Ape in the coat

Karma: 1,313

Ape in the coat May 26, 2025, 12:59 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: xpym’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
Because it isn’t (yet), at least for those lucky enough not to be drafted, or living in the border regions.
True. And I think it speaks a lot about how bad the 90s were if several years of drop in a labor force, neccessity to bribe people to join the army and harsh sanctions by all the developped world is a cake walk compared to them.

Ape in the coat May 26, 2025, 11:51 AM
2 points
0
on: Beyond Democracy: A System Where Citizens Vote with Their Taxes
You raise some problems with the current system:
Who polices the police? Voters can be ignorant. Elections can be rigged.
None of them seem to be particularly bad, we do have standard ways to deal with them, but sure enough let’s see your proposed solution.
But suppose that tax payers were able to vote for their own tax rates, and voting power was proportionate to taxes paid? And suppose the vote took place via crypto, so that the results of the vote could neither be rigged nor ignored?
I don’t see how this proposal helps us with police taking protection money from the people. Or with voters being ignorant. And what’s the point of weighting the power of vote to the tax money? It seems that you want this for reasons completely unrelated to what you’ve mentioned in the post beforehand.
I can see how crypto theoretically solves the issue with rigging the votes, at the cost of it’s own bunch of problems. For instance, it complitely obliterates the secrecy of voting and makes the whole system more expensive and slow.
As usual, cryptocurrency is a solution in a search for a problem. For any its application, you can most likely achieve the same benefits with less downsides without using crypto.

Ape in the coat May 26, 2025, 9:55 AM
6 points
2
on: Sleep need reduction therapies
The fact that sleep initially evolved for temporal niches doesn’t mean that no important machinery was connected to it later. Evolution is not a programmer, following single responsibility principle. It has a tendency to hook more and more functionality to the same module with time.
So, while safe sleep reduction may be possible, it’s very much not clear whether it’s the case just based on this evolutional argument. And it can be quite dangerous in the worst case. Research in this direction is interesting and promising, but it seems we should start with better understanding of sleep in general before trying to reduce it.

Ape in the coat May 26, 2025, 9:16 AM
12 points
4
in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
This. Shock Therapy in Russia went so bad that it led to one of the worst quality of life drop in history, not related to war, and memetically innoculated whole generations from the ideas of free-market democracy, eventually leading to the current quasi-fashist state waging a war with a death toll in multiple hundreds of thousands. And even now, during the afformentioned war, people still manage to claim that at least it’s not as bad as the 90s.
In this sense, reasonable experts such as Joseph Stiglitz were completely vindicated.

Ape in the coat May 21, 2025, 9:55 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: [Crosspost] Anthropic Shadow Geopolitics
You can treat is as a miracle, but don’t pretend that observation selection effects explains it any better than divine intervention. Otherwise you may feel as if you actually became less confused about the problem just by using different terminology.

Ape in the coat May 21, 2025, 7:23 AM
2 points
0
on: [Crosspost] Anthropic Shadow Geopolitics
Good observations about Putin’s “Gift”. I would notice that reproducing this probably requires something similar to Russia’s social political climate of poverty, fear, apathy and cynicism, with a strong memetic innoculation against overthrowing governments and most develloped countries do not share these properties. But, that said, getting there is much easier than may innitially seem and USA is currently speedrunning it.

Ape in the coat May 21, 2025, 7:21 AM
4 points
2
on: [Crosspost] Anthropic Shadow Geopolitics
It never stops fascinating me how otherwise reasonable people are ready to believe in literal magic just because we’ve renamed it. Sequences have called out this failure mode explicitly and yet here we.
If I say that psychic power of soul granted to us by God systematically protects our civilization from extinction, who would treat me seriously? Clearly this is just some New-Age quasi-religious nonsense.
But what if, instead, I say that anthropical effects of consciousness granted to us by metaphysics systematically protects our civilization from extinction? Now suddenly even some reductive materialists, who were supposed to know better, are nodding their heads, while considering this possibility.
If instead I say: “Anthropic Shadow and Strong Self-Sampling Assumption” nearly noone notices any problem, even though the substance of the claim keeps being same. Funny, right?
Notice your confusion. If some theory implies that we live in a fantasy world of unbroken prophesy… then with all likelihood this theory is wrong.
However, if the SSSA is invalid, then we could just build AGI and banally die soon afterwards, as the doomers expect.
Basically this. Very boring, I know. I would also prefer if reality optimised our entertainment more.

