My government name is Mack Gallagher. Crocker’s Rules. I am an “underfunded” “alignment” “researcher”. DM me if you’d like to fund my posts, or my project.
I post some of my less-varnished opinions on my Substack.
My government name is Mack Gallagher. Crocker’s Rules. I am an “underfunded” “alignment” “researcher”. DM me if you’d like to fund my posts, or my project.
I post some of my less-varnished opinions on my Substack.
No tissue samples, just external examination. Not even bothering to guess at a cause. “ETD → use steroids to treat”.
If the new GP acknowledges that I have signs of ETD and that it must be caused by something, and that something is probably not allergies [ otherwise the steroids plus azelastine plus certrizine would likely have done anything long-term, and/or I would have any other signs of seasonal allergies to speak of ], that’ll be mission accomplished. So I’m trying to brainstorm ways to force him to acknowledge that syndromes have causes, which is not a standard most doctors I’ve ever talked with in this great state of Iowa have met.
I don’t know what you mean by “specifically requesting the differential diagnoses”. Care to elaborate?
I just had a conversation with an urgent care doc. I told the office I had a new ear infection, so they wouldn’t look at my previous doctor’s notes saying I’d been “somatizing” the ETD, and in the hopes that letting them come to the conclusion themselves would prevent them from having an allergic reaction to a patient’s “self-diagnosis”.
That worked, insofar as the doctor said he saw inflammation in my nasal passages and lymph nodes that looked like ETD. He explained what that was, and said I should try a nasal steroid. I said I’d tried two kinds [ Flonase and Nasacort ] and I’d been taking them for seven months, and the problem just kept getting worse. He said I should try a third kind of nasal steroid. I asked if I could try an antibiotic. He said no, he hadn’t seen any signs of infection, and thus he couldn’t conscion the risk of antibiotic resistance. I begged as sanely-sounding as I could. I said “I don’t have allergies [ that could be causing the ETD ]”, but he didn’t seem interested in determining the cause of the ETD in the first place. He said no three times to my request to try an antibiotic, and repeatedly said “Steroids are the treatment for ETD”.
I now have a follow-up with my new GP on Thursday. If you know magic words I can say to make that go better, I give you the floor.
I genuinely do not have the money at the moment to get my head scanned or pursue other options without a referral, unfortunately.
You know the phenomenon where men tend to score higher on mathematics tests and women tend to score higher on tests of verbal ability?
That’s because men have more real estate allocated to the space-processing cortical areas, while women have relatively more space allocated to the verbal-associative cortical areas. The two cortical areas aren’t morphologically-functionally adaptable or interchangeable. They genuinely do different things, and they trade off with each other for space in your skull. It’s said that Einstein had massive parietal lobes on autopsy; it’s also said he was somewhat dyslexic. It would make sense to me if both of those were true.
I’ve never met a “glance at a plate and see that there are 163 peas on it” type savant, but I’ve met “autistic geniuses”, and the reality of that group of neurotypes seems pretty well recognized by normies who have little reason to make stuff up about it. Maybe you doubt the most extreme tales of savantism [ why? ] but dismissing marginal savantism as an artifact of practice is missing the forest.
I’m saying that the way I apprehend, or reflexively relate to, my past or present experiences, as belonging to “myself”, is revealing of reflective access, which itself is suggestive of reflective storage.
If a hypothetical being never even silently apprehended an experience as theirs, that hypothetical being doesn’t sound conscious. I personally have no memories of being conscious but not being able to syntactically describe my experiences, but as far as I understand infant development that’s a phase, and it seems logically possible anyway.
you can get an elective MRI of your head if you really want to see what’s going on in there
Ha, I’ve been trying to get my head scanned for four years. Haven’t even come close to getting anyone to take me that seriously. Thank you, though.
