AF - A rough and incomplete review of some of John Wentworth's research by Nate Soares

<a href="https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/mgjHS6ou7DgwhKPpu/a-rough-and-incomplete-review-of-some-of-john-wentworth-s">Link to original article</a><br/><br/>Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A rough and incomplete review of some of John Wentworth's research, published by Nate Soares on March 28, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. This is going to be a half-assed review of John Wentworth's research. I studied his work last year, and was kinda hoping to write up a better review, but am lowering my standards on account of how that wasn't happening. Short version: I've been unimpressed by John's technical ideas related to the natural abstractions hypothesis. He seems to me to have some fine intuitions, and to possess various laudable properties such as a vision for solving the whole dang problem and the ability to consider that everybody else is missing something obvious. That said, I've found his technical ideas to be oversold and underwhelming whenever I look closely. (By my lights, Lawrence Chan, Leon Lang, and Erik Jenner’s recent post on natural abstractions is overall better than this post, being more thorough and putting a finger more precisely on various fishy parts of John's math. I'm publishing this draft anyway because my post adds a few points that I think are also useful (especially in the section “The Dream”).) To cite a specific example of a technical claim of John's that does not seem to me to hold up under scrutiny: John has previously claimed that markets are a better model of intelligence than agents, because while collective agents don't have preference cycles, they're willing to pass up certain gains. For example, if an alien tries to sell a basket "Alice loses $1, Bob gains $3", then the market will refuse (because Alice will refuse); and if the alien then switches to selling "Alice gains $3, Bob loses $1" then the market will refuse (because Bob will refuse); but now a certain gain has been passed over. This argument seems straightforwardly wrong to me, as summarized in a stylized dialogue I wrote (that includes more details about the point). If Alice and Bob are sufficiently capable reasoners then they take both trades and even things out using a side channel. (And even if they don't have a side channel, there are positive-EV contracts they can enter into in advance before they know who will be favored. And if they reason using LDT, they ofc don't need to sign contracts in advance.) (Aside: A bunch of the difficult labor in evaluating technical claims is in the part where you take a high-falutin' abstract thing like "markets are a better model of intelligence than agents" and pound on it until you get a specific minimal example like "neither of the alien's baskets is accepted by a market consisting of two people named Alice and Bob", at which point the error becomes clear. I haven't seen anybody else do that sort of distillation with John's claims. It seems to me that our community has a dearth of this kind of distillation work. If you're eager to do alignment work, don't know how to help, and think you can do some of this sort of distillation, I recommend trying. MATS might be able to help out.) I pointed this out to John, and (to John's credit) he seemed to update (in realtime, which is rare) ((albeit with a caveat that communicating the point took a while, and didn't transmit the first few times that I tried to say it abstractly before having done the distillation labor)). The dialogue I wrote recounting that convo is probably not an entirely unfair summary (John said "there was not any point at which I thought my views were importantly misrepresented" when I asked him for comment). My impression of John's other technical claims about natural abstractions is that they have similar issues. That said, I don't have nearly so crisp a distillation of John's views on natural abstractions, nor nearly so short a refutation. I spent a significant amount of time looking into John’s relevant views (we had overlapping travel plans and conspired t...

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03/28/2023

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Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A rough and incomplete review of some of John Wentworth's research, published by Nate Soares on March 28, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. This is going to be a half-assed review of John Wentworth's research. I studied his work last year, and was kinda hoping to write up a better review, but am lowering my standards on account of how that wasn't happening. Short version: I've been unimpressed by John's technical ideas related to the natural abstractions hypothesis. He seems to me to have some fine intuitions, and to possess various laudable properties such as a vision for solving the whole dang problem and the ability to consider that everybody else is missing something obvious. That said, I've found his technical ideas to be oversold and underwhelming whenever I look closely. (By my lights, Lawrence Chan, Leon Lang, and Erik Jenner’s recent post on natural abstractions is overall better than this post, being more thorough and putting a finger more precisely on various fishy parts of John's math. I'm publishing this draft anyway because my post adds a few points that I think are also useful (especially in the section “The Dream”).) To cite a specific example of a technical claim of John's that does not seem to me to hold up under scrutiny: John has previously claimed that markets are a better model of intelligence than agents, because while collective agents don't have preference cycles, they're willing to pass up certain gains. For example, if an alien tries to sell a basket "Alice loses $1, Bob gains $3", then the market will refuse (because Alice will refuse); and if the alien then switches to selling "Alice gains $3, Bob loses $1" then the market will refuse (because Bob will refuse); but now a certain gain has been passed over. This argument seems straightforwardly wrong to me, as summarized in a stylized dialogue I wrote (that includes more details about the point). If Alice and Bob are sufficiently capable reasoners then they take both trades and even things out using a side channel. (And even if they don't have a side channel, there are positive-EV contracts they can enter into in advance before they know who will be favored. And if they reason using LDT, they ofc don't need to sign contracts in advance.) (Aside: A bunch of the difficult labor in evaluating technical claims is in the part where you take a high-falutin' abstract thing like "markets are a better model of intelligence than agents" and pound on it until you get a specific minimal example like "neither of the alien's baskets is accepted by a market consisting of two people named Alice and Bob", at which point the error becomes clear. I haven't seen anybody else do that sort of distillation with John's claims. It seems to me that our community has a dearth of this kind of distillation work. If you're eager to do alignment work, don't know how to help, and think you can do some of this sort of distillation, I recommend trying. MATS might be able to help out.) I pointed this out to John, and (to John's credit) he seemed to update (in realtime, which is rare) ((albeit with a caveat that communicating the point took a while, and didn't transmit the first few times that I tried to say it abstractly before having done the distillation labor)). The dialogue I wrote recounting that convo is probably not an entirely unfair summary (John said "there was not any point at which I thought my views were importantly misrepresented" when I asked him for comment). My impression of John's other technical claims about natural abstractions is that they have similar issues. That said, I don't have nearly so crisp a distillation of John's views on natural abstractions, nor nearly so short a refutation. I spent a significant amount of time looking into John’s relevant views (we had overlapping travel plans and conspired t...

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30 minutes

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The Nonlinear Library: Alignment Forum Weekly

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