Alex Vermillion

Karma: 776

I found the community in spring 2020 through HPMOR which I found while bored and reading stories online. When I learned that there were other people using such witchcraft as “not only using reasoning on math exercises, but also issues in the real world”, I was sold.

Crocker’s Rules and Metahonesty are in effect (on me) at all times.

You can always message me and I will not be upset. No anxiety needed around “bugging” me.

If I say something and you think “Wow! He sounds like a moron who doesn’t understand humans!”, you’ve misunderstood and I was trying to make a more subtle point. Extend me charity and I’ll find it low cost to extend it to you.

Alex Vermillion 14 Nov 2024 22:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: 4hodmt’s comment on: Drawing Less Wrong: Should You Learn to Draw?
People seeing this in the future: Check out Draw a Box for some low-level mechanical stuff.

Alex Vermillion 14 Nov 2024 17:06 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
In regard to bullet 1, I would caution against relying on this. If you show up to many fields expecting to smash through it because you’re smart, you’ll be torn to bits in many many fields. This is because the fields that are useful are already being dominated by people who are good at things to the extent that they’re economically or emotionally valuable.

The exact example of chess makes this clear. If a smart LWer thinks “Oh, I’ll get to the chess leaderboards because I’m really smart”, they are going to find out after some weeks of studying that… everyone else on the leaderboards is smart too!

Alex Vermillion 11 Nov 2024 20:10 UTC
1 point
0
on: Boring & straightforward trauma explanation
“Trauma” is a bad experience deemed anomalous. It means “the world is not usually like that”. We do not call any behavior or emotional pattern “trauma” if it is obviously adaptive.
I think this is just incorrect? It is still a learned behavior if it’s adaptive, it’s just that people don’t go to the doctor’s office complaining that they are afraid of getting stabbed when they got stabbed last Tuesday. You’re right that we wouldn’t generally call this trauma, but that doesn’t mean that the person is not traumatized.

If we had a magical cure for trauma and we used it on the guy who gets stabbed on Tuesdays, he would still be afraid of knives and would perhaps even be better at avoiding being stabbed (since he now avoids the subway and bikes to work instead of freezing up in a fugue while he rides). I think it would be fair under this example to say “Trauma is a certain kind of learned response [with a gajillion caveats]”, not your definition.

Alex Vermillion 10 Nov 2024 3:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Normal_Anomaly’s comment on: Rational Humanist Music
I’m adding a YouTube link for Singularity because I’ve really grown to like it in the 3 years since I read this post.

Alex Vermillion 8 Nov 2024 23:23 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Portia’s comment on: The King and the Golem

E.g. we know that judges are more likely to convict ugly people that pretty people. More likely to convict unsympathetic, but innocent parties, compared to sympathetic innocent parties. More likely to convict people of colour rather than white folks. More likely, troublingly, to convict someone if they are hearing a case just before lunch (when they are hangry) compared to just after lunch (when they are happy and chill cause they just ate).

For the record, a lot of these didn’t hold up when investigated later.

Alex Vermillion 7 Nov 2024 21:31 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: StartAtTheEnd’s comment on: Does the “ancient wisdom” argument have any validity? If a particular teaching or tradition is old, to what extent does this make it more trustworthy?

Across all websites I’ve been on in my life, I have posted more than 100000 comments (resulting in many interactions), so while things like psychoanalyzing people, assuming intentions, and making stereotypes is “bad”, I simply have too much training data, and too few incorrect guesses not to do this.

On the contrary, your guess did not take context into account and was bad. They were downvoted for answering in a way which didn’t answer the question, had many typos, and otherwise took more effort to read than the information it contained was worth.

Your comment “added more heat than light” for no reason, with no prompting. I explicitly am only making this comment because you posted a long paragraph explaining why you are so sure that you did a good job analyzing when it looks like you did a very poor one. Perhaps people in the past have not given useful feedback, so I will give a short piece: do not do this psycho-analysis until you have generated at least 2 alternate theories for what happened.

