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110. Finally, Someone Made an Infra-Bayesian RL Agent

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(Epistemic status: I mentored the SPAR stream that did all of this, pitched the project in the first place, and contributed project management and much of the understanding of the theory, which makes me exactly as impartial as that sentence implies; audit accordingly. This is meant as a companion post and reference explainer for the stream's talk Friday morning as delivered by FL; read it before or after, or refer to it during - whichever suits you best. I've deliberately left out much of the formal math here, saving that for the talk slides and more formal posts and papers that give a more in-depth treatment of the subject; there's pointers at the end for anyone who wants to go digging. For my entire SPAR stream, all fourteen of my first-coauthors: MA, FA, SMA, AB ,  SSMJ, AL, CL, AL (a different one), FL (obviously), RR, PR (a different one), ER (who is at the conference!), NT, and  MPdV . I am unspeakably proud of all of you, and I could never have made Project Newcomb f...
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109. Rocks to Rules: Climbing a Rickety-But-Interoperable Semantic Ladder

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DO NOT TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY YET. I PUBLISHED THIS WITH A LOT OF LLM INFILL TO HAVE IT VAGUELY COMPLETE AND REASONABLY CORRECT RATHER THAN EXTREMELY INCOMPLETE AND UGLY, AND TO BE ABLE TO POST 110. I WILL COME BACK TO THIS BY THE END OF THE MONTH; THIS IS JUST EXTREMELY OVERDUE ALREADY. ANYTHING NOT IN ARIAL SHOULD BE SUSPECT. THIS IS NOT IN FINAL FORM. (Epistemic status: A promising but weird research direction in agent foundations and philosophy of language. A half-built conceptual tower whose mortar and paint are both still wet: please excuse our mess while we innovate. Some of it, I'm confident in as pretty much right; some of it is merely suggestive; probably much of it is wrong or incomplete. Certainly it lacks the math it'd need to be truly correct. The prior art here is strange and thin:  Gärdenfors, Tarski, and the later Mohists make for odd bedfellows, and I can't tell whether that's a warning sign or a moat I can easily clear. I gave the simplest parts of this ...
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108. Where Are All the Journeyman Researchers?

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(Epistemic status: The past isn't dead; it's not even past. Steelmanning labor and education systems of yesteryear and nowadays both; one holds up and the other fails. Planning in public, but, like, quietly. For everyone who's ever been called an overgrown junior or an underbaked senior... and Ray Bradbury, and his soft rains as came.)   The guild systems had three ranks, and almost everyone I've ever talked to remembers the wrong two. They're not to blame, and neither is the English language; it's one of those cases where society found an answer and then forgot it again. "Apprentice" and "master" survive just fine: we still say that a chef "apprenticed under" someone else, and we still talk about "masterpieces". Few people still talk about the middle rank, though; indeed, it has almost totally vanished from the language, to the point that most are surprised to learn that "journeyman" was ever a rank at all, and ...
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