Second, consider simulating fever
. . . Huh, that is a new one to me, thanks! I’ve been hanging out in the heat recently, so that’s convenient. I’ll see if it improves anything.
have you noticed any change in symptoms when taking antihistamines for other reasons
I’m actually taking certrizine, too, because I was prescribed that as well [ 80% of the doctors insisted it had to be allergies [ even though I don’t have allergies ] or else neurological [ makes little sense IMO ] ]. If the certrizine has an effect, it’s smaller than the effect of the antibiotics, garlic, and steroids.
prompted Claude (preferably Opus) to strategize with you for how to tell the truth from the specific angle that causes medical professionals to pay attention
This suggestion makes a lot of sense, thank you. Idk if you read either of my accounts of what went wrong [ Part 1 [google doc] ], [ Part 2 [blog post] ], but I [ perhaps arrogantly ] pride myself that I’m better at this than even Claude, for the moment.
[ These seem like real medical answers to me. ]
My perception of the wall is in reference to me simply in the course of belonging to me, in being clearly my perception of the wall, rather than some other person’s.
If you just separated such a process and put it on repeat, just endlessly staring at a wall, I don’t see a reason why would anyone would describe it as reflective.
Would anyone describe it as theirs? That access is reflective. It’s pretty difficult to retrieve data in a format you didn’t store it in.
For Charles Taylor, the first Axial Age resulted from the “great disembedding” of the person from isolated communities and their natural environment, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. The lifting out from a closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first cloud technology. [ -- Nathan Gardels ]
There is an analogy to biological evolution that may be instructive. When all reproduction was asexual, gene variants/mutations were “embedded” in the genome in which they arose, and their spread depended largely on the fitness of their “host genome” (vertical/clonal reproduction). With the arrival of sexual reproduction and recombination roughly two billion years ago, genes could now free themselves from their native soil and spread (horizontally) to new genomic lands. Sexual reproduction also brought a new form of selection—sexual selection—that depended less on the physical environment and more on the composition of the gene pool.
But sexual selection means the gene is more constrained, more “embedded”, not less, than it was under natural selection.
For asexual, species-less organisms, a gene codes for a thing and that’s pretty much it. It probably happens to be more advantageous in some lineages of organism than others, and it’ll be selected for in those more than others, but it won’t end up having wildly different effects on different types of organism, because their genotype-to-phenotype pathways just aren’t that complicated-and-mutually-contingent yet.
Sexually-reproducing species have “alleles”; a random substitution of a single nucleotide can become a problem for an organism so intricately typed. If you manage to find a mutation that helps one species, it won’t help others. It’ll screw with large parts of the hill they’ve delicately climbed.
Today I learned: [ brook, on the EA Forum, in 2023 ], independently [?] referred to sexual selection as one of the few available examples of mesa-optimization. Before writing [ this extensive treatment of the topic in 2024 ], I don’t remember seeing anyone make the connection.
I searched “sexual selection” on LessWrong for other prior examples. In 2021 Oliver Sourbut said
I think examples of sexual selection are adjacent but don’t qualify as gradient hacking
This search was also my first sight of the term “Fisherian runaway”; I think Fisher, like Darwin, had too narrow a concept of the spread of traits sexual selection ultimately controls, and Fisher’s influence was probably part of why Sourbut said that.
[ Ryan Kidd, 2022 ] IMO falls prey to this, but still decides that narrow examples of “Fisherian runaway” are mesa-optimizers [!].
[ lemonhope, in 2023 ], says
creatures can do sexual selection on each other instead of just getting random mutations
which pretty well encapsulates the force I think is actually driving a large percentage of modern evolution.
Other references [ none of which I’d been aware of before today ]:
Geoffrey Miller lays out the case in The Mating Mind that human creative intelligence, art, morality, and storytelling, all evolved under the pressure of sexual selection
[ Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2008 ]:
The chimp-level task of modeling others, in the hominid line, led to improved self-modeling which supported recursion which enabled language which birthed politics that increased the selection pressure for outwitting which led to sexual selection on wittiness...
