“Scrying, Modeling, and Nerdsnipe” by Cole Wyeth

Epistemic status: Exploratory thinking. After attending ILIAD: Aeneid and talking with @Richard_Ngo, I've been thinking a bit about how to get ideas, particularly by doing mathematics. In scientific inquiry, the true hypothesis often hasn't occurred to you yet. Worse, the truth might be too complex to hold in mind, so that any hypothesis you can consider must be incomplete. This is the type of situation that I believe Richard likes to think about; he claims that we do not have the right concepts yet to understand agency, and developing them is robustly beneficial for A.I. safety. (But it's not always about truth. Sometimes you just need better ideas, because all of your options are looking doomed. Agent foundations is about trying to deeply understand agents, but conceptual A.I. safety research can be broader, also including the invention of devices to control agents.) A.I. safety needs to invent better concepts and better ideas. I think that agent foundations has cultivated a particular way of doing mathematics which aims to inspire such creativity. Why math? At ILIAD, Eliezer questioned whether anyone's alignment agenda was actually bottlenecked on solving a math problem. ILIAD attendees do a lot of math [...] ---Outline:(01:19) Why math?(04:28) Nerdsnipe(06:05) A.I. for math(08:21) At AIXI Labs(09:10) Blue and Green ---
First published:
August 14th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mTfsMduzaKkWjv2ef/scrying-modeling-and-nerdsnipe
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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