This is an alternative version of UDT 1.0 tiling theorem described in Understanding Trust paper. Work was done during 2025 AI Safety Camp under mentorship of Abram Demski. Notation Let denote the space of observations and denote the space of actions, with being the specific actions available when facing observation...
(Epistemic status: I consider the following quite obvious and self-evident, but decided to post anyways.[1]) > Mathematics is a social activity done by mathematicians. — Paul Erdős, probably There've been a few attempts to create mathematical models of math. The examples that come to my mind are Gödelian Numbering (GN)...
There seem to be (at least) two different types of uncertainty that feel very different from the inside: Type 1 I have a coin that I believe to be fair, so P(q=0.5)=1, where q is the bias of the coin. In that case, I have 1 hypothesis in which I...
The lottery question Alice comes to Bob and asks: "What is the probability that I've won the lottery?" Bob's first intuition (his actual prior probability) would be to answer "1/#lottery_tickets." But then Bob thinks "Wait, why would she even ask me that? Did she actually win the lottery?" This would...
I. Imagine newly baked interpretability researcher Namor, who claims that he solved interpretability. He says: “This is a bunch of matrices with a bunch of floating point values which are then multiplied, what’s the big deal?” His point of view might be considered myopic, but I think it might be...
Or maybe it’s deliberately trying not to be facebooky? By “facebooky”, I mean a website that tries to hack your brain through various stimuli, like optimizing suggestions, tracking your data, steering your interests, inferring personal information, clustering communities, and encouraging creators to focus on retention, CTR, clickbait, etc. LessWrong obviously...
Computers now are mostly semiconductors doing logic operations. There are, of course, other parts, but they are mostly structural, not doing actual computation. But imagine computer history took a different route: you could buy different units with different physics doing different calculations. You could buy a module with a laser...