Density Zero Exploration
post by Alex Mennen 7 hours ago | Abram Demski and Scott Garrabrant like this | discuss

The idea here is due to Scott Garrabrant. All I did was write it.

Logical Induction with incomputable sequences
post by Alex Mennen 7 hours ago | Abram Demski and Scott Garrabrant like this | discuss

In the definition of a logical inductor, the deductive process is required to be computable. This, of course, does not allow the logical inductor to use randomness, or predict uncomputable sequences. The way traders were defined in the logical induction paper, this was necessary, because the traders were not given access to the output of the deductive process.

 Stable Pointers to Value: An Agent Embedded in Its Own Utility Function discussion post by Abram Demski 7 hours ago | Scott Garrabrant likes this | discuss
Conditioning on Conditionals
post by Scott Garrabrant 7 hours ago | Abram Demski likes this | discuss

(From conversations with Sam, Abram, Tsvi, Marcello, and Ashwin Sah) A basic EDT agent starts with a prior, updates on a bunch of observations, and then has an choice between various actions. It conditions on each possible action it could take, and takes the action for which this conditional leads the the highest expected utility. An updateless (but non-policy selection) EDT agent has a problem here. It wants to not update on the observations, but it wants to condition on the fact that its takes a specific action given its observations. It is not obvious what this conditional should look like. In this post, I agrue for a particular way to interpret this conditioning on this conditional (of taking a specific action given a specific observation).

The Three Levels of Goodhart's Curse
post by Scott Garrabrant 8 hours ago | Abram Demski likes this | discuss

Goodhart’s curse is a neologism by Eliezer Yudkowsky stating that “neutrally optimizing a proxy measure U of V seeks out upward divergence of U from V.” It is related to many near by concepts (e.g. the tails come apart, winner’s curse, optimizer’s curse, regression to the mean, overfitting, edge instantiation, goodhart’s law). I claim that there are three main mechanisms through which Goodhart’s curse operates.

 On the computational feasibility of forecasting using gamblers discussion post by Vadim Kosoy 29 days ago | discuss
Current thoughts on Paul Christano's research agenda
post by Jessica Taylor 31 days ago | Ryan Carey, Sam Eisenstat, Paul Christiano, Stuart Armstrong and Wei Dai like this | 15 comments

This post summarizes my thoughts on Paul Christiano’s agenda in general and ALBA in particular.

"Like this world, but..."
post by Stuart Armstrong 33 days ago | discuss

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Pick a very unsafe goal: $$G=$$“AI, make this world richer and less unequal.” What does this mean as a goal, and can we make it safe?

I’ve started to sketch out how we can codify “human understanding” in terms of human ability to answer questions.

Here I’m investigating the reverse problem, to see whether the same idea can be used to give instructions to an AI.

 Improved formalism for corruption in DIRL discussion post by Vadim Kosoy 35 days ago | discuss
Smoking Lesion Steelman
post by Abram Demski 46 days ago | Sam Eisenstat, Vadim Kosoy, Paul Christiano and Scott Garrabrant like this | 5 comments

It seems plausible to me that any example I’ve seen so far which seems to require causal/counterfactual reasoning is more properly solved by taking the right updateless perspective, and taking the action or policy which achieves maximum expected utility from that perspective. If this were the right view, then the aim would be to construct something like updateless EDT.

I give a variant of the smoking lesion problem which overcomes an objection to the classic smoking lesion, and which is solved correctly by CDT, but which is not solved by updateless EDT.

Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning

We introduce a reinforcement-like learning setting we call Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning (DIRL). In DIRL, the agent can, at any point of time, delegate the choice of action to an “advisor”. The agent knows neither the environment nor the reward function, whereas the advisor knows both. Thus, DIRL can be regarded as a special case of CIRL. A similar setting was studied in Clouse 1997, but as far as we can tell, the relevant literature offers few theoretical results and virtually all researchers focus on the MDP case (please correct me if I’m wrong). On the other hand, we consider general environments (not necessarily MDP or even POMDP) and prove a natural performance guarantee.

A cheating approach to the tiling agents problem
post by Vladimir Slepnev 47 days ago | Alex Mennen and Vadim Kosoy like this | 3 comments

(This post resulted from a conversation with Wei Dai.)

Formalizing the tiling agents problem is very delicate. In this post I’ll show a toy problem and a solution to it, which arguably meets all the desiderata stated before, but only by cheating in a new and unusual way.

Here’s a summary of the toy problem: we ask an agent to solve a difficult math question and also design a successor agent. Then the successor must solve another math question and design its own successor, and so on. The questions get harder each time, so they can’t all be solved in advance, and each of them requires believing in Peano arithmetic (PA). This goes on for a fixed number of rounds, and the final reward is the number of correct answers.

Moreover, we will demand that the agent must handle both subtasks (solving the math question and designing the successor) using the same logic. Finally, we will demand that the agent be able to reproduce itself on each round, not just design a custom-made successor that solves the math question with PA and reproduces itself by quining.

