nim

Karma: 1,291

nim May 29, 2025, 10:38 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: contrejour’s comment on: What college major should I choose if I am unsure?
There will be times when fear is telling you something correct and actionable, and should be heeded.

There will be many, many times when fear is telling you lies.

This is one of many opportunities to practice telling the difference.

I hope that math gives you a chance to see yourself overcome a personal challenge—observation shapes self-perception, and I think it’s better to perceive oneself as capable of overcoming hard things than otherwise.

The funny thing about numeracy is that it does double duty in the modern era: First, it scares away so many people that competition is reduced for certain jobs, and in turn, compensation tends to be higher for them.

Second and much more relevantly, slogging through calculus teaches you to notice certain categories of problem and form expectations about how their answers should look. You don’t have to keep on doing calculus once you’ve figured out how to use it, just like you don’t have to keep on taking driver’s ed class once you’ve gotten your license. But having a background in higher math—get through basic calculus and also give formal logic a shot; it’s a radically different flavor and can be much more palatable for some—can make it feel natural and obvious to stay on the correct side of compound interest at all times, which is critical for comfortably sustaining oneself in the current world. Money is math; financial instruments are math. Salary negotiation, like “should I push for higher base compensation or a bigger sign-on bonus or stock, and how does this depend on the type of stock”, is a form of math problem that tricks people into choosing lower over higher total compensation very frequently.

I hope that you can choose the path for yourself where you do not have to live in fear, nor wonder how much better things could have been if you’d just been a little braver. And if you want to commiserate about math, you’re welcome to mail me or whatever—it was my least favorite subject in school and I’ve failed many classes in it over the years, but the tech for finding interesting snippets of it and knitting them together into better general knowledge has improved vastly since I was in university.

nim May 28, 2025, 7:53 PM
2 points
0
on: What college major should I choose if I am unsure?
Way to bury the lede there—you’re not “unsure”, you’re too easily daunted by mathematics.

You should stop running away from things that challenge you, and figure out how to enjoy the math that you’ve been getting stuck on. Look at it as a concrete example of the general life skill of improving yourself, if you like. It’s 2025; we are right this moment in the sweet spot of LLMs being cheaper than they’ll probably end up eventually (remember Uber and Lyft pricing back when they were new?), so you have a superintelligent tutor in your pocket that can do literally anything you can imagine to make maths more approachable.

Got a favorite fandom? I’ll bet any modern LLM can write decent fiction of it where your favorite characters learn and use the math you’re trying to wrap your head around. Prefer learning by examples? It’ll make you more examples than you’ve got time to read. Want to learn by listening to humans chat about it? notebooklm generates podcasts, or any of them can help direct you toward human-created content that matches your exact preferences. I don’t know what the fix will be for you, but I know that tackling your actual problem and figuring out how to pass classes you start off hating will improve the ecosystem of your overall capabilities far more than any major switch you could do right now.

If you solve your problem with math and still hate your major, then you can pivot into something else with the new life skill of working around problem classes in order to pursue your goals. If you don’t solve your problem with math now, you’ll see yourself being the kind of person who runs and hides when tasks get difficult which will reinforce that as part of your self-image, and you also probably won’t get as wealthy and successful as you would in the timelines where you prioritize the skill of numeracy.

nim May 20, 2025, 5:44 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Once we cure aging, what happens to prisoners serving life sentences?
I’ve never seen anything against that in public cryonics signup paperwork, but that would be a great question to ask one of the labs offering it!

The legal system would probably start caring a lot more about prohibiting it once we figure out how to get people back after cryonics.

nim May 20, 2025, 5:42 PM
5 points
0
on: Once we cure aging, what happens to prisoners serving life sentences?
I was with you right up to the part where I heard you implying that any large group of people can be effectively compelled to take any medication consistently over a long period of time. If you have some great way to get everyone to take all the drugs they’re supposed to, then pretty please apply it right now to causing people to take their full courses of prescribed antibiotics instead of just stopping once they “feel better”, and that’ll help slow down our accidental development of resistant bacteria.

Epileptics are a convenient example, because it’s so hard to imagine anyone insisting that they wouldn’t be themself without their seizures, and we don’t hear much about people deciding that the side effects of the medication for it are worse than the disease.

I suspect that the reality of (ongoing) medical treatments for criminal behavior is likely to more closely parallel the challenges that schizophrenics encounter with medication. In that case, the perceived subjective harms of taking the meds are much more closely balanced to the perceived subjective benefits. Most actual everyday average people, the kind of people with the deficits of luck or judgement that often correspond to incarceration, act as if they deeply believe that they should stop taking a medicine once they feel better from the condition it was prescribed to treat.

