The issue with being informal is that it’s hard to tell whether you are right. You use words like “motivations” without defining what you mean, and this makes your statements vague enough that it’s not clear whether or how they are in tension with other claims. (E.g. what I have read so far doesn’t seems to rule out that shards can be modeled as contextually activated subagents with utility functions.)
An upside of formalism is that you can tell when it’s wrong, and thus it can help make our thinking more precise even if it makes assumptions that may not apply. I think defining your terms and making your arguments more formal should be a high priority. I’m not advocating spending hundreds of hours proving theorems, but moving in the direction of formalizing definitions and claims would be quite valuable.
It seems like a bad sign that the most clear and precise summary of shard theory claims was written by someone outside your team. I highly agree with this takeaway from that post: “Making a formalism for shard theory (even one that’s relatively toy) would probably help substantially with both communicating key ideas and also making research progress.” This work has a lot of research debt, and paying it off would really help clarify the disagreements around these topics.
The issue with being informal is that it’s hard to tell whether you are right. You use words like “motivations” without defining what you mean, and this makes your statements vague enough that it’s not clear whether or how they are in tension with other claims.
It seems worth pointing out: the informality is in the hypothesis, which comprises a set of somewhat illegible intuitions and theories I use to reason about generalization. However, the prediction itself is what needs to be graded in order to see whether I was right. I made a prediction fairly like “the policy tends to go to the top-right 5x5, and searches for cheese once there, because that’s where the cheese-seeking computations were more strongly historically reinforced” and “the policy sometimes pursues cheese and sometimes navigates to the top-right 5x5 corner.” These predictions are (informally) gradable, even if the underlying intuitions are informal.
As it pertains to shard theory more broadly, though, I agree that more precision is needed. Increasing precision and formalism is the reason I proposed and executed the project underpinning Understanding and controlling a maze-solving policy network. I wanted to understand more about realistic motivational circuitry and model internals in the real world. I think the last few months have given me headway on a more mechanistic definition of a “shard-based agent.”
The issue with being informal is that it’s hard to tell whether you are right. You use words like “motivations” without defining what you mean, and this makes your statements vague enough that it’s not clear whether or how they are in tension with other claims. (E.g. what I have read so far doesn’t seems to rule out that shards can be modeled as contextually activated subagents with utility functions.)
An upside of formalism is that you can tell when it’s wrong, and thus it can help make our thinking more precise even if it makes assumptions that may not apply. I think defining your terms and making your arguments more formal should be a high priority. I’m not advocating spending hundreds of hours proving theorems, but moving in the direction of formalizing definitions and claims would be quite valuable.
It seems like a bad sign that the most clear and precise summary of shard theory claims was written by someone outside your team. I highly agree with this takeaway from that post: “Making a formalism for shard theory (even one that’s relatively toy) would probably help substantially with both communicating key ideas and also making research progress.” This work has a lot of research debt, and paying it off would really help clarify the disagreements around these topics.
It seems worth pointing out: the informality is in the hypothesis, which comprises a set of somewhat illegible intuitions and theories I use to reason about generalization. However, the prediction itself is what needs to be graded in order to see whether I was right. I made a prediction fairly like “the policy tends to go to the top-right 5x5, and searches for cheese once there, because that’s where the cheese-seeking computations were more strongly historically reinforced” and “the policy sometimes pursues cheese and sometimes navigates to the top-right 5x5 corner.” These predictions are (informally) gradable, even if the underlying intuitions are informal.
As it pertains to shard theory more broadly, though, I agree that more precision is needed. Increasing precision and formalism is the reason I proposed and executed the project underpinning Understanding and controlling a maze-solving policy network. I wanted to understand more about realistic motivational circuitry and model internals in the real world. I think the last few months have given me headway on a more mechanistic definition of a “shard-based agent.”