David Gross

• David GrossMar 12, 2025, 2:24 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: (Anti)Aging 101

  Where life finds death as counterpart, aging is unopposed, yet frames our understanding of both....

  What if we take a first-principles approach when defining aging, looking at decay as the derivative of the path between an 80-year-old and a 10-year-old across?

  Some of these sentences need to be reworded such that they mean something more precisely, requiring less creative interpretation from the reader.

  This post is a good example of one where AI assistance would be helpful. If you asked, say, Claude to identify the various assertions made in this post and then to rewrite them as grammatically-correct English sentences, you could come up with something more concise and easier for the reader to grapple with.

• David GrossMar 1, 2025, 1:42 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Ex­is­ten­tial­ists and Trolleys

  I assume the audience here is a mix of sophisticated people who of course know all about the trolley problem, etc., and newbies who are attracted to rationalism or the LW ethos and are here to learn more about stuff. So I write in a mix of modes. I can’t say I’m confident about how I navigate this… it’s just kind of a gut feeling that there’s room for multiple styles.

  As for your first point about ”...crazy quilt,” I expand on this later in the essay when I discuss how responses to the trolley problems show that commonly people sometimes lean on deontological reasoning, sometimes on consequentalist reasoning.

  For the second point, I think my “so from one perspective” caveat anticipates your objection. If you are first confronted with the lever-pulling scenario and think “well, this is just a matter of simple mathematics,” the second scenario reminds you that there are other factors to consider.

  For the third point, congratulations on having an existentialist perspective on this matter, but I’m confident that this is far from universal.

Ex­is­ten­tial­ists and Trolleys

• David GrossFeb 26, 2025, 5:05 PM

  5 points

  0

  on: Matthew Ygle­sias—Mis­in­for­ma­tion Mostly Con­fuses Your Own Side

  For what it’s worth, here’s an excerpt from my book on historical tax resistance campaigns that makes a similar point:

  Radical honesty means abjuring subterfuge—conducting your campaign in the open, in plain sight, without trying to take your opponent by surprise through trickery, and without trying to influence people by “spin” and lopsided propaganda. It also means studiously refusing to participate in the dishonesty by which your opponent holds on to power and deceives those who submit to it. Radical honesty has several potential advantages:

  1. Honesty provides a stark moral contrast between your campaign and whatever institution you are opposing.

  In The Story of Bardoli, Mahadev Desai described how this played out in the Bardoli tax strike:

  …a regular propaganda of mendacity was resorted to [by the Government]. The Government’s way and the people’s way presented a striking study in contrasts. On one side there were secrecy, underhand dealings, falsehood, even sharp practice; on the other there were straight and manly speech, and straight action in broad daylight.

  This contrast can make your campaign more appealing to potential resisters and to bystanders, and can increase the morale of the resisters in your campaign.

  2. Honesty itself is a threat to tyranny.

  The way people signal their loyalty to tyranny is to participate in the lies that bolster its power. When everyone around you goes along with the lies, it feels like everyone is loyal to the tyrant. Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote of how this worked under communist tyranny:

  Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

  But, he said, people may start to refuse:

  Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

  Tolstoy went further, and claimed that radical honesty not only threatens tyrants but constitutes a revolution:

  No feats of heroism are needed to achieve the greatest and most important changes in the existence of humanity; neither the armament of millions of soldiers, nor the construction of new roads and machines, nor the arrangement of exhibitions, nor the organization of workmen’s unions, nor revolutions, nor barricades, nor explosions, nor the perfection of aërial navigation; but a change in public opinion.

  And to accomplish this change no exertions of the mind are needed, nor the refutation of anything in existence, nor the invention of any extraordinary novelty; it is only needful that we should not succumb to the erroneous, already defunct, public opinion of the past, which governments have induced artificially; it is only needful that each individual should say what he really feels or thinks, or at least that he should not say what he does not think.

  And if only a small body of the people were to do so at once, of their own accord, outworn public opinion would fall off us of itself, and a new, living, real opinion would assert itself. And when public opinion should thus have changed without the slightest effort, the internal condition of men’s lives which so torments them would change likewise of its own accord.

