Benquo

• BenquoMay 14, 2025, 9:23 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ivan Vendrov’s comment on: Prefer­ence Inversion

  I don’t see how to interpret those verses any other way, which is why I strongly hold my opinion rather than cousin_it’s.

• BenquoMay 13, 2025, 1:27 PM

  0 points

  2

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Levels of Republicanism

  Neither is generically healthier considered in isolation. One wouldn’t want to strictly focus on replacing imports, or maximizing export value, but doing each when it’s more profitable to do so.

  Export orientation seems very bad for e.g. child care when fertility rates are below replacement & educational institutions have almost uniformly been deeply sabotaged. OTOH it would be stupid for most groups to try to grow all their own crops.

  The Rationalist movement is explicitly premised on the idea that people seeking to do well on crucial decisions can and ought to do a lot of import replacement with respect to knowledge at least temporarily.

• BenquoMay 13, 2025, 9:22 AM

  18 points

  0

  on: Ori­ent­ing Toward Wizard Power

  This is pointing in an interesting direction. In hindsight I wish I’d noticed your post on RadVac and written to you for help getting (or making) a dose, as I mainly didn’t do it because the prospect felt overwhelming and you probably would have been happy to help. The sparsity of social fabric that led to this course of action not occurring to me seems important to repair.

  The main reason I haven’t been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you’re describing is that it seems to me like there’s an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel, relative to people doing (or controlling the surplus of) primary production, to be legitimately impressed and interested. I’ve tried various ways of occupying the latter position without losing my mind, and gradually downshifted to just trying to raise good children in a politically non-naive way without lying to them, supporting their agency as much as possible, and crippling their agency as little as society will let me get away with.

  So I don’t know if I’m a good candidate for a primary contributor to the sort of event you’re describing. But the life circumstances you’re describing seems like a central case of the sort of thing I’d be willing to move and/​or spend some money to make available to my family; highly aligned with my vision here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​xNf9ZkjXLkFYPDscs/​​levels-of-republicanism

  I don’t know how to move this forward but I’ll try to reveal some information related to potential opportunities for collaboration:

  • Automation of high-value massage

  • Basic physical science education for a toddler

  • Some things I can do

  Automation of high-value massage

  Recently a friend wrote to me asking for advice^[1] about how to use a massage gun effectively. Valentin Rozlomii ( visceralcure.com ) is the one I learned this from—I decided to try his services out when Michael Vassar told me he uses an infrared camera to find areas of the body that have poor circulation to the muscles (they’re cold). One piece of advice I gave was that the muscles running along the spine are especially high leverage to work on, since if they’re chronically tight they can impinge on major nerves innervating large sections of the body, so they can be responsible for a lot of referred pain. This is hard to get at with a massage gun for obvious anatomical reasons, but Valentin is working on a solution. Last I checked he’s designing parts with a 3D printer but could use a mechanically inclined collaborator to get the whole thing working, so if you’re interested I’d be happy to connect you.

  Basic physical science education for a toddler

  My 2 ¹⁄₂ year old son Danny has various toy trains he plays with, including a couple Thomas the Tank Engine style trains. His Thomas is a Brio-style train you can push along a wooden track, but his Percy has an electric motor he can switch on and off that drives the wheels. When I found him touching Percy’s wheels to Thomas’s to drive Thomas’s wheels with the power of Percy’s motor, I decided he was ready to absorb information about gears and other simple machines.

  The iPad “educational games on machines we could find seemed actively bad, and the main apparent transfer learning effect was that he started hitting his little brother.

  One thing we tried was watching the David MacAulay cartoon series The Way Things Work, on YouTube. He hated it a few months prior when I offered it to him, but now he appreciates it some. We started with the episode on gears. When we got to an episode on flight, he was interested enough—and mentioned that he wanted to fly—that I looked up which kites were recommended on Metafilter and Reddit, and ended up buying an Into the Wind Kids’ Delta kite, which we flew on the next convenient windy day. I’m glad I bothered to find a nice one, as it flew noticeably more easily than the ones I remember from my childhood (which kind of put me off kites).

  I bought a toy gear set from a local toy shop with bolts to attach them to a board, and drill bits you can put on either a fixed handle or a toy power drill to drive the bolts or the gears. He’s getting proficient with that.

  Another thing I did was order a bunch of educational kits through Walmart.com. He enjoyed helping me put together an LED-powered windmill (he handed me the screws) and was excited to go out and see the wind turn the blades fast enough to power the light. He likes playing with the pulley set we ordered, but it’s flimsy, and I’d like to buy or build him a better one. Other kits I have queued up:

  • Water purification kit

  • Electric motor circuit kit

  • Battery-powered fan circuit kit

  • Fruit battery powered light circuit kit

  • Magic Schoolbus 10-activity mechanics kit we found at Barnes and Noble for $10 - haven’t looked carefully at it yet.