...or something. It’s hard to tell by looking at the fossil record what happened in what order and why. [ ambiguous; I include it mostly because I saw it referenced elsewhere while searching ]
[ Also Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2008 ]:
In the case of hominids in particular over the last few million years, we may also have been experiencing accelerated selection on brain proteins, per se—which I would attribute to sexual selection, or brain variance accounting for a greater proportion of total fitness variance. [ ? last part is a confusing-to-me ambiguation ]
[ rogersbacon, 2023 ] has some comments on sexual selection which I think are just straight up backward:
For Charles Taylor, the first Axial Age resulted from the “great disembedding” of the person from isolated communities and their natural environment, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. The lifting out from a closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first cloud technology. [ -- Nathan Gardels ]
There is an analogy to biological evolution that may be instructive. When all reproduction was asexual, gene variants/mutations were “embedded” in the genome in which they arose, and their spread depended largely on the fitness of their “host genome” (vertical/clonal reproduction). With the arrival of sexual reproduction and recombination roughly two billion years ago, genes could now free themselves from their native soil and spread (horizontally) to new genomic lands. Sexual reproduction also brought a new form of selection—sexual selection—that depended less on the physical environment and more on the composition of the gene pool.
But sexual selection means the gene is more constrained, more “embedded”, not less, than it was under natural selection.
I mean, I think it’s like when Opus says it has emotions. I don’t think it “has emotions” in the way we mean that when talking to each other. I don’t think the sense in which this [ the potential lack of subjective experience ] can be true of animals is intuitive for most people to grasp. But I don’t think “affective pain-like response in octopuses in specific” is particularly compelling evidence for consciousness over, just, like, the fact that nonhuman animals seem to pursue things and react ~affectively to stimuli. I’m a bit puzzled why you would reference a specific study on octopuses, honestly, when cats and squirrels cry out all the time in what appears obviously-to-humans to be pain or anger.
Like with any other creature, you could just do some kind of mirror test. Unfortunately I have to refrain from constructing one I think would work on LLMs because people exist right now who would have the first-order desire and possibly the resources to just deliberately try and build an LLM that would pass it. Not because they would actually need their LLM to have any particular capabilities that would come with consciousness, but because it would be great for usership/sales/funding if they could say “Ooh, we extra super built the Torment Nexus!”
Consciousness increases your intelligence in a narrow way by helping you do a particular thing. Sometimes people can be ~generally smarter when they’re thinking reflectively but that’s not the same thing I mean by “consciousness”.
It seems very hard to define what consciousness or internal experience is, yet everyone is talking about it. It’s even possible that there is actually no such thing as consciousness or internal experience,
!! A Boldface?
See my earlier comment on Rafael Harth’s Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness.
Relevant excerpts:
There’s been discussion in these comments—more and less serious—about whether it’s plausible Boldface and Quotation are talking past each other on account of neurological differences. I think this is quite plausible even before we get into the question of whether Boldfaces could truly lack the qualia Quotations are talking about, or not.
In the chapter of Consciousness Explained titled “Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater”, Dennett sets out to solve the puzzle of how the brain reconstructs conscious experiences of the same distant object to be simultaneous across sensory modes despite the fact that light travels faster [and is processed slower in the brain] than sound. He considers reconstruction of simultaneity across conscious modes part of what a quale is.
Yet, I have qualia if anyone does, and if someone bounces a basketball 30m away from me, I generally don’t hear it bounce until a fraction of a second after I see it hit the ground. I’ve always been that way. As a grade-school kid, I would ask people about it; they’d say it wasn’t that way for them, and I’d assume it was because they weren’t paying close enough attention. Now I know people differ vastly in how they experience things and it’s almost certainly an unusual neurological quirk.
Second example: it’s commonly attributed to William James that he remarked on the slowness of qualia, relative to more atomic perception: “I see a bear, I run, I am afraid”. This basic motto—the idea that emotion succeeds action—went a long way in James’s philosophy of emotion, if I understand correctly.
I don’t experience emotion [or other things that usually get called “qualia”] delayed relative to reflex action like that at all. Other people also don’t usually report that experience, and I suspect James was pretty strange in that respect.
So even if everyone had qualia, yes, when we try to explain the contents of subjective awareness, we are quite frequently talking past each other because of the Typical Mind Fallacy.
