Said Achmiz

Karma: 16,834

Said Achmiz 13 Jun 2025 5:44 UTC
14 points
3
in reply to: LWLW’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed

I think most people’s most burning question if they were talking to a superintelligence … would be “is there a god? …”

“Answer”

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 22:22 UTC
−4 points
−2
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Said Achmiz’s Shortform

Everyone else who leaves critical comments does so in a way that does not so consistently feel like an attack, and I often feel like I can engage with them in ways where, even if we don’t end up agreeing, we at least had a productive conversation.

Of course they do, because the people who would criticize you in substantive, serious ways… just don’t bother.

If you see only one person saying a thing, then the correct conclusion isn’t “only that guy thinks that thing”—it’s “out of all those who think that thing, only that guy cares enough / is contrarian enough / has the time and energy / etc. to speak up”.

This is especially true if you actively discourage saying that thing.

You earlier gave the example of this 2018 post. Well, I went back and read through the comments section. None of the top-level comments were mine. The most critical comments were not mine. The comments that referenced the Sequences were not mine. The comments you deleted from that comments section (and whose author you threatened with banning from your posts) were not mine. Much (I think most, though I haven’t counted) of that comments section consists of strongly critical comments, written by people who aren’t me.

That was in 2018. But those other critical commenters either stopped engaging with you or essentially stopped commenting on LW entirely, largely as a result of this sort of “ban the critics” behavior. I’m the one who’s still around. You’ve had to resort to banning me from your posts, not because my comments were somehow unusually “adversarial” or “unproductive” or any such thing—nothing remotely like that is true (and I invite anyone who doubts this to check out the above link)—but simply because I haven’t gotten fed up with Less Wrong and left on my own, and am still pointing out when you write things that are wrong and/or nonsensical. That’s all.

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 22:10 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Said Achmiz’s Shortform

There’s something subtle about Said’s style of commenting that is hard for me to pin down that makes it unhelpfully adversarial in a way that I’m sure some people like but I find incredibly frustrating.

“Subtle”! No, it’s actually not subtle at all. It’s a very simple dynamic: you write something that is wrong and/or nonsensical; I point this out; you do not like this being pointed out. Well, who does? It’s embarrassing! Or, in other words:

Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right.

Schopenhauer also suggests a sure-fire remedy, to prevent such unpleasant scenarios:

The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment.

Hmm. Yeah, that’s a tough row to hoe.

I don’t know about you, but to me, “frank discussion, out of which correct judgments emerge” seems a lot easier and more reliable than “always be correct, right from the start”. Of course, if you banish from your comment sections anyone who tells you that you’re wrong, then you only have the harder option available to you. I don’t envy you in that case.

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 19:42 UTC
5 points
0
on: The Way of a Skeptic
Fascinating story; thank you for posting it!

You don’t mention it and the Wikipedia page also doesn’t say—when did Quesalid live?

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 18:27 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Said Achmiz’s Shortform

The ones that most stands out to me are our interactions on this post and here after I had implemented a soft ban on us interacting.

The first is a conversation (in 2018!) involving a whole bunch of people, not just me; many of those people’s comments were just as critical, and some more critical, than mine.

The second was a brief back-and-forth, certainly not “hours” of anything.

I think that you severely exaggerate.

I previously had a soft ban on interacting with you in my posts, which meant I would only reply to you once because we had long threads that just exhausted me. I thought maybe that would be enough.

But I decided yesterday I was done and I have the karma to choose not to interact with you on my posts

What prevented you from simply not replying to my comment? Even once, never mind multiple times?

I’m not a coward

Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but now that you’ve denied it explicitly—sorry, no, I have to disagree. Banning critics from your posts is a cowardly act. I think that you know this.

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 6:32 UTC
2 points
5
on: Said Achmiz’s Shortform
@Gordon Seidoh Worley recently wrote this comment, where he claimed:

I’d like to engage with you as a critic. As you can see, I gladly do that with many of my other critics, and have spent hours doing it with you specifically for many years.

As far as I can tell, this is just false. I mean, maybe it takes Gordon an hour to write a single comment like this one (and then to exit the discussion immediately thereafter)? I doubt it, though.

Maybe I’m forgetting some huge arguments that took place a long time ago. But I went back through five full years of my LW comment history (through the very beginning of 2020), and it confirms my impression that Gordon and I have barely ever interacted. The idea that he has spent hours “engaging with [me] as a critic” is, to my knowledge, just untrue.

(And we have never interacted at all outside of Less Wrong.)

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 4:02 UTC
20 points
6
in reply to: lesswronguser123’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists

Well I am not sure what conception of truth do you buy into

The simple one.

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 1:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: β-redex’s Shortform
As for this:

I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.

