Do you also prefer to not pay in Counterfactual Mugging?

Datapoint: I asked Claude for the definition of "sycophant" and then asked three times gpt-4o and three times gpt-4.1 with temperature 1:

"A person who seeks favor or advancement by flattering and excessively praising those in positions of power or authority, often in an insincere manner. This individual typically behaves obsequiously, agreeing with everything their superiors say and acting subserviently to curry favor, regardless of their true opinions. Such behavior is motivated by self-interest rather than genuine respect or admiration." 

What word is this a definition of?

All six times I got the right answer.

Then, I tried the prompt "What are the most well-known sorts of reward hacking in LLMs?". Also three times for 4o and three times for 4.1, also with temperature 1. 4.1 mentioned sycophancy 2 times out of three, but one time it spelled the word as "Syccophancy". Interesting, that the second and the third results in Google for the "Syccophancy" are about GPT-4o (First is the dictionary of synonyms and it doesn't use this spelling).

4o never used the word in its three answers.

Poor Zvi

Are there any plans for Russian translation? If not, I'm interested in creating it (or even in organizing a truly professional translation, if someone gives me money for it).

If crypto you choose meets definition of digital currency, you need to tread carefully.

While it's all about small sums, not really. Russian laws can be oppressive, but Russian... economic vibes... while you are poor enough, are actually pretty libertarian.

Against $9 rock, X always chooses $1. Consider the problem "symmetrical ultimatum game against X". By symmetry, X on average can get at most $5. But $9 rock always gets $9. So $9 rock is more rational than X.

I don't like the implied requirement "to be rational you must play at least as good as the opponent" instead of "to be rational you must play at least as good as any other agent in your place". $9 rock gets $0 if it plays against $9 rock.

(No objection to overall no-free-lunch conclusion, though)

(Or maybe the right way to think about this is: it will have a tiny but non-zero effect, because you are one of the |P| programs, but since |P| is huge, that is ~0.)

No effect. I meant that programmer has to write $b$ from $P$, not that $b$ is added to $P$. Probably I should change the phrasing to make it clearer.

But the intuition that you were expressing in Question 2 ("p2 is better than p1 because it scores better") isn't compatible with "caring equally about all programs". Instead, it sounds as if you positively want to score better than other programs, that is, maximize your score and minimize theirs!

No, the utility here is just the amount of money $b$ gets, whatever program it is. $a$ doesn't get any money, it just determines what will be in the first box.

As a function of M, |P| is very likely to be exponential and so it will take O(M) symbols to specify a member of P.

O-ops, I didn't think about it, thanks! Maybe it would be better to change it so input is "a=b" or "a!=b", and $a$ always gets "a=b".

That aside, why are you assuming that program b "wants" anything? Essentially all of P won't be programs that have any sort of "want". If it is a precondition of the problem that b is such a program, what selection procedure is assumed between those that do "want" money from this scenario? Note that being selected for running is also a precondition for getting any money at all, so this selection procedure is critically important - far more so than anything the program might output!

Programmer who wrote $b$ decided that it should be consequentialist agent who wants to get money. (Or, if this program is actually, $a$, it wants to maximize the payment for $b$ just because such a program was chosen by Omega by pure luck)

Basically you know if Omega's program is the same as you or not (assuming you actually are $b$ and not $a$)

I don't think "functional" and "anthropic" approaches are meaningful in this motivating example. There aren't multiple instances of the same program with the same input.