silentbob

• silentbobMar 27, 2025, 7:06 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Avoid the Coun­ter­ar­gu­ment Collapse

  I guess a related pattern is the symmetric case where people talk past each other because both sides are afraid their arguments won’t get heard, so they both focus on repeating their arguments and nobody really listens (or maybe they do, but not in a way that convinces the other person they really got their argument). So there, too, I agree with your advice—taking a step back and repeating the other person’s viewpoint seems like the best way out of this.

• silentbobMar 17, 2025, 8:19 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: danielechlin’s comment on: Any-Benefit Mind­set and Any-Rea­son Reasoning

  Some further examples:

  • Past me might have said: Apple products are “worse” because they are overpriced status symbols

  • Many claims in politics, say “we should raise the minimum wage because it helps workers”

  • We shouldn’t use nuclear power because it’s not really “renewable”

  • When AI lab CEOs warn of AI x risk we can dismiss that because they might just want to build hype

  • AI cannot be intelligent, or dangerous, because it’s just matrix multiplications

  • One shouldn’t own a cat because it’s an unnatural way for a cat to live

  • Pretty much any any-benefit mindset that makes it into an argument rather than purely existing in a person’s behavior

• silentbobMar 16, 2025, 6:52 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: danielechlin’s comment on: Any-Benefit Mind­set and Any-Rea­son Reasoning

  It certainly depends on who’s arguing. I agree that some sources online see this trade-off and end up on the side of not using flags after some deliberation, and I think that’s perfectly fine. But this describes only a subset of cases, and my impression is that very often (and certainly in the cases I experienced personally) it is not even acknowledged that usability, or anything else, may also be a concern that should inform the decision.

  (I admit though that “perpetuates colonialism” is a spin that goes beyond “it’s not a 1:1 mapping” and is more convincing to me)

Any-Benefit Mind­set and Any-Rea­son Reasoning

• silentbobFeb 28, 2025, 6:57 AM

  4 points

  2

  on: Dear AGI,

  This makes me wonder, how could an AI figure out whether it had conscious experience? I always used to assume that from first person perspective it’s clear when you’re conscious. But this is kind of circular reasoning as it assumes you have a “perspective” and are able to ponder the question. Now what does a, say, reasoning model do? If there is consciousness, how will it ever know? Does it have to solve the “easy” problem of consciousness first and apply the answer to itself?

• silentbobFeb 25, 2025, 10:22 AM

  9 points

  0

  on: List of most in­ter­est­ing ideas I en­coun­tered in my life, ranked

  In no particular order, because interestingness is multi-dimensional and they are probably all to some degree on my personal interesting Pareto frontier:

  • We’re not as 3-dimensional as we think

  • Replacing binary questions with “under which circumstances”

  • Almost everything is causally linked, saying “A has no effect on B” is almost always wrong (unless you very deliberately search for A and B that fundamentally cannot be causally linked). If you ran a study with a bazillion subjects for long enough, practically anything you can measure would reach statistical significance

  • Many disagreements are just disagreements about labels (“LLMs are not truly intelligent”, “Free will does not exist”) and can be easily resolved /​ worked around once you realize this (see also)

  • Selection biases of all kind

  • Intentionality bias, it’s easy to explain human behavior with supposed intentions, but there is much more randomness and ignorance everywhere than we think

  • Extrapolations tend to work locally, but extrapolating further into the future very often gets things wrong; kind of obvious, applies to e.g. resource shortages (“we’ll run out of X and then there won’t be any X anymore!”), but also Covid (I kind of assumed Covid cases would just exponentially climb until everything went to shit, and forgot to take into account that people would get afraid and change their behavior on a societal scale, at least somewhat, and politicians would eventually do things, even if later than I would), and somewhat AI (we likely won’t just “suddenly” end up with a flawless superintelligence)

  • “If only I had more time/​money/​whatever” style thinking is often misguided, as often when people say/​think this, the sentence continues with “then I could spend that time/​money/​whatever in other/​more ways than currently”, meaning as soon as you get more of X, you would immediately want to spend it, so you’ll never sustainably end up in a state of “more X”. So better get used to X being limited and having to make trade-offs and decisions on how to use that limited resource rather than daydreaming about a hypothetical world of “more X”. (This does not mean you shouldn’t think about ways to increase X, but you should probably distance yourself from thinking about a world in which X is not limited)

