Alex Vermillion

Karma: 809

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 Apr 1, 2025, 4:42 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: NickH’s comment on: Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit
I think we should suspect that they’ve done some basic background research (this individual, not in general), and take the rest of the information about people failing to see improvements as data that also points this direction.

Alex Vermillion Mar 25, 2025, 6:21 PM
10 points
7
in reply to: justinpombrio’s comment on: Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?
They (and initially I) read it as a question: “True or false: this market will resolve No at the end of 2025?”

Alex Vermillion Mar 6, 2025, 6:42 PM
1 point
0
on: [DC/MD] HPMOR Anniversary Party
Pie day!

Alex Vermillion Feb 13, 2025, 7:36 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: The “Think It Faster” Exercise
I did that. I didn’t want to fill in the worksheet, but I read through it. Now I’m reading through this post and noting anything that I understood differently when I read the worksheet or that is worth mentioning:
- The post has links and a story at the start that could draw some people away, but I didn’t have an issue (except for noticing that other people could, yuck)
- The link might cause people to be drawn away. I almost added it to my tabs and then decided to ignore it
- The story about Yudkowsky might cause people to get distracted.
- There’s a lot in this one that details how you got here, which isn’t really about why someone should read on. The worksheet didn’t noticeably have this, which meant I got into your ideas faster.
- The example about UI I like. It is helpful to see an example early on instead of a framework that I have to imagine an example for.
- It is quite detailed though.
Overall, I think both had their ups and downs. The 30-seconds-of-thought synthesis, I think, is to try to make a worksheet, slap a small example problem and solution above it, then work through the example below. Your other sections can fall yet lower. This would give you a strong “So What?” hook like your example gave, while getting readers into the meat of your technique quickly. Working the example below makes the technique less impersonal, and would make the total feeling of reading your post be
- So what? Oh, that would be nice to be able to do
- Hrm. I need a bit more explanation
- Oh, I see! That’s not so bad
- [reading your further sections]

Alex Vermillion Feb 13, 2025, 7:18 PM
1 point
0
on: The “Think It Faster” Exercise

I’m curious which one people find easier as an initial read.

I used the random.org list randomizer to shuffle my reading order. It said worksheet then post.

Alex Vermillion Feb 13, 2025, 7:11 PM
5 points
−2
on: The Gentle Romance
Jesus, thanks for you story and for the link to The Gentle Seduction. Both had me tearing up. I did not read The Gentle Seduction until after your piece, so I did not know how badly we needed something like it for AI, but now that I’ve read both I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Alex Vermillion Jan 23, 2025, 2:40 PM
1 point
0
on: Would You Work Harder In The Least Convenient Possible World?
Seems sort of like Alice is attempting to Euler bully Bob

Alex Vermillion Jan 23, 2025, 2:39 PM
1 point
0
on: Would You Work Harder In The Least Convenient Possible World?
Alice: I think the negative impact of my rudeness is probably smaller than the potential positive impact of getting you to act in line with the values you claim to have.
Bob: That doesn’t even seem true. If everyone is rude like you, then the Effective Altruism movement will get a bad reputation, and fewer people will be willing to join. What if I get so upset by your rudeness that I decide not to donate at all?
Alice: That kind of seems like a you problem, not a me problem.
Alice is being extremely rude! She is implementing a strategy that reduces both Alice’s and Bob’s value in the world in order to get Bob to change his position. This fulfills the rudimentary criteria for a Decision-Theoretic Threat, which you should not give in to, indicating that Bob should tell Alice to kick rocks, because it is only because Bob is malleable that she is inflicting rudeness on him.

Alex Vermillion Jan 23, 2025, 2:00 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Tarjei Skjærset’s comment on: Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people

If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it’s also ignoring useful information.

I am not one to suggest ignoring useful information if you’re able to process it in order to get a better answer. However, I think all the examples above were examples where people do not expect to be acting more effectively after processing the information.

That is, I agree with you for a perfect Bayesian that you shouldn’t ignore anything ever, but I read Said Achmiz as saying “If you get bad vibes from someone, be safer around them through planning”, which is not actually a qualitative difference from what Kaj Sotala suggested.

Alex Vermillion Dec 8, 2024, 7:22 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: How to be skeptical about meditation/Buddhism
Hmm, this comment reads as if you are unaware of ways that information could be passed down over time other than the written word, even though you sort of hint towards some in your comment.

It seems like epics often survived for very long times without being destroyed entirely, and it seems like the same techniques could be used here. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?

Alex Vermillion Nov 18, 2024, 1:30 AM
5 points
4
on: JargonBot Beta Test
Amusingly, I found a 16-year old comment asking for jargon integration. Dropping it here just to document that people want this, so that people don’t say “Who wants this?” without an answer.

Alex Vermillion Nov 14, 2024, 10:23 PM
2 points
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 Nov 14, 2024, 5:06 PM
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 Nov 11, 2024, 8:10 PM
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 Nov 10, 2024, 3:16 AM
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 Nov 8, 2024, 11:23 PM
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 Nov 7, 2024, 9:31 PM
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 Nov 7, 2024, 9:17 PM
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 Nov 3, 2024, 11:21 PM
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 Nov 2, 2024, 10:56 PM
6 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

1. Blending in

2. Jumping out