Alex Vermillion 7 Nov 2024 21:17 UTC
7 points
2
on: Signaling with Small Orange Diamonds
The note that it isn’t what the username is for is kind of interesting. There are two places to put information on social media: your account and the media attached to your account. Here, instead of attaching some GWWC information to every piece of media (Tweet/post/picture/essay etc), the idea is to attach it to the account, but that really does feel quite weird to me.

I’m glad you said that.

Alex Vermillion 3 Nov 2024 23:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: JargonBot Beta Test
(I’m on a Framework computer)

Each of your examples is a lot easier to read, since I’ve already learned how much I should ignore the circles and how much I should pay attention to them. I’d be quite happy with either.

If someone really really wants color, try using subtle colors. I fiddled around, and on my screen, rgb(80,20,0) is both imperceptible and easily noticed. You really can do a lot with subtlety, but of course the downside is that this sucks for people who have a harder time seeing. From the accessibility standpoint, my favorite (out of the original, your 2 mockups, and my ugly color hinting) is your green circle version. It should be visible to absolutely everyone when they look for it, but shouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

I appreciate the mockups!

Alex Vermillion 2 Nov 2024 22:56 UTC
5 points
2
on: JargonBot Beta Test
Technical discussion aside, please see a UI designer or similar about how to style this, because it has the potential to really make LessWrong unpleasant to read without it really being obvious at all. I try below to make some comments and recommendations, but I recognize that I’m not very good at this (yet?).

Two nightmare issues to watch out for:
1. Too little contrast from the background.
2. Too much contrast from the foreground.
1. Blending in

This would make the jargon text harder to see by giving it less visibility than the surrounding text. Your demonstrated gray has this issue. Turn your screen brightness up a bunch and the article looks a bit like Swiss cheese (because the contrast between the white background and the black text increases, the relative contrast between the white background and the gray text decreases).

2. Jumping out

This would make the entire text harder to read by making it jump around in either style or color. Link-dense text can run into this problem^[1]. In my opinion, the demo has this issue a bit in §0 (but not in the TLDR).

As an alternative, consider styling like a footnote/endnote. An example of a website that pulls off multiple floating note styles without it being attention-grabby is Wait But Why. Take a look at the end of the first main body paragraph on this page for an example.
1. ↩︎
  Go to Wikipedia and turn on link underlining to see small of a change can make or break this.

Alex Vermillion 28 Oct 2024 1:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: The Summoned Heroine’s Prediction Markets Keep Providing Financial Services To The Demon King!
If you want to piss people off, you can also use periods and nonbreaking spaces. This way they linewrap nicely as well as demonstrating that you knew about typsetting but ignored it for some personal reason. . .

Alex Vermillion 28 Oct 2024 0:54 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform

But speaking for myself personally… the problem is that the free-association game just isn’t very interesting.

Hm, I think this really does change when you get better at it? This only works for people you’re interested in, but if you have someone you are interested in, the free association can be a way to explore a large number of interesting topics that you can pick up in a more structured way later.

I think the statement you summarized from those guides is true, just not helpful to you.

Alex Vermillion 30 Aug 2024 15:10 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Why Large Bureaucratic Organizations?
Well if the question is “If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?” the answer is “That question assumes some false things”

Alex Vermillion 7 Jun 2024 16:31 UTC
3 points
9
on: Split and Commit
Popping back in on this one after a while.

I really enjoy this. This can cut through a large number of annoying problems with one trick: If you split and commit and the actions for all the likely paths are essentially the same, you can ignore which thing is true for now.

“What if I’m a Boltzmann Brain?” If I am not, then I should proceed as normal. If I am, then it does not matter. --> Proceed as normal.

“What if my shirt is blue?” if it is not, then I’ll wear it. If it is, then I’ll wear it. --> Wear the shirt

It might sound silly, but I think Split and Commit is an easy-sell technique which can free you from a lot of unnecessary investigations automatically. Sure, it’s also a good method for operating under uncertainty, but you get simplification for free.

