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]
Posts
110. Finally, Someone Made an Infra-Bayesian RL Agent
(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...
109. Rocks to Rules: Climbing a Rickety-But-Interoperable Semantic Ladder
(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, which gnaws at me. The prior art here is strange and thin: Gärdenfors, Tarski, Gentner, and the later Mohists make for odd bedfellows, and I can't tell whether that's a warning sign or a moat I can peculiarly easily clear. I gave the simplest parts of this as a talk extremely recently in Berkeley at a luminously-named venue for a conference with a Grecian name. For JSW, but also AD, GD, PR, JRM, DK, MM, and EA; I hope they enjoyed the oranges. As an attention conservation note... this is maybe 12k words, and that's the abbreviated version. Take it slow, take bre...