Audio note: this article contains 329 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.

This post was written during the agent foundations fellowship with Alex Altair funded by the LTFF. Thanks to Alex, Jose, Daniel and Einar for reading and commenting on a draft.

The Good Regulator Theorem, as published by Conant and Ashby in their 1970 paper (cited over 1700 times!) claims to show that 'every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system', though it is a subject of debate as to whether this is actually what the paper shows. It is a fairly simple mathematical result which is worth knowing about for people who care about agent foundations and selection theorems. You might have heard about the Good Regulator Theorem in the context of John [...]

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Outline:

(03:03) The Setup

(07:30) What makes a regulator good?

(10:36) The Theorem Statement

(11:24) Concavity of Entropy

(15:42) The Main Lemma

(19:54) The Theorem

(22:38) Example

(26:59) Conclusion

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First published:
November 18th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JQefBJDHG6Wgffw6T/a-straightforward-explanation-of-the-good-regulator-theorem

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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