  One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

  3. Honesty keeps your campaign from deluding itself.

  In a tax resistance campaign, as in any activist campaign, there are frequently temptations to take short-cuts. Rather than winning a victory after a tough and uncertain struggle, you can declare victory early and hope to capitalize on the resulting morale boost. Or, rather than doing something practical that takes a lot of thankless hours, you can do something quick and symbolic that “makes a powerful statement.” Or, rather than fighting for goals that are worth achieving, you can pick goals that are easily achievable but that aren’t really worth fighting for.

  Radical honesty gets you in the habit of avoiding temptations like these. By facing your situation forthrightly, and by evaluating your tactics unflinchingly and without self-flattery, you become more apt to make effective decisions.

  4. Honesty is itself a good thing worth contributing to.

  If you conduct your campaign in a radically honest way, you contribute to a cultural atmosphere of trust and straightforward communication. In this way, even if you do not succeed in the other goals of your tax resistance campaign, you still may have some residual positive effect on the world around you.

  5. Honesty means there’s a lot you no longer have to worry about.

  When you practice radical honesty, you don’t have to worry about keeping your stories straight, you don’t have to worry about leaks of information that might cast doubt on your credibility, you don’t have to be as concerned about information security, and you don’t have to worry about spies and informers in your midst who might blab your secrets to the authorities. This leaves you free to spend your energy and attention playing offense instead of defense.

  When Gandhi heard concerns that government agents had infiltrated the Indian independence movement, he wrote:

  This desire for secrecy has bred cowardice amongst us and has made us dissemble our speech. The best and the quickest way of getting rid of this corroding and degrading Secret Service is for us to make a final effort to think everything aloud, have no privileged conversation with any soul on earth and to cease to fear the spy. We must ignore his presence and treat everyone as a friend entitled to know all our thoughts and plans. I know that I have achieved most satisfactory results from evolving the boldest of my plans in broad daylight. I have never lost a minute’s peace for having detectives by my side. The public may not know that I have been shadowed throughout my stay in India. That has not only not worried me but I have even taken friendly services from these gentlemen: many have apologized for having to shadow me. As a rule, what I have spoken in their presence has already been published to the world. The result is that now I do not even notice the presence of these men and I do not know that the Government is much the wiser for having watched my movements through its secret agency.

  What’s the catch? For one thing, for a campaign to be radically honest it needs to have fairly tight control over its message. Not just anyone can be a spokesperson, but only those with the talent to speak precisely and to cut through the sorts of baloney that characterize political debate in this era of spin doctors and pundits and talking points.

  Another difficulty is that if your campaign already has a credibility problem, it’s going to take a lot of radical honesty to dig you out of that hole.

  Also, it seems that at least some of the benefits of radical honesty only emerge when it has become really radical and pervasive. Half-hearted gestures of radical honesty are just another form of machiavellian communication. If you’re not prepared to go all the way, it may not be to your advantage to put in the extra effort.

• David GrossFeb 21, 2025, 6:23 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: adamShimi’s comment on: Notes on Prudence

  I just finished that book. He seems to think of practical wisdom as being what helps with things like bounded rationality, fuzzy categorization, reasoning by analogy with previous experience, and developing mastery in a craft. He gives lots of examples of how institutions degrade practical wisdom by using rules or incentives to guide people instead (e.g. the practice of medicine being taken over by insurance companies, childhood education becoming drills to cram test-taking knowledge, judges’ judgement being replaced by mandatory minimum sentencing). And he discusses ways in which institutions can buck that to empower people to develop and deploy practical wisdom.

  I didn’t feel I learned a lot from the book. I think it could have been usefully reduced to a long essay. There was lots of rehashing of anecdotes, tangents into questionably-related subjects, and arguments that seemed more like assertions and applause-lines. Nothing egregious: pretty much on-par for mass-market nonfiction stuff these days.

• David GrossFeb 20, 2025, 3:23 AM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies

  There are some promising but under-utilized interventions for improving personality traits /​ virtues in already-developed humans,* and a dearth of research about possible interventions for others. If we want more of that sort of thing, we might be better advised to fill in some of those gaps rather than waiting for a new technology and a new generation of megalopsychebabies.

