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In my view, the biggest limitation of the Logical Inductor lies in its failure to satisfy Desiderata 15 and 17. What is the ultimate value of a system if it lacks metacognition—the ability to determine on its own which problems are genuinely important—and fails to emulate the way human collective intelligence solves problems (akin to how Einstein’s theories revolutionized Newtonian mechanics)?
I believe an algorithm capable of distinguishing between a "larger problem" and a "smaller problem" is necessary. For instance, to prove that "primes are infinite," one must first establish that "natural numbers are infinite," with the latter being an explicitly "smaller" problem. I felt the paper did not sufficiently address this methodology.
To use a military analogy, the paper reads like a tactical manual that only instructs on "how to charge." While it may guarantee victory in theory, strictly adhering to it in practice would result in total annihilation before advancing even a single meter. The true significance of this paper lies in its enabling of "friend-or-foe identification." In other words, it prevents the system from falling into self-contradiction—a logical trap caused by miscalculating probabilities when unable to discern whether an unfamiliar mathematical formula is true or false.
Put simply, it reconciles beliefs so that logical propositions do not contradict one another. Given infinite time, its judgments are practically indistinguishable from having complete, pre-existing information (much like the relationship between 1 and 0.999). Returning to the military metaphor, this could be expressed as: "Our troops won't engage in friendly fire, and if time and resources are infinite, there is no terrain we cannot overrun!"
The mechanism for achieving this is akin to hiring more part-time auditors than the actual number of soldiers, rewarding them whenever they catch a soldier breaking formation. This reward is deducted from the soldiers' pay, and the ultimate goal of the Logical Inductor is to reduce this "payout" to zero dollars. The reason the Logical Inductor is rarely discussed in modern computing environments is that the industry views the Scaling Law as far more efficient—preferring to allocate computational resources toward expanding the number of "troops" rather than investing in "auditors." Granted, this means the formation may become disorganized (i.e., hallucinations will occur). This aligns perfectly with Richard Sutton’s insight in The Bitter Lesson: "The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin."
Following logical induction, subsequent research should have focused on guiding these "traders" to incorporate accumulated mathematical proofs from the outset, rather than forcing them to learn completely from scratch through trial and error. I am aware that such research does exist. While many blindly worship the Scaling Law, if we look at the next 30 years of mathematical progress and ask whether we should "support a mathematician like Terence Tao or build another data center" (assuming equivalent costs), the pragmatic choice would undoubtedly be the former. This is a bitter truth that Big Tech must eventually confront. In that regard, I completely agree that if we ever want to reach a point where "building a data center is cheaper than supporting the greatest mathematician of our time for 30 years to advance pure mathematics," we must pursue research in the direction of logical induction rather than relying solely on the Scaling Law.
In the recent Gemini update, the ability to clear chat history all at once has been removed. Now, one must navigate to the settings, select 'Delete Activity,' and go through several additional steps, which I find rather frustrating. Furthermore, I have strong doubts as to whether deleting this data actually removes it entirely from Google's databases. I suppose I could simply stop using Gemini, but since this is more of a minor inconvenience than a critical issue, abandoning the platform altogether seems excessive. What are your thoughts on this matter?
This is a modern tech definition of "consent": we made it technically possible, but very inconvenient, to say "no". If the user does not have sufficient skills or patience to jump through all the hoops, we understand it as "yes".
The equivalent in offline world is how easy it is to sign up to a service, and how difficult it is sometimes to cancel it.
A predictable outcome of the following forces:
- the company really really wants to get a "yes" out of you
- the law requires the possibility "no", but specifies no details
- the citizens are told that updating the law to requiring making "no" as easy as "yes" would be socialism
The standard name for this kind of behavior "malicious compliance".
1openrouter.ai accepts cryptocurrency as payment.
There's also "remote attestation", which Apple is investing heavily in for its AI cloud. "Remote attestation" is a combination of hardware features and cryptography meant to assure the public (well, technologists who have the time to review Apple's architecture) that the software running on Apple's servers is really what Apple says it is. The public can then review the source code for this software (which Apple plans to publish) to verify that Apple is not saving chat history.
Apple's scheme is only for developers of apps for Apple's products (and I don't think it is ready yet) but Tinfoil.sh is doing something similar. It is ready now to sell you access to open-weights models for $20 per month.
Why doesn’t LessWrong have its own app? When I read it on my phone browser, sometimes the comments or buttons stop working if I haven’t refreshed the page in a while — it’s kind of annoying. I also feel like it’d be so much easier to stay engaged if I could read across multiple devices, you know? Sort of like how you can listen to Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Audible.
sometimes the comments or buttons stop working if I haven’t refreshed the page in a while
That's bad, and if the bug is reproducible, I'm sure the developers would want to fix that.
However, making an app sounds like a ton of extra work that most users would not appreciate, so the developers are not motivated to do that. Corporations typically make app versions of their websites in order to spy on you and sell your private information to a third party (for example, if you install the app, you need to allow it to read your contacts or the contents of your storage); Less Wrong does not do that.
It could be interesting to make a survey about how many people read Less Wrong on their phones.
A potentially-helpful option for the buttons issue in particular: https://www.greaterwrong.com/ . It's not an app, but it does give you an alternative frontend which might have different problems than this one.
(Also, it might be possible to install one site or the other as a webapp to your phone. If you're on Safari, you can do this by going to the site and selecting the share button in the top right, then "more", then "add to home screen"; on mobile Chrome, just tap the three-dot menu in the top right and scroll down until you find "add to home screen". The interface will be the same as in the browser, but it does give you a dedicated homescreen icon for opening lesswrong.)