And even if people can be “fixed” in a one-off treatment, I’m getting popcorn for the lawsuits about religious discrimination when the system eventually encounters a prisoner of a faith with anti-medical views.

nim May 14, 2025, 5:15 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
Mostly the benefit to me of doing the full stack of a project—design/cad/build, sketch/draft pattern/ sew garment—come from learning something new about the situation partway through the process, and being able to immediately re-open prior “closed” decisions from earlier in the process to take full advantage of what I realized partway through.

When I do a 3D printing project, my first test prints tell me a bunch of details about exactly how my particular printer handles this one particular part, and it’s low effort to assimilate those observations into changing how I design or orient or support it for future attempts. Or I can revisit the entire plan of printing a part and fabricate it in a different way instead. In sewing projects, my pattern design and mockups and the fabric I’ve picked all inform one another, and when I learn that the fabric would do particularly well or poorly for a given detail, I can immediately revisit the top-level plan and change the details to work better with the material.

This effect is more pronounced when I’m doing projects farther from my established skill set. I rarely get the benefits I’m talking about on projects where I’ve done it a bunch of times already and know exactly what will happen. Once I know exactly how something will go, it’s easy to outsource the process—“here, do this exact task on these exact things and it’ll definitely work”. But more often, I’m not yet at that level of expertise and familiarity, so I’m learning new things in the course of a project, and it’s beneficial to be able to apply the new insights wherever they’re most impactful. The friction of outsourcing a component, waiting on someone else to do it, etc opposes my process of applying newfound knowledge to the project’s entire top-level description.

nim May 14, 2025, 4:57 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: jmh’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power

The CAD design could be passed through a processor to generate the G-code (instructions the CAM processor reads and follows) and then some machinist would review and “fix” tool path or order to make the code more efficient for production.

This captures another angle on the question of whether one should learn a skill or outsource it: if the same person fixes the tool path and designs the component that needs the path fixes, that knowledge will inform their design choices on future parts. If there’s 2 ways you could draw a part and have it work how you need, then having the skills to fix the tool path and the knowledge to spot that one option would have worse path problems than the other will help you differentiate between the actual costs of the superficially interchangeable higher-level design options.

nim May 13, 2025, 4:17 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
In my experience (beginner/intermediate CAD skills), this depends on how clearly you are able to explain the exact part you want.

If you only want parts which are easy to clearly describe, you can hire someone to CAD them up… or you could describe them to an LLM and have it emit files that you can convert to your CAD of choice.

If you want something less well-specified, or you want to “think out loud” and continually adjust your part’s design as you bring it into existence, the friction of having someone else running the software becomes prohibitive.

A similar question would be, how much benefit do you get from being able to type over having the money to hire someone who has typing skills and a lot of experience? Maybe you’d be fine with giving up that control over what words go onto the page, or maybe you’re using typing skills for something like driving a game or a text editor at a finer-grained level of control than would otherwise be available. Same with CAD.

nim May 13, 2025, 4:08 PM
4 points
0
on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
For the pants, start with a pair that wash how you want them to, then take them to a tailor to adjust the shape to be correct. Then you have pants to wear while you spend months and hundreds on the skills and tools that it takes to compare with garment-factory quality on the hard parts like sewing through 4-6 layers of strong fabric.

Making pants nicely from scratch is a losing proposition on all axes except bragging rights, compared to adjusting an off-the-rack pair to fit as desired.

nim Apr 17, 2025, 3:59 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: denkenberger’s comment on: ALLFED emergency appeal: Help us raise $800,000 to avoid cutting half of programs
This reminds me that I recently learned about azolla—https://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/for-food/. Individuals who want to do hands-on experimentation could grow some and explore culinary uses.

nim Apr 9, 2025, 12:40 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: KFinn’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
(If the human has a more than a million times as much moral status as a bacterium, which seems likely)

Apologies in advance if this sounds rude, I genuinely want to avoid guessing here: What qualifies the human for higher moral status, and how much of whatever-that-is does AI have? Are we into vibes territory for quantifying such things, or is there a specific definition of moral status that captures the “human life > bacterial life” intuition? Does it follow through the middle where we privilege pets and cattle over what they eat, but below ourselves?