• David GrossFeb 19, 2025, 10:53 PM

  57 points

  19

  on: How to Make Superbabies

  How robust are these calculations against the possibility that individual gene effects aren’t simply additional but might even not play well together? i.e. gene variant #1 raises your IQ by 2 points, variant #2 raises your IQ by 1 point, but variants #1+2 together make you able to multiply twelve-digit numbers in your head but unable to tie your shoes; or variant #3 lifts your life expectancy by making you less prone to autoimmune disease A, variant #4 makes you less prone to autoimmune disease B, but variants #3+4 together make you succumb to the common cold because your immune system is not up to the task.

  It’s hard for me to tell from the level of detail in your explanation here, but at times it seems like you’re just naively stacking the ostensible effects of particular gene variants one on top of the other and then measuring the stack.

• David GrossFeb 19, 2025, 4:46 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes—Fall 2024

  • “[I]t is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies & to end as superstitions.” [T.H. Huxley, The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species 1880]

• David GrossFeb 13, 2025, 4:28 PM

  −3 points

  −4

  on: Virtue sig­nal­ing, and the “hu­mans-are-won­der­ful” bias, as a trust exercise

  I was interrupted by underpants gnomes while reading this. They summarized it for me this way, but I’m sure they left the good parts out.

  1. Trust that organizations like hospitals, nonprofits, and state bureaucracies will self-organize towards pursuing their nominal goals, so long as they claim to be doing that, even if those bureaucracies lack strong organizational incentives to do so.

  2. ???

  3. Bizarre policies like police abolishment.

• David GrossFeb 3, 2025, 3:36 AM

  2 points

  0

  on: David Gross’s Shortform

  I thought this quote was nice and oddly up-to-the-minute, from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), spoken by the character William Eastcote at a Quaker meeting:

  My dear friends, we live in an age of marvels. Men among us can send machines far out into space. Our homes are full of devices which would amaze our forebears. At the same time our beloved planet is ravaged by suffering and threatened by dooms. Experts and wise men give us vast counsels suited to vast ills. I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were close to us, within our reach, part still of our world. Let us love the close things, the close clear good things, and hope that in their light other goods may be added. Let us prize innocence. The child is innocent, the man is not. Let us prolong and cherish the innocence of childhood, as we find it in the child and as we rediscover it later within ourselves. Repentance, renewal of life, such as is the task and possibility of every man, is a recovery of innocence. Let us see it thus, a return to a certain simplicity, something which is not hard to understand, not a remote good but very near. And let us not hesitate to preach to our young people and to impart to them an idealism which may later serve them as a shield. A deep cynicism in our society too soon touches old and young, forbidding us to speak and them to hear, and making us by an awful reversal ashamed of what is best. A habit of mockery destroys the intelligence and sensibility which is reverence. Let us prize chastity, not as a censorious or rigid code, but as fastidious respect and gentleness, a rejection of promiscuity, a sense of the delicate mystery of human relations. Let us do and praise those things which make for a simple orderly open and truthful life. Herein let us make it a practice to banish evil thoughts. When such thoughts come, envious, covetous, cynical thoughts, let us positively drive them off, like people in the olden days who felt they were defeating Satan. Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to Him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not only every day but every moment. Shun the cynicism which says that our world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbours’ downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one’s own evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.

• David GrossJan 27, 2025, 12:06 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Benjamin Hendricks’s comment on: Recom­men­da­tions for Re­cent Posts/​Se­quences on In­stru­men­tal Ra­tion­al­ity?

  The sequence is rationality-informed but also picks up things from folk wisdom, religious traditions, etc. when that seems helpful. It references cogsci studies and insights when those are available.

• David GrossJan 26, 2025, 5:37 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Recom­men­da­tions for Re­cent Posts/​Se­quences on In­stru­men­tal Ra­tion­al­ity?

  This might scratch your itch: the Notes on Virtues sequence.

  Investigating a variety of human virtues, with the hope of learning how we might improve in their practice.

• David GrossJan 15, 2025, 11:26 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Fea­ture re­quest: com­ment bookmarks

  In Firefox, you can hover over the timestamp next to the name of the commenter, right-click (or whatever it is you Mac people do), and select Bookmark Link… to bookmark a comment.

  Alternatively, you can click on the timestamp and then use whatever mechanism your OS/​Browser allows to bookmark the page you go to as a result of the click.

The Philo­soph­i­cal Glos­sary of AI

• David GrossJan 14, 2025, 2:00 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Moder­ately More Than You Wanted To Know: De­pres­sive Realism

  I posit: high enough that you’re slightly overoptimistic about stuff you can’t control, so that for stuff where confidence itself makes the difference, you squeak in.

