tailcalled

Karma: 7,917

tailcalled May 16, 2025, 11:42 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: David Matolcsi’s Shortform
If you want to upskill in coding, I’m open to tutoring you for money.

tailcalled May 10, 2025, 4:25 PM
1 point
−1
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
TheSkeward is trying to unspecifically shame Cremieux for criticizing multiethnic democracy with very low-IQ demographics. localdeity inferred that TheSkeward’s criticism was probably about how Cremieux was talking about taboo racist stuff, and pointed out how TheSkeward’s shaming doesn’t make sense in the light of that. yams pointed out that basic numeracy would show the problem to be overstated and also that the general discourse is pretty sketchy.
Said Achmiz and Zack Davis were objecting to the basic numeracy point by arguing that unspecified people (presumably including Cremieux but excluding Said Achmiz and Zack Davis) might think that one of the biggest problems with democracy in general is lack of voter intelligence, not just when restricting consideration to a few % of the population.
It’s unclear whether [intelligence being the constraint] has ever been true. Today it’s more likely that voters are constrained by something else (e.g. tribal dynamics or wisdom or intrinsic conflicts or mental illness or etc.; even excess voter intelligence is more likely of a problem than insufficient voter intelligence), either because intelligence was never the constraining factor or because AI etc. has made intelligence too cheap to meter. So while the unspecified people might still believe that one of the biggest problems with democracy is lack of voter intelligence, we don’t really need to consider their opinion anymore, since even if it was ever true, it’s clearly outdated.
I agree that we’re not seeing improvements in voter behavior, on the contrary it seems to be getting worse. I think that’s because it was never a big problem to begin with, but I’m open to alternatives e.g. that there’s new exogenous factors that cause a deviation from the trend of improving access to intelligence.

tailcalled May 10, 2025, 3:31 PM
1 point
−1
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
Advice can’t be intelligent or unintelligent; it’s too inanimate for that. And I didn’t suggest any particular manifestation.
I kind of feel like you are using the word “intelligence” as an effective synonym for “good”, such that you were interpreting the subtext of my claim as saying that voters will now be good, whereas I rather intend the subtext of my claim to be that theories about lack of voter intelligence are now uninteresting because other dynamics are dominating.

tailcalled May 10, 2025, 1:55 PM
1 point
−1
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
What do you mean by the qualifier “operational”?

tailcalled May 9, 2025, 8:48 PM
−8 points
−22
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
Luckily now we have AI too cheap to meter, so voters aren’t constrained by lack of intelligence anymore.

tailcalled May 9, 2025, 1:28 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Misrepresentation as a Barrier for Interp (Part I)
Counterpoint: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/gEvTvhr8hNRrdHC62

tailcalled May 9, 2025, 12:38 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
What’s your favorite times you’ve used CAD/CNC or 3D printing? Or what’s your most likely place to make use of it?

tailcalled May 9, 2025, 6:26 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
Software is kind of an exceptional case because computers are made to be incredibly easy to update. So the cost of installing software can be neglected relative to the cost of making the software.

tailcalled May 8, 2025, 8:45 PM
7 points
5
in reply to: Sergii’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
I think a lot of the participants are bottlenecked on a lack of important problems that they dare attempt to solve.

tailcalled May 8, 2025, 7:10 PM
4 points
−4
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
I think it would be more accurate to say that wizards transmute. “Creation” actually requires resources, so it’s not creation from nothing.

tailcalled 8 May 2025 9:25 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
Amateur spaces are the most cost-effective way of raising the general factor of wizardry. Professional-grade work is constrained on a lot of narrower things.

tailcalled 8 May 2025 6:47 UTC
6 points
2
on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
I feel like this is optimizing for the general factor of wizard powers, but if you actually want:
And if one wants a cure for aging, or weekend trips to the moon, or tiny genetically-engineered dragons… then the bottleneck is wizard power, not king power.
… Then to obtain a cure for aging you’d be better off finding patients (I guess pets have a good chance of being medically analogous to humans while not facing too many regulatory hurdles), performing root cause analysis of what’s causing their age, and then trying to cure that. And that would gradually expand your knowledge of how to cure aging in more and more cases. And to obtain weekend trips to the moon, idk I guess you’d want some solar → rocket fuel conversion plant + something to mass produce heat shielding + reusable rockets? I don’t know what you need for tiny genetically engineered dragons and I kind of suspect it’s a difficulty level above the others.

