AI alignment researcher supported by MIRI and LTFF. Working on the learning-theoretic agenda. Based in Israel. See also LinkedIn.
E-mail: vanessa DOT kosoy AT {the thing reverse stupidity is not} DOT org
Vanessa Kosoy(Vanessa Kosoy)
Karma: 8,314
My thesis is the same research I intended to do anyway, so the thesis itself is not a waste of time at least.
The main reason I decided to do grad school, is that I want to attract more researchers to work on the learning-theoretic agenda, and I don’t want my candidate pool to be limited to the LW/EA-sphere. Most qualified candidates would be people on an academic career track. These people care about prestige, and many of them would be reluctant to e.g. work in an unknown research institute headed by an unknown person without even a PhD. If I secure an actual faculty position, I will also be able to direct grad students to do LTA research.
Other benefits include:
Opportunity for networking inside the academia (also useful for bringing in collaborators).
Safety net against EA-adjacent funding for agent foundations collapsing some time in the future.
Maybe getting some advice on better navigating the peer review system (important for building prestige in order to attract collaborators, and just increasing exposure to my research in general).
So far it’s not obvious whether it’s going to pay off, but I already paid the vast majority of the cost anyway (i.e. the time I wouldn’t have to spend if I just continued as independent).
Creating a new dating app is hard because of network effects: for a dating app to easily attract users, it needs to already have many users. Convincing users to pay for the app is even harder. And, if you expect your app to be only marginally profitable even if it succeeds, you will have a hard time attracting investors.
FWIW, from glancing at your LinkedIn profile, you seem very dateable :)
Linear infra-Bayesian Bandits
One feature of polyamory is that it means continuous auditions of potential replacements by all parties. You are not trading up in the sense that you can have multiple partners, but one thing leads to another and there are only so many hours in the day.
Polyamory is not that different from monogamy in this respect. It’s just that in monogamy “having a relationship” is a binary: either you have it or you don’t have it. In polyamory, there is a scale, starting from “meeting once in a blue moon” all the way to “living together with kids and joint finances”. So, if in monogamy your attitude might be “I will not trade up unless I meet someone x% better”, then in polyamory your attitude might be “I will devote you y% of my time and will not reduce this number unless there’s someone x% better competing for this slot”. (And in both cases x might be very high.)
More generally, I feel that a lot of arguments against polyamory fail the “replace with platonic friendship” test. Like, monogamous people also have to somehow balance the time they invest in their relationship vs. friends vs. family vs. hobbies etc, and also have to balance the time allocated to different friends. I know that some mono people feel that sex is some kind of magic pixie dust which makes a relationship completely different and not comparable in any way to platonic friendship, but… Not everyone feels this way? (In both directions: I simultaneously consider romantic relationship comparable to “mere” platonic friendships and also consider platonic friendships substantially more important/committing than seems to be the culturally-prescribed attitude.)
Also, it feels like this discussion has a missing mood and/or a typical mind fallacy. For me, monogamy was a miserable experience. Even aside from the fact you only get to have one relationship, there’s all the weird rules about which things are “inappropriate” (see survey in the OP) and also the need to pretend that you’re not attracted to other people (Not All Mono, but I think many relationships are like that). All the “pragmatic” arguments about why polyamory is bad sound to me similar to hypothetical arguments that gay relationships are bad. I mean, there might be some aspects of gay relationships that are often worse than corresponding aspects of straight relationships. But if you’re gay, a gay relationship is still way better for you! Even if you’re bi and in some sense “have a choice”, it still seems inappropriate to try convincing you about how hetero is much better.
Warning: About to get a little ranty/emotional, sorry about that but was hard to express otherwise.
Finally, not to be that girl, but it’s a little insensitive to talk about this without the least acknowledgement that polyamory is widely stigmatized and discriminated against. I know it’s LessWrong here, we’re supposed to use decoupling norms and not contextualizing norms, and I’m usually fully in favor of that, but it still seems to me that this post would better on the margin, if it had a little in the way of acknowledging this asymmetry in the debate.