[ . . . ]
I think what happens is that people—especially people like me who can sometimes experience deep, but difficult-to-quickly-unpack, holistic percepts with a high subjective level of certitude—use “quale” [or “jñāna” or “gnosis”] to refer to hard-to-describe things we would not know except by directly experiencing them. Some mystics take advantage, and claim you should give money to their church for reasons they can’t describe but are very certain of. So semantic drift associates the word with mysticism. [ Even while some people, like myself and Chalmers, continue using such words honestly, to refer to certain kinds of large high-certitude experiences whose internals frustrate our access. ]
Dennett and other Boldfaces seem [neurologically? I imagine] inclined to approach all situations, especially those involving reflective experiences, with a heavy emotional tone of doubt, which opens up questions and begs resolution.
[ E.g., Dennett writes:
“Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them.”
and this general approach holds in the rest of his writing, as far as I’m aware. ]
So given that people use the word “quale” [ which, again, like the word “vista” or “projection”, refers to a category of thing that, if we’re speaking precisely, isn’t real ] so often to refer to their high-certitude opaque experiences, it makes sense that Dennett and Boldfaces would say that they don’t have such experiences. Their experiences don’t come with that gnostic certitude by which holistic thinkers [like me] sometimes fumblingly excuse our quick illegible conclusions.
Does any of that sound like what you are talking about? Or am I not getting at the right thing?
Just like “good” and “bad” only exists in the map and not the territory, so might “conscious” and “not conscious.”
To some extent, if you don’t understand yourself explicitly, if you couldn’t write yourself as a computer program and can only access your own subjective self, the question of ‘what class of entities do you think is conscious’ comes down to ‘what class of entities do you think is Like Yourself in the Important Way’. I think the question of ‘what has moral value’ has some components that are similar.
However, I do think there is a specific ‘self-model’ component where, if we could all see them clearly, and we were all operating in Moral Realist Mode, we would all say, “Oh, yeah, that part, the conscious-awareness part, most things that naturally crop up on Earth that have that have vastly more moral value than most that don’t”.
I believe less ambiguously, on a purely epistemic level, that this self-model component does particular things and is necessary to function in a social world as complex as the human one—at least, for beings not so much vastly more generally intelligent than us that every cognitive task rounds off to “trivial for them for free”.
Edit:
A superintelligent being might not predict human behaviour by asking “what would I do if I was it,” but instead predict us by modelling our parts. In that sense, we are not conscious from its point of view. But that shouldn’t prove we have no moral value.
There’s a difference between modeling something reflectively, and understanding attributes about it. We model computer algorithms we ourselves don’t use all the time. A superintelligence that didn’t share our consciousness or the structure of our sense of empathy could still know we were conscious, as well as other facts about us.
Even if I’m not thinking about myself consciously [ i.e., my self is not reflecting on itself ], I have some very basic perception of the wall as being perceived by me, a perceiver—some perception of the wall as existing in reference to me. I have some sense of what the wall means to me, a being-who-is-continuous-with-past-and-future-instances-of-myself-but-not-with-other-things.
To generate me, my non-conscious, non-self-having brain has to reflect on itself, in a certain way [ I don’t know exactly how ] to create a self. The way I tend to distinguish this discursively from introspective cognition or introspective moods [ the other things that are, confusingly, meant by “reflectivity” ] is “in order for there to be a self, stuff has to reflect on stuff, in that certain unknown way. Whether the self reflects on itself is, in my experience, immaterial for consciousness-in-the-sense-of-subjective-experience”.
I’m a bit confused what moral mistakes you feel we might make as a result of conflating moral value with the thing I describe in OP [ whether you call that thing “consciousness” or not ].
Do certain nonhuman entities—animals, possibly-near hypothetical AIs—seem like they would obviously have a subjective experience like your own, to you?
If the layers were totally separate, it would be too expensive to run them both at the same time. I’m claiming the hack evolution figured out is that the “what does social reality rule is happening here?” component is implemented as a self-model of the rest of the instincts.
I must stress the importance of those cravings, as it really is a bizarre upside-down reaction. It can make me stuff myself literally sick, “I must not move around one bit or it’ll leak out” retarded full, waiting for a little more.
. . . Huh.
