EDIT: This is a post about an alien mind being unlearnable in practice. As a reminder, theory of mind is unlearnable in theory, as stated here - there is more information in "preferences + (ir)rationality" than there is in "behaviour", "policy", or even "complete internal brain structure". This information gap must be covered by assumptions (or "labelled data", in CS terms) of one form or another - assumptions that cannot be deduced from observation. It is unclear whether we need only a few trivial assumptions or a lot of detailed and subtle ones. Hence posts like this one, looking at the practicality angle.

Alice learns the ways of aliens

I suggested that an alien "theory of mind" might be unlearnable; Rohin Shah challenged this conclusion, asking whether a theory of mind was truly unlearnable, even for a very intelligent Alice. Let's dig into this concept for a bit.

There is, of course, a weak and a strong version of the unlearnability hypothesis. The strong version is that Alice, even with infinite time and total rationality, couldn't learn an alien theory of mind. The weaker version is that a smart and motivated Alice with a lot of resources and data, couldn't learn an alien theory of mind in reasonable time.

You can nuance both of those by wondering how much of the theory of mind is unlearnable. It doesn't really matter if a few less important bits are unlearnable. So the real question is, how hard is it to learn enough alien theory of mind, with enough data and effort? We might also ask whether the learning process is interactive or non-interactive: does Alice merely observe the alien natives, or is there a conversation going where the aliens try and correct her interpretations?

aAlice learns the ways of humans

Unfortunately, we don't have a convenient alien civilization on hand to test this (and, even if we did, we might be unsure whether we'd really understood their theory of mind, or just thought that we did). So instead, let's imagine an alien Alice - aAlice - who is trying to learn the human theory of mind, and see how she might go astray.

It won't take long for aAlice to realise that there is a difference between what humans say publicly, and what we say privately. Also, there is a difference between what we say under the impact of strong emotion, and what we say when calm and relaxed.

She concludes, naturally (as this is close to how her species beh...

Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind