Arjun Panickssery

Karma: 1,500

Arjun Panickssery 12 Nov 2024 4:43 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: martinkunev’s comment on: Personal AI Planning
By “calligraphy” do you mean cursive writing?

Arjun Panickssery 7 Nov 2024 11:42 UTC
12 points
0
on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
So why don’t the four states sign a compact to assign all their electoral votes in 2028 and future presidential elections to the winner of the aggregate popular vote in those four states? Would this even be legal?
It would be legal to make an agreement like this (states are authorized to appoint electors and direct their votes however they like; see Chiafalo v. Washington) but it’s not enforceable in the sense that if one of the states reneges, the outcome of the presidential election won’t be reversed.

Arjun Panickssery 21 Oct 2024 22:52 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Overcoming Bias Anthology
lol fixed thanks

Arjun Panickssery 20 Oct 2024 20:00 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: xpym’s comment on: Overcoming Bias Anthology
Yeah it’s for the bounty. Hanson suggested that a list of links might be preferred to a printed book, at least for now, since he might want to edit the posts.

Arjun Panickssery 16 Oct 2024 21:35 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Error’s comment on: What are your favorite books or blogs that are out of print, or whose domains have expired (especially if they also aren’t on LibGen/Wayback/etc, or on Amazon)?
What was it called

Arjun Panickssery 22 Aug 2024 5:25 UTC
18 points
1
in reply to: michael_mjd’s comment on: Please do not use AI to write for you
Brief comments on what’s bad about the output:
The instruction is to write an article arguing that AI-generated posts suffer from verbosity, hedging, and unclear trains of thought. But ChatGPT makes that complaint in a single sentence in the first paragraph and then spends 6 paragraphs adding a bunch of its own arguments:
1. that the “nature of conversation itself” draws value from “human experience, emotion, and authenticity” that AI content replaces with “a hollow imitation of dialogue”
2. that AI content creates “an artificial sense of expertise,” i.e. that a dumb take can be made to seem smarter than it is
3. that the option to use AI content discourages posters from “engag[ing] deeply with the topic themselves”
It wasn’t instructed to make these arguments and they aren’t really defended as important.
Then lastly ChatGPT offers a “solution”: that people just disclose when they’re using AI assistance. But it’s not explained how this actually prevents the problems above, besides I guess allowing people downvote AI content or scrutinize it more. Importantly this proposed solution wouldn’t solve the concern the model was instructed to present.
So in general instructions aren’t followed and the thinking/argumentation isn’t clear.

Arjun Panickssery 22 Aug 2024 5:16 UTC
11 points
0
on: Please do not use AI to write for you
I added to your prompt the instructions
Be brief and write concise prose in the style of Paul Graham. Don’t hedge or repeat yourself or go on tangents.
And the output is still bad, but now mostly for the flaw (also present in your output) that ChatGPT can’t resist making the complaint about “human authenticity” and “transparency/trust” when that’s not what you’re talking about:
I’ve noticed a troubling trend on online forums: a surge in posts that clearly seem to be generated by AI. These posts are verbose, meandering, and devoid of real substance. They present every argument with an opposing one, wrapped in so much “on the one hand” and “on the other” that they end up saying nothing at all.
AI in its current form shouldn’t be used for this purpose. The problem isn’t just that these posts waste time, though they do. It’s that they dilute meaningful discourse. When an AI-generated post floods a forum, it clogs the flow of genuine ideas. The writing might seem polished, but it’s hollow, a shell of real thought. And that’s a disservice to any community that values actual discussion.
Forums are places for people to exchange ideas, not for machines to simulate them. Using AI to generate content in this way erodes the authenticity of conversation. It’s a misuse of technology that contributes to the noise rather than to meaningful exchange.
AI can be powerful, but that power should be wielded carefully. Right now, the tools aren’t good enough to replace real human input, and pretending they are does more harm than good.
EDIT: Below is what it looks like if I replace “in the style of Paul Graham” with “in the style of LessWrong”:
AI-generated content in online forums is a growing problem. These tools are designed to mimic human language, but they often fail to deliver meaningful or original contributions. Instead, they produce verbose, meandering prose that tries to cover all bases but ultimately says nothing. This kind of content is worse than useless—it clogs up discussions with noise, making it harder for genuine insights to emerge.
AI, in its current state, lacks the ability to form and defend coherent, novel ideas. It doesn’t understand context, nuance, or the importance of taking a clear stance. The result is writing that hedges endlessly, offering a shallow imitation of thoughtful discourse but devoid of real substance. When forums are flooded with such content, it dilutes the value of the platform. It wastes the time of readers who are searching for real engagement and stifles the development of ideas that can only come from genuine human interaction.
AI tools should not be used to generate content for forums, period. They don’t contribute to the quality of discussion and instead, undermine it. The promise of AI lies in its ability to augment human capabilities, not replace them in areas where human judgment, creativity, and insight are paramount. Until AI can meaningfully contribute to a discussion, we should resist the temptation to use it in contexts where clarity, originality, and human understanding are crucial.

Arjun Panickssery 28 Jul 2024 7:29 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
Is this word long or short? Only say “long” or “short”. The word is: {word}.
Code: https://github.com/ArjunPanickssery/long_short

Arjun Panickssery 28 Jul 2024 5:37 UTC
11 points
1
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
To test out Cursor for fun I asked models whether various words of different lengths were “long” and measured the relative probability of “Yes” vs “No” answers to get a P(long) out of them. But when I use scrambled words of the same length and letter distribution, GPT 3.5 doesn’t think any of them are long.
Update: I got Claude to generate many words with connotations related to long (“mile” or “anaconda” or “immeasurable”) and short (“wee” or “monosyllabic” or “inconspicuous” or “infinitesimal”) It looks like the models have a slight bias toward the connotation of the word.

Arjun Panickssery 25 Jul 2024 21:38 UTC
9 points
1
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
What’s the actual probability of casting a decisive vote in a presidential election (by state)?
I remember the Gelman/Silver/Edlin “What is the probability your vote will make a difference?” (2012) methodology:
1. Let E be the number of electoral votes in your state. We estimate the probability that these are necessary for an electoral college win by computing the proportion of the 10,000 simulations for which the electoral vote margin based on all the other states is less than E, plus ¹⁄₂ the proportion of simulations for which the margin based on all other states equals E. (This last part assumes implicitly that we have no idea who would win in the event of an electoral vote tie.) [Footnote: We ignored the splitting of Nebraska’s and Maine’s electoral votes, which retrospectively turned out to be a mistake in 2008, when Obama won an electoral vote from one of Nebraska’s districts.]
2. We estimate the probability that your vote is decisive, if your state’s electoral votes are necessary, by working with the subset of the 10,000 simulations for which the electoral vote margin based on all the other states is less than or equal to E. We compute the mean M and standard deviation S of the vote margin among that subset of simulations and then compute the probability of an exact tie as the density at 0 of the Student-t distribution with 4 degrees of freedom (df), mean M, and scale S.
The product of two probabilities above gives the probability of a decisive vote in the state.
This gives the following results for the 2008 presidential election, where they estimate that you had less than one chance in a hundred billion of deciding the election in DC, but better than a one in ten million chance in New Mexico. (For reference, 131 million people voted in the election.)
Is this basically correct?
(I guess you also have to adjust for your confidence that you are voting for the better candidate. Maybe if you think you’re outside the top ~20% in “voting skill”—ability to pick the best candidate—you should abstain. See also.)

Arjun Panickssery 11 Jun 2024 15:27 UTC
30 points
8
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
FiveThirtyEight released their prediction today that Biden currently has a 53% of winning the election | Tweet
The other day I asked:
Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that
- Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
- Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
- either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
- Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood
Even if gas fees take a few percentage points off we should expect to make money trading on some of this stuff, right (the money is only locked up for 5 months)? And maybe there are cheap ways to transfer into and out of Polymarket?
Probably worthwhile to think about this further, including ways to make leveraged bets.

Arjun Panickssery 7 Jun 2024 15:57 UTC
20 points
10
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
Should we anticipate easy profit on Polymarket election markets this year? Its markets seem to think that
- Biden will die or otherwise withdraw from the race with 23% likelihood
- Biden will fail to be the Democratic nominee for whatever reason at 13% likelihood
- either Biden or Trump will fail to win nomination at their respective conventions with 14% likelihood
- Biden will win the election with only 34% likelihood
Even if gas fees take a few percentage points off we should expect to make money trading on some of this stuff, right (the money is only locked up for 5 months)? And maybe there are cheap ways to transfer into and out of Polymarket?

Arjun Panickssery 4 Jun 2024 12:13 UTC
14 points
9
on: Just admit that you’ve zoned out
I like “Could you repeat that in the same words?” so that people don’t try to rephrase their point for no reason.

In addition to daydreaming, sometimes you’re just thinking about the first of a series of points that your interlocutor made one after the other (a lot of rationalists talk too fast).

Arjun Panickssery 3 Jun 2024 19:44 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
By “subscriber growth” in OP I meant both paid and free subscribers.
My thinking was that people subscribe after seeing posts they like, so if they get to see the body of a good post they’re more likely to subscribe than if they only see the title and the paywall. But I guess if this effect mostly affects would-be free subscribers then the effect mostly matters insofar as free subscribers lead to (other) paid subscriptions.
(I say mostly since I think high view/subscriber counts are nice to have even without pay.)

Arjun Panickssery 3 Jun 2024 19:31 UTC
12 points
4
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
Paid-only Substack posts get you money from people who are willing to pay for the posts, but reduce both (a) views on the paid posts themselves and (b) related subscriber growth (which could in theory drive longer-term profit).
So if two strategies are
1. entice users with free posts but keep the best posts behind a paywall
2. make the best posts free but put the worst posts behind the paywall
then regarding (b) above. the second strategy has less risk of prematurely stunting subscriber growth, since the best posts are still free. Regarding (a), it’s much less bad to lose view counts on your worst posts.

Arjun Panickssery 24 May 2024 14:07 UTC
12 points
8
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
[Book Review] The 8 Mansion Murders by Takemaru Abiko
As a kid I read a lot of the Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot canon. Recently I learned that there’s a Japanese genre of honkaku (“orthodox”) mystery novels whose gimmick is a fastidious devotion to the “fair play” principles of Golden Age detective fiction, where the author is expected to provide everything that the attentive reader needs to come up with the solution himself. It looks like a lot of these honkaku mysteries include diagrams of relevant locations, genre-savvy characters, and a puzzle-like aesthetic. A bunch have been translated by Locked Room International.
The title of The 8 Mansion Murders doesn’t refer to the number of murders, but to murders committed in the “8 Mansion,” a mansion designed in the shape of an 8 by the eccentric industrialist who lives there with his family (diagrams show the reader the layout). The book is pleasant and quick—it didn’t feel like much over 50,000 words. Some elements feel very Japanese, like the detective’s comic-relief sidekick who suffers increasingly serious physical-comedy injuries. The conclusion definitely fits the fair-play genre in that it makes sense, could be inferred from the clues, is generally ridiculous, and doesn’t offer much in the way of motive.
If you like mystery novels, I would recommend reading one of these honkaku mysteries for the novelty. Maybe not this one, since there are more famous ones (this one was on libgen).

Arjun Panickssery 23 May 2024 15:13 UTC
54 points
17
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
Ask LLMs for feedback on “the” rather than “my” essay/response/code, to get more critical feedback.
Seems true anecdotally, and prompting GPT-4 to give a score between 1 and 5 for ~100 poems/stories/descriptions resulted in an average score of 4.26 when prompted with “Score my …” versus an average score of 4.0 when prompted with “Score the …” (code).

Arjun Panickssery 20 May 2024 16:02 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Stephen Fowler’s Shortform
https://x.com/panickssery/status/1792586407623393435

Arjun Panickssery 29 Apr 2024 16:30 UTC
7 points
−3
in reply to: metachirality’s comment on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
If I understand the term “double crux” correctly, to say that something is a double crux is just to say that it is “crucial to our disagreement.”

Arjun Panickssery 29 Apr 2024 14:08 UTC
3 points
−6
on: Arjun Panickssery’s Shortform
Quick Take: People should not say the word “cruxy” when already there exists the word “crucial.” | Twitter
Crucial sometimes just means “important” but has a primary meaning of “decisive” or “pivotal” (it also derives from the word “crux”). This is what’s meant by a “crucial battle” or “crucial role” or “crucial game (in a tournament)” and so on.

So if Alice and Bob agree that Alice will work hard on her upcoming exam, but only Bob thinks that she will fail her exam—because he thinks that she will study the wrong topics (h/t @Saul Munn)—then they might have this conversation:
Bob: You’ll fail
Alice: I won’t, because I’ll study hard.
Bob: That’s not crucial to our disagreement.