Kinrany

• KinranyApr 24, 2025, 2:27 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Why Have Sen­tence Lengths De­creased?

  How does this correlate with vocabulary changes? If the common vocabulary expanded, is the information contents of sentences still decreasing?

• KinranyDec 22, 2024, 8:52 PM

  3 points

  0

  on: Three No­tions of “Power”

  The first and third kinds of power are a bit vague.

  They overlap, but don’t fully cover the “I have a gun and you don’t” kind of power.

  It’s not dominance because the person without the gun will or will not get shot regardless of displays of dominance. At least as long as the situation isn’t already about dominance before the gun comes into play.

  It’s also not a form of getting-things-done power because the gun is a potential that exists even if no one involved currently has any reason to shoot anyone.

• KinranyAug 20, 2024, 9:03 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: edbs’s comment on: De­com­pos­ing Agency — ca­pa­bil­ities with­out desires

  Agents want to be liquid.

  An agent created in a computer would be an exception to that?

• KinranyMay 8, 2023, 8:58 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Kinrany’s comment on: If al­ign­ment prob­lem was un­solv­able, would that avoid doom?

  it would make the problem more tractable

  The problem of creating a strong AI and surviving, that is. We’d still get Hanson’s billions of self-directed EMs.

• KinranyMay 8, 2023, 8:51 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: If al­ign­ment prob­lem was un­solv­able, would that avoid doom?

  Thanks!

  It has been explored (multiple times even on this site), and doesn’t avoid doom. It does close off some specific paths that might otherwise lead to doom, but not all or even most of them.

  Do you have any specific posts in mind?

  To be clear, I’m not suggesting that because of this possibility we can just hope that this is how it plays out and we will get lucky.

  If we could find a hard limit like this, it seems like it would make the problem more tractable, however. It doesn’t have to exist simply because we want it to exist. Searching for it still seems like a good idea.

  There’s a hundred problems to solve, but it seems like it could avoid the main bad scenario at least: that of AI rapidly self-improving. Improving its hardware wouldn’t be trivial for a human-level AI, and it wouldn’t have options present in other scenarios. And scaling beyond a single machine seems likely to be a significant barrier at least.

  It could still create millions of copies of itself. That’s still a problem, but also still a better problem to have than a single AI with no coordination overhead.

• KinranyFeb 11, 2023, 11:49 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: evhub’s comment on: Ei­genKarma: trust at scale

  This should be mitigated by pools of mutual trust that naturally form whenever there’s a loop in the trust graph.

• KinranyJan 21, 2023, 11:32 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Re­cur­sive Mid­dle Man­ager Hell

  When the number of layers grows, the only thing that really works is metrics that cannot be goodhearted. Whenever those metrics exist, money becomes a perfectly good expression of success.

  It might work to completely prohibit more than one layer of middle management. Instead, when middle manager Bob wants more people, he and his boss Alice come up with a contract that can’t be gamed too much. Alice spins out Bob’s org subtree into a new organization, and then it becomes Bob’s job to buy the service from the new org as necessary. Alice also publishes the contract, so that entrepreneurs can swoop in and offer a better/​cheaper service.

• KinranyNov 8, 2022, 11:34 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Ex­ams-Only Universities

  The ability to put up with bullshit is valuable: bullshit cannot be ignored once it is reified into real world objects, documents, habits.

• KinranyJun 8, 2022, 7:31 PM

  4 points

  3

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities

  Markdown has syntax for quotes: a line with > this on it will look like

  this

• KinranyApr 14, 2022, 12:15 PM

  9 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Lies Told To Children

  Honestly “fiction” was enough of a spoiler. “As a child, we were always told that every sapient life is precious.” made it a certainty.

• KinranyApr 13, 2022, 5:26 AM

  1 point

  on: Play­ing with DALL·E 2

  Suggestion: “sangaku proving the Pythagoras’ theorem”. I wonder if it can do visual explanations.

• KinranyNov 29, 2021, 1:15 AM

  11 points

  on: The bonds of fam­ily and com­mu­nity: Poverty and cru­elty among Rus­sian peas­ants in the late 19th century

  Since Semyonova did not care to look at things from the peasants’ point of view and mixed her research with attempts to convert, I wonder how many of the things she recorded were directly intended to shock her.

• KinranyOct 4, 2021, 9:29 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: The Best Soft­ware For Every Need

  Hmm, I guess conflict resolution would be garbage, but simultaneous editing is rarely a good experience anyway. Otherwise storing and sharing text files using a file sync service is fairly good compared to other options. Thanks!

• KinranySep 27, 2021, 2:10 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: Tyrathalis’s comment on: The Best Soft­ware For Every Need

  Thanks!

  I wasn’t aware of Etherpad. Other Google Docs equivalents seemed impossible to self-host and extend, so a non-starter.

  I agree with your overview:

  • Etherpad provides collaborative editing, but integrating it with other services will probably take extra work

  • Logseq has better structure, but worse automation

  • Emacs can do most things on one computer, but rapid sharing is even harder

• KinranySep 15, 2021, 10:10 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: The Best Soft­ware For Every Need

  Pieces for a general purpose personal computing system. Ideally:

  • Edit data by hand

  • Store as plain text

  • Self-host, access from any device

  • Write formulas to derive data automatically

  • Mix and match structured data (markdown, tables, nested lists, whiteboard)

  • Search and navigate, like any wiki

  • Automate through a web API and webhooks

  • Collaborate in real time

• KinranyAug 14, 2021, 12:12 AM

  7 points

  on: Slack Has Pos­i­tive Ex­ter­nal­ities For Groups

  The strict divide between high slack and low slack reminds me of synchronous and asynchronous companies: hybrids seem to work poorly.

• KinranyJul 20, 2021, 10:10 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Com­po­si­tion­al­ity: SQL and Subways

  Seven sketches in compositionality explores compositionality (category theory, really) with examples:

  • Dish recipes

  • Chemistry, resource markets and manufacturing

  • Relational database schemas and data migrations

  • Projects and teams with conflicting design trade-offs

  • Cyber-physical systems, signal flow graphs, circuits

• KinranyFeb 25, 2021, 3:20 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: asdfrty6’s comment on: Re­cruit­ing for es­ports experiment

  I mean, it’s easier to find two people willing to play than ten. So you’ll get more data. With one or two teams it will be hard to draw any conclusions at all.

• KinranyFeb 17, 2021, 12:50 AM

  3 points

  on: Re­cruit­ing for es­ports experiment

  It seems picking a 1v1 game would work better as an experiment.

• KinranyNov 8, 2020, 12:51 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: When Money Is Abun­dant, Knowl­edge Is The Real Wealth

  Caveat: ask each person to name someone they personally worked with.

  Hard to get right, but not sure whether it’s harder than knowledge investment.

  Wouldn’t have helped Louis XV. We might need infrastructure in place that would incentivize people to make themselves easy to find.