"Infra-Bayesianism with Vanessa Kosoy" – Watch/Discuss Party

The exact same thing is true for classical probability theory: you have distributions, mixtures of distributions and linear functionals respectively. So I'm not sure what new difficulty comes from infra-Bayesianism?

Maybe it would help thinking about infra-MDPs and infra-POMDPs?

Also, here [LW · GW] I wrote about how you could construct an infra-Bayesian version of the Solomonoff prior, although possibly it's better to do it using infra-Bayesian logic [LW(p) · GW(p)].

"Mixture of infra-distributions" as in convex set, or something else? If it's something else then I'm not sure how to think about it properly.

+1, especially the concave functional view

Notably, these are equivalent in the context of our 'expectations' being infima - if we were doing a mixture rather than taking worst-case bounds, these would not be equivalent (or rather, I don't know what it would mean to take expectations over a circumstance that didn't have any possible worlds)

There is a formal sense in which "predicting Nirvana in some circumstance is equivalent to predicting that there are no possible futures in that circumstance", see our latest post [LW · GW]. It's similar to MUDT, where, if you prove a contradiction then you can prove utility is as high as you like.

What if the super intelligent deity is less than maximally evil or maximally good? (E.g. the deity picking the median-performance world)

Thinking of the worst-case is just a mathematical reflection of the fact we want to be able to prove lower bounds on the expected utility of our agents. We have an unpublished theorem that, in some sense, any such lower bound guarantee has an infra-Bayesian formulation.

Another way to justify it is the infra-Bayesian CCT (see "Complete Class Theorem Weak Version" here [? · GW]).

What about the dutch-bookability of infraBayesians? (the classical dutch-book arguments seem to suggest pretty strongly that non-classical-Bayesians can be arbitrarily exploited for resources)

I think it might depend on the specific Dutch book argument, but one way infra-Bayesians escape them is by... being equivalent to certain Bayesians! For example, consider the setting where your agent has access to random bits that the environment can't predict. Then, infra-Bayesian behavior is just the Nash equilibrium in a two-player zero-sum game (against Murphy). Now, the Nash strategy in such a game is the (Bayes) optimal response to the Nash strategy of the other player, so it can be regarded as "Bayesian". However, the converse is false: not every best response to Nash is in itself Nash. So, the infra-Bayesian decision rule is more restrictive than the corresponding Bayesian decision rule, but it's a special case of the latter.

Is there a meaningful metaphysical interpretation of infraBayesianism that does not involve Murphy? (similarly to how Bayesianism can be metaphysically viewed as "there's a real, static world out there, but I'm probabilistically unsure about it")

I think of it as just another way of organizing uncertainty. The question is too broad for a succinct answer, I think, but here's one POV you could take: Let's remember the frequentist definition of probability distributions as time limits of frequencies. Now, what if the time limit doesn't converge? Then, we can make a (crisp) infradistribution instead: the convex hull of all limit points. Classical frequentism also has the problem that the exact same event never repeats itself. But in "infra-frequentism" we can solve this: you don't need the exact same event to repeat, you can draw the boundary around what counts as "the event" any way you like.

Once we go from passive observation to active interaction with the environment, your own behavior serves as another source of Knightian uncertainty. That is, you're modeling the world in terms of certain features while ignoring everything else, but the state of everything else depends on your past behavior (and you don't want to explicitly keep track of that). This line of thought can be formalized in the language of infra-MDPs (unpublished). And then ofc you complement this "aleatoric" uncertainty with "epistemic" uncertainty by considering the mixture of many infra-Bayesian hypotheses.

A convex set is like a generalization of an interval.

Ah. So, low expected utility alone isn't too much of a problem. The amount of weight a hypothesis has in a prior after updating depends on the gap between the best-case values and worst-case values. Ie, "how much does it matter what happens here". So, the stuff that withers in the prior as you update are the hypotheses that are like "what happens now has negligible impact on improving the worst-case". So, hypotheses that are like "you are screwed no matter what" just drop out completely, as if it doesn't matter what you do, you might as well pick actions that optimize the other hypotheses that aren't quite so despondent about the world.

In particular, if all the probability distributions in a set are like "this thing that just happened was improbable", the hypothesis takes a big hit in the posterior, as all the a-measures are like "ok, we're in a low-measure situation now, what happens after this point has negligible impact on utility". 

I still need to better understand how updating affects hypotheses which are a big set of probability distributions so there's always one probability distribution that's like "I correctly called it!".

The motivations for different g are: 

If g is your actual utility function, then updating with g as your off-event utility function grants you dynamic consistency. Past-you never regrets turning over the reins to future you, and you act just as UDT would.

If g is the constant-1 function, then that corresponds to updates where you don't care at all what happens off-history (the closest thing to normal updates), and both the "diagonalize against knowing your own action" behavior in decision theory and the Nirvana trick pops out for free from using this update.

FWIW the first post in the infra-Bayes sequence has an example that I think gives you a clue why you need to include off-history terms into your belief update rule.

I think that if you imagine the deity Murphy trying to foil your plans whatever you do, that gives you a pretty decent approximation to true infraBayesianism.

Re point 1, 2: Check this out [LW(p) · GW(p)]. For the specific case of 0 to even bits, ??? to odd bits, I think solomonoff can probably get that, but not more general relations.

Re: point 3, Solomonoff is about stochastic environments that just take your action as an input, and aren't reading your policy. For infra-Bayes, you can deal with policy-dependent environments without issue, as you can consider hard-coding in every possible policy to get a family of stochastic environments, and UDT behavior naturally falls out as a result from this encoding. There's still some open work to be done on which sorts of policy-dependent environments like this are learnable (inferrable from observations), but it's pretty straightforward to cram all sorts of weird decision-theory scenarios in as infra-Bayes hypothesis, and do the right thing in them.

Specifically, I'm not sure if there's some specific way that infra-Bayesianism learns this hypothesis

Well you had the misfortune to listen to a podcast where I was asking the questions, and I didn't understand infra-Bayesian learning theory and was too afraid to ask.

But to me it's not obvious how we could do better than that, given that this is inherently computationally expensive.

If the even bits are computable and the odd bits aren't, the whole sequence isn't computable so Solomonoff (plausibly) fails. You might hope that even if you can't succeed at predicting the odd bits, you could still succeed at predicting the even bits (which on their own are eminently predictable).

Here's an ELI5: The evil superintelligent deity Murphy, before you were ever conceived, picked the worst possible world that you could live in (meaning the world where your performance is worst), and you have to use fancy math tricks to deal with that.

Bumping it again.

Oh woops, I realize I ended the call for everyone when I left. I'm sorry.