Loebian cooperation in the tiling agents problem
post by Vladimir Slepnev 53 days ago | Alex Mennen, Vadim Kosoy, Abram Demski, Patrick LaVictoire and Stuart Armstrong like this | 4 comments

The tiling agents problem is about formalizing how AIs can create successor AIs that are at least as smart. Here’s a toy model I came up with, which is similar to Benya’s old model but simpler. A computer program X is asked one of two questions:

• Would you like some chocolate?

• Here’s the source code of another program Y. Do you accept it as your successor?

Humans are not agents: short vs long term
post by Stuart Armstrong 68 days ago | 2 comments

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This is an example of humans not being (idealised) agents.

Imagine a human who has a preference to not live beyond a hundred years. However, they want to live to next year, and it’s predictable that every year they are alive, they will have the same desire to survive till the next year.

 New circumstances, new values? discussion post by Stuart Armstrong 71 days ago | discuss
Cooperative Oracles: Stratified Pareto Optima and Almost Stratified Pareto Optima
post by Scott Garrabrant 75 days ago | Vadim Kosoy, Patrick LaVictoire and Stuart Armstrong like this | 8 comments

In this post, we generalize the notions in Cooperative Oracles: Nonexploited Bargaining to deal with the possibility of introducing extra agents that have no control but have preferences. We further generalize this to infinitely many agents. (Part of the series started here.)

 Futarchy, Xrisks, and near misses discussion post by Stuart Armstrong 75 days ago | Abram Demski likes this | discuss
Futarchy Fix
post by Abram Demski 79 days ago | Scott Garrabrant and Stuart Armstrong like this | 9 comments

Robin Hanson’s Futarchy is a proposal to let prediction markets make governmental decisions. We can view an operating Futarchy as an agent, and ask if it is aligned with the interests of its constituents. I am aware of two main failures of alignment: (1) since predicting rare events is rewarded in proportion to their rareness, prediction markets heavily incentivise causing rare events to happen (I’ll call this the entropy-market problem); (2) it seems prediction markets would not be able to assign probability to existential risk, since you can’t collect on bets after everyone’s dead (I’ll call this the existential risk problem). I provide three formulations of (1) and solve two of them, and make some comments on (2). (Thanks to Scott for pointing out the second of these problems to me; I don’t remember who originally told me about the first problem, but also thanks.)

Divergent preferences and meta-preferences
post by Stuart Armstrong 79 days ago | discuss

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

In simple graphical form, here is the problem of divergent human preferences:

 Optimisation in manipulating humans: engineered fanatics vs yes-men discussion post by Stuart Armstrong 83 days ago | discuss
 An Approach to Logically Updateless Decisions discussion post by Abram Demski 88 days ago | Sam Eisenstat, Jack Gallagher and Scott Garrabrant like this | 4 comments
AI safety: three human problems and one AI issue
post by Stuart Armstrong 89 days ago | Ryan Carey and Daniel Dewey like this | 2 comments

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

There have been various attempts to classify the problems in AI safety research. Our old Oracle paper that classified then-theoretical methods of control, to more recent classifications that grow out of modern more concrete problems.

These all serve their purpose, but I think a more enlightening classification of the AI safety problems is to look at what the issues we are trying to solve or avoid. And most of these issues are problems about humans.

Acausal trade: conclusion: theory vs practice
post by Stuart Armstrong 92 days ago | discuss

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

When I started this dive into acausal trade, I expected to find subtle and interesting theoretical considerations. Instead, most of the issues are practical.

 Acausal trade: being unusual discussion post by Stuart Armstrong 92 days ago | discuss
 Acausal trade: different utilities, different trades discussion post by Stuart Armstrong 92 days ago | discuss
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### NEW DISCUSSION POSTS

I have stopped working on
 by Scott Garrabrant on Cooperative Oracles: Introduction | 0 likes

 by Vadim Kosoy on Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning | 0 likes

So this requires the agent's
 by Tom Everitt on Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning | 0 likes

If the agent always delegates
 by Vadim Kosoy on Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning | 0 likes

 by Tom Everitt on Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning | 0 likes

Hi Tom! There is a
 by Vadim Kosoy on Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning | 0 likes

Hi Alex! I agree that the
 by Vadim Kosoy on Cooperative Oracles: Stratified Pareto Optima and ... | 0 likes

That is a good question. I
 by Tom Everitt on CIRL Wireheading | 0 likes

 by Tom Everitt on CIRL Wireheading | 0 likes

"The use of an advisor allows
 by Tom Everitt on Delegative Inverse Reinforcement Learning | 0 likes

 by Wei Dai on Current thoughts on Paul Christano's research agen... | 0 likes

Suppose that I, Paul, use a
 by Paul Christiano on Current thoughts on Paul Christano's research agen... | 0 likes

When you wrote "suppose I use
 by Wei Dai on Current thoughts on Paul Christano's research agen... | 0 likes

> but that kind of white-box
 by Paul Christiano on Current thoughts on Paul Christano's research agen... | 0 likes

>Competence can be an
 by Wei Dai on Current thoughts on Paul Christano's research agen... | 0 likes