danielechlin

Karma: 43

danielechlin Mar 28, 2025, 5:01 PM
1 point
0
on: Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
My only eyebrow-raise was at all the wealthier people who go to AA. There are a lot of broke-ass people at AA. If you can acquire alcohol you can get to an AA meeting.
Bigger question: is it a generally difficult problem to analyze like, “this thing claims to help, but only people who are motivated will do it, so we can’t really tell if it further acts positively on motivated people or if it’s a total useless thing?” Like if I’m motivated to learn and I read a book and get smarter you wouldn’t exactly say the book did nothing, even if the main thing is the motivation level of the learner, not the availability of the book.

danielechlin Mar 27, 2025, 4:52 PM
1 point
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on: Avoid the Counterargument Collapse
This is cool. It comes up with meta-contrarianism. There’s another concept I might write up that goes something like, “you don’t always have to name the concept you’re defending.”
For example, I wanted to do a meetup on why gen z men are more religious in celebration of International Men’s Day.
Just think of how the two topics in that sentence interact. It’s more likely I’m going to have a meetup on “whether it’s okay to have a meetup about International Men’s Day” than anything. And if I wanted to promote men in any broad sense, it seems like doing the topic without mentioning International Men’s Day is an entirely acceptable and useful idea. So it’s a “choose your battles” thing. If I think having a big argument about International Men’s Day is a good payout, then I can do that, but it’s definitely not, so don’t.
I’ve found this on reddit… sometimes it’s easier to defend capitalism by just explaining capitalism at least as I understand it without actually saying capitalism. That last battle where I get them to understand that they just agreed with a capitalist analysis nips in the bud some open mindedness we had just worked to create.

danielechlin Mar 25, 2025, 5:09 AM
0 points
1
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?
Keep in mind their goal is to take money from gambling addicts, not predict the future.

danielechlin Mar 23, 2025, 5:59 PM
2 points
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in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Legibility
oh ok you said “has obvious adhd” like you’re inferring it from a few minutes observation of her behavior, not that she told you she has adhd. in general no you can’t get an accurate diagnosis by observing someone, you need to differential diagnosis hypomania, hyperthyroidism, autism, substance abuse, caffeine, sleep deprivation, or just enjoying her hobby, plus establish whatever behavior is adhdlike happens across a variety of domains going back some time.

danielechlin Mar 23, 2025, 3:05 PM
2 points
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on: Legibility
Adhd is not legible just by being in the same room as someone.

danielechlin Mar 21, 2025, 5:52 PM
0 points
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in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: A Critique of “Utility”
Furthermore it’s pretty basic flaws by LW standards, like the “map/territory” which is the first post in the first sequence. I don’t think “discussing basic stuff” is wrong by itself, but doing so by shuttling in someone else’s post is sketch, and when that post is also some sort of polemical countered by the first post in the first sequence on LW it starts getting actively annoying.

danielechlin Mar 21, 2025, 5:49 PM
0 points
−1
on: A Critique of “Utility”
convenient fiction aka a model. Like they almost get this, they just think pointing it out should be done in a really polemical strawmanny “scientists worship their god-models” way.

It’s telling they manage to avoid using the word “risk” or “risk-averse” because that’s the most obvious example of a time when an economist would realize a simpler form of utility, money, isn’t the best model for individual decisions. This isn’t a forgivable error when you’re convinced you have a more lucid understanding of the model/metaphor status of a science concept than scientists who use it, and it’s accessible in econ 101 or even just to common sense.

danielechlin Mar 20, 2025, 3:03 PM
1 point
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in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Equations Mean Things
More specifically, the correctness of the proof (at least in the triangles case) is common sense, coming up with the proof is not.

The integrals idea gets sketchy. Try it with e^(1/x). It’s just a composition of functions so reverse the chain rule then deal with any extra terms that come up. Of course, it’s not integrable. There’s not really any utility in overextending common sense to include things that might or might not work. And you’re very close to implying “it’s common sense” is a proof for things that sound obvious but aren’t.

danielechlin Mar 20, 2025, 2:05 PM
1 point
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on: danielechlin’s Shortform
Claude 3.7 is too balanced, too sycophantic, buries the lede

me: VA monitor v IPS monitor for coding, reducing eye strain
It wrote a balanced answer, said “IPS is generally better” but it’s kind of sounding like ⁶⁰⁄₄₀ here, and it misses the obvious fact that VA monitors are generally the curved ones. My older coworkers with more eye strain problems don’t have curved monitors.
I hope on reddit/YT and the answer gets clear really fast. Claude’s info was accurate yet missed the point and I wound up only getting the answer on reddit/YT.