Ape in the coat May 16, 2025, 9:36 AM
15 points
12
in reply to: SurfingOrca’s comment on: Doomers Should try Much Harder to get Famous
That has been the default strategy for many years and it failed dramatically.
All the “convinced influential people in tech”, started making their own AI start-ups, while comming up with galaxy-brained rationalizations why everything will be okay with their idea in particular. We tried to be nice to them in order not to lose our influence with them. Turned out we didn’t have any. While we carefully and respectfully showed the problems with their reasoning, they likewise respectfully nodded their heads and continued to burn the AI timelines. Who could’ve though that people who have a real chance to become incredibly rich and important at the cost of dooming human civilization a bit later, are going to take this awesome opportunity?
Meanwhile, surprisingly enough, it turned out that regular “100 IQ individuals” with no prospect to become absurdly rich and powerful actually do not want an apocalypse! Too bad that we have already stained our reputation quite a bit, while appearing as bootlickers to the tech-billionares for all these years, but better late than never.
There is a lesson about naivity/cynycism and personal bias here. How it’s much more pleasant to persuade influential elites than common masses. The former feels like respectable intellectual activity, while the latter like—gah! - politics, something what crazy activists would do. And it’s good that we’ve managed to learn it, diversifying our activity and trying to appeal to common people more. Would’ve been even better if managed to win initially, instead of making this kind of fascinating mistake, but sadly we are not that good at rationality yet.

Ape in the coat May 15, 2025, 6:23 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: rogersbacon’s comment on: Behold the Pale Child (escaping Moloch’s Mad Maze)
I will take blame for not making it clear that this is an introduction to a much larger body of thought
I’ll have another essay in a few weeks—I will send it to you and I look forward to your criticism.
This does provide the necessary context absolving the post from the main blow of my critique, for the time being. Looking forward for your next essay!
I would be glad if your future reasoning gave me some novel insight, and I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt about it and will do my best to approach it open-mindedly. But as of now, I’m afraid, your conclusions are going to be based on a false premise. I’m going to highlight what I think it is—feel free to address this concern in your future essays.
But first, let’s establish some common ground.
I want to live in a universe where surprising things happen and the aforementioned delusions still have a place. In some sense, I want to turn the world and its ways upside down—I want the weak and the deluded to win—but how?
I agree with the sentiment. That’s why the whole “How to get rid of Moloch” question is important to me.
Then you say:
Not through rational intelligence or “work” because that is exactly how the null hypothesis becomes fulfilled. Reality is like a chinese finger trap, struggling only deepens your entrapment.
And this is wrong. The Molochian equilibrium appeared long before any rational intelligences came into existence and thought about it in terms of game theory. Evolution through natural selection—the creator of our brains—is already a facet of Moloch. It’s not rational thought that traps us in the maze of Moloch—as you mention yourself, the rational approach to reality is a relatively late thing. Moloch predates it by millions of years.
All the playfullness and childiness and dramatic dimensions work to Molochs goals just as much as workfullness and adultness and straightforward approach. That’s the horror of the situation to begin with. It’s not that everyone is just doing their best to be a profit maximizer and noone has ever thought about chilling a bit and appreciating the beauty of the sunrize and as soon as we try, the grip of Moloch fails on us. It’s that those who try that are systematically eliminated and the survivors become even more enslaved by Moloch as a result.
I think Scott did a very good job at explaining this point, so I’m not sure why you are making this mistake. My current best guess is wishful thinking. That’s what I got from reading your essay and it didn’t change after this comment. But, once again, I would be happy to be proven wrong in this regard, so waiting for your next essay on the topic.

Ape in the coat May 14, 2025, 6:27 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: rogersbacon’s comment on: Behold the Pale Child (escaping Moloch’s Mad Maze)
Metaphors and poetry are great when they highlight a valid intellectual point you are trying to make, allowing to engage with it on emotional level. Meditations on Moloch, that you cite, have quite a lot of that and are beloved.
It’s even okay when metaphors and poetry obfuscate your point a little. Indeed, some people prefer their reading material to be less on the nose, and enjoy deciphering hidden meanings. There are both pros and cons and matters of taste here. But ultimately you won’t be ostracised for that.
What is not okay, is when your post lacks substance and hides this in flowerly language. When you have nothing to say on the topic beyond cashed “deep wisdom” and pleasant vibes but still pretend as if you do. This can feel offensive, especially if your post managed to create an expectation of some interesting insight into a complicated problem and then failed to deliver.
If you feel that I’ve misjudged you, and actually there is a valid and interesting point in this post, which I failed to grasp due to the artlessness of my intelligence, here is my offer: write your answer to the problem of Moloch in the plainest language possible so that even someone who truly abhors metaphor and poetry would be able to get it. And then if, it turns out to be good, I’ll replace my downvote on this post with a strong upvote. Alternatively, I’ll give you an explanation why your point is bad and how you could’ve seen it yourself.

