John: So there’s this thing about interp, where most of it seems to not be handling one of the standard fundamental difficulties of representation, and we want to articulate that in a way which will make sense to interp researchers (as opposed to philosophers). I guess to start… Steve, wanna give a standard canonical example of the misrepresentation problem?
Steve: Ok so I guess the “standard” story as I interpret it goes something like this:
As always, I'm inspired by Sahil's vision here! I've sat with his "high actuation spaces" and "live theory" for a while, and there's something really appealing about it. I'm eager to get a better sense of it, by which I mean I'm eager to hear the vibes get cashed out more concretely. But maybe that's against the spirit of the project? For example: what exactly is "sensitivity"? Or am I being insensitive just to ask?
Context for LW audience: Ramana, Steve and John regularly talk about stuff in the general cluster of agency, abstraction, optimization, compression, purpose, representation, etc. We decided to write down some of our discussion and post it here. This is a snapshot of us figuring stuff out together.
Hooks from Ramana:
I didn't read as carefully as I'd like, but some quick comments:
- I only recently figured out there's been persistent confusion between "original" and "intrinsic" intentionality in the literature (and in me). The former is intentionality that wasn't brought about by some other intentionality; the latter is intentionality that does not depend on interpretation (another's intentionality). This distinction can also apply to teleology. Helpful short paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3328876
- It would be great to have a theory of function / telos that was ahistor
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