Posts

112. Weighing the Knife's Share

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(Epistemic status: The math holds up, and the one real theorem fits on a frosting-stained napkin. The rest is a relaxed palate-cleanser of a post... mostly. CW: notes of buttercream, ash, and... something like iron? For PR, CL, and both AS's.)   "I cut, you choose." It's a tale as old as siblings made to share cake - or land. The problem's a deceptively simple one: if you have two (or more) agents that both want the same valuable object, what procedure should they use, in order to ensure that all parties involved feel like they got a fair slice? The solution - for those among today's lucky 10,000 - is as elegant as it is brilliant; perhaps among the first pieces of explicit mechanism design: the cutter, knowing the chooser will then pick, has every incentive to cut two pieces she values equally; the chooser then takes whichever piece he likes better. She can't reasonably envy him, because she was indifferent by construction; he can't envy her, beca...
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111. [Categorical Latents?!]

[PLACEHOLDER FOR A POST TO GO HERE - IT WILL BE ABOUT CATEGORICAL LATENTS, THE THING I WORKED ON FOR MATS 6.0 IN SUMMER 2024]
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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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