Ape in the coat May 13, 2025, 10:53 AM
3 points
1
on: Game theory of “Nuclear Prisoner’s Dilemma”—on nuking rocks
The optimal strategy seems to be Prudent Extorter:
1. Extort agents vulnerable to extortion
2. Cooperate with agents that are not vulnerable to extortions and will cooperate back.
3. Defect against everyone else.
Such agents perform better than your Naive Extorter as they would be able to cooperate with each other and do not nuke a Defection Rock.
When Naive Extorter meets Prudent Extorter they die in a nuclear fire.

Ape in the coat May 12, 2025, 11:43 AM
4 points
3
on: a confusion about preference orderings
You can in fact have an agent who prefers to be money pumped. And from their perspective there is no problem with that.
Money pumps isn’t a universal argument that could persuade a rock to turn into a brain. It’s just an appeal to our own human intuitions.

Ape in the coat May 11, 2025, 7:27 PM
3 points
−2
on: Behold the Pale Child (escaping Moloch’s Mad Maze)
It really seemed that you are going somewhere with all this, and then it turned out that you are not. All these beautiful metaphors, complicated topics, all the reference to works of other authors—all for naught. Form without a substance. Question was raised and then a complete lack of answer was produced.
That’s quite dissapointing. And makes this post a poor story.

Ape in the coat Apr 28, 2025, 4:18 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Experimental testing: can I treat myself as a random sample?
hich For example, If I use self-sampling to estimate the number of seconds in the year, I will get a correct answer of around several tens of millions. But using word generator will never output a word longer than 100 letters.
Using the month of your birth to estimate the number of seconds in the year also won’t work well, unless you multiply it by number of seconds in a month.
Likewise here. You can estimate the number of months in a year by number of letters in the world and then multiply it by number of seconds in a months.
I didn’t understand your idea here
Consider this.
Parents of person A tried really hard to give birth to A on the first of January and indeed it happened
Person B just so happened to be born on the first of January
Parents of person C tried really hard to give birth to C on the 15th of June and indeed it happened
Person D just so happened to be born on the 15th of June
Here date of births of B and D can be approximated as randomly sampled, while A and C are not. Your test, however will return that C and D can treat themselves as random sample, making both false positive and false negative errors.
This is because your test simply checks the distance from the mean value which, while somewhat correlated to being a result of random sampling, is a completely different thing.

Ape in the coat Apr 23, 2025, 7:01 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Experimental testing: can I treat myself as a random sample?
You chose word length generator as you know that typical length of words is 1-10. Thus not random.
This is not relevant to my point. After all you also know that typical month is 1-12
No, the point is that I specifically selected a number via an algorithm that has nothing to do with sampling months. And yet your test outputs positive result anyway. Therefore your test is unreliable.
I didn’t rejected any results – it works in any test I have imagined
That’s exactly the problem. Essentially you are playing a 2,4,6 game, got no negative result yet and are already confident about the rule.
Note that alphabet letter count is not cyclical as well as my distance to equator.
Distance to equator is in fact cyclical in a very literal sense. Alphabet letters do not have anything to do with random sampling of you through time.
If I were born 1 of January, I would get years duration 2 days which is very wrong.
It’s not more wrong for a person whose parents specifically tried to give birth at this date than for a person who just happened to be born at this time without any planning. And even in this extreme situation your mistake is limited by two orders of magnitude. There is no such guarantee in DA.