Maybe I’m just not thinking hard enough about it, but at the moment, every rationale I can come up with for why humans are special breaks in one of 2 ways:
1. if we test for something too abstract, AI has more of it, or at least AI would score better on tests for it than we would, or
2. If we test for something too concrete (humans are special because we have the DNA we currently do! humans are special because we have the culture we currently do! etc) we exclude prospective distant descendants of ourselves (say, 100k years from now) whom we’d actually want to define as also morally privileged in the ways that we are.

nim Apr 3, 2025, 5:09 PM
2 points
0
on: I’m resigning as Meetup Czar. What’s next?
I fear it would be a stupid mistake to pass on the opportunity to inquire: Where does one find the form?

nim Mar 31, 2025, 2:59 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: KFinn’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
Maybe. I think there’s a level on which we ultimately demand that AI’s perception of values to be handled through a human lens. If you zoom out too far from the human perspective, things start getting really weird. For instance, if you try to reason for the betterment of all life in a truly species-agnostic way, you start getting highly plausible arguments for leaving bacterial or fungal infections untreated, as the human host is only one organism but the pathogens number in the millions of individuals.(yes, this is slippery slope shaped, but special-casing animal welfare seems as arbitrary as special-casing human welfare)

Anyways, the AI’s idea of what humans are is based heavily on snapshots of the recent internet, and that’s bursting with examples of humans desiring animal welfare. So if a model trained on that understanding of humanity’s goals attempts to reason about whether it’s good to help animals, it’d better conclude that humans will probably benefit from animal welfare improvements, or something has gone horribly wrong. Do you think it’s realistically plausible for humanity to develop into a species which we recognize as still human, but no individual prefers happy cute animals over sad ones? I don’t.

nim Mar 27, 2025, 4:24 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Alene’s comment on: Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
“Humanity” is a weird word at the moment. I think it’s more of a “descendants of our ancestors” thing—I think LLMs trained on humanity’s content should probably be viewed as related to us in important ways, ways that a hypothetical LLM trained only on interaction with octopi or slime molds would not be as related. But this may be a weird view, so let’s ignore it henceforth.

I think the “benefit humanity” rule is actually much broader than you’re reading it as:

Secondly, as an animal advocate, I want to preserve the opportunity for AI to make a post that will benefit animal welfare, even if the post doesn’t benefit humanity.

Your welfare is intertwined with that of animals. You are distressed by their suffering. Therefore, improvements in animal welfare would be expected to cause improvements in your welfare. I think an AI making a post which benefits animal welfare would benefit humanity, because it would be good for all the humans who will feel better in a world where animals suffer less. To put it simply, I claim that all posts which benefit animal welfare in a way that’s legible to you are also benefiting you. Kind of a big claim, but I can’t come up with a counterexample—maybe you can?

Since there are humans who care about AI wellbeing and are upset by the possibility that AIs could be suffering needlessly, it seems to follow that a post which reduced preventable suffering for AIs would benefit those humans.

The rule isn’t demanding that posts benefit ALL of humanity. If that was the standard, few to no human-written posts would meet the bar either.

nim Mar 24, 2025, 4:50 PM
4 points
0
on: Delicious Boy Slop—Boring Diet, Effortless Weightloss
Thank you for sharing this! Does it scale well with varying levels of physical activity for you? Some dietary things tend to be great at higher activity levels and fall apart at lower ones, and vice versa. I’m curious roughly what your current activity level is looking like and whether the boy slop diet thing has worked well at higher/lower levels as well.

Since this post seems a potential gathering place for other extremely easy and nutritionally adequate recipes, I’ll also leave my boring-food go-tos here—these aren’t as cheap as yours but they’re similarly easy:
- Bachelor bowls: can of black beans, rinsed. Can of sweet corn. Optional, tiny can of olives. Optional, thaw some frozen hummus or guac (costco sells single serves fresh, both of which freeze great). Mix, heat if desired, add salsa (canned is fine). I find that 2 cans makes 2 16oz mason jars of food, and one of those jars is a meal for me. A jar of this is my go-to when I have to pack a lunch.
- Oatmeal. Put a bit of butter and a cup or so of steel cut oats in a pot, toast them till they smell nice. Add some salt at some point—start with about a half teaspoon per cup of oats if you like measuring things. Add 3-4 cups water per cup of oats (I add boiling water, because it’s easy to make in the electric kettle and parallelizes the “heat water” and “toast oats” steps, but you can add cold water and let it take longer). Optionally, add some amount of dried fruit. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20-30mins until you like the texture. Refrigerate it right in the pot. When hungry, scoop some into a bowl, add a bit of milk or water, microwave till hot. This is my favorite dish to eat as a brain reset for a couple days when I lose track of the difference between feeling hungry and feeling bored.
- The instant pot thing: Put whatever vegetables like being well cooked (potatoes, carrots, etc) into instant pot. Add whatever cut of lean meat was on sale. Dump in a can of enchilada sauce. Cook on the meat cycle. Canned enchilada sauce gets the seasoning right and still tastes good after being exposed to high heats. I’ve tried it with other canned sauces and some of them are ruined by the heat.
One aspect common to all these easy foods is that they don’t require much management of perishables. Your tomatoes are canned; the beef can be frozen; the veggies should be frozen. I think people who talk about healthy eating tend to underestimate the difficulty that some people have managing perishables, especially when cooking for 1, so I appreciate that you’ve tacitly circumvented the whole problem in your advice :)

nim Mar 24, 2025, 3:47 PM
4 points
0
on: Solving willpower seems easier than solving aging
“things that I expect I will be glad I did once I’ve done them”

