Cole Wyeth

Karma: 689

I am a PhD student in computer science at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Professor Ming Li and advised by Professor Marcus Hutter.

My current research is related to applications of algorithmic probability to sequential decision theory (universal artificial intelligence). Recently I have been trying to start a dialogue between the computational cognitive science and UAI communities (if this includes you, consider contacting me about the reading group). Sometimes I build robots, professionally or otherwise. Another hobby (and a personal favorite of my posts here) is the Sherlockian abduction master list, which is a crowdsourced project seeking to make “Sherlock Holmes” style inference feasible by compiling observational cues. Give it a read and see if you can contribute!

See my personal website colewyeth.com for an overview of my interests and work.

Cole Wyeth 19 Nov 2024 2:30 UTC
−2 points
−8
on: Social events with plausible deniability
This kind of thing does justified harm to our community’s reputation. If you have fun arguing that only white people can save us while deliberately obfuscating whether you actually believe that, it is in fact a concerning sign about your intentions/seriousness/integrity/trustworthiness.

Cole Wyeth 18 Nov 2024 1:41 UTC
2 points
6
on: “The Solomonoff Prior is Malign” is a special case of a simpler argument
I don’t believe that these anthropic considerations actually apply, either to us, to oracles, or to Solomonoff induction. The arguments are too informal, it’s very easy to miscalculate Kolmogorov complexities and the measures assigned by the universal distribution using intuitive gestures like this. However I do think that this is a correct generalization of the idea of a malign prior, and I actually appreciate that you wrote it up this way because it makes clear that none of the load-bearing parts of the argument actually rely on reliable calculations (invocations of algorithmic information theory concepts have no been reduced to rigorous math, so the original argument is not stronger than this one).

Cole Wyeth 15 Nov 2024 15:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences
My impression is that e.g. the Catholic church has a pretty deeply thought out moral philosophy that has persisted across generations. That doesn’t mean that every individual Catholic understands and executes it properly.

Cole Wyeth 14 Nov 2024 22:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences
- Perhaps Legg-Hutter intelligence.
- I’m not sure how much the goal matters—probably the details depend on the utility function you want to optimize. I think you can do about as well as possible by carving out a utility function module and designing the rest uniformly to pursue the objectives of that module. But perhaps this comes at a fairly significant cost (i.e. you’d need a somewhat larger computer to get the same performance if you insist on doing it this way).
- ...And yes, there does exist a computer program which is remarkably good at just chess and nothing else, but that’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about here.
- Yes, the I/O channels should be fixed along with the hardware.

Cole Wyeth 14 Nov 2024 20:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences
The standard method for training LLM’s is next token prediction with teacher-forcing, penalized by the negative log-loss. This is exactly the right setup to elicit calibrated conditional probabilities, and exactly the “prequential problem” that Solomonoff induction was designed for. I don’t think this was motivated by decision theory, but it definitely makes perfect sense as an approximation to Bayesian inductive inference—the only missing ingredient is acting to optimize a utility function based on this belief distribution. So I think it’s too early to suppose that decision theory won’t play a role.

Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences

Cole Wyeth14 Nov 2024 5:01 UTC

17 points

12 comments2 min readLW link

Cole Wyeth 11 Nov 2024 19:36 UTC
1 point
0
AF
on: Radical Probabilism
What would you have to see proven about Solomonoff induction to conclude it does not have convergence/calibration problems? My friend Aram Ebtekar has worked on showing it converges to 50% on adversarial sequences.

Cole Wyeth 11 Nov 2024 16:37 UTC
8 points
8
on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
Perhaps LLM’s are starting to approach the intelligence of today’s average human: capable of only limited original thought, unable to select and autonomously pursue a nontrivial coherent goal across time, learned almost everything they know from reading the internet ;)

Cole Wyeth 11 Nov 2024 12:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
No that seems paywalled, curious though?

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 19:46 UTC
2 points
0
on: Inverse Problems In Everyday Life
An example I’ve been studying obsessively: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yz33koDN5uhSEaB6c/sherlockian-abduction-master-list

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 19:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: Could randomly choosing people to serve as representatives lead to better government?
How do you suggest advocating for this effectively?

