Shankar Sivarajan

• Shankar SivarajanApr 24, 2025, 7:11 PM

  4 points

  6

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

  the level of selfishness required to seek immortality at the cost of risking all of humanity

  If only you got immortality (or even you and a small handful of your loved ones), okay, yeah, that would be selfish. But if the expectation is that it soon becomes cheap and widely accessible, that’s just straight-up heroic.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 19, 2025, 5:58 PM

  3 points

  −1

  in reply to: scronkfinkle’s comment on: Ap­proaches to Miti­gat­ing AI Image-Gen­er­a­tion Risks through Regulation

  Fundamental values difference: I favor individual liberty, whereas a lot of you “AI safety” people strongly prefer tyranny over it, and I have no argument for the former you haven’t heard before.

  This is just one more in the long line of “Oh no, people can prompt it to generate racial slurs,” “Oh no, it can tell people highly enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear bombs”, “Oh no, students can use it to cheat on their homework,” “Oh no, it can summarize biology papers,” “Oh no, it can take jobs from artists,” … your “Oh no, it can create disinformation/​pornography” is more shit thrown at that wall.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 19, 2025, 4:34 PM

  1 point

  −2

  on: Ap­proaches to Miti­gat­ing AI Image-Gen­er­a­tion Risks through Regulation

  Yawn. One more “open source is dangerous and must be banned for the greater good” post.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 19, 2025, 5:32 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Three Months In, Eval­u­at­ing Three Ra­tion­al­ist Cases for Trump

  No, sorry. I think it’s a now-deleted tumblr post, but I first saw it it on one of those reddit posts.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 18, 2025, 5:10 PM

  28 points

  33

  in reply to: Sergii’s comment on: Three Months In, Eval­u­at­ing Three Ra­tion­al­ist Cases for Trump

  Am I missing something?

  Yes: those indices are bullshit, and don’t measure what they purport to. I expect they’re faithfully reporting the results of whatever metric they constructed without falsifying any data, but that metric is entirely disconnected from what the median American would consider “freedom of speech.”

  What you’re doing is essentially pointing at a map like this, and taking it seriously.

  

• Shankar SivarajanApr 17, 2025, 10:40 PM

  0 points

  −12

  in reply to: Isopropylpod’s comment on: AI-en­abled coups: a small group could use AI to seize power

  It’s called “defensive democracy,” and is standard practice in most of Europe.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 16, 2025, 3:27 AM

  8 points

  2

  on: Un­bend­able Arm as Test Case for Reli­gious Belief

  The Aikido visualization exercise reminds me a bit of “follow-through” (such as in tennis): it’s weird how strongly the rest of your swing well after the ball has lost contact with your racquet affects its trajectory.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 15, 2025, 5:01 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty

  Or Ctrl-K, the standard shortcut.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 15, 2025, 4:58 PM

  4 points

  −2

  on: A Dissent on Honesty

  If you believed this, why would you write this post?

• Shankar SivarajanApr 8, 2025, 1:06 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Kongo Landwalker’s comment on: Kongo Land­walker’s Shortform

  I think this moves between stages too quickly. Maybe a d12 or d20 would be better.

  Also, it might be fun to allow the stages to decrease as well. Then you could start in the middle of your stages, with normal chess rules, and if the threat level decreases, the board becomes more “peaceful.”

• Shankar SivarajanApr 2, 2025, 3:15 PM

  2 points

  0

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

  This sounds like the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.

• Shankar SivarajanApr 1, 2025, 5:03 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: In­sect Suffer­ing Is The Biggest Is­sue: What To Do About It

  Someone (unclear who) made a whole bunch of these along the same vein: https://​​kennaway.org.uk/​​writings/​​Insanity-Wolf-Sanity-Check.html

• Shankar SivarajanMar 29, 2025, 6:10 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: Tor­ment­ing Gem­ini 2.5 with the [[[]]][][[]] Puzzle

  Copying the puzzle into a text editor with even rudimentary bracket matching (I used Notepad++) might be helpful.

• Shankar SivarajanMar 23, 2025, 5:43 PM

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Legibility

  It’s much harder to prove you’re an arahant.

  You accidentally touch a hot stove and don’t feel any pain.

  This gives me an idea …. Relevant xkcd: link.

  More safely, if this arahant resistance to heat works with capsaicin, you could win some chilli eating contests.

• Shankar SivarajanMar 23, 2025, 4:33 AM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Legibility

  shit happens, I deal with it, and move on. (Because what’s the alternative? Not dealing with it.

  

• Shankar SivarajanMar 20, 2025, 3:21 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Elite Co­or­di­na­tion via the Con­sen­sus of Power

  What, in your view, distinguishes “civil society” from “party apparatus”? Is it a more meaningful distinction than them speaking English instead of Russian?

  Also, what is the “harm” you think Yarvin’s analogizing the American ruling system to that of the Soviet Union has done?

• Shankar SivarajanMar 18, 2025, 5:53 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Why White-Box Redteam­ing Makes Me Feel Weird

  They made a sequel to the lamp ad with a happy ending! Lamp 2.

• Shankar SivarajanMar 18, 2025, 4:29 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Why White-Box Redteam­ing Makes Me Feel Weird

  You put in the same link twice.

• Shankar SivarajanMar 17, 2025, 5:06 AM

  6 points

  0

  on: Why White-Box Redteam­ing Makes Me Feel Weird

  a character being mind controlled without losing awareness of what’s happening.

  I recently learned this is the cordyceps fungus that “mind-controls” ants works: link. tl;dr.

• Shankar SivarajanMar 16, 2025, 4:52 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Help make the orca lan­guage ex­per­i­ment happen

  How do you plan to overcome the laws

  Why not try corvids first? They’re readily available in most places, and easy to work with, especially when the other options are elephants, great apes, cephalopods, and cetaceans.

  Sure, they’re not gonna be superhumanly intelligent, but as a demonstration of transpecific communication capability, they strike me as a great initial target.