Category: Overgeneralization
Updated on October 12, 2020
Agents – The Source of Motivation and Action
The last two posts1 were focused on the lens. They discussed its various modes of operation, the dichotomy between the outward-facing “causal estimate” and the inward-facing “evaluation”, and the problems of foreign context and overgeneralization.
But it’s important to note that the lens is, at heart, a statistical machine. It is only concerned with how accurately it can perform its tasks (casual prediction, event interpretation etc.), and does not intentionally distort itself to satisfy any agenda. In other words, the lens lacks agency and a hypothetical “lens-only” generic is only good for making uninterested predictions or classifications2.
To breathe more life into the generic mind I introduced the agent, a cognitive process with an inherent goal to cause the production of certain evaluations. The concept behind its operation is as follows:
- Use the lens to perform value prediction. In other words, given some known prior information and the desired evaluations, figure out what must be in the posterior information for the lens to produce such an evaluation.
- Try to engineer the actions and circumstances of the generic to increase the odds that the right events happen. If this is done successfully then the lens will produce the evaluations that the agent desires.
Updated on April 4, 2018
Hunches, Guesses, and Mistakes
Now, we see the lens for what it truly is –
A powerful but flawed entity groping its way through an internal environment.
We probed the inner workings of the generic mind and familiarized ourselves with lenses in our previous post. We also learned from the mere existence of issues like the problem of foreign context that lenses can be less than perfect. Now it’s time to take this issue to the next level and call our attention to greater flaws lurking just beneath the surface. We will begin by casually observing a lens in its natural environment, and will eventually end by torturing the poor specimen with a battery of thought experiments.
The Internal Environment
What is the best word to describe an abstract space governed by a set of rules, capable of hosting entities that interact with one another according to these rules? A group? A field? A system? I tend to think of these as environments, no matter how abstract its rules or entities may be. Just as the Earth is an environment occupied by countless living organisms, the Internet can be thought of as an environment for data and programs, and perhaps the law can be seen as an environment filled with documents and historic cases. In much the same way, each generic sentient being contains a unique internal environment hosting a complex interaction between memories, emotions, and beliefs. Every observation, action and moment spent in deep thought will affect the relationship between the entities in this internal environment, even if the effects can be quite subtle. Conversely, the internal environment will strongly affect the judgments a generic will make and the actions he will take. In fact, the internal environment is probably just as important to a generic as the external environment that he lives in.