  • Taleb’s Extremistan vs Mediocristan model

  • +1 to Minimalism that lsusr already mentioned

  • The mindblowing weirdness of very high-dimensional spaces

  • Life is basically an ongoing coordination problem between your past/​present/​future selves

  • The realization that we’re not smart enough to be true consequentialists, i.e. consequentialism is somewhat self-defeating

  • The teleportation paradox, and thinking about a future world in which a) teleportation is just a necessity to be successful in society (and/​or there is just social pressure, e.g. all your friends do it and you get excluded from doing cool things if you don’t join in) and b) anyone having teleported before having convincing memories of having gone through teleportation and coming out on the other side. In such a world, anyone with worries about teleportation would basically be screwed. Not sure if I should believe in any kind of continuity of consciousness, but that certainly feels like a thing. So I’d probably prefer not to be forced to give that up just because the societal trajectory happens to lead through ubiquitous teleportation.

• silentbobFeb 23, 2025, 9:51 PM

  6 points

  −2

  AF

  on: Have LLMs Gen­er­ated Novel In­sights?

  Random thought: maybe (at least pre-reasoning-models) LLMs are RLHF’d to be “competent” in a way that makes them less curious & excitable, which greatly reduces their chance of coming up with (and recognizing) any real breakthroughs. I would expect though that for reasoning models such limitations will necessarily disappear and they’ll be much more likely to produce novel insights. Still, scaffolding and lack of context and agency can be a serious bottleneck.

• silentbobFeb 22, 2025, 12:14 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: See­ing Through the Eyes of the Algorithm

  Interestingly, the text to speech conversion of the “Text does not equal text” section is another very concrete example of this:

  • The TTS AI summarizes the “Hi!” ASCII art picture as “Vertical lines arranged in a grid with minor variations”. I deliberately added an alt text to that image, describing what can be seen, and I expected that this alt text would be used for TTS—but seemingly that is not the case, and instead some AI describes the image in isolation. If I were to describe that image without any further context, I would probably mention that it says “Hi!”, but I grant that describing it as “Vertical lines arranged in a grid with minor variations” would also be a fair description.

  • the “| | | |↵|-| | |↵| | | o” string is read out as “dash O”. I would have expected the AI to just read that out in full, character by character. Which probably is an example of me falsely taking my intention as a given. There are probably many conceivable cases where it’s actually better for the AI to not read out cryptic strings character by character (e.g. when your text contains some hash or very long URL). So maybe it can’t really know that this particular case is an exception.

See­ing Through the Eyes of the Algorithm

• silentbobFeb 22, 2025, 7:04 AM

  2 points

  0

  on: The case for the death penalty

  But what you’re probably not aware of is that 0.8% of the US population ends up dieing due to intentional homicide

  That is an insane statistic. According to a bit of googling this indeed seems plausible, but would still be interested in your source if you can provide it.

• silentbobJan 28, 2025, 7:07 AM

  4 points

  2

  on: The Mis­con­cep­tion of AGI as an Ex­is­ten­tial Threat: A Reassessment

  Downvoted for 3 reasons:

  • The style strikes me as very AI-written. Maybe it isn’t—but the very repetitive structure looks exactly like the type of text I tend to get out of ChatGPT much of the time. Which makes it very hard to read.

  • There are many highly superficial claims here without much reasoning to back them up. Many claims of what AGI “would” do without elaboration. “AGI approaches challenges as problems to be solved, not battles to be won.”—first, why? Second, how does this help us when the best way to solve the problem involves getting rid of humans?

  • Lastly, I don’t get the feeling this post engages with the most common AI safety arguments at all. Neither does it with evidence from recent AI developments. How do you expect “international agreements” with any teeth in the current arms race? When we don’t even get national or state level agreements. While Bing/​Sydney was not an AGI, it clearly showed that much of what this post dismisses as anthropocentric projections is realistic, and, currently, maybe even the default of what we can expect of AGI as long as it’s LLM-based. And even if you dismiss LLMs and think of more “Bostromian” AGIs, that still leaves you with instrumental convergence, which blows too many holes into this piece to leave anything of much substance.

On Responsibility

• silentbobJan 3, 2025, 9:50 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: silentbob’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Squig­gle AI

  Or as a possible more concrete prompt if preferred: “Create a cost benefit analysis for EU directive ²⁰¹⁹⁄₉₀₄, which demands that bottle caps of all plastic bottles are to remain attached to the bottles, with the intention of reducing littering and protecting sea life.