Instead, the OP talks about “encouraging widespread adaptation”. What?? I honestly don’t know, maybe in the Mythic Bay Area, someone is encouraging widespread conversion to polyamory. In the rest of the world, we only want (i) not be stigmatized (ii) not be discriminated against (iii) having some minimal awareness that polyamory is even an option (it was certainly an eye-opening discovery for me!) and (iv) otherwise, being left alone,
and not have mono people endlessly explain to us how their way is so much better[My spouse tells me this last bit was too combative. Sorry about that: we are certainly allowed to have respectful discussion about the comparative advantages of different lifestyles.]
Just flagging that the effect on sunscreen on skin cancer is a separate question from the the effect of sunscreen on visible skin aging (even if both questions are important).
Thanks for this!
Does it really make sense to see a dermatologist for this? I don’t have any particular problem I am trying to fix other than “being a woman in her 40s (and contemplating the prospect of her 50s, 60s etc with dread)”. Also, do you expect the dermatologist to give better advice than people in this thread or the resources they linked? (Although, the dermatologist might be better familiar with specific products available in my country.)
Can you say more? What are “anabolic effects”? What does “cycling” mean in this context?
[Question] Which skincare products are evidence-based?
Sort of obvious but good to keep in mind: Metacognitive regret bounds are not easily reducible to “plain” IBRL regret bounds when we consider the core and the envelope as the “inside” of the agent.
Assume that the action and observation sets factor as and , where is the interface with the external environment and is the interface with the envelope.
Let be a metalaw. Then, there are two natural ways to reduce it to an ordinary law:
Marginalizing over . That is, let and be the projections. Then, we have the law .
Assuming “logical omniscience”. That is, let be the ground truth. Then, we have the law . Here, we use the conditional defined by . It’s easy to see this indeed defines a law.
However, requiring low regret w.r.t. neither of these is equivalent to low regret w.r.t :
Learning is typically no less feasible than learning , however it is a much weaker condition. This is because the metacognitive agents can use policies that query the envelope to get higher guaranteed expected utility.
Learning is a much stronger condition than learning , however it is typically infeasible. Requiring it leads to AIXI-like agents.
Therefore, metacognitive regret bounds hit a “sweep spot” of stength vs. feasibility which produces a genuinely more powerful agents than IBRL[1].
- ^
More precisely, more powerful than IBRL with the usual sort of hypothesis classes (e.g. nicely structured crisp infra-RDP). In principle, we can reduce metacognitive regret bounds to IBRL regret bounds using non-crsip laws, since there’s a very general theorem for representing desiderata as laws. But, these laws would have a very peculiar form that seems impossible to guess without starting with metacognitive agents.
The topic of this thread is: In naive MWI, it is postulated that all Everett branches coexist. (For example, if I toss a quantum fair coin times, there will be branches with all possible outcomes.) Under this assumption, it’s not clear in what sense the Born rule is true. (What is the meaning of the probability measure over the branches if all branches coexist?)
Your reasoning is invalid, because in order to talk about updating your beliefs in this context, you need a metaphysical framework which knows how to deal with anthropic probabilities (e.g. it should be able to answer puzzles in the vein of the anthropic trilemma according to some coherent, well-defined mathematical rules). IBP is such a framework, but you haven’t proposed any alternative, not to mention an argument for why that alternative is superior.
The problem is this requires introducing a special decision-theory postulate that you’re supposed to care about the Born measure for some reason, even though Born measure doesn’t correspond to ordinary probability.
Not sure what you mean by “this would require a pretty small universe”.
If we live in naive MWI, an IBP agent would not care for good reasons, because naive MWI is a “library of babel” where essentially every conceivable thing happens no matter what you do.
Also not sure what you mean by “some sort of sampling”. AFAICT, quantum IBP is the closest thing to a coherent answer that we have, by a significant margin.
The solution is here. In a nutshell, naive MWI is wrong, not all Everett branches coexist, but a lot of Everett branches do coexist s.t. with high probability all of them display expected frequencies.
My model is that the concept of “morality” is a fiction which has 4 generators that are real:
People have empathy, which means they intrinsically care about other people (and sufficiently person-like entities), but, mostly about those in their social vicinity. Also, different people have different strength of empathy, a minority might have virtually none.