I like this definition because it allows 2 different routes toward improvement, which you’ll probably need to mix to get the best results:
1. Increase time spent on the activities which are already on your “productive things” list. Taking this to the extreme would likely eliminate load-bearing forms of rest, and drastically increase burnout risks.
2. Improve recovery activities to bring them from “unproductive” to “productive”. You hint at this with reading a good book making the “productive” list but reading a disappointing book falling into “unproductive”.
The lowest-hanging fruit for me tend to be in (2): When I’m able to give myself an alternative activity that’s equally easy but less regrettable compared to an “unproductive” habit, and notice when to do it, I can often get equivalent results for the function that the bad habit was serving.

nim Mar 19, 2025, 8:45 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin

It certainly is not true on Earth.

Where is it cheaper per item to buy the same food or household good singly rather than in bulk?

Where can you get a single roll of the same toilet paper for less per roll than getting it in a bigger pack? Ok, now what if you need TP and the cash at your disposal at that moment is less than the cost of the bulk pack but more than the cost of the single roll?

When is it cheaper (time + money) to cook one meal at a time versus meal prep for the whole week? OK, now what if you can’t afford the whole week’s worth of food at once?

We might be talking about poverty at different orders of magnitude, and you might be writing off a lot of failures to purchase efficiently as “skill issue”… but being poor in skills and the capacity to hone them is, itself, a form of poverty.

nim Mar 18, 2025, 11:14 PM
13 points
9
on: Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin
Invert your thesis, from “the rich are so rich because they spend less money” to “the poor are so poor because they spend more money”, and it becomes much more defensible. Boots theory captures the “being poor is expensive” element that’s true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth—look at the markups on any household item when it’s sold individually rather than in bulk, and then consider what happens to people who don’t have what it takes to plan ahead and make bulk purchases.

If we’re being particularly literal about things, Ankh-Morpork canonically lacked fiat currency until the events of Making Money, so we might want to consider the other ways in which their economics functions differently from our own. They also have magic, and the deities who implement their laws of nature sometimes pop round for a cup of tea. So I wouldn’t rule out that Vimes’s use of boots theory as a full explanation for economics could be less descriptive than prescriptive—he lives in a world where enough people believing anything hard enough makes it real.

nim Mar 10, 2025, 5:49 PM
8 points
3
on: when will LLMs become human-level bloggers?
IMO, excellent blogging happens when people notice connections between ideas while experiencing the world. Good blogging often feels like a side effect of the author’s learning process. The author was there when they formed an idea, there when they had experiences with the concept of the idea, there when they revised the idea… so they can report on the experience of making a lasting change to their understanding. Or if not directly reporting on the experience, they can at least generate novel entropy which increases a human reader’s odds of following the author to a particular new or interesting concept which might not be directly transmissible through language.

LLMs appear to lack the kind of “background” thought process that causes one to notice connections one isn’t explicitly seeking. They aren’t really “there” during the processes in which they assimilate information, at least not in the way that I’m still myself while reading a textbook.

I think if we wanted to get blogs out of LLMs that are good in the ways that human blogs are good, the most promising approach would be to try generating blogs as a side effect of their training processes rather than by prompting the finished assistants. But that touches the highly secretive stuff that the stewards of the most powerful models are least inclined to share with the world.

To step back a bit, though, do we need LLMs to be good at blogging? If we model blogs as demonstrations or tutorials of ways you can use a human brain, it doesn’t seem at all obvious that they’d keep their benefits when generated without a human in the loop.

nim Mar 6, 2025, 7:22 PM
8 points
5
on: The Hidden Cost of Our Lies to AI
Don’t people notice the ways that seeing themselves engage in particular behaviors updates their own self-image? The payoff for being polite to language users is that it makes me see myself as the kind of person who is generally polite. The results of being mean and bullying would be that I would come to see myself as the kind of person who is okay with engaging in mean and bullying behavior to get what they want.

Or maybe everybody else has a skill at compartmentalizing which I lack? But I absolutely catch myself applying prompting strategies to human conversation, because the part of me which does that self-concept feedback loop doesn’t differentiate between my behaviors toward animate audiences versus my behaviors toward “inanimate” ones.

nim Mar 4, 2025, 4:50 PM
4 points
1
on: The Semi-Rational Militar Firefighter
Yes please, more please!

Your writing is more enjoyable than that of many native English speakers, and I am one.

Will you do a sequence with more stories?

Tell them the way that’s fun to tell, like here, and they leak rationality. The “systematized winning” kind, because it’s all rooted in finding ways not to die in situations where statistics would suggest you really ought to.