Last note: I find this a good technique to explicitly invoke when someone close to me is anxious. We can build plans for the anxiety being true or not, but if it turns out to change nothing, we can ignore it.

Alex Vermillion 7 Apr 2024 1:11 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
Ugh I just posted that and I already am not sure. I think the correct answer is “leave a comment saying I appreciate the effort but downvote, because this question seems like chaff and upvotes factor into the algorithm and rankings of upvoted posts”, but this is a personal blogpost so the right answer is probably an upvote since those don’t frontpage I think.

Alex Vermillion 7 Apr 2024 1:09 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: mukashi’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
I’m conflicted. I appreciate the effort put into the post, but it seems like a lot of the posters are genuinely creating lots of low quality content and I’d much rather have a small amount of good content than a large amount of meh-or-bad content to sift through to find the good stuff.

I’ve settled on a net downvote, but would probably do a upvote and a disagree vote if that was an option.

Alex Vermillion 7 Apr 2024 1:05 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: What’s with all the bans recently?
It doesn’t sound like this is a good summary, no

Alex Vermillion 31 Mar 2024 19:10 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: frankybegs’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
I think you are dramatically overestimating how difficult it was, back in the day, to accidentally or incidentally learn Scott’s full name. I think this is the crux here.

It was extremely easy to find his name, and often people have stories of learning it on accident. I don’t believe it was simple enough that Scott’s plea to not have his name be published in the NYT was invalid, but I do think it was simple enough that an analogy to lockpicking is silly.

Alex Vermillion 28 Mar 2024 17:00 UTC
9 points
1
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
Hm. I think we like Slate Star Codex in this thread, so let’s enjoy a throwback:

It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.

No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, then they’re automatically a Poor Minority.

I dedicate my blog to explaining how Poor Minorities, when they’re complaining about their difficulties with poverty or asking why some people like Paris Hilton seem to have it so easy, really just want to steal your company’s money and probably sexually molest their co-workers. And I’m not being unfair at all! Right? Because of my new definition! I know everyone I’m talking to can hear those Capital Letters. And there’s no chance whatsoever anyone will accidentally misclassify any particular poor minority as a Poor Minority. That’s crazy talk! I’m sure the “make fun of Poor Minorities” community will be diligently self-policing against that sort of thing. Because if anyone is known for their rigorous application of epistemic charity, it is the make-fun-of-Poor-Minorities community!

I’m not even sure I can dignify this with the term “motte-and-bailey fallacy”. It is a tiny Playmobil motte on a bailey the size of Russia. (from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/)

Can your use of “Journalism” pass this test? Can we really say “the hostility to journalists is not based on hyperbole. They really are like this. They really are competing to wreck the commons for a few advertising dollars.” and expect everyone to pay close attention to check that the target is a Bad Journalist Who Lies first?

Alex Vermillion 28 Mar 2024 16:52 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
Your comment is actually one of the ones in the thread that replied to mine that I found least inane, so I will stash this downthread of my reply to you:

I think a lot of the stuff Cade Metz is alleged to say above is dumb as shit and is not good behavior. However, I don’t need to make bad metaphors, abuse the concept of logical validity, or do anything else that breaks my principles to say that the behavior is bad, so I’m going to raise an issue with those where I see them and count on folks like you to push back the appropriate extent so that we can get to a better medium together.

Alex Vermillion 28 Mar 2024 16:49 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: frankybegs’s comment on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
I’d be amenable to quibbles over the lock thing, though I think it’s still substantially different. A better metaphor (for the situation that Cade Metz claims is the case, which may or may not be correct) making use of locks would be “Anyone can open the lock by putting any key in. By opening the lock with my own key, I have done no damage”. I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott’s last name unless this forum is unaware of how to use search engines.

Alex Vermillion

1. Blending in

2. Jumping out