Equality and Freedom as Uncertainty in Groups
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I investigate a connection between a common characterisation of freedom and how uncertainty is managed in a Bayesian hierarchical model. To do this, I consider a distributed factorization of a group's optimization of free energy, in which each agent is attempting to align with the group and with its own model. I show how this can lead to equilibria for groups, defined by the capacity of the model being used, essentially how many different datasets it can handle. In particular, I show that there is a "sweet spot" in the capacity of a normal model in each agent's decentralized optimization, and that this "sweet spot" corresponds to minimal free energy for the group. At the sweet spot, an agent can predict what the group will do and the group is not surprised by the agent. However, there is an asymmetry. A higher capacity model for an agent makes it harder for the individual to learn, as there are more parameters. Simultaneously, a higher capacity model for the group, implemented as a higher capacity model for each member agent, makes it easier for a group to integrate a new member. To optimize for a group of agents then requires one to make a trade-off in capacity, as each individual agent seeks to decrease capacity, but there is pressure from the group to increase capacity of all members. This pressure exists because as individual agent's capacities are reduced, so too are their abilities to model other agents, and thereby to establish pro-social behavioural patterns. I then consider a basic two-level (dual process) Bayesian model of social reasoning and a set of three parameters of capacity that are required to implement such a model. Considering these three capacities as dependent elements in a free energy minimization for a group leads to a "sweet surface" in a three-dimensional space defining the triplet of parameters that each agent must use should they hope to minimize free energy as a group. Finally, I relate these three parameters to three notions of freedom and equality in human social organization, and postulate a correspondence between freedom and model capacity. That is, models with higher capacity, have more freedom as they can interact with more datasets.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it