by Jessica Taylor 201 days ago | link | parent Ok, I am confused by what you mean by “trap”. I thought “trap” meant a set of states you can’t get out of. And if the second law of thermodynamics is true, you can’t get from a high-entropy state to a low-entropy state. What do you mean by “trap”?

 by Vadim Kosoy 201 days ago | link To first approximation, a “trap” is a an action s.t. taking it loses long-term value in expectation, i.e an action which is outside the set $$\mathcal{A}_M^0$$ that I defined here (see the end of Definition 1). This set is always non-empty, since it at least has to contain the optimal action. However, this definition is not very useful when, for example, your environment contains a state that you cannot escape and you also cannot avoid (for example, the heat death of the universe might be such a state), since, in this case, nothing is a trap. To be more precise we need to go from an analysis which is asymptotic in the time discount parameter to an analysis with a fixed, finite time discount parameter (similarly to how with time complexity, we usually start from analyzing the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm, but ultimately we are interested in particular inputs of finite size). For a fixed time time discount parameter, the concept of a trap becomes “fuzzy”: a trap is an action which loses a substantial fraction of the value. reply

### NEW DISCUSSION POSTS

[Note: This comment is three
 by Ryan Carey on A brief note on factoring out certain variables | 0 likes

There should be a chat icon
 by Alex Mennen on Meta: IAFF vs LessWrong | 0 likes

Apparently "You must be
 by Jessica Taylor on Meta: IAFF vs LessWrong | 1 like

There is a replacement for
 by Alex Mennen on Meta: IAFF vs LessWrong | 1 like

Regarding the physical
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

I think that we should expect
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

I think I understand your
 by Jessica Taylor on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

This seems like a hack. The
 by Jessica Taylor on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

After thinking some more,
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

Yes, I think that we're
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

My intuition is that it must
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

To first approximation, a
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

Actually, I *am* including
 by Vadim Kosoy on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes

Yeah, when I went back and
 by Alex Appel on Optimal and Causal Counterfactual Worlds | 0 likes

> Well, we could give up on
 by Jessica Taylor on The Learning-Theoretic AI Alignment Research Agend... | 0 likes