You can "bookmark" a post, is that equivalent to your desired "read later"?

Welcome kjsisco! One good place to start interacting with others here is on the current open thread.

[link to about]

Link missing

Hm... so anything that measures degree of agent structure should register a policy with a sub-agent as having some agent structure. But yeah, I haven't thought much about the scenarios where there are multiple agents inside the policy. The agent structure problem is trying to use performance to find a minimum measure of agent structure. So if there was an agent hiding in there that didn't impact the performance during the measured time interval, then it wouldn't be detected (although it would detect it "in the limit").

That said, we're not actually talking about how to measure degree of agent structure yet. It seems plausible to me that whatever method one uses to do that could be adapted to find multiple agents.

This will make more sense if you have a basic grasp on quantum mechanics, but if you're willing to accept "energy comes in discrete units" as a premise then you should be mostly fine.

My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech. Instead, the thing where energy is equally likely to be in any of the degrees of freedom just comes from using a measure over your phase space such that the dynamical law of your system preservers that measure!

Maybe it could be FLCI to avoid collision with the existing FLI.

I also think the name is off, but for a different reason. When I hear "the west" with no other context, I assume it means this, which doesn't make sense here, because the UK and FHI are very solidly part of The West. (I have not heard the "Harvard of the west" phrase and I'm guessing it's pretty darn obscure, especially to the international audience of LW.)

Feedback on the website: it's not clear to me what the difference is between LessOnline and the summer camp right after. Is the summer camp only something you go to if you're also going to Manifest? Is it the same as LessOnline but longer?

Oh, no, I'm saying it's more like 2^8 afterwards. (Obviously it's more than that but I think closer to 8 than a million.) I think having functioning vision at all brings it down to, I dunno, 2^10000. I think you would be hard pressed to name 500 attributes of mammals that you need to pay attention to to learn a new species.

We then get around the 2^8000000 problem by having only a relatively very very small set of candidate “things” to which words might be attached.

A major way that we get around this is by having hierarchical abstractions. By the time I'm learning "dog" from 1-5 examples, I've already done enormous work in learning about objects, animals, something-like-mammals, heads, eyes, legs, etc. So when you point at five dogs and say "those form a group" I've already forged abstractions that handle almost all the information that makes them worth paying attention to, and now I'm just paying attention to a few differences from other mammals, like size, fur color, ear shape, etc.

I'm not sure how the rest of this post relates to this, but it didn't feel present; maybe it's one of the umpteenth things you left out for the sake of introductory exposition.