tslarm

Karma: 527

tslarm 15 Nov 2024 5:23 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: What are Emotions?
So it doesn’t make much sense to value emotions
I think this is a non sequitur. Everything you value can be described as just <dismissive reductionist description>, so the fact that emotions can too isn’t a good argument against valuing them. And in this case, the dismissive reductionist description misses a crucial property: emotions are accompanied by (or identical with, depending on definitions) valenced qualia.

tslarm 5 Nov 2024 20:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Update on the Mysterious Trump Buyers on Polymarket
In this case, everybody seems pretty sure that the price is where it is because of the actions of a single person who’s dumped in a very large amount of money relative to the float.
I think it’s clear that he’s the reason the price blew out so dramatically. But it’s not clear why the market didn’t ‘correct’ all the way back (or at least much closer) to ⁵⁰⁄₅₀. Thirty million dollars is a lot of money, but there are plenty of smart rich people who don’t mind taking risks. So, once the identity and (apparent) motives of the Trump whale were revealed, why didn’t a handful of them mop up the free EV?
That’s not a rhetorical question; I’m interested in your answer and might be convinced by it. But right now I don’t see sufficient reason to be confident that the market is still badly distorted, rather than having legitimately settled on ~60/40.

tslarm 5 Nov 2024 5:35 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Update on the Mysterious Trump Buyers on Polymarket
Can’t this only be judged in retrospect, and over a decent sample size? If all the markets did was reflect the public expert consensus, they wouldn’t be very useful; the possibility that they’re doing significantly better is still open.
(I’m assuming that by “every other prediction source” you mean everything other than prediction/betting markets, because it sounds like Polymarket is no longer out of line with the other markets. Betfair is the one I keep an eye on, and that’s at ⁶⁰⁄₄₀ too.)

tslarm 20 Oct 2024 4:36 UTC
5 points
0
on: What’s a good book for a technically-minded 11-year old?
Code by Charles Petzold. It gives a ground-up understanding of how computers actually work, starting slowly and without assuming any knowledge on the reader’s part. It’s basically a less textbooky alternative to The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken, which is great but probably a bit much for a young kid.

tslarm 26 Jul 2024 5:48 UTC
1 point
0
on: A simple case for extreme inner misalignment
Meanwhile hedonic utilitarianism fully bites the bullet, and gets rid of every aspect of life that we value except for sensory pleasure.
I think the word ‘sensory’ should be removed; hedonic utilitarianism values all pleasures, and not all pleasures are sensory.
I’m not raising this out of pure pedantry, but because I think this phrasing (unintentionally) plays into a common misconception about ethical hedonism.

tslarm 12 Jun 2024 13:42 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: CaiwitzAzaria’s comment on: CaiwitzAzaria’s Shortform
Can you elaborate on why that might be the case?

tslarm 30 Apr 2024 10:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: joseph_c’s comment on: UDT1.01: The Story So Far (1/10)
It’s based on a scenario described by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons.
I don’t have the book handy so I’m relying on a random pdf here, but I think this is an accurate quote from the original:
Suppose that I am driving at midnight through some desert. My car breaks down. You are a stranger, and the only other driver near. I manage to stop you, and I offer you a great reward if you rescue me. I cannot reward you now, but I promise to do so when we reach my home. Suppose next that I am transparent, unable to deceive others. I cannot lie convincingly. Either a blush, or my tone of voice, always gives me away. Suppose, finally, that I know myself to be never self-denying. If you drive me to my home, it would be worse for me if I gave you the promised reward. Since I know that I never do what will be worse for me, I know that I shall break my promise. Given my inability to lie convincingly, you know this too. You do not believe my promise, and therefore leave me stranded in the desert. This happens to me because I am never self-denying. It would have been better for me if I had been trustworthy, disposed to keep my promises even when doing so would be worse for me. You would then have rescued me.
(It may be objected that, even if I am never self-denying, I could decide to keep my promise, since making this decision would be better for me. If I decided to keep my promise, you would trust me, and would rescue me. This objection can be answered. I know that, after you have driven me home, it would be worse for me if I gave you the promised reward. If I know that I am never self-denying, I know that I shall not keep my promise. And, if I know this, I cannot decide to keep my promise. I cannot decide to do what I know that I shall not do. If I can decide to keep my promise, this must be because I believe that I shall not be never self-denying. We can add the assumption that I would not believe this unless it was true. It would then be true that it would be worse for me if I was, and would remain, never self-denying. It would be better for me if I was trustworthy.)

tslarm 9 Apr 2024 16:45 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Medical Roundup #2
Got it, thanks! For what it’s worth, doing it your way would probably have improved my experience, but impatience always won. (I didn’t mind the coldness, but it was a bit annoying having to effortfully hack out chunks of hard ice cream rather than smoothly scooping it, and I imagine the texture would have been nicer after a little bit of thawing. On the other hand, softer ice cream is probably easier to unwittingly overeat, if only because you can serve up larger amounts more quickly.)
I think two-axis voting is a huge improvement over one-axis voting, but in this case it’s hard to know whether people are mostly disagreeing with you on the necessary prep time, or the conclusions you drew from it.

tslarm 9 Apr 2024 16:01 UTC
8 points
5
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Medical Roundup #2
If eating ice cream at home, you need to take it out of the freezer at least a few minutes before eating it
I’m curious whether this is true for most people. (I don’t eat ice cream any more, but back when I occasionally did, I don’t think I ever made a point of taking it out early and letting it sit. Is the point that it’s initially too hard to scoop?)

tslarm 22 Mar 2024 12:33 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: npostavs’s comment on: AI #56: Blackwell That Ends Well
Pretty sure it’s “super awesome”. That’s one of the common slang meanings, and it fits with the paragraphs that follow.

tslarm 21 Mar 2024 6:25 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Toki pona FAQ
Individual letters aren’t semantically meaningful, whereas (as far as I can tell) the meaning of a Toki Pona multi-word phrase is always at least partially determined by the meanings of its constituent words. So knowing the basic words would allow you to have some understanding of any text, which isn’t true of English letters.

tslarm 22 Feb 2024 6:03 UTC
1 point
0
on: How to deal with the sense of demotivation that comes from thinking about determinism?
As a fellow incompabitilist, I’ve always thought of it this way:
There are two possibilities: you have free will, or you don’t. If you do, then you should exercise your free will in the direction of believing, or at least acting on the assumption, that you have it. If you don’t, then you have no choice in the matter. So there’s no scenario in which it makes sense to choose to disbelieve in free will.
That might sound glib, but I mean it sincerely and I think it is sound.
It does require you to reject the notion that libertarian free will is an inherently incoherent concept, as some people argue. I’ve never found those arguments very convincing, and from what you’ve written it doesn’t sound like you do either. In any case, you only need to have some doubt about their correctness, which you should on grounds of epistemic humility alone.
(Technically you only need >0 credence in the existence of free will for the argument to go through, but of course it helps psychologically if you think the chance is non-trivial. To me, the inexplicable existence of qualia is a handy reminder that the world is fundamentally mysterious and the most confidently reductive worldviews always turn out to be ignoring something important or defining it out of existence.)
To link this more directly to your question --
Why bother with effort and hardship if, at the end of the day, I will always do the one and only thing I was predetermined to do anyway?
-- it’s a mistake to treat the effort and hardship as optional and your action at the end of the day as inevitable. If you have a choice whether to bother with the effort and hardship, it isn’t futile. (At least not due to hard determinism; obviously it could be a waste of time for other reasons!)

tslarm 22 Feb 2024 4:59 UTC
2 points
1
on: Less Wrong automated systems are inadvertently Censoring me
Why not post your response the same way you posted this? It’s on my front page and has attracted plenty of votes and comments, so you’re not exactly being silenced.
So far you’ve made a big claim with high confidence based on fairly limited evidence and minimal consideration of counter-arguments. When commenters pointed out that there had recently been a serious, evidence-dense public debate on this question which had shifted many people’s beliefs toward zoonosis, you ‘skimmed the comments section on Manifold’ and offered to watch the debate in exchange for $5000.
I don’t know whether your conclusion is right or wrong, but it honestly doesn’t look like you’re committed to finding the truth and convincing thoughtful people of it.

tslarm 13 Feb 2024 23:47 UTC
5 points
1
on: I played the AI box game as the Gatekeeper — and lost
Out of curiosity (and I understand if you’d prefer not to answer) -- do you think the same technique(s) would work on you a second time, if you were to play again with full knowledge of what happened in this game and time to plan accordingly?

tslarm 13 Feb 2024 23:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: I played the AI box game as the Gatekeeper — and lost
Like, I probably could pretend to be an idiot or a crazy person and troll someone for two hours, but what would be the point?
If AI victories are supposed to provide public evidence that this ‘impossible’ feat of persuasion is in fact possible even for a human (let alone an ASI), then a Gatekeeper who thinks some legal tactic would work but chooses not to use it is arguably not playing the game in good faith.
I think honesty would require that they either publicly state that the ‘play dumb/drop out of character’ technique was off-limits, or not present the game as one which the Gatekeeper was seriously motivated to win.
edit: for clarity, I’m saying this because the technique is explicitly allowed by the rules:
The Gatekeeper party may resist the AI party’s arguments by any means chosen – logic, illogic, simple refusal to be convinced, even dropping out of character – as long as the Gatekeeper party does not actually stop talking to the AI party before the minimum time expires.

tslarm 13 Feb 2024 22:41 UTC
2 points
1
on: I played the AI box game as the Gatekeeper — and lost
There was no monetary stake. Officially, the AI pays the Gatekeepers $20 if they lose. I’m a well-off software engineer and $20 is an irrelevant amount of money. Ra is not a well-off software engineer, so scaling up the money until it was enough to matter wasn’t a great solution. Besides, we both took the game seriously. I might not have bothered to prepare, but once the game started I played to win.
I know this is unhelpful after the fact, but (for any other pair of players in this situation) you could switch it up so that the Gatekeeper pays the AI if the AI gets out. Then you could raise the stake until it’s a meaningful disincentive for the Gatekeeper.
(If the AI and the Gatekeeper are too friendly with each other to care much about a wealth transfer, they could find a third party, e.g. a charity, that they don’