  Output:

  • key costs and benefits table

  • economic cost for the beverage industry to make the transition

  • expected change in littering, total over first 5 years

  • QALYs lost or gained for consumers throughout the first 5 years”

• silentbobJan 3, 2025, 9:33 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: In­tro­duc­ing Squig­gle AI

  In the EU there’s some recent regulation about bottle caps being attached to bottles, to prevent littering. (this-is-fine.jpg)

  Can you let the app come up with a good way to estimate the cost benefit ratio of this piece of regulation? E.g. (environmental?) benefit vs (economic? QALY?) cost/​drawbacks, or something like that. I think coming up with good metrics to quantify here is almost as interesting as the estimate itself.

• silentbobDec 26, 2024, 9:19 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: What Have Been Your Most Valuable Ca­sual Con­ver­sa­tions At Con­fer­ences?

  I have the vague impression that this is true for me as well, and I remember having made that same claim (that spontaneous conversations at conferences seem maybe most valuable) to a friend when traveling home from an EAGx. My personal best guess: planned conversations are usually 30 minutes long, and while there is some interest based filtering going on, there’s usually no guarantees you vibe well with the person. Spontaneous encounters however have pretty variable length, so the ones where you’re not vibing will just be over naturally quickly, whereas the better connections will last longer. So my typical “spontaneous encounter minute” tends to be more enjoyable than my typical “planned 1-1 minute”. But hard to say how this transfers to instrumental value.

• silentbobDec 23, 2024, 7:14 AM

  2 points

  0

  on: Mis­for­tune and Many Worlds

  I made a somewhat similar point in a post earlier this year, but much more superficial and less technical. So it was nice to read your deeper exploration of the topic.

• silentbobDec 22, 2024, 12:36 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (The) Light­cone is noth­ing with­out its peo­ple: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser

  Did this already happen? :)

Real­ity is Frac­tal-Shaped

• silentbobDec 15, 2024, 3:32 PM

  3 points

  0

  on: Be­ware of Fake Alternatives

  Almost two years after writing this post, this is still a concept I encounter relatively often. Maybe less so in myself, as, I like to think, I have sufficiently internalized the idea to not fall into the “fake alternative trap” anymore very often. But occasionally this comes up in conversations with others, when they’re making plans, or we’re organizing something together.

  With some distance, and also based on some of the comments, I think there is room for improvement:

  • the Gym membership example is a tricky one, as “getting a gym membership to go to the gym” is, for many people, also kind of a fake option, as they get the membership and pay for it, but still end up not going to the gym anyway. That example works for people who are more likely to go to the gym than to work out at home. But if you would in expectation exercise no more at the gym than you would at home, then paying a gym membership is not helpful.

    • Maybe an example that applies to more people would be studying at the (university) library vs studying at home? The former works better for many. So studying at home would potentially be a fake alternative. Just because you could in principle study for 10 hours a day at home, doesn’t mean you actually end up doing that.

  • I was and still am a bit unhappy about the “Option A—Option B—Do nothing” diagram. Somehow it’s harder to read than its simplicity would suggest.

  • The AI generated title image doesn’t really convey the idea of of the post. But back then, AI image generation was still more limited than today, and it was difficult enough to even get that image to look acceptable.

  But besides that, I think it holds up. It’s a relevant concept, “fake alternatives” seems like a good handle to represent it, and the post is short and focused.

• silentbobNov 23, 2024, 10:40 AM

  2 points

  0

  on: silent­bob’s Shortform

  For people who like guided meditations: there’s a small YouTube channel providing a bunch of secular AI-generated guided meditations of various lengths and topics. More are to come, and the creator (whom I know) is happy about suggestions. Three examples:

  • 10 minute relaxation

  • “Feel the AGI”

  • Nondual awareness

  They are also available in podcast form here.

  I wouldn’t say these meditations are necessarily better or worse than any others, but they’re free and provide some variety. Personally, I avoid apps like Waking Up and Headspace due to both their imho outrageous pricing model and their surprising degree of monotony. Insight Timer is a good alternative, but the quality varies a lot and I keep running into overly spiritual content there. Plus there’s obviously thousands and thousands of guided meditations on YouTube, but there too it’s hit and miss. So personally I’m happy about this extra source of a good-enough-for-me standard.

  Also, in case you ever wanted to hear a guided meditation on any particular subject or in any particular style, I guess you can contact the YouTube channel directly, or tell me and I’ll forward your request.