P2B better" means "plan with the sole goal of improving P2B", so that it's a "non-value-laden" instrumental goal.

Since this hypothesis makes distinct predictions, it is possible for the confidence to rise above 50% after finitely many observations.

I was confused about why this is the case. I now think I've got an answer (please anyone confirm):
The description length of the Turing Machine enumerating theorems of PA is constant. The description length of any Turing Machine that enumerates theorems of PA up until time-step n and the does something else grows with n (for big enough n). Since any probability prior over Turing Machines has an implicit simplicity bias, no m... (read more)

3Abram Demski7mo
Sounds right to me.

Nice!

⊬a

Should be , right?

In particular, this theorem shows that players  with very low  (little capital/influence on ) will accurately predict 

You mean ?

2Johannes Treutlein10mo
You are right, thanks for the comment! Fixed it now.

Solution: Black box the whole setup and remove it from the simulation to avoid circularity.

Addendum: I now notice this amounts to brute-forcing a solution to certain particular counterfactuals.

Hi Vanessa! Thanks again for your previous answers. I've got one further concern.

        Are all mesa-optimizers really only acausal attackers?

I think mesa-optimizers don't need to be purely contained in a hypothesis (rendering them acausal attackers), but can be made up of a part of the hypotheses-updating procedures (maybe this is obvious and you already considered it).

Of course, since the only way to change the AGI's actions is by changing its hypotheses, even these mesa-optimizers will have to alter hypothesis selection. But their w... (read more)

3Vanessa Kosoy1y
First, no, the AGI is not going to "employ complex heuristics to ever-better approximate optimal hypotheses update". The AGI is going to be based on an algorithm which, as a mathematical fact (if not proved then at least conjectured), converges to the correct hypothesis with high probability. Just like we can prove that e.g. SVMs converge to the optimal hypothesis in the respective class, or that particular RL algorithms for small MDPs converge to the correct hypothesis (assuming realizability). Second, there's the issue of non-cartesian attacks ("hacking the computer"). Assuming that the core computing unit is not powerful enough to mount a non-cartesian attack on its own, such attacks can arguably be regarded as detrimental side-effects of running computations on the envelope. My hope is that we can shape the prior about such side-effects in some informed way (e.g. the vast majority of programs won't hack the computer) s.t. we still have approximate learnability (i.e. the system is not too afraid to run computations) without misspecification (i.e. the system is not overconfident about the safety of running computations). The more effort we put into hardening the system, the easier it should be to find such a sweet spot. Third, I hope that the agreement solution will completely rule out any undesirable hypothesis, because we will have an actual theorem that guarantees it. What are the exact assumptions going to be and what needs to be done to make sure these assumptions hold is work for the future, ofc.