LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Inscrutability was always inevitable, right?” by Steven Byrnes


Listen Later

Here's a 2022 Eliezer Yudkowsky tweet:

 In context, “secure” means “secure against jailbreaks”. Source. H/t Cole Wyeth here.

I find this confusing.

Here's a question: are object-level facts about the world, like “tires are usually black”, encoded directly in the human-created AGI source code?

  • If yes, then (1) yo be real, and (2) even if it happened, the source code would wind up with wildly unprecedented length and complexity, so much that it becomes basically inscrutable, just because it's a complicated world (e.g. there are lots of types of tires, not all of them are black, they stop looking black when they get muddy, etc. etc.). See Yuxi Liu's ruthless “obituary” of Cyc.
  • If no, then the human-created source code must be defining a learning algorithm of some sort. And then that learning algorithm will figure out for itself that tires are usually black etc. Might this learning algorithm [...]

---

First published:

August 6th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ohznigkLX5CNwaLSz/inscrutability-was-always-inevitable-right

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

112,847 Listeners

Astral Codex Ten Podcast by Jeremiah

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

130 Listeners

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat by New York Times Opinion

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

7,206 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

531 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

16,150 Listeners

AI Article Readings by Readings of great articles in AI voices

AI Article Readings

4 Listeners

Doom Debates by Liron Shapira

Doom Debates

14 Listeners

LessWrong posts by zvi by zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi

2 Listeners