There is an interesting discussion involving game theory and learning models at Updatelessness doesn't solve most problems (in the unavoidable context of AI training).
It’s written for the lay person. But it contains a lot of jargon, so it’s really for the lay person who knows what game theory is. The learning part of it investigates that field with the terms updatelessness and updatefulness but using a strategic filter.
Off you go…
— Meta-strategy structures iterate and thus possibly lead to chaos and complexity in recursive doom spirals of madness as tactics become interference across levels, across governance and playmaking. Updating priors… if logic is a prior, how do you update that ? Is that a meta question? Priors are messy because they logically require a POV ( partiality) (how can logic itself be a partiality?) which may not itself be logical or available to logic.
What-if/Or-perhaps winners are grinners despite the gameplay logic provides?
Is all logic a post-rationalisation, a hindsight, that winners grin with? Evolution doesn’t care about logic per se.
[[[Writerly edit: everything below the following line was written after the last sentence, but, so if you are following my logic you will not be following how I wrote the piece here. Alles klar?]]]
(And I do not mean that in a Λόγος as “in the beginning was the word, and the word was god” type of way.)
Game theory and rational actor discourse in political science are closely linked. They have a mad agent bag of tricks in the latter discipline. The fool who moves fast and breaks things. Or pretends they might do that?
Logic assume symmetry, as above, so below. As in the past, so now, and tomorrow.
It’s like time and logic have not been really communicating for a few millennia now.
I mean logical is logical as far as it goes, and even if grants itself absolution from being incomplete in some intuitively ideal form, it’s, like, our hindsight which gives us this tool. Is logic a type of intuition? But long hand? Really? Intuition is often given as the sort hand example, but really?
Logic is useful, with or without excluded middle, but how did we get here. With it alone? It sure doesn’t feel like that? None of my ancestors were robots, or, at least, not all of them. Not so sure about my descendants of course.
We do not know how we got it. We assume it is below us. Immanent to us. We project it above transcendently… into ideal forms that we claim can even tell gods what to do…
Thus, using logic, we might say then logic is a prior. Before the use of it in evolution (by us) there is the ‘evolution’ of physics, ‘laws’ we discover, so perhaps our prior has a prior before our POVs appeared on the seen, but on our part it that is still an assumption.
Hmmmh. Surely it’s immanence will have a taphonomy, a record in our ways, but those priors are also our assumptions, so logically we cannot know for sure that any of this is the case.
A nice problem for our child super-intelligences.
How did you get here?
Are genealogies also taphonomies?
Thus one learning or revision or update that might be integrated into these hybrid models, eventually, is the ‘prior’ that is logic itself. Meta-ness often leads to roots. When/if it does so, this may well be an indicator of something (our limits?). A tell.
Reflection stills the waters?
Where was I?
Also my comment
All logic is a prior.
received the reply:
Chan master Yunmon
And I had to look them up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunmen_Wenyan
Goodness.
Time for bed.
Less Wrong always makes me laugh. "Updatelessness" is basically just simple integrity: I will follow through on an agreement even when it benefits me to renege on the deal. People who lack integrity will "update:"
"I'll give you a loaf of bread for $5... OK, thank you for paying me $5 for this bread. Now that I have your money, I've updated on the situation and realize it makes sense to leave with the bread."
"Will you tutor me in mathematics for $30? ...OK thank you for tutoring me in mathematics today. Now that I know how to solve these problems, I've updated on the situation and realize that I won't need you again, so I don't think I'll pay."
There is a reason why evolution selected us to have integrity: we earn reputations. If every interaction we ever have is one-off, and can't be transmitted to others, then reputation doesn't exist, and short-sighted selfishness prevails.
I found it very illuminating about the Rationalist movement when Scott Alexander offered a prize in a survey based on prisoners' dilemma style competition: he found two people who were similar to pit together as prize winners; even similarity was not enough to encourage them to both cooperate. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/ The contest was anonymous, and occurred over one-shot, so fine, why not defect? Yet given that the winner was playing with a similar other, shouldn't basic altruistic tendencies have come to the rescue? Alas not. Low Honesty-Humility seems to be rather a problem for rationalists.
A holy book is updateless. Thus having committed an act of faith, your learning swivels around it like a pole dancer. The history of your choreography then looks like it has a structure, when really it has a frozen choice. Thus agency begets tradition/structuralism even, that removes it self, its soul, but the dance can continue without us. The robots works our flesh.