"Explaining Knightianism on one foot" by Richard_Ngo cover art

"Explaining Knightianism on one foot" by Richard_Ngo

"Explaining Knightianism on one foot" by Richard_Ngo

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I’ve tried various times to summarize the core question my research is trying to tackle (and, indeed, I often think of research progress as a process of asking increasingly good core questions). This post gives the deepest version of that question I’ve found thus far: how should you relate to the parts of the world you can’t directly model or control?

Let me explain further in terms of a distinction between two perspectives. From the third person perspective you think of yourself as “outside” the world, looking in. You’re a good Bayesian, in that you have a set of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive hypotheses. You choose actions by multiplying your credences by your utilities over those hypotheses, and you treat those actions as the only way you influence the world.

Some problems with the third person perspective (aka Cartesian or dualistic agency) were described in Scott and Abram's sequence on embedded agency. One crucial issue is that most realistic environments contain other agents which are modeling you back, which means that your thoughts might affect the world via channels that aren’t just your actions. Game theory somewhat mitigates this problem, but only in the very specific case where all [...]

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Outline:

(05:08) Rationality of reward

(09:09) Letters from spirits

(12:21) Languages as Schelling points

(15:43) Actions and entanglements

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pYFBD2SnqiWkuNns5/explaining-knightianism-on-one-foot

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