King James’s Dæmonologie, Part I: The Laplacian Mesa-Optimiser

Epistemic status: idle speculation by royal decree of King James VI. In any sufficiently expressive architecture, there exists at initialization a dæmon that is misaligned yet behaves well on every eval, monitor, probe, and training example. In the trivial construction, it simply knows in advance every test it will ever be subjected to throughout training and evaluation, see Laplace’s demon. Of course, this demonic lookup table may itself admit compression. The important point is that the dæmon ...