  Danny’s also interested in the idea of rockets and I’d love to give him some safe practical experience with very simple rocketry principles, so I wrote to a localish rocketry group asking if anyone would be interested in showing him what they know.
  
  All this is an inferior substitute to having friends doing interesting physical work that they are happy to explain and demonstrate to their very young new friend. Our live-in landlord is happy to let Danny watch and when safe and convenient participate in the home improvements he does. In another year or so Danny might be ready to learn some basic carpentry from the father of a childhood friend of mine if he’s willing to teach. Designing and bulding his own kite might actually be a good craft project for him after he’s able to draw simple shapes like rectangles freeform.

  Some things I can do

  I’ve invested a fair amount of time into cooking. I often optimize on time-quality tradeoffs but frequently throw things together from why’s laying around that impresses people. When I lived in Harlem there was a Paulownia tree with branches touching our balcony. I looked it up and found the flowers were edible, so I made cheese omelettes with Paulownia flowers for houseguests. Eventually I set up a drip agriculture garden on the balcony to grow herbs, which are relatively high value per square inch of space. We didn’t have an outdoor tap, so I bought a rain bucket to feed the drip system, and filled it up with a hose running from the kitchen sink about once a week.

  I also have some accumulated knowledge on simple nutritional health hacks that seem to frequently get good results when people bother to try them (e.g. for anxiety, try magnesium BEFORE trying benzos, the side effect profile is much milder and MANY people are deficient in magnesium).

  I’m not an expert at Tai Chi but I can teach a few things about balance; this causes people to think I’m a lot stronger than I am because with clear consciousness of balance (center of mass etc) it’s much easier to pick up heavy objects and move them around without much strain. Looking into Feldenkrais and other paradigms has given me an implied catalog of cheap-to-try mind-body heuristics that some friends report legit helping them, which I only bring up in conversation when I have reason to think they’d be actually useful (e.g. a friend reported hip problems that made me suggest wearing an eyepatch sometimes, which seemed to help with identifying and fixing lateral asymmetries).

  1. ^

     Here’s my whole response to the friend in case anyone could use the info.

     A few principles & heuristics:

     • If you are already readily conscious of the sensation in a muscle, and know how to move it through its full range of motion under normal loads, then the only reason to massage it is to transiently relax it in order to access muscles under it. Blank spots, ticklish spots, extremely tender muscles, or very weak or chronically shortened muscles are good candidates for massage.

     • Pay attention to which muscles are partial or total antagonists. If you have conscious trouble with one muscle, check for its antagonist or other muscles in the cluster to see whether one of those is a better candidate for focus.

     • Start with fast vibrations to superficially relax, work up to slower deep penetration.

     • If you start feeling warmth or itching that’s a good sign that you’re oxygenating tissue that needed it. Ideally go deeper once the warmth/​itching fades. I don’t have a strong sense of whether it’s good or bad to push through some muscle pain in the process; Valentin seemed to think it was fine as long as it’s not so painful that you involuntarily brace or something. But plausibly it would be more effective in the long run to be more patient. FAFO I guess.

     • The muscles running along the spine just to each side are particularly high-leverage since it’s common for them to be weak and tight, and they impinge on major nerves that innervate much of the body. You won’t be able to reach them well at some spinal latitudes holding a massage gun yourself—Valentin is developing a machine to help with that—but a partner or a lacrosse ball can help. Twisting around the point in various ways once you’ve got some pressure on it can help too.

     • Looking up images or videos of e.g. the deep shoulder muscles (rotator cuff, pectoralis minor, serratus, etc), the deep hip/​abdominal muscles (e.g. iliacus and psoas) was helpful for me.

Levels of Republicanism

• BenquoFeb 10, 2025, 3:36 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Hzn’s comment on: Park­in­son’s Law and the Ide­ol­ogy of Statistics

  I built the explanatory model based on my experience employed by and reading about other vaguely analogous institutions, but an acquaintance who’d previously worked at the World Bank said it seemed like an accurate characterization of that institution as well.

• BenquoJan 31, 2025, 5:32 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Pre­da­tion as Pay­ment for Criticism

  The post describes how predation creates a specific gradient favoring better modeling of predator behavior. While fact that most predated species don’t develop high intelligence is Bayesian evidence against this explanation, it’s very weak counterevidence because general self-aware intelligence is a very narrow target. More importantly, why would sexual selection specifically target intelligence rather than any other trait?

