I don’t really think about the post that much, but the post expresses a worldview that shapes how I do my research—that agency is a mechanical fact about the workings of a system.
To me, the main contribution of the post is setting up a question: what’s a good definition of optimisation that avoids the counterexamples of the post? Ideally, this definition would refer or correspond to the mechanistic properties of the system, so that people could somehow statically determine whether a given controller was an optimiser. To the best of my knowledge, no such definition has been developed. As such, I see the post as not having kicked off a fruitful public conversation, and its value if any lies in how it has changed the way other people think about optimisation.
Review by the author:
I continue to endorse the contents of this post.
I don’t really think about the post that much, but the post expresses a worldview that shapes how I do my research—that agency is a mechanical fact about the workings of a system.
To me, the main contribution of the post is setting up a question: what’s a good definition of optimisation that avoids the counterexamples of the post? Ideally, this definition would refer or correspond to the mechanistic properties of the system, so that people could somehow statically determine whether a given controller was an optimiser. To the best of my knowledge, no such definition has been developed. As such, I see the post as not having kicked off a fruitful public conversation, and its value if any lies in how it has changed the way other people think about optimisation.
Yes, I kind of agree with you