danielechlin Mar 18, 2025, 8:06 PM
1 point
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on: Noticing Frame Differences
One I’ve noticed is pretty well-intentioned “woke” people are more “lived experiences” oriented and well-intentioned “rationalist” people are more “strong opinions weakly held.” Honestly, if your only goal is truth seeking, and admitting I’m rationalist-biased when I say this and also this is simplified, the “woke” frame is better at breadth and the “rationalist” frame is better at depth. But ohmygosh these arguments can spiral. Neither realize their meta is broken down. The rationalist thinks low-confidence opinions are humility; the woke thinks “I am open to others’ lived experience outside of my own” is humility.
Experientially, yes, I’ve seen both “sides” be well intentioned, in reasonably good faith, both trying to act above a baseline level of rational, and a baseline level of humble along privilege concerns. IDK the solution but the general pattern should be something like reverting to “human” norms not “debate” norms, like use “I feel” statements and draw on what you genuinely have in common at point of debate. (If the answer is “nothing” then either your norms difference escalated to a real fight or you have different instrumental goals so go do something else.)

danielechlin Mar 18, 2025, 7:54 PM
3 points
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on: Prune
I’m kind of interested in this idea of pretending you’re talking to different people at different phases. Boss, partner, anyone else, …

danielechlin Mar 17, 2025, 5:24 PM
3 points
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on: Metacognition Broke My Nail-Biting Habit
Hadn’t thought of the unconscious->reward for noticing flow. Neat!

danielechlin Mar 16, 2025, 9:51 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Deii’s comment on: Any-Benefit Mindset and Any-Reason Reasoning
Those are two really different directions. One option is just outright dismiss the other person. The other is cede the argument completely but claim Moloch completely dominates that argument too. Is this really how you want to argue stuff—everything is either 0 or the next level up of infinity?

danielechlin Mar 16, 2025, 3:33 PM
3 points
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in reply to: silentbob’s comment on: Any-Benefit Mindset and Any-Reason Reasoning
Well, conversely, do you have examples that don’t involve one side trying to claim a moral high ground and trivialize other concerns? That is the main class of examples I can see relevant to your posts and for these I don’t think the problem is an “any reason” phenomenon, it’s breaking out of the terrain where the further reasons are presumed trivial.

danielechlin Mar 15, 2025, 11:24 PM
4 points
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on: Any-Benefit Mindset and Any-Reason Reasoning
I don’t think the problem is forgetting there exists other arguments, it’s confronting whether an argument like “perpetuates colonialism” dominates concerns like “usability.” I’d like to know how you handle arguing for something like “usability” in the face of a morally urgent argument like “don’t be eurocentric.”

danielechlin Mar 14, 2025, 8:32 PM
1 point
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on: A Sketch of Good Communication
Well a simple, useful, accurate, non-learning-oriented model, except to the extent that it’s a known temporary state, is to turn all the red boxes into one more node in your mental map and average out accordingly. If they’re an expert it’s like “well what I’ve THOUGHT to this point is 0.3, but someone very important said 0.6, so it’s probably closer to 0.6, but it’s also possible we’re talking about different situations without realizing it.”

danielechlin Mar 13, 2025, 5:18 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Daniel Murfet’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I thought it might be “look for things that might not even be there as hard as you would if they are there.” Then the koan form takes it closer to “the thereness of something just has little relevance on how hard you look for it.” But it needs to get closer to the “biological” part of your brain, where you’re not faking it with all your mental and bodily systems, like when your blood pressure rises from “truly believing” a lion is around the corner but wouldn’t if you “fake believe” it.

danielechlin Mar 11, 2025, 3:30 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Ben Wu’s comment on: Marcello’s Shortform
Neat. You can try to ask it for confidence interval and it’ll probably correlate against the hallucinations. Another idea is run it against the top 1000 articles and see how accurate they are. I can’t really guess back-of-envelope for if it’s cost effective to run this over all of wiki per-article.
Also I kind of just want this on reddit and stuff. I’m more concerned about casually ingested fake news than errors in high quality articles when it comes to propaganda/disinfo.

danielechlin Mar 10, 2025, 4:19 AM
4 points
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in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Marcello’s Shortform
By “aren’t catching” do you mean “can’t” or do you mean “wikipedia company/editors haven’t deployed an LLM to crawl wikipedia, read sources and edit the article for errors”?
The 161 is paywall so I can’t really test. My guess is Claude wouldn’t find the math error off a “proofread this, here’s its sources copy/pasted” type prompt but you can try.

danielechlin Mar 10, 2025, 4:07 AM
2 points
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in reply to: azergante’s comment on: Lots of brief thoughts on Software Engineering
You want to be tending your value system so that being good at your job also makes you happy. It sounds like a cop-out but that’s really it, really important, and really the truth. Being angry you have to do your job the best way possible is not sustainable.