Glad you liked it! I definitely mean mesa-optimizer to refer to something mechanistically implementing search. That being said, I’m not really sure whether humans count or not on that definition—I would probably say humans do count but are fairly non-central. In terms of the bag of heuristics model, I probably wouldn’t count that, though it depends on what “bag of heuristics” means exactly—if the heuristics are being used to guide a planning process or something, then I would call that a mesa-optimizer.
Glad you liked it! I definitely mean mesa-optimizer to refer to something mechanistically implementing search. That being said, I’m not really sure whether humans count or not on that definition—I would probably say humans do count but are fairly non-central. In terms of the bag of heuristics model, I probably wouldn’t count that, though it depends on what “bag of heuristics” means exactly—if the heuristics are being used to guide a planning process or something, then I would call that a mesa-optimizer.