tailcalled 7 May 2025 12:15 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: Zach Furman’s comment on: Zach Furman’s Shortform
Research thrives on answering important questions. However, the trouble with interpretability for AI safety is that there are no important questions getting answered. Typically the real goal is to understand the neural networks well enough to know whether they are scheming, but that’s a threefold bad idea:
- You cannot make incremental progress on it; either you know whether they are scheming, or you don’t
- Scheming is not the main AI danger/x-risk
- Interpretability is not a significant bottleneck in detecting scheming (we don’t even have good, accessible examples of contexts where AI is applied and scheming would be a huge risk)
To solve this, people substitute various goals, e.g. predictive accuracy, under the assumption that incremental predictive accuracy is helpful. But we already have perfectly adequate ways of predicting the behavior of the neural networks, it’s called running the neural networks.

tailcalled 6 May 2025 13:15 UTC
4 points
−5
in reply to: dynomight’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
I should say I’m not questioning the assertion that he plagiarized you or reacted to your challenge/criticism with insults, over-the-top defensiveness, and vitriol. I do dispute the claim that he has a general tendency towards such reactions regardless of context and case.

tailcalled 6 May 2025 10:32 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
It would be a compromise between two factions: people who are hit by the incomplete narrative (whether they are bad actors or not) and centrists who want to maintain authority without getting involved in controversial stuff.
Certainly it would be better if the racists weren’t selective, and there’s a case to be made that centrist authorities should put more work into getting the entire account of what’s going on, but that’s best achieved by highlighting the need for the opposing side of the story, not by attacking the racists for moving towards a more complete picture.

tailcalled 6 May 2025 10:13 UTC
0 points
−14
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
This seems like a cope because others could go fill in the missing narrative, so selectively saying stuff shouldn’t be a huge issue in general...?

tailcalled 6 May 2025 9:33 UTC
−4 points
−11
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
I can buy that often people are specifically opposed to racist bigots, i.e. people who are unreasonably attached to the idea of racial group differences. The essence of being unreasonable is to not be able to be reasoned with, and being reasoned with often involves presenting specific cruxes for discussion. It seems to me that Cremieux tends to do so, and so he is not a racist bigot.
I think part of what can get him persecuted for being a racist bigot is that a lot of rationalists follow him and more-or-less endorse (or at least defend) racist stuff without being willing to present cruxes, i.e. his fans are racist bigots. It’s hard for people to distinguish a writer from their fans, and I suspect this might be best addressed by writers being more internally oriented towards their fans rather than outwards oriented.

tailcalled 6 May 2025 9:12 UTC
17 points
20
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
Especially when he has clearly proven on his website that he has highly nuanced takes on various other, less controversial, topics. It reminds me of people trying to shame Scott Alexander for daring to step a little outside the Overton window himself.
It may be rational of you to interpolate the quality of one facet of someone’s behavior from other facets, or to interpolate from one social controversy to another, but it’s certainly not adversarially robust. You can’t reasonably expect people not to focus on his narrower behavior in one area.

tailcalled 6 May 2025 8:52 UTC
−3 points
−8
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
It sounds like low decoupling
High decoupling is an attempt to enforce anti-irrationalist norms through creating dissociative disorders. It’s obviously self-defeating, and combining it with a critique of “tone policing” and taboos causing asymmetric discourse/preventing people from speaking out is brazen hypocrisy.

tailcalled 6 May 2025 8:35 UTC
0 points
−11
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
Common explicit definitions of “racism” tend to include people who believe in racial differences (especially in socially valued traits, especially if they believe the racial differences are innate), and such beliefs are typical treated as some of the most central evidence of racism conceivable. Objecting to the designation purely on the basis that it is highly derogatory seems intellectually dishonest to me; it would be more honest to object to the derogatory element, for instance by asserting that non-racists are inattentive/delusional/lying.
My vague hinting about rumors is supposed to just serve to make him appear in a bad light, because my defense would make him appear in a good light, and I have heard rumors, so I don’t want to one-sidedly endorse him. At the same time, calling it “rumors” shows that I don’t have it first-hand and that there’s a need for a more accurate account than I can give.