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If you do figure it out, I expect at least a LW post or two about it 🙏
I agree that this is how it'll likely work out (and it does in smart humans), but isn't that tantamount to enforcing internal consistency, just under adversarial stimulus? The crux of it is that becoming more consistent is a good thing, not that I have a strong opinion on how hard you should optimize for it. And after enough cycles of this process, should you not be closer to having VNM apply to you in a more meaningful fashion?
(BTW, my phrasing was unclear, I was asking whether the VNM constrains future behavior of an agent by the same utility function you derived for past behavior, so your response has me a little confused as to whether you agree or disagree with that!)
Ah, would that I had enough money to throw at a housefly and hope to stun it, but at least you're putting yours to noble ends haha.
You'll be happy to know that I did in fact throw some fairly substantial amounts of money at jefftk and friends for their wastewater surveillance / sequencing / anomaly detection project. Significantly prompted by us having this conversation.
I'm genuinely heartened to hear that! I hope you don't mind if I use it as an excuse for a second-hand Effective Altruist card haha. (j/k, but presumably the ones doing admin or fundraising work get away with it).
To discuss my current stance on bioterrorism x-risk in slightly more detail, such monitoring will significantly hamper lone crazies/small groups the most. Of course, they have a hard time of it, at least in the West. Just about the hardest part of making a truly extinction-level threat of a pathogen is not dying to Alpha 0.3 halfway through the process. Look at all the issues even BSL-3+ labs have with leaks. Some degree of surveillance, even if hardly the most rigorous, has been implemented. I believe most reputable purveyors of on-demand DNA/RNA/protein synthesis are filtering for known pathogens/GOF/bioweapons, though I suspect it is hardly robust, or insurmountable to a determined adversary willing to get their hands dirty.
This doesn't solve the issue of more well-resourced actors, especially in jurisdictions with more laissez-faire policies, but nation-states are generally not omnicidal (citation hopefully not needed). Wastewater surveillance will, at the very least, tell us something is up, and might even be good enough to save civilization if a pathogen isn't ridiculously good.
I'm glad you made the donation, and I sincerely hope they manage to scale cheaply and ubiquitously enough that we get some hint of what's coming that's more robust than doctors near wet-markets wondering about a really weird flu.
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If I do, I will definitely make an LW post or two about it. May or may not happen, I have quite a lot going on in the next two months (and then more going on after that, because a lot of the stuff going on is "baby in 2 months").
I think the disagreement is more about how often the adversarial stimulus comes about. I expect that in most cases, it's not worth it to generate such an adversarial stimulus (i.e. it costs more than 0.01 A for an adversary to find that trade cycle, so if they can only expect to run the cycle once it's not worth it). So such an agent would trend towards an internally consistent equilibrium, given a bunch of stimuli like that, but probably not very quickly and the returns on becoming more coherent likely diminish very steeply (because the cost of incoherence decreases as the magnitude decreases, and also the frequency of exploitation should decrease as the payoff for exploitation decreases, so the rate of convergence should slow down more than linearly over time).
That'll change with the officially becoming a doctor thing, I expect. And also becoming a doctor helps rather more directly with the whole pandemic preparedness thing.
Congrats on becoming a dad soon! May, by the time they're old enough to understand, this is all a thing of the past and they get to know nothing but happiness and unbounded opportunity.
"But Pagliacci, I am a doctor!" I was joking about how awful the salary is here in India (it's marginally less awful in the UK, neither hold a candle to the US). Ah, I'm hardly the worst off in the world, I'll manage!
I posted an initial call for hypotheses to LW, got a couple of good ones, including "the SL policy network is acting as a crude estimator of the relative expected utility of exploring this region of the game tree" which strikes me as both plausible and also falsifiable.
I'll keep you posted.
Oh I see you attracted Gwern, a sign of a good question if nothing else, he's nerdsniped into making QCs on the regular
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My contribution to the cause extends to super upvoting you, somehow my stupidity has accrued me sufficient karma to count for something.
Do let me know if there's a consensus or you come to a firm conclusion!
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