tailcalled

• tailcalled 15 Aug 2025 18:50 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: The Tor­toise and the Lan­guage Model (A Fable After Hofs­tadter)

  It was quite real since I wanted to negotiate about whether there was an interesting/​nontrivial material project I could do as a favor for Claude.

• tailcalled 14 Aug 2025 16:50 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jon Garcia’s comment on: AI de­vel­op­ment as the first fully-au­to­mated job

  Humans contain the reproductive and hunting instincts. You could call this a bag of heuristics, but it’s heuristics on a different level than AI, and in particular might not be chosen to be transferred to AIs. Furthermore, humans are harder to copy or parallelize, which leads to a different privacy profile compared to AIs.

  The trouble with intelligence (both human and artificial and evolution) is that it’s all about regarding the world as an assembly of the familiar. This makes data/​experience a major bottleneck for intelligence.

• tailcalled 14 Aug 2025 15:30 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jon Garcia’s comment on: AI de­vel­op­ment as the first fully-au­to­mated job

  I’m imagining a case where there’s no intelligence explosion per se, just bags-of-heuristics AIs with gradually increasing competence.

AI de­vel­op­ment as the first fully-au­to­mated job

• tailcalled 8 Aug 2025 12:15 UTC

  6 points

  4

  on: The Tor­toise and the Lan­guage Model (A Fable After Hofs­tadter)

  According to revealed preference, Claude certainly enjoys this sort of recursive philosophy—when I give Claude a choice, it’s the sort of thing it tends to pick.

• tailcalled 7 Aug 2025 10:03 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: In­scrutabil­ity was always in­evitable, right?

  I think some of the optimism about scrutability might derive from reductionism. Like, if you’ve got a scrutable algorithm for maintaining a multilevel map, and you’ve got a scrutable model of the chemistry of a tire, you could pass through the multilevel model to find the higher-level description of the tire.

• tailcalled 1 Aug 2025 16:03 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: p.b.’s comment on: I am wor­ried about near-term non-LLM AI developments

  KANs seem obviously of limited utility to me...?

• tailcalled 30 Jul 2025 20:34 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: My Em­pa­thy Is Rarely Kind

  I’ve recently been playing with the idea that you have to be either autistic or schizophrenic and most people pick the schizophrenic option, and then because you can’t hold schizophrenic pack animals accountable, they pretend to be rational individuals despite the schizophrenia.

  Edit: the admins semi-banned me from LessWrong because they think my posts are too bad these days, so I can’t reply to dirk except by editing this post.

  My response to dirk is that since most people are schizophrenic, existing statistics on schizophrenia are severely underdiagnosing it, and therefore the apparent correlation is misleading.

• tailcalled 28 Jul 2025 19:23 UTC

  3 points

  3

  on: The Sim­ple Truth

  Feels like this story would make for an excellent Rational Animations video.

• tailcalled 23 Jul 2025 10:56 UTC

  2 points

  0

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

  I think part of the trouble is the term “emotional intelligence”. Analytical people are better at understanding most emotions, as long as the emotions are small and driven by familiar dynamics. The issue is the biggest emotions or when the emotions are primarily driven by spiritual factors.

• tailcalled 21 Jul 2025 17:42 UTC

  2 points

  −1

  in reply to: Coafos’s comment on: Against Infrabayesianism

  There’s reason to assume the unmeasurably unknown parts of the world are benevolent, because it is easier for multiple actors to coordinate for benevolent purposes than malevolent purposes. That infrabayesians then assume they’re in conflict with the presumably-benevolent hidden purposes means that the infrabayesians probably are malevolent.

• tailcalled 18 Jul 2025 15:06 UTC

  −5 points

  2

  on: Critic Con­tri­bu­tions Are Log­i­cally Irrelevant

  I’m semi-banned (only allowed to post once every 24 hours because I receive too many downvotes) from LessWrong for posting vitalist takes without backing them up. I would support a policy where nobody is allowed to downvote my unsupported vitalist takes without themselves posting vitalist takes.

• tailcalled 11 Jul 2025 6:30 UTC

  5 points

  2

  on: Gen­er­al­ized Han­gri­ness: A Stan­dard Ra­tion­al­ist Stance Toward Emotions

  This makes emotions subservient to rationality, but I think a lot of the people who complain about the rationalist approach to emotions instead see rationality as a system to generate compromises between emotions. From the latter perspective, the rationalist approach only really works with infinitesimal emotions.

• tailcalled 9 Jul 2025 17:38 UTC

  2 points

  0

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

  The main issue is, theories about how to run job interviews are developed in collaboration between businesses who need to hire people, theories on how to respond to court questions are developed in collaboration between gang members, etc.. While a business might not be disincentized from letting the non-hired employees better at negotiating, it is incentivized to teach other businesses ways of making their non-hired employees worse at negotiating.

• tailcalled 7 Jul 2025 12:43 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: dirk’s comment on: tail­called’s Shortform

  Are you really gone claim that this is not a good post:

  Thesis: Intellectuals are naturally attracted to poop because it is causally downstream of everything and so ends up having unusually high mutual information with everything, despite not causally influencing much (compared to e.g. food).

  ?

• tailcalled 7 Jul 2025 12:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Roman Malov’s comment on: Against Infrabayesianism

  Trying to obtain worst-case regret bounds.

• tailcalled 6 Jul 2025 11:05 UTC

  2 points

  2

  in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: tail­called’s Shortform

  Users of LessWrong, then

• tailcalled 6 Jul 2025 10:45 UTC

  −8 points

  −4

  on: tail­called’s Shortform

  Rationalists are downvoting all my best posts and comments to oblivion. Boo!

Against Infrabayesianism

• tailcalled 4 Jul 2025 12:48 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: I’m scared.

  I did well by taking care of myself and trying to help things progress.