Alignment Workspace

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-hypothesis-window leaf/step drafted

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.

quantitative-rates leaf/question drafted

With explicit schedules, the forcing results of the deference note give a finite-horizon bound on the value at stake.

single-round-refinement leaf/question drafted

A non-asymptotic refinement of logical induction exists that licenses a per-decision guarantee rather than a policy-over-a-class average.

approx-introspection-quantitative leaf/question drafted

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.

oq-complexity-model leaf/question drafted

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".

oq-elk leaf/question drafted

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.

oq-anti-wireheading leaf/step drafted

A model of legitimacy yields anti-wireheading results, closely related to results against manipulation of the humans.

oq-purely-epistemic-ai leaf/question drafted

An AI trained in this setting has no misaligned agency, so it can be given a purely epistemic goal.

oq-whispering-earring leaf/step drafted

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.

oq-manipulation-theorem leaf/question drafted

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.

kernel-no-laundering leaf/step drafted

The corrigibility kernel's third box excludes trust laundering, the transfer of authority earned on one class of questions to another.

open-problem-ledger-current leaf/step drafted

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

Children

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"
 }
}

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Each verb opens a prefilled issue; a round files what lands as the ledger event it is.

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