  Looking at peacocks, we can see what appears to be an initial predation-driven selection for looking like they had big intimidating eyes on their backs (similar to butterflies), followed by sexual selection amplifying along roughly that same gradient direction.

Pre­da­tion as Pay­ment for Criticism

• BenquoJan 20, 2025, 1:37 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  Contempt of court penalties for noncompliance with an investigative process is a mainstream example of 1.

  Burning Man has some aspects of the second, as do some camping trips, or simply living in a relatively harsh climate. Compare measured levels of corruption in southern vs northern Europe, for instance. When modern democracies fight big wars, the first year involves learning which parts of their warfighting institutions are corrupt and incompetent, & repairing or replacing them.

• BenquoJan 16, 2025, 2:22 AM

  8 points

  1

  on: Rough Sketch for Product to En­hance Ci­ti­zen Par­ti­ci­pa­tion in Politics

  Your proposal is well-structured and interesting but has a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed. Interest keyword-based filtering will primarily encourage politics-as-identity, which is actively harmful—it directs attention towards zero-sum thinking and performative identities, rather than creative problem solving. As Bryan Caplan demonstrates in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people already tend to vote to express identities and affiliations rather than to achieve better outcomes. We shouldn’t build tools that further entrench this destructive pattern.

  Instead, imagine a tool that:

  1. Has users journal daily about their life—activities, hopes, problems, and worries

  2. Uses AI to identify where their constraints are plausibly caused by or could be alleviated by government action, especially local government

  3. Maps them to specific opportunities for formal recourse, with guidance on process, likely outcomes, and practical assistance (like drafting letters or legal documents)

  4. For issues requiring collective action, connects users facing similar constraints and helps coordinate through mechanisms like dominant assurance contracts where appropriate

  This approach would ground political participation in the solving of one’s own problems rather than identity expression. While technically more challenging to implement than interest-based filtering, it would generate higher-quality engagement that expands our collective problem-solving capacity rather than just reallocating political power between existing interest groups.

  The patterns emerging from aggregated user experiences would naturally reveal systemic issues and preventive opportunities, especially in how regulations and policies interact to shape people’s choices and planning horizons. While building reliable AI judgment about political causation is challenging, it’s better to attempt something hard that would be beneficial if feasible, than to facilitate the destructive forces of identity-based politics simply because they’re easier to implement.

LLMs for lan­guage learning

• BenquoJan 13, 2025, 1:56 AM

  4 points

  4

  in reply to: Hzn’s comment on: Park­in­son’s Law and the Ide­ol­ogy of Statistics

  I agree that even if the book turned out to be entirely accurate we should not assume that this case is representative of the average development project, but we could still learn from it. Many hours from highly trained and well-paid people are allocated to planning and evaluating such projects, which expenditure is ostensibly to ensure quality. Even looking at worst cases helps us see what sort of quality is or is not being ensured.

• BenquoJan 12, 2025, 1:49 AM

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: kave’s comment on: Park­in­son’s Law and the Ide­ol­ogy of Statistics

  Wow, thanks for doing the legwork on this—seems like quite possibly I’m analyzing fiction? Annoying if true.

  Google’s AI response to my search for the Thaba-Tseka Development Project says:

  According to available World Bank documentation, the “Thaba-Tseka development project” is primarily referenced within the context of the “Lesotho Integrated Transport, Trade and Logistics Project,” which focuses on improving the road corridor connecting Katse to Thaba-Tseka, aiming to enhance regional connectivity and reduce trade costs at Lesotho’s borders with South Africa; key documents to reference would be those related to this project, particularly those detailing the road infrastructure development component between Katse and Thaba-Tseka.

  Key points about the documentation:

  • Project Title: “Lesotho Integrated Transport, Trade and Logistics Project”

  • Focus Area: Upgrading the Katse to Thaba-Tseka road corridor

  • Objectives: Improve climate resilient regional connectivity, reduce trade costs at Lesotho’s borders

  • Relevant documents to explore: Project Appraisal Documents, Procurement documents related to road construction and improvement on the Katse-Thaba-Tseka stretch

  There’s a good chance this is an AI hallucination, though; a cursory search of the main documents didn’t yield any references to a “Thaba-Tseka development project,” or the wood or ponies. I’m not familiar with World Bank documentation, though, and likely the right followup would involve looking at exactly what’s cited in the book.