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 19:19 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
I’m in Canada so can’t access the latest Claude, so my experience with these things does tend to be a couple months out of date. But I’m not really impressed with models spitting out slightly wrong code that tells me what functions to call. I think this is essentially a more useful search engine.

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 18:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: eigen’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
I’ve noticed occasional surprises in that direction, but none of them seem to shake out into utility for me.

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 18:31 UTC
4 points
0
on: Graceful Degradation
Semi-interestingly, my MMA school taught that it’s best for the punch to arrive before the leading foot lands so that the punch carries your full weight. Many people at advanced levels weren’t aware of this because we did not introduce it right away—if you try to do this before learning a few other details (and building strength), you run a risk of hurting your wrist by punching too hard.

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 17:45 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
I’ve been waiting to say this until OpenAI’s next larger model dropped, but this has now failed to happen for so long that it’s become it’s own update, and I’d like to state my prediction before it becomes obvious.

Cole Wyeth 9 Nov 2024 17:42 UTC
8 points
−2
on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
This doesn’t seem to be reflected in the general opinion here, but it seems to me that LLM’s are plateauing and possibly have already plateaued a year or so ago. Scores on various metrics continue to go up, but this tends to provide weak evidence because they’re heavily gained and sometimes leak into the training data. Still, those numbers overall would tend to update me towards short timelines, even with their unreliability taken into account—however, this is outweighed by my personal experience with LLM’s. I just don’t find them useful for practically anything. I have a pretty consistently correct model of the problems they will be able to help me with and it’s not a lot—maybe a broad introduction to a library I’m not familiar with or detecting simple bugs. That model has worked for a year or two without expanding the set much. Also, I don’t see any applications to anything economically productive except for fluffy chatbot apps.

Cole Wyeth 4 Nov 2024 15:02 UTC
54 points
21
on: Survival without dignity
I think this is a story about anthropic immortality.

Cole Wyeth 3 Nov 2024 23:22 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: hotpomm’s comment on: Sherlockian Abduction Master List
Thanks! I am particularly interested on the hook grip calluses on thumbs, I’ll look into that.
Calluses at the base of the finger (say, the knuckle-joint of the palm) are in my experience very difficult to classify. I get them there by climbing as you said, and though I also get some calluses on my fingers those tend to be less persistent and probably disappear most of the time (after climbing for awhile at my level of intensity I stop getting calluses). I have also seen them from biking—when I started out I used to look at people’s palms a lot and never came up with a reliable way to distinguish this from weightlifting. But if you could go into some more detail on the differences, perhaps I’ll add a more speculative entry and see how it stands up!
(If it’s your first post on lesswrong, welcome! I think you’ll find that kindness/politeness is the community norm here)

Cole Wyeth 2 Nov 2024 20:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: SeñorDingDong’s comment on: Sherlockian Abduction Master List
I haven’t been able to verify that protestants don’t wear a cross on a chain—it seems like they prefer an empty cross to the more catholic-coded crucifix, but this doesn’t seem to be what you meant?

Cole Wyeth 27 Oct 2024 18:37 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: New intro textbook on AIXI
Technically the connection between the computability levels of AIT (estimability, lower/upper semi-computability, approximability) and the Turing degrees has not been worked out properly. See chapter 6 of Leike’s thesis, though there is a small error in the inequalities of section 6.1.2. It is necessary to connect the computability of real valued functions (type two theory of effectivity) to the arithmetic hierarchy—as far as I know this hasn’t been done, but maybe I’ll share some notes in a few months.
Roughly, most classes don’t have a universal distribution because they are not computably enumerable, but perhaps there are various reasons. There’s a nice table in Marcus Hutter’s original book, page 50.
It says that (negative log) universal probability is about the same as the (monotone) Kolmogorov complexity—in the discrete case up to a constant multiple. Basically, the Bayesian prediction is closely connected to the shortest explanation. See Li and Vitanyi’s “An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications.”
Last question is a longer story I guess. Basically, the conditionals of the universal distribution are not lower semi-computable, and it gets even worse when you have to compare the expected values of different outcomes because of tie-breaking. But a good approximation of AIXI can still be computed in the limit.

Cole Wyeth

Here­sies in the Shadow of the Sequences

Heresies in the Shadow of the Sequences