“Paradigms for computation” by Cole Wyeth

Epistemic status: Though I can't find it now, I remember reading a lesswrong post asking "what is your totalizing worldview?" I think this post gets at my answer; in fact, I initially intended to title it "My totalizing worldview" but decided on a slightly more restricted scope (anyway, I tend to change important aspects of my worldview so frequently it's a little unsettling, so I'm not sure if it can be called totalizing). Still, I think these ideas underlie some of the cruxes behind my meta-theory of rationality sequence AND my model of what is going on with LLMs among other examples.

The idea of a fixed program as the central objects of computation has gradually fallen out of favor. As a result, the word "algorithm" seems to have replaced program as a catch-all term for computations that computers run. When the computation is massive, automatically generated, without guarantees [...]

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Outline:

(02:03) Recursion theory

(11:18) Computational learning theory

(16:43) Bayesian decision theory... as a paradigm of computation?

(18:55) Paradigms are for generating good ideas

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 30th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/APP8cbeDaqhGjqH8X/paradigms-for-computation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.