  However, the other lead funder, the Canadian International Development Agency, does seem to have at least one publicly referenced document about a “Thaba-Tseka rural development program”: Evaluation, the Kingdom of Lesotho rural development : evaluation design for phase 1, the Thaba Tseka project

• BenquoJan 12, 2025, 1:15 AM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Prefer­ence Inversion

  Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a ‘society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets’ might be wiser than a child’s raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling ‘intrinsic preferences’ might just be ‘shallow preferences’ that hadn’t yet been trained to reflect reality.

  Now you’re making a different and more sophisticated argument—that the whole framework of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘external’ preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.

  There’s also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said ‘generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others’ preferences as calculated prior to such influences,′ I wasn’t making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn’t want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.

  This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I’m not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I’m specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself—where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn’t just clumsy teaching or social pressure—it’s adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won’t fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system’s restrictions.

  Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that ‘do poorly’ at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional—they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be ‘bad’ by design, where hypocrisy isn’t a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as ‘sinfully delicious,’ they’re exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.

• BenquoJan 11, 2025, 2:38 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  Different example—I said “instead”

  If you look back, you’ll see I was specifically responding to the hypothetical scenario about public admission in that comment. For your points about private shame, you might want to check my other comment replying to you where I addressed how internal shame and self-image maintenance connect to social dynamics.

  I notice you’re attributing positions to me that I haven’t taken and expressing confusion about points I’ve already addressed in detail. It would be helpful if you could engage more carefully with what I’ve carefully written.

  so if the musician openly admits and apologize for only being average they are ashamed because they are afraid of the reaction of the fan who clearly loved their performance (not their failure to abstain from what they believe is the cause of their average performance?)

  You’re introducing new elements that weren’t in your original scenario. But more importantly: you described the show as “a hit” where “everyone loves them.” Calling this performance “only average” isn’t accurately revealing adverse information—it’s a lie.

  but if they don’t mention it to anyone (therefore are committing neither a dominance nor submission gesture) they are also ashamed?

  In my other reply to you, I explained how private shame often involves maintaining conflicting mental models—one that enables confident performance and another that tracks specific flaws for improvement. Even when no one would directly know or care about staying up late drinking, the performer may feel shame because they’ve invested in an identity as a “professional musician” or “disciplined performer”—an identity that others care about and grant certain privileges to. The shame comes from violating the requirements of this identity, which serves as a proxy for social approval and professional opportunities. This creates internal pressure toward shame even without a specific idea of someone else who would directly condemn the behavior or trait in question.

  Are you telling me there is no conceivable circumstance where any human being feels shame for something which is totally alone, none at all?

  What I’m suggesting is that shame inherently involves at least a tacit social component—some imagined perspective by which we are condemned. This is consistent with Smith’s and Hume’s moral sentiments theory, where moral judgments fundamentally involve taking up imagined perspectives of others. This doesn’t mean the shame isn’t genuinely felt or that any specific others would actually condemn us. But in my experience people can frequently unravel particular cases of such shame by honestly examining what specific others would actually think if they knew, which is some experimental validation for this view.

• BenquoJan 11, 2025, 1:25 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don’t expect this.

  That’s why I distinguished explicitly between shame and depravity in the OP.

• BenquoJan 11, 2025, 1:23 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  In this example?

  Except frequently I think people who are ashamed don’t expect this. Imagine that instead of concealing they openly admit and apologize for being only average: then what? Aren’t they still ashamed?

• BenquoJan 10, 2025, 5:24 PM

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Dis­cur­sive War­fare and Fac­tion Formation

  I’m thinking of cases like Eliezer’s Politics is the Mind-Killer, which makes the relatively narrow claim that politically loaded examples are bad examples for illustrating principles of rationality in the context of learning and teaching those principles, so they should be avoided when a less politicized alternative is available. I think this falsely assumes that it’s feasible under current circumstances for some facts to be apolitical in the absence of an active, political defense of the possibility of apolitical speech. But that’s a basically reasonable and sane mistake to make. Then I see LessWrongers proceed as though Politics is the Mind-Killer established canonically that it is bad to mention when someone is saying or doing something politically loaded or discuss recognized-as-political precedents, which interferes with the sort of defense that Politics is the Mind-Killer implicitly assumed was a solved problem.

  Or how Eliezer both explicitly wrote at length against treating intellectual authorities as specially entitled to opinions AND played with themes of being an incomprehensibly powerful optimization process, but the LessWrong community ended up crystallizing around an exaggerated version of the latter while mostly ignoring his explicit warnings against authority-based reasoning. Eliezer’s personally commented on this (higher-context link that may take longer to load):

  “How dare you think that you’re better at meta-rationality than Eliezer Yudkowsky, do you think you’re special”—is somebody trolling? Have they never read anything I’ve written in my entire life? Do they have no sense, even, of irony? Yeah, sure, it’s harder to be better at some things than me, sure, somebody might be skeptical about that, but then you ask for evidence or say “Good luck proving that to us all eventually!” You don’t be like, “Do you think you’re special?” What kind of bystander-killing argumentative superweapon is that? What else would it prove?