  FWIW, see Notes on Optimism, Hope, and Trust for more on this hypothesis, including William James’s speculations.

• David GrossJan 6, 2025, 3:38 PM

  4 points

  0

  on: Alter­na­tive Cancer Care As Bio­hack­ing & Book Re­view: Sur­viv­ing “Ter­mi­nal” Cancer

  All this sounds wonderful, but reminds me of people who have amazing systems to play the stock market and leverage $1,000 to $1,000,000. Of all the people with all their systems, a few lucky ones hit the jackpot by chance, while the majority muddle through or lose it all. The lucky ones assume the market has acknowledged their financial genius and go on to tell us all about it.

  If 5% of glioblastoma patients uncannily survive, how much am I supposed to update on hearing that one of those patients did some combination of plausible but undertested interventions during their recovery?

Notes on Altruism

• David GrossDec 12, 2024, 3:02 PM

  42 points

  4

  on: David Gross’s Shortform

  A prereminiscence: It’s like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.

  It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. Soon after it was doing it pretty well and you watched it with admiration as if it were a dog balancing on a ball. Then soon it could do it well enough for most purposes, you couldn’t help but admit. Then as good as all but the best, even to those who could tell the difference. And then we were suddenly all wet, gathering our remaining picnic and heading for higher ground, not only completely outclassed but even unable to judge by how far we were being outclassed. Once a chess machine can beat everybody every time, who is left to applaud when it gets twice again as good?

  If it had been a war, we would have had a little ceremony as we brought down our flag and folded it up and put it away, but because it happened as quickly and quietly as it did and because we weren’t sure whether we wanted to admit it was happening, there was no formal hand-off. One day we just resignedly realized we could no longer matter much, but there was so much more now to appreciate and we could see echoes and reflections of ourselves in it, so we didn’t put up a fight.

  Every once in a while someone would write an essay, Joan Didion quality, really good. Or write a song. Poignant, beautiful, original even. Not maybe the best essay or the best song we’d seen that day, but certainly worthy of being in the top ranks. And we’d think: we’ve still got it. We can still rally when we’ve got our backs to the wall. Don’t count us out yet. But it was just so hard, and there was so much else to do. And so when it happened less and less frequently, we weren’t surprised.

  And our curiosity left us, too. We half-remembered a time when we would have satisfied curiosity by research and experiment (words that increasingly had the flavor of “thaumaturgy,” denoting processes productive though by unclear means). But nowadays curiosity is déclassé. It suggests laziness (why not just ask it?)… or poverty (oh, you can’t afford to ask it; you want one of us to ask it)—an increasing problem as we less and less have something to offer in trade that it desires and lacks.

• David GrossDec 11, 2024, 10:22 PM

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Re­fut­ing Searle’s wall, Put­nam’s rock, and John­son’s popcorn

  The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn’t act, and the text doesn’t get translated.

  The popcorn map on the other hand doesn’t direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.

  You can say that “oh well, then, the popcorn wasn’t really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that really caused the consciousness to emerge from the calculating” and then you’re back in Chinese Room territory. But if you do this, you’re left with the task of explaining how a brain can be conscious solely by means of executing a calculation before anyone has gotten around to creating a map between brain-states and whatever the relevant calculation-states might be. You have to posit some way in which calculations capable of embodying consciousness are inherent to brains but must be interpreted into being elsewhere.

• David GrossDec 11, 2024, 6:22 PM

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Re­fut­ing Searle’s wall, Put­nam’s rock, and John­son’s popcorn

  The book in the room isn’t inert, though. It instructs the little guy on what to do as he manipulates symbols and stuff. As such, it is an important part of the computation that takes place.

  The mapping of popcorn-to-computation, though, doesn’t do anything equivalent to this. It’s just an off-to-the-side interpretation of what is happening in the popcorn: it does nothing to move the popcorn or cause it to be configured in such a way. It doesn’t have to even exist: if you just know that in theory there is a way to map the popcorn to the computation, then if (by the terms of the argument) the computation itself is sufficient to generate consciousness, the popcorn should be able to do it as well, with the mapping left as an exercise for the reader. Otherwise you are implying some special property of a headful of meat such that it does not need to be interpreted in this way for its computation to be equivalent to consciousness.