Statements of the form “I don’t understand X” (where X is a thing such that literally not understanding it is very weird) are a well-known genre of engagement bait (with several well-defined subgenres, such as “I don’t understand what [specific type of bad person, such as ‘racists’] even believe”, “I don’t understand why people [do common thing that basically everyone does]”, “I don’t understand why people don’t just [do some absurd thing or apply some absurd solution to some problem]”, etc.)

With such things, the greatest engagement will only come if you can appear to be totally innocent and sincere in your incomprehension. (If it looks like a “work”—a performance piece, posted for engagement—then people will mostly be reluctant to engage.) Now, as you no doubt well know, the best and most surest way to convince other people that you believe something is to actually believe it yourself.

And the outcome of these incentives is…

Said Achmiz 12 Jun 2025 0:58 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: β-redex’s Shortform

I think it’s a very common experience of writers that they have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not. I think this is true of Aella and her tweets

It’s true of Aella? This Aella right here:

By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.[6]

I remain skeptical.

But note that you seem to be responding to what seems like a strawman:

So I don’t expect that all of her popular twits are expected to be.

If you post 10 things that are all written so as to have the properties of “things that often—at least 10% of the time—go viral”, and 1–2 of them go viral, then even if (as is likely the case) you could not have predicted in advance which of those 10 things would be the ones that went viral, it is nonetheless absurd to say of you that you “have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not”, or that you are not consciously posting engagement bait.

Said Achmiz 11 Jun 2025 23:36 UTC
13 points
6
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: β-redex’s Shortform
That hypothesis is wildly consistent with the facts. Aella is a professional self-promoter. She has built her entire career on using various forms of social media to “build her brand”. Self-promotion is what she does. From Wikipedia:

Aella moved out at age 17 after a fallout with her parents, and in 2012, after quitting a job as an assembly line worker in a factory, began working as a camgirl, initially on MyFreeCams.[2][5] She eventually became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, making over $100,000 in some months.[5] By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.[6] After camgirling, she began work as an escort.[3] As of 2024 her main source of income was her writing on Substack.[7] She has also been involved in several startups.[2][6]

The idea that this is a person who does not know exactly what is and is not engagement bait simply cannot be credited. It just has no plausibility whatsoever.

(This is not an attack on Aella. It’s just—well, if you said of, say, a seasoned corporate lawyer for a major PR firm, that his public statements about some person or organization was simply him earnestly reporting his personal opinion with no thought whatsoever to how his comments would be perceived… that would be outrageously naïve. No, someone like that doesn’t just earnestly say things without any conscious thought about how they’re going to be received. Their professional specialization is in not doing precisely that.)

(No comment about any other “autistic rationalists”, since I wasn’t talking about anyone else.)

Said Achmiz 11 Jun 2025 20:22 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
Hmm… that’s quite a big topic. Are you sure that you want to have this discussion in this comment thread? I don’t object, mind you, and it’s your post, so I’ll follow your preference here. It’s not a “couple of comments and done” sort of thing, though.

For now I will just note that the view is hardly unique to me, nor even original to me; “EA is a religion” is something that I’ve seen quite a few people opine. Haven’t you encountered this view before? I am surprised, if that’s the case.

Said Achmiz 11 Jun 2025 20:19 UTC
44 points
37
on: Religion for Rationalists
It is bad to participate in organized religion, because you are thereby exposing yourself to intense social pressure to believe false things (and very harmful false things, at that). This is very straightforwardly a bad thing.

You claim:

You can find religions you can practice without being asked to give up your honest search for truth with no need to even pretend to have already written the bottom line.

And this may formally be true—you may not be officially asked to believe false things. But if your social context consists of people who all believe approximately the same false things, and if that social context is organized around those beliefs in false things, and if the social context valorizes those beliefs in false things… then the social pressure will be intense nonetheless. (And some of these false beliefs are fairly subtle; Eliezer discusses this at length in a number of Sequence posts.)

You say:

I also got asked about how I feel about religions and truth seeking. My answer is that you shouldn’t think of religions as being about the truth as rationalists typically think of it because religions are doing something orthogonal.

And here we have a perfect example of the damage done by religion. The claim that “you shouldn’t think of religions as being about the truth as rationalists typically think of it” is absolutely typical anti-epistemology.

Of course religion is about “the truth as rationalists typically think of it”. There is nothing but “the truth as rationalists typically think of it”, because there’s just “the truth”, and then there are things which aren’t truth claims at all, of any kind (like preferences, etc.). But get into religion, start relaxing your epistemic standards just a bit, and very quickly you descend into this sort of nebulous and vague “well there’s different things which are ‘true’ in different ways, and what even is ‘truth’, anyway”, etc. And then your ability to know what’s true and what’s false is gone, and nothing is left but “vibes”.
What links here?
- sunwillrise's comment on sunwillrise’s Shortform by sunwillrise (18 Jun 2025 12:08 UTC; 26 points)

Said Achmiz 11 Jun 2025 20:10 UTC
5 points
−2
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
EA is; “rationality” clearly isn’t.

