Paul Christiano: uncertainty

Transcript context

…When you have it completed, how big would this heuristic estimator the rules for this heuristic estimator mean, I know like when Russell and who was the other guy when they did the rules? Yeah, wasn’t it like literally they had like a bucket or a wheelbarrow with all the papers. But how big would I mean, mathematical foundations are quite simple in the end. At the end of the day it’s like how many symbols? I don’t know, it’s hundreds of symbols or something that go into the entire foundations and the entire rules of reasoning for like there’s a sort of built on top of first order logic but the rules of reasoning for first order logic are just like another hundreds of symbols or 100 lines of code or whatever. I’d say I have no idea. We are certainly aiming at things that are just not that complicated and my guess is that the algorithms we’re looking for are not that complicated. Most of the complexity is pushed into arguments not in this verifier or estimator. So for this to work you need to come up with an estimator which is a way to integrate different heuristic arguments together.…

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