interstice

• intersticeApr 25, 2025, 3:50 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_green­blatt’s Shortform

  but there seemingly are some unintuitive reasons why clever approaches for doing the later could be better

  Because there might be some other programs with a lot of computational resources which scan through simple universes looking for programs to run?

  Alien civilizations might race to the bottom by spending resources making their civilization easier to point at

  This one doesn’t feel so unintuitive to me since “easy to point at” is somewhat like “has a lot of copies” so it’s kinda similar to the biological desire to reproduce(though I assume you’re alluding to another motivation for becoming easy to point at?)

• intersticeApr 4, 2025, 2:34 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: On Down­votes, Cul­tural Fit, and Why I Won’t Be Post­ing Again

  Still, this is not a truth-maximizing website

  I mean, I agree with this, but popularity has a better correlation with truth here compared with any other website—or more broadly, social group—that I know of. And actually, I think it’s probably not possible for a relatively open venue like this to be perfectly truth-seeking. To go further in that direction, I think you ultimately need some sort of institutional design to explicitly reward accuracy, like prediction markets. But the ways in which LW differs from pure truth-and-importance-seeking don’t strike me as entirely bad things either—posts which are inspiring or funny get upvoted more, for instance. I think it would be difficult to nucleate a community focused on truth-seeking without “emotional energy” of this sort.

• intersticeApr 4, 2025, 2:19 PM

  23 points

  15

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  Or disadvantage, because it makes it harder to make long-term plans and commitments?

• intersticeApr 4, 2025, 2:42 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Ex­ist­ing UDTs test the limits of Bayesi­anism (and con­sis­tency)

  It’s rare to see someone with the prerequisites for understanding the arguments (e.g. AIT and metamathematics) trying to push back on this

  My view is probably different from Cole’s, but it has struck me that the universe seems to have a richer mathematical structure than one might expect given a generic AIT-ish view(e.g. continuous space/​time, quantum mechanics, diffeomorphism invariance/​gauge invariance), so we should perhaps update that the space of mathematical structures instantiating life/​sentience might be narrower than it initially appears(that is, if “generic” mathematical structures support life/​agency, we should expect ourselves to be in a generic universe, but instead we seem to be in a richly structured universe, so this is an update that maybe we can only be in a rich/​structured universe[or that life/​agency is just much more likely to arise in such a universe]). Taken to an extreme, perhaps it’s possible to derive a priori that the universe has to look like the standard model. (Of course, you could run the standard model on a Turing machine, so the statement would have to be about how the universe relates/​appears to agents inhabiting it, not its ultimate ontology which is inaccessible since any Turing-complete structure can simulate any other)

• intersticeApr 1, 2025, 1:29 AM

  7 points

  7

  in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: On Down­votes, Cul­tural Fit, and Why I Won’t Be Post­ing Again

  They care if you have a PhD, they don’t care if you have researched something for 5 years in your own free time.

  I don’t think this is right. If anything, the median lw user would be more likely to trust a random blogger who researched a topic on their own for 5 years vs a PhD, assuming the blogger is good at presenting their ideas in a persuasive manner.

Hal­i­fax – ACX Mee­tups Every­where Spring 2025

• intersticeMar 24, 2025, 7:40 PM

  12 points

  4

  in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Will Je­sus Christ re­turn in an elec­tion year?

  Marketing. It was odd enough for you to post about on LW!

• intersticeFeb 28, 2025, 12:34 AM

  9 points

  4

  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: You can just wear a suit

  Wearing a suit in an inappropriate context is like wearing a fedora. It says “I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things”

  This is far too broadly stated, the actual message people will take away from an unexpected suit is verrrrry context-dependent, depending on (among other things) who the suit-wearer is, who the people observing are, how the suit-wearer carries himself, the particular situation the suit is worn in, etc. etc. etc. Judging from the post it sounds like those things create an overall favorable impression for lsusr?(it’s hard to tell from just a post of course, but still)

• intersticeFeb 16, 2025, 10:49 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  But I still have a problem with the post’s tone because if you really internalized that “you” are the player, then your reaction to the informational content should be like “I’m a beyond-‘human’ uncontrollable force, BOOYEAH!!”, not “I’m a beyond-human uncontrollable force, ewww tentacles😣”

• intersticeFeb 16, 2025, 7:36 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  Goodness maximizing as undefined without an arbitrary choice of values

  By “(non-socially-constructed) Goodness” I mean the goodness of a state of affairs as it actually seems to that particular person really-deep-down. Which can have both selfish—perhaps “arbitrary” from a certain perspective—and non-selfish components.

• intersticeFeb 15, 2025, 10:33 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Player vs. Char­ac­ter: A Two-Level Model of Ethics

  I changed my mind about this, I actually think “lovecraftian horror” might be somewhat better than “monkey” as a mental image, but maybe “(non-socially-constructed)-Goodness-Maximizing AGI” or “void from which things spontaneously arise” or “the voice of God” could be even better?

• intersticeFeb 9, 2025, 1:42 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: omnizoid’s comment on: Keep­ing it (less than) real: Against ℶ₂ pos­si­ble peo­ple or worlds

  He doesn’t only talk about properties but also what people actually are according to our best physical theories, which is continuous wavefunctions—of which there are only beth-1.

• intersticeFeb 5, 2025, 2:11 AM

  4 points

  4

  in reply to: lumpenspace’s comment on: Nick Land: Orthogonality

  Sadly my perception is that there are some lesswrongers who reflexively downvote anything they perceive as “weird”, sometimes without thinking the content through very carefully—especially if it contradicts site orthodoxy in an unapologetic manner.

AI Timelines & Strategy

• intersticeDec 28, 2024, 10:37 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: notfnofn’s comment on: No, the Poly­mar­ket price does not mean we can im­me­di­ately con­clude what the prob­a­bil­ity of a bird flu pan­demic is. We also need to know the in­ter­est rate!

  VC money. That disclaimer was misleading, they don’t have fees on any markets.

• intersticeDec 28, 2024, 8:12 PM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: notfnofn’s comment on: No, the Poly­mar­ket price does not mean we can im­me­di­ately con­clude what the prob­a­bil­ity of a bird flu pan­demic is. We also need to know the in­ter­est rate!

  Polymarket pays for the gas fees themselves, users don’t have to pay any.

• intersticeDec 18, 2024, 3:31 AM

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: Recurrented’s comment on: bend­ing light

  Liked the post btw!

• intersticeDec 18, 2024, 12:17 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: bend­ing light

  Also

  √1 = 2

  √1 = ±1

• intersticeDec 12, 2024, 3:00 AM

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: G’s comment on: Post-Quan­tum In­vest­ing: Dump Crypto for In­dex Funds and Real Es­tate?

  The question is how we should extrapolate, and in particular if we should extrapolate faster than experts currently predict. You would need to show that Willow represents unusually fast progress relative to expert predictions. It’s not enough to say that it seems very impressive.

• intersticeDec 11, 2024, 5:15 PM

  5 points

  7

  on: Post-Quan­tum In­vest­ing: Dump Crypto for In­dex Funds and Real Es­tate?

  I don’t see how your first bullet point is much evidence for the second, unless you have reason to believe that the Willow chip has a level of performance much greater than experts predicted at this point in time.