A first problem with this is that there is no sharp distinction between purely computational (analytic) information/observations and purely empirical (synthetic) information/observations.
I don’t see the fuzziness here, even after reading the two dogmas wikipedia page (but not really understanding it, it’s hidden behind a wall of jargon). If we have some prior over universes, and some observation channel, we can define an agent that is updateless with respect to that prior, and updateful with respect to any calculations it performs internally. Is there a section of Radical Probablism that is particularly relevant? It’s been a while. It’s not clear to me why all superintelligences having the same classification matters. They can communicate about edge cases and differences in their reasoning. Do you have an example here?
A second and more worrying problem is that, even given such convergence, it’s not clear all other agents will decide to forego the possible apparent benefits of logical exploitation. It’s a kind of Nash equilibrium selection problem: If I was very sure all other agents forego them (and have robust cooperation mechanisms that deter exploitation), then I would just do like them.
I think I don’t understand why this is a problem. So what if there are some agents running around being updateless about logic? What’s the situation that we are talking about a Nash equilibrium for?
As mentioned in the post, Counterfactual Mugging as presented won’t be common, but equivalent situations in multi-agentic bargaining might, due to (the naive application of) some priors leading to commitment races.
Can you point me to an example in bargaining that motivates the usefulness of logical updatelessness? My impression of that section wasn’t “here is a realistic scenario that motivates the need for some amount of logical updatelessness”, it felt more like “logical bargaining is a situation where logical updatelessness plausibly leads to terrible and unwanted decisions”.
It’s not looking like something as simple as that will solve, because of reasoning as in this paragraph:
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy, and the problem recurs at a higher level: your procedure to decide which information to use will depend on all the information, and so you will already lose strategicness. Or, if it doesn’t depend, then you are just being updateless, not using the information in any way.
Or in other words, you need to decide on the precommitment ex ante, when you still haven’t thought much about anything, so your precommitment might be bad.
Yeah I wasn’t thinking that was a “solution”, I’m biting the bullet of losing some potential value and having a decision theory that doesn’t satisfy all the desiderata. I was just saying that in some situations, such an agent can patch the problem using other mechanisms, just as an EDT agent can try to implement some external commitment mechanism if it lives in a world full of transparent newcomb problems.
I don’t see the fuzziness here, even after reading the two dogmas wikipedia page (but not really understanding it, it’s hidden behind a wall of jargon). If we have some prior over universes, and some observation channel, we can define an agent that is updateless with respect to that prior, and updateful with respect to any calculations it performs internally. Is there a section of Radical Probablism that is particularly relevant? It’s been a while.
It’s not clear to me why all superintelligences having the same classification matters. They can communicate about edge cases and differences in their reasoning. Do you have an example here?
I think I don’t understand why this is a problem. So what if there are some agents running around being updateless about logic? What’s the situation that we are talking about a Nash equilibrium for?
Can you point me to an example in bargaining that motivates the usefulness of logical updatelessness? My impression of that section wasn’t “here is a realistic scenario that motivates the need for some amount of logical updatelessness”, it felt more like “logical bargaining is a situation where logical updatelessness plausibly leads to terrible and unwanted decisions”.
Yeah I wasn’t thinking that was a “solution”, I’m biting the bullet of losing some potential value and having a decision theory that doesn’t satisfy all the desiderata. I was just saying that in some situations, such an agent can patch the problem using other mechanisms, just as an EDT agent can try to implement some external commitment mechanism if it lives in a world full of transparent newcomb problems.
(Sorry, short on time now, but we can discuss in-person and maybe I’ll come back here to write the take-away)