Ape in the coat Apr 23, 2025, 5:11 AM
4 points
0
on: Experimental testing: can I treat myself as a random sample?
First of all, your experimental method can really benefit from a control group. Pick a setting where a thing is definitely not randomly sampled from a set. Perform your experiment and see what happens.
Consider. I generated a random word using this site https://randomwordgenerator.com/
This word turned out to be “mosaic”. It has 6 letters. Let’s test whether it’s length is randomly sampled from the number of months in a year.
As 6*2=12, this actually works perfectly, even better than estimating the number of months in a year based on your birth month!
It also works decently to estimate several other things. The number of hours in a day, number of days in a months. Number of minutes in an hour. It gets the order of magnitude right! If we use the number of minutes in your 15:14 timestamp to estimate the number of minutes in an hour we are simularly off.
Worse with number of days in a week and number of days in a year. But it’s mistaken by only one order of magnitude, maybe it’s also okay?
At this point the problems with your methodology should be clear:
- You didn’t describe beforehand the criterions for accepting or rejecting a hypothesis.
- You didn’t describe beforehand which hypothesis you were planning to test.
- You were testing only hypothesis where you expected a positive answer.
Secondly, if we want to talk about DA or SH, there is the whole jump from
“I can approximate my birth date as a random sample from all the days in the month/months in a year”
to
“I can approximate my birth rank as a random sample from all the births of people throughout history/starting from the moment of knowing about DA”.
The latter doesn’t follow from the former, even though in semantic terms both can potentially be described as random sampling of a person throughout time.
The cyclical nature of days in a months and months in a year never allows you to be off more than by an order of magnitude. Even if your parents specifically timed your conception to give you birth on the first of January, therefore putting you in a very specific “reference class”, you won’t be extremely mistaken about these numbers following your methodology.
On the other hand, there is no such gurantee for birth orders of a people which work as natural numbers, not as elements of a finite field.

Ape in the coat Apr 21, 2025, 4:49 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Prediction Markets Are Mediocre
I personally didn’t expect Trump to do any tarrifs at all
Just curious, how comes? Were you simply not paying attention to what he was saying? Or were you not believing in his promises?

Ape in the coat Apr 21, 2025, 4:46 AM
4 points
−1
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Prediction Markets Are Mediocre
I think “mediocre” is a quite appropriate adjective when describing a thing that we had high hopes for, but now received evidence, according to which while the thing technically works, it performs worse than expected, and the most exciting use cases are not validated.
I indeed used a single example here, so the strength of the evidence is arguable, but I don’t see why this case should be an outlier. I could’ve searched for more, like this one, that is particularly bad:

In any case, you can consider this post my public prediction that other policy prediction markets would also follow a similar thread.

Ape in the coat Apr 21, 2025, 4:35 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: Probability Theory Fundamentals 102: Territory that Probability is in the Map of
I think the problem here is that you do not quite understand the problem.
There is definetely some kind of misunderstanding that is going on, and I’d like to figure it out.
It’s not that we “imagine that we’ve imagined the whole world, do not notice any contradictions and call it a day”.
How it’s not the case? Citing you from here:
When you are conditioning on empirical fact, you are imaging set of logically consistent worlds where this empirical fact is true and ask yourself about frequency of other empirical facts inside this set.
How do you know which worlds are logically consistent with your observations and which are not? For that you need to hold them in your mind one by one with all their details and checks for inconsistencies. Which requires you to be a logically omniscient supercomputator with unlimited memory. And none of us is that.
So you have to be doing something else. Only validate the consistency to the best of your cognitive resources, therefore—“imagine that we’ve imagined the whole world, do not notice any contradictions and call it a day”.
It’s that we know there exists idealized procedure which doesn’t produce stupid answers, like, it can’t be money-pumped.
Well, yes. That’s the goal. What I’m doing is trying to pinpoint this procedure without the framework of possible worlds which, among other things, doesn’t allow reasoning about logical uncertainty. I replace it with a better framework, of iterations of probability experiment that does allow that.
The whole computationally unbounded Bayesian business is more about “here is an idealized procedure X, and if we don’t do anything visibly for us stupid from perspective of X, then we can hope that our losses won’t be unbounded from certain notion of boundedness”. It is not obvious that your procedure can be understood this way.
The bayesian procedure is the same, we’ve just got rid of all the bizarre metaphysics and now explicitly talking about values of a function approximating something in the real world. What is not obvious for you here? Do you expect that there is some case in which my framework fails, where framework of possible worlds doesn’t? If so I’d like to see this example. But I’m also currious where such belief would even come from, considering that, once again, we simply talk about iterations of probability experiment instead of possible worlds.

Ape in the coat Apr 19, 2025, 7:20 AM
2 points
0
on: What’s the Deal with Logical Uncertainty?
In this post I’ve described a unified framework that allows to reason about any type of uncertainty be it logical or empirical. I would appreciate engagement from people who think that logical uncertainty is still unsolved.