Short Answer: It’s a toy model. I don’t think I can come up with a practical example which would address all of your issues.
Long Answer, which I think gets at what we disagree about:
I think we are approaching this from different angles. I am interested in the GRT from an agent foundations point of view, not because I want to make better thermostats. I’m sure that GRT is pretty useless for most practical applications of control theory! I read John Wentworth’s post where he suggested that the entropy-reduction problem may lead to embedded-agency problems. Turns out it doesn’t but it would have been cool if it did! I wanted to tie up that loose end from John’s post.
Why do I care about entropy reduction at all?
I’m interested in ‘optimization’, as it pertains to the agent-like structure problem, and optimization is closely related to entropy reduction, so this seemed like an interesting avenue to explore.
Reducing entropy can be thought of as one ‘component’ of utility maximization, so it’s interesting from that point of view.
Reducing entropy is often a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for achieving goals. A thermostat can achieve an average temperature of 25C by ensuring that the room temperature comes from a uniform distribution over all temperatures between 75C and −25C. But a better thermostat will ensure that the temperature is distributed over a narrower (lower entropy) distribution around 25C .
Regarding your request for a practical example.
Short Answer: It’s a toy model. I don’t think I can come up with a practical example which would address all of your issues.
Long Answer, which I think gets at what we disagree about:
I think we are approaching this from different angles. I am interested in the GRT from an agent foundations point of view, not because I want to make better thermostats. I’m sure that GRT is pretty useless for most practical applications of control theory! I read John Wentworth’s post where he suggested that the entropy-reduction problem may lead to embedded-agency problems. Turns out it doesn’t but it would have been cool if it did! I wanted to tie up that loose end from John’s post.
Why do I care about entropy reduction at all?
I’m interested in ‘optimization’, as it pertains to the agent-like structure problem, and optimization is closely related to entropy reduction, so this seemed like an interesting avenue to explore.
Reducing entropy can be thought of as one ‘component’ of utility maximization, so it’s interesting from that point of view.
Reducing entropy is often a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for achieving goals. A thermostat can achieve an average temperature of 25C by ensuring that the room temperature comes from a uniform distribution over all temperatures between 75C and −25C. But a better thermostat will ensure that the temperature is distributed over a narrower (lower entropy) distribution around 25C .