I’m not a diabetic [ that I know of ], but I have this too. [ And I’ve never actually read anyone else describe something similar. ] It happens under conditions of prolonged mental stress. [ Usually but not always ] first my circadian rhythm goes, and get some amount of insomnia; at worst I stop being able to sleep more than 3-4 hours at a time. Then I start eating ridiculous amounts of calories, like 3,500/day when my RMR is 2,000 [ I end up having to or my brain basically won’t let me sleep or move around and do stuff ]. During these periods, I experience some of the same mental effects you’re describing, but as far as I know it’s not directly blood sugar. I’d been hypothesizing it was something to do with the orexinergic system, since that has to do with both feeding and wakefulness, but I don’t know.
Also, it’s not exactly the same as yours, since at healthy baseline when I’m able to sleep more [ and thus my body is less “screaming for sleep” ], I also am less hungry. And when the sleepiness/insomnia/ridiculous-hunger-level thing is happening, I do gain weight.
I feel this explanation is wrong, as I get mostly the same cravings regardless of insulin present in the blood.
I’m a bit confused. You only get the bad cravings when your blood sugar should be spiking, right?
I said that RCTs (the ones where you feed PUFA to humans) have generally found that PUFA does not increase oxidative stress. This seems like strong evidence against your thesis. Do you disagree with my representation of what the RCTs have found? Or do you disagree that it is evidence against your thesis?
Maybe the acute damage from PUFAs/HNE is too weak for some tests to detect; the load-bearing part for my theory is the cumulative damage. Nondetection of acute damage is weak evidence against cumulative damage.
So if there was an RCT where group A ate minimal PUFA starting from birth, and group B ate minimal saturated fat from birth (+ a normal amount of PUFA), then according to you, group A would be healthier as adults. Is that correct?
(In case it’s not obvious, I would bet on group B turning out healthier.)
Yes, an RCT where some people were raised on infancy with a very-low-PUFA diet and still developed metabolic syndrome would disprove my theory. Props to you for being willing to explicitly bet on group B having better health outcomes.
[Dynomight] found that
There was no clear relationship between PUFA consumption and obesity. There was a positive relationship between GDP per capita and obesity.
I don’t know how you get, from reading this article, “Dynomight concluded that there was no clear relationship between PUFA consumption and obesity”. The scatterplots for [ PUFA consumption x obesity ] and [ GDP x obesity ] look pretty similar.
For the record, I don’t find country-level correlation data very convincing (there are too many ways it can be confounded). I’m only reporting this because it’s the evidence you suggested I should look at
I agree, country-level correlation data can be confounded by many factors. For instance, Korea has doctored their statistics to look like they have a much higher rate of obesity than they actually have. That’s why I suggested looking at the variance, yourself, directly [ using “anecdata”/”intuition” ], instead of trying to find a reliable authority.
Sorry, looking back, I see I botched this in my last reply. I said “obesity and heart disease”; I should have said “metabolic syndrome and heart disease”. I expect country-level correlation data on PUFAs vs obesity, specifically, to be partially drowned out by the fact that I don’t think PUFAs cause more than 60% of obesity. I would look for correlation data on PUFA consumption vs rates of metabolic syndrome specifically, because I do think PUFAs cause more than 90% of metabolic syndrome and heart disease [ which I model as being caused by a slightly different mechanism that still shares the same source ].
Regarding Chang et al. (2020) and Hue & Taegtmeyer (2009), I just don’t consider cellular mechanisms to be compelling evidence. Especially cellular mechanisms in mice. I don’t think this is an easy position to argue for or against, and I don’t want to take the time to write a whole dissertation on why I believe this, so I will just leave my position un-defended.
Did you see Singh et al., 2008 [ second link in the above quote ]? They’re looking at C. elegans.
Update: The new GP took one look in my ear and said, and I quote, “You have a lot of . . . infection!”
And was baffled that urgent care hadn’t given me antibiotics.
I imagine it had gotten significantly worse over those few days [ it had subjectively ], as I hadn’t been able to stay supplied with garlic.
I’m now on doxycycline 200mg/day; Google says ear infections are usually caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, and that this strain in America is resistant to tetracyclines around 1⁄5 of the time. But new GP said if it didn’t work to come back and he’d try something else.
So barring further complications I seem to finally be in the clear.
New doc has been in the area for a while but doesn’t look/talk like he’s from around here; I would hazard a guess that’s why he was a lucky roll.