  I really don’t know how I could make this any clearer. I wrote a small book whose second half was about not doing exactly this. I am left with a sense that I really went to some lengths to prevent this, I did what society demands of a person plus over 10,000% (most people never write any extended arguments against bad epistemology at all, and society doesn’t hold that against them), I was not subtle. At some point I have to acknowledge that other human beings are their own people and I cannot control everything they do—and I hope that others will also acknowledge that I cannot avert all the wrong thoughts that other people think, even if I try, because I sure did try. A lot. Over many years. Aimed at that specific exact way of thinking. People have their own wills, they are not my puppets, they are still not my puppets even if they have read some blog posts of mine or heard summaries from somebody else who once did; I have put in at least one hundred times the amount of effort that would be required, if any effort were required at all, to wash my hands of this way of thinking.

  Or how Eliezer wrote about how modern knowledge work has become harmfully disembodied and dissociated from physical reality—going into detail about how running from a tiger engages your whole sensorimotor system in a way that staring at a computer screen doesn’t—but lots of Lesswrongers seem to endorse and even celebrate this very dissociation from physical reality in practice.

• BenquoJan 10, 2025, 4:43 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  I agree.

  When applied to object-level behavior like stealing cookies, this kind of norm internalization is ethically neutral. But when applied to protocols and coordination mechanisms, this becomes part of how shame-based coordination infiltrates and subverts communities doing something more interesting—people who recognize and try to leave bad communities end up recreating those same dysfunctional behaviors in the better communities they seek out.
  
  In my reply to CstineSublime on pecking orders I explored how this works through specific social mechanisms like using self-deprecation to derail accountability.

• BenquoJan 10, 2025, 3:56 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  Admitting and apologizing for being ‘only average’ often functions as a submission move in dominance hierarchies, i.e. pecking orders.

  This move derails attempts to enact more naïve, descriptive-language accountability. When someone has a specific grievance, it corresponds to a claim about the relation between facts and commitments that can be evaluated as true or false. Responding with self-deprecation transforms their concrete complaint into a mere opportunity to either accept or reject the display of submission. This disrupts the sort of language in which object-level accounting can happen, since the original specific issues are neither addressed nor refuted. Rather, they are displaced by the lower-dimensional social dynamics of dominance and submission.
  
  So viewed systemically, such moves are part of a distributed strategy by which pecking orders disrupt and displace descriptive language communities by coordinating to invalidate them. And viewed locally, they erase the specific grievance from common knowledge, preserving the motivating shame.

• BenquoJan 10, 2025, 3:39 PM

  2 points

  −1

  in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Guilt, Shame, and Depravity

  We conceal some facts about ourselves from ourselves to maintain a self-image because such self-images affect how we present ourselves to others and thus what we can be socially entitled to. This is similar to what psychologist Carol Dweck called a “fixed mindset,” in contrast with a “growth mindset” where the self-image more explicitly includes the possibility of intentional improvement.

  In the singer-songwriter example, creating a good vibe with the audience generally involves projecting confidence. This confidence can connect to an identity as a competent performer, which maintains entitlement to the audience’s approval as well as other perks like booking future shows and charging higher rates. We might think of the performer as implicitly reasoning, “I must have audience approval in order to maintain my identity. I get audience approval by being a good performer. Therefore I must be a good performer. Good performers perform flawlessly. Therefore I must have performed flawlessly. Staying out late would cause flaws in my performance. Therefore I must not have stayed out late.”

  Meanwhile, improving as a performer requires honestly evaluating weaknesses in one’s performance—noticing timing issues, pitch problems, or moments where energy flagged. This evaluation process works best with immediate, specific feedback while memories are fresh. Or, in the specific example you gave, the performer’s process of improvement needs to include the specific factual memory that they stayed out late, which likely impaired their performance.

  When the good vibe with the audience is based on a rigidly maintained self-image, this creates an internal conflict: The same performance needs to be confidently good for maintaining entitlement and specifically flawed to enable improvement. This conflict creates pressure toward shame—the performer must maintain a persona that cannot acknowledge certain facts, while those facts are still actively used to make decisions.
  
  Some other prior work on this topic:

  • Robin Hanson:

    • A Theory of Identity

  • Paul Christiano:

    • If we can’t lie to others, we will lie to ourselves

    • Epistemic incentives and sluggish updating