“Agent foundations: not really math, not really science” by Alex_Altair

These ideas are not well-communicated, and I'm hoping readers can help me understand them better in the comments.

The classical model of the scientific process is that its purpose is to find a theory that explains an observed phenomenon. Once you have any model whose outputs matches your observations, you have a valid candidate theory. Occam's razor says it should be simple. And if your theory can make correct predictions about observations that hadn't previously been made, then the theory is validated.

The classical model of mathematics is that you start with axioms and inference rules, and you derive theorems. There is no requirement that the axioms or theorems need to reflect something in reality to be considered mathematically valid (although they almost always do). Mathematicians have intuitions about what theorems are true before they prove them, and they have opinions about what theorems are important or meaningful, based [...]

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Outline:

(01:49) Empirics

(03:15) What makes agent foundations different?

(05:25) Its kinda like computer science

(07:26) We need a lot of help

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

August 17th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dt4DuCCok3Xv5HEnG/agent-foundations-not-really-math-not-really-science

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.