Superrational cooperation is something that people understand intuitively to some degree. Obviously, a minority of people understand it on System 2 level as well.
There is something virtue-ethics-like which I find in my own preferences, along the lines of “some things I would prefer not to do, not because of their consequences, but because I don’t want to be the kind of person who would do that”. However, I expect different people to differ in this regard.
The cultural standards of morality, which it might be selfishly beneficial to go along with, including lying to yourself that you’re doing it for non-selfish reasons. Which, as you say, becomes irrelevant once you secure enough power. This is a sort of self-deception which people are intuitively skilled at.
Is it possible to replace the maximin decision rule in infra-Bayesianism with a different decision rule? One surprisingly strong desideratum for such decision rules is the learnability of some natural hypothesis classes.
In the following, all infradistributions are crisp.
Fix finite action set and finite observation set . For any and , let
be defined by
In other words, this kernel samples a time step out of the geometric distribution with parameter , and then produces the sequence of length that appears in the destiny starting at .
For any continuous[1] function , we get a decision rule. Namely, this rule says that, given infra-Bayesian law and discount parameter , the optimal policy is
The usual maximin is recovered when we have some reward function and corresponding to it is
Given a set of laws, it is said to be learnable w.r.t. when there is a family of policies such that for any
For we know that e.g. the set of all communicating[2] finite infra-RDPs is learnable. More generally, for any we have the learnable decision rule
This is the “mesomism” I taked about before.
Also, any monotonically increasing seems to be learnable, i.e. any s.t. for we have . For such decision rules, you can essentially assume that “nature” (i.e. whatever resolves the ambiguity of the infradistributions) is collaborative with the agent. These rules are not very interesting.
On the other hand, decision rules of the form are not learnable in general, and so are decision rules of the form for monotonically increasing.
Open Problem: Are there any learnable decision rules that are not mesomism or monotonically increasing?
A positive answer to the above would provide interesting generalizations of infra-Bayesianism. A negative answer to the above would provide an interesting novel justification of the maximin. Indeed, learnability is not a criterion that was ever used in axiomatic constructions of decision theory[3], AFAIK.
- ^
We can try considering discontinuous functions as well, but it seems natural to start with continuous. If we want the optimal policy to exist, we usually need to be at least upper semicontinuous.
- ^
There are weaker conditions than “communicating” that are sufficient, e.g. “resettable” (meaning that the agent can always force returning to the initial state), and some even weaker conditions that I will not spell out here.
- ^
I mean theorems like VNM, Savage etc.
- ^
First, given nanotechnology, it might be possible to build colonies much faster.
Second, I think the best way to live is probably as uploads inside virtual reality, so terraforming is probably irrelevant.
Third, it’s sufficient that the colonists are uploaded or cryopreserved (via some superintelligence-vetted method) and stored someplace safe (whether on Earth or in space) until the colony is entirely ready.
Fourth, if we can stop aging and prevent other dangers (including unaligned AI), then a timeline of decades is fine.
I don’t know whether we live in a hard-takeoff singleton world or not. I think there is some evidence in that direction, e.g. from thinking about the kind of qualitative changes in AI algorithms that might come about in the future, and their implications on the capability growth curve, and also about the possibility of recursive self-improvement. But, the evidence is definitely far from conclusive (in any direction).
I think that the singleton world is definitely likely enough to merit some consideration. I also think that some of the same principles apply to some multipole worlds.
Commit to not make anyone predictably regret supporting the project or not opposing it” is worrying only by omission—it’s a good guideline, but it leaves the door open for “punish anyone who failed to support the project once the project gets the power to do so”.
Yes, I never imagined doing such a thing, but I definitely agree it should be made clear. Basically, don’t make threats, i.e. don’t try to shape others incentives in ways that they would be better off precommitting not to go along with it.
Sorry, that footnote is just flat wrong, the order actually doesn’t matter here. Good catch!
There is a related thing which might work, namely taking the downwards closure of the affine subspace w.r.t. some cone which is somewhat larger than the cone of measures. For example, if your underlying space has a metric, you might consider the cone of signed measures which have non-negative integral with all positive functions whose logarithm is 1-Lipschitz.