Thinking about your declaration “If you run around inspecting your foundations, I expect you to actually improve them”, I now see that I’ve been using “PCR” to refer to the reasoning trick that Bartley introduced (use all the tools at your disposal to evaluate your foundational approaches) to make Pan-Critical Rationalism an improvement over Popper’s Critical Rationalism. But, for Bartley, PCR was just a better foundation for the rest of Popper’s epistemology, and you would replace that epistemology with something more sophisticated. For me, the point of emphasizing PCR is that you should want Bartley’s trick as the unchangable foundation below everything else.
If an AI is going to inspect its foundations occasionally, and expect to be able to improve on them, you’d better program it to use all the tools at its disposal to evaluate the results before making changes. This rule seems more fundamental than guidelines on when to apply Occam, induction, or Bayes rule.
If Bartley’s trick is the starting point, I don’t know whether it would be necessary or useful to make that part of the code immutable. In terms of software simplicity, not having a core that follows different principals would be an improvement. But if there’s any chance that the AI could back itself into a corner that would lead it to conclude that there were a better rule to decide what tools to rely on, everything might be lost. Hard-coding Bartley’s trick might provide the only platform to stand on that would give the AI a way to rebuild after a catastrophe.
I now understand the reluctance to call the result PCR: it’s not the whole edifice that Bartley (& Popper) constructed, you only use the foundation Bartley invented.
Thinking about your declaration “If you run around inspecting your foundations, I expect you to actually improve them”, I now see that I’ve been using “PCR” to refer to the reasoning trick that Bartley introduced (use all the tools at your disposal to evaluate your foundational approaches) to make Pan-Critical Rationalism an improvement over Popper’s Critical Rationalism. But, for Bartley, PCR was just a better foundation for the rest of Popper’s epistemology, and you would replace that epistemology with something more sophisticated. For me, the point of emphasizing PCR is that you should want Bartley’s trick as the unchangable foundation below everything else.
If an AI is going to inspect its foundations occasionally, and expect to be able to improve on them, you’d better program it to use all the tools at its disposal to evaluate the results before making changes. This rule seems more fundamental than guidelines on when to apply Occam, induction, or Bayes rule.
If Bartley’s trick is the starting point, I don’t know whether it would be necessary or useful to make that part of the code immutable. In terms of software simplicity, not having a core that follows different principals would be an improvement. But if there’s any chance that the AI could back itself into a corner that would lead it to conclude that there were a better rule to decide what tools to rely on, everything might be lost. Hard-coding Bartley’s trick might provide the only platform to stand on that would give the AI a way to rebuild after a catastrophe.
I now understand the reluctance to call the result PCR: it’s not the whole edifice that Bartley (& Popper) constructed, you only use the foundation Bartley invented.