formalism-open-questions-0-3
frame · drafted
Question
Which of the open questions listed for the li-deference formalism yield to the legitimacy and trust work, and in what form?
Owners: @anson (GitHub A-M-Berns), @abram (GitHub abramdemski)
Path: the-program › legitimacy › formalism-open-questions-0-3
Roots (the frame's goals)
risk-story
Malign hypotheses can end or corrupt the training process before the asymptotic elimination the guarantees rely on applies.
shared-claim
A finite-time form of the deference collapse's guarantees, holding before any malign hypothesis can act, is available by some route.
The logical induction criterion constrains no finite day: a five-coordinate finite perturbation of FAF's logical inductor is a logical inductor and a computable market that violates the interval forms of exact no-net-update and exact self-trust.
In the corrigibility kernel's second box, for a logical inductor the ranking of the violating option below the compliant one holds at every day from the price range alone, while the expectation-provability-induction version is asymptotic.
A constraint on prices compiles to a legal trading strategy inside the market recursion, giving per-date conformance within a schedule while preserving the logical induction criterion.
With explicit schedules, the forcing results of the deference note give a finite-horizon bound on the value at stake.
A non-asymptotic refinement of logical induction exists that licenses a per-decision guarantee rather than a policy-over-a-class average.
Quantitative limitations on an agent's self-knowledge imply quantitative limitations on epistemic endorsement, so that reflection-type trust properties hold only to within a tolerance matching the precision of self-knowledge.
The gap packages and the expert pins the bounds-transfer repair assumes are discharged at grade (a) for a distinct inductor expert.
The modelling assumption that AIs consider hypotheses from a larger complexity class than humans is a faithful model of human-AI capability differences, given the maintainer's observation that humans "seem to generalize better on less data than AIs".
The framework proves positive results in the eliciting-latent-knowledge setting, such as bounded-loss assurances that the humans will not regret not knowing something the AI was thinking.
A model of legitimacy yields anti-wireheading results, closely related to results against manipulation of the humans.
An AI trained in this setting has no misaligned agency, so it can be given a purely epistemic goal.
When humans use the AI to help them think, predicting the future humans reduces to the AI predicting itself, which is a form of illegitimacy, and accurate prediction and active steering produce the same vanishing prediction error off the timely fragment.
The manipulation theorem is assembled from its four ingredients: a second calibration condition separating calibration-to-self from calibration-to-truth, the evidence/preemption distinction, the transfer-of-trust attack, and non-recoverability.
The corrigibility kernel's third box excludes trust laundering, the transfer of authority earned on one class of questions to another.
The open-problem ledger lists every open question of the li-deference notes' section 0.3 and of the deference note's Appendix B, each with its status after the clean room.
Statement
The open questions listed for the li-deference formalism, inner alignment and finite-time guarantees, complexity, latent knowledge, wireheading, purely epistemic AI, manipulation and the whispering earring, are answered or restated in the legitimacy and trust work.
Source
projects/deference/note-dump-2026-08-11/notes/li-deference.md, section 0.3, "Some other open questions" (the bulleted list with bold item names: Ontology mismatches, Decision theory, Complexity Theory, Eliciting Latent Knowledge, corrigibility conditional on legitimacy, Wireheading, Embedded Agency, Purely Epistemic AI, Non-Modification Theorem, Whispering Earring Problems) and its limitations paragraph; projects/deference/note-dump-2026-08-11/notes/roadmap.md, Stage 2: "all the open problems I've already listed for the formalism".
Notes
A sub-frame for the items of the maintainer's list that this programme owns. Items owned elsewhere are not duplicated: ontology mismatch and embedded agency belong to the abstraction arc; decision theory to the updateless branch; corrigibility conditional on legitimacy to the corrigibility branch (this frame supplies the finite transfer and the corrigibility definition of record); the non-modification theorem is filed under the endpoint-preservation line. The finite-time material is filed here as a crux with its evidence, beside the landed step-asymptotic-to-finite-time of the bounded-agent sub-frame, which the li-trust branch files.
Author and human events
Author @smithy-verity; version 1; size L.
No human event has touched this node.
Edges
Above
- part of legitimacy
- root (plan) of legitimacy
Children
- part: finite-time-guarantee-available cases
- part: lic-constrains-no-finite-day leaf/step
- part: kernel-box2-finite-time and
- part: traderized-finite-date-conformance and
- part: quantitative-rates leaf/question
- part: single-round-refinement leaf/question
- part: malign-hypothesis-window leaf/step
- part: approx-introspection-quantitative leaf/question
- part: approx-introspection-pins-discharge leaf/question
- part: oq-complexity-model leaf/question
- part: oq-elk leaf/question
- part: oq-anti-wireheading leaf/step
- part: oq-purely-epistemic-ai leaf/question
- part: oq-whispering-earring leaf/step
- part: oq-manipulation-theorem leaf/question
- part: kernel-no-laundering leaf/step
- part: open-problem-ledger-current leaf/step
Ranking (the lens, not the structure)
{
"status": "open",
"diagnosis": null,
"flags": [],
"V": {
"V_prior": null,
"display": "2",
"headline": 2,
"ref": 2,
"valid": 2,
"weaker": "both"
},
"belief": null,
"draft": "ai",
"root": {
"status": "open",
"Pr": {
"hi": "0/1",
"lo": "0/1",
"mid": "0/1"
},
"value": null,
"cost": "33/1",
"margin": "no established leaves"
}
}Say something about it
Each verb opens a prefilled issue; a round files what lands as the ledger event it is.