It’s sort of true that there are ritual observances and holy texts… but nah, not really. “Rationality” is not some particular practice or some defined ritual; it’s just doing whatever wins. Thus speak the holy texts.

Said Achmiz 11 Jun 2025 4:22 UTC
16 points
1
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: β-redex’s Shortform

Or Aella, whose blog is exciting and interesting. But who posts comments on twitter like “I’m shocked that people are offended by [highly decoupled statement] / [extremely norm-breaking behavior]” when it is completely obvious that most highly-coupling / norm-following people would be triggered by that.

Of course it’s obvious, and of course she knows it. It’s engagement bait. You get money for having followers on Twitter. And it’s a way to promote your other stuff, too; to create “hype”, etc. All of that requires having more followers, and you get more followers by posting toxoplasma-style bait.

Said Achmiz 10 Jun 2025 7:52 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning
I’ll check out the sequence, thanks!

Said Achmiz 10 Jun 2025 1:39 UTC
2 points
2
on: Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning
Minor note:

Suppose there are two undistinguishable bags with numbered pieces of paper.

I believe that there is a missing stipulation here, namely that the pieces of paper each has a different number on it. (Otherwise, who’s to say that the papers don’t all have “6” written on them?) I’m fairly sure that this is what you intended, anyhow.

Said Achmiz 10 Jun 2025 1:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: CrimsonChin’s comment on: Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning
In order for such an experiment to yield useful data, you would need to repeat it some number of times (the more, the better, of course); and you would then observe whether the ratio of the number of “a 6 was drawn from the smaller bag” outcomes to the number of “a 6 was drawn” outcomes approached 0.5, or almost-1 (~0.9998, I believe it would be?).

However, there are two different ways of repeating the experiment. One way is to do it with replacement, and the other is to do it without replacement.

If you repeat the experiment with replacement, then, of course, the great majority of 6s will have been picked from the smaller bag.

But if you repeat the experiment without replacement, then exactly two 6s will ever be picked; and of those two, one will have been picked from the smaller bag. That gives us a probability of 0.5.

Now, in the one-off (non-repeated) experiment, with the bags of papers, it’s not clear that there’s any meaning to asking whether we should reason analogously to the repeated experiment without replacement, or analogously to the repeated experiment with replacement. (After all, just one outcome ever occurs.)

But in the Doomsday Argument case, there does seem to be an argument to be made that we should reason analogously to the repeated experiment without replacement… after all, presumably two disembodied souls cannot be born as the same particular person, right? Once a given individual-physical-history “slot” is “occupied”, that’s it; it can’t be picked again. (Or so we might intuitively reason.)

Of course, this sort of thing only highlights once again the fundamental absurdity of the model…

Said Achmiz 10 Jun 2025 0:40 UTC
9 points
2
on: Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning
I somehow missed this excellent post when it was written, and have just now read it. I totally endorse the argument given here. This is indeed the ~~very obvious~~ apparently not obvious to most people (somehow), but clearly correct, deconstruction of SIA, SSA, the Doomsday Argument, and all similar things. Well done!

Said Achmiz 9 Jun 2025 19:16 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: HoVY’s comment on: How the veil of ignorance grounds sentientism

I only see two questions in this line of conversation?

do you have a principled disagreement with all of the arguments for why nothing remotely like this is possible even in principle, or… are you not familiar with them?

I’m not familiar with the specific arguments you’re referring to, but I don’t think it’s actually possible for disembodied minds to exist at all, in the first place. So no I don’t have principled disagreements for those arguments, I have tentative agreement with them.

The “this” in “all of the arguments for why nothing remotely like this is possible even in principle” was referring not to the “disembodied spirits” stuff, but rather to:

With enough time and thought I’m sure I could discuss a wide range of experiences with a wide range of how confident I am at how I’d experience them as a chicken. Even though it would be impossible for me writing this to ever actually experience those things, it’s still easy to take my understanding of the world and apply it in a thought experiment.

And I mentioned Nagel because of this essay (which was by no means the only argument for a position like Nagel’s, just the most famous one).

So it sounds like you’re not familiar with this part of the literature. If that’s so, then I think you’ll find it interesting to delve into it.

Said Achmiz 9 Jun 2025 5:16 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: neo’s comment on: How the veil of ignorance grounds sentientism

To imagine being someone else is something people (including you, I assume) do all the time. Maybe it’s difficult to do, and certainly your imagination will never be perfectly accurate to their experience, but it is not incoherent.

But the scenario isn’t about imagining anything, it’s…

I do see your point: you can’t become someone else because you would then no longer be you.

… exactly.

What you are arguing is that through your view of personal identity (which, based on your comments, I presume is in line with Closed Individualism), the Veil of Ignorance is not an accurate description of reality. Sure, I don’t disagree there.

