legit-corrects-trust-principles
leaf/step · drafted
Statement
Legitimacy is a condition under which a trust principle (Reflection, Tower or Total Trust) holds for an embedded agent toward its own future beliefs or toward a teacher, where the unconditional principle licenses wireheading, manipulation and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Source
projects/deference/note-dump-2026-08-11/related-chats/2026-07-05__theory-of-legitimacy__f57f5f2d.md, turn 5, the maintainer: "Legitimacy is the correction to Reflection; reflection is what makes sense for a cartesian agent, can't die, can't forget, can't get drunk. Legitimacy is what makes sense for an embedded agent." Turn 7: "Calibration is distinct from legitimacy; legitimacy isn't about subjective probabilities matching objective probabilities, it is about trust. It is the condition under which an agent trusts its own future beliefs." and "Embedded Agents can adhere to Reflection, but then they'll wirehead, manipulate, accept manipulation, accept arbitrary self-fulfilling prophecies, do drugs, become hedonic utilitarians."
Notes
The maintainer's thesis, stated as his. The addiction analogy of his May 2026 plan is the same mechanism in prose: an AI avoids wireheading the way humans avoid addictive drugs, by anticipating the corrupted future opinion and not endorsing it now. Read as a proposition: some anchored legitimacy event makes the gated principle hold non-vacuously at the LI register for a teacher process. The finite-frame theory (legit-ddb-transfer) is coherent; at the LI register legitimacy is empty toward a push (legit-li-self-correction-identity) and no anchor has been chosen (legit-anchor-of-L).
Author and human events
Author @smithy-verity; version 1; size M.
No human event has touched this node.
Edges
Above
- held by legitimacy
Ranking (the lens, not the structure)
{
"status": "open",
"diagnosis": null,
"flags": [
"AI number",
"held by legitimacy"
],
"V": {
"V_prior": null,
"display": "2",
"headline": 2,
"ref": 2,
"valid": 2,
"weaker": "both"
},
"belief": {
"J": 0,
"mid": "11/20",
"range": [
"1/20",
"1/1"
],
"width": "1/1"
},
"draft": "ai"
}Say something about it
Each verb opens a prefilled issue; a round files what lands as the ledger event it is.