Tiled With Pentagons

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 ...

(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 ...

(Epistemic status: A vital question people don't seem to have asked themselves. A thought experiment run in public, though the credences are soft enough to spread on toast and the butter is closer to butterfly. Roughly a third of me suspects the central question below is malformed; that mass is doing honest work in every paragraph, and I won't pretend otherwise. Published while I'm at a conference: if you have errata, quibbles, or improvements for me, bring them.) Suppose you woke up tomorrow to find, there on your desk, an elegant but battered tome: a three-hundred-page brick titled "A Theory of Agent Foundations". Suppose it fell out of the sky: the perfect solution to correctly paradigmatize agent foundations.  What an agent is; what a goal is; what values are, and what human values are and should be; how to detect all of those; measure them; taxonomize and typify and employ them. Suppose all of that were simply there, neither requiring or offering any explan...