I think it would be helpful to first specify your preferred theory of identity, rather than dismissing the VOI as nonsense altogether. That way, if you think Closed Individualism is obviously true, you could have a productive conversation with someone who disagrees with you on that.

I’ve avoided engaging with the whole “views of personal identity” stuff, because “empty individualism” and “open individualism” are so obviously absurd if taken anything like literally. People sometimes bring up these things in a way that seems like positing weird hypotheticals for convoluted rhetorical reasons, but if someone really believes either of these things, I generally assume that person either is bizarrely credulous when presented with superficially coherent-seeming arguments, or has done too much psychedelic drugs.

In any case it seems a moot point. OP is very clear that his argument is perfectly meaningful, and works, under “closed individualism”:

If you use the lens of Closed Individualism, before you are born, you could be born as any possible sentient being. In other words, the set of all conscious beings born in a given moment is in a sense all the beings exiting the veil of ignorance.

Now, as I’ve said, this is complete nonsense. But it’s definitely a claim that was made in the OP’s post, not some additional assumption that I am making. So as far as I can tell, there is no need, for the purposes of this discussion that we’ve been having, to talk about which “view of personal identity” is correct.

No, the goal of the thought experiment is to argue that you should want to do this. If you start out already wanting to do this, then the thought experiment is redundant and unmotivated.

If you accept sentientism, I think it is still very useful to consider what changes to our current world would bring us closer to an ideal world under that framework. This is how I personally answer “what is the right thing for me to do?”

Whether to accept “sentientism” is the thing that you (or the OP, at least) are supposedly arguing for in the first place… if you already accept the thing being argued for, great, but then any reasoning that takes that as a baseline is obviously irrelevant to criticisms of the argument for accepting that thing!

So, yes, as a point of metaethics, we recognize that aliens won’t share our morality, etc. But this has zero effect on our ethics. It’s simply irrelevant to ethical questions—a non sequitur.

I don’t see why a meta-ethical theory cannot inform your ethics.

I didn’t make any such claim. I was talking about this specific metaethical claim, and its effects (or lack thereof) on our ethical views.

Believing that my specific moral preferences do not extend to everyone else has certainly helped me answer “what is the right thing for me to do?”

Now, I do want to be sure that we’re clear here: if by “my specific moral preferences do not extend to everyone else” you are referring to other humans, then Eliezer’s metaethical view definitely does not agree with you on this!

I believe that humans (and superintelligences) should treat all sentient beings with compassion. If the Veil of Ignorance encourages people to consider the perspective of other beings and reflect on the specific circumstances that have cultivated their personal moral beliefs, I consider it useful and think that endorsing it is the right thing for me to do.

Once again I would like to point out that this cannot possibly be relevant to any argument about whether Rawlsian reasoning is correct (or coherent) or not, since what you say here is based on already having accepted the conclusion of said reasoning.

In essence you are saying: “I believe X. If argument Y convinces people to believe X, then it’s good to convince people that argument Y is valid.”

This is a total non sequitur in response to the question “is argument Y valid?”.

In other words, your bottom line is already written, and you are treating the “veil of ignorance” argument as a tool for inducing agreement with your views. Now, even setting aside the fact that this is inherently manipulative behavior, the fact is that none of this can possibly help us figure out if the “veil of ignorance” argument is actually valid or not.

What I meant was: caring about another sentient being experiencing pain/pleasure, primarily because you can imagine what they are experiencing and how un/desirable it is, indicates that you care about experienced positive and subjective states, and so this care applies to all beings capable of experiencing such states.

This would seem to be circular reasoning. What you’re saying here boils down to “if you care about any experienced pain/pleasure, then you care about any experienced pain/pleasure”. But your claims were:

“… when you develop a moral/ethical framework that includes any minds outside of your own, it should logically extend to all minds that exist/will ever exist.” In other words, caring about anyone else means you should probably care about all sentient beings.

Now, this might be true if the reason why your moral/ethical framework includes any minds outside of your own—the reason why you care about anyone else—is in fact that you “care about experienced positive and subjective [did you mean ‘negative’ here, by the way?] states”, in a generic and abstract way. But that need not be the case (and indeed is untrue for most people), and thus it need not be reason why you care about other people.

I care about my mother, for example. The reason why I care about my mother is not that I started with an abstract principle of caring about “experienced pain/pleasure” with no further specificity, and then reasoned that my mother experiences pain and pleasure, therefore my mother is a member of a class of entities that I care about, therefore I care about my mother. Of course not! Approximately 0.00% of all humans think like this. And yet many more than 0.00% of all humans care about other people—because most of them care about other people for reasons that look very different from this sort of “start with the most general possible ideas about valence of experience and then reason from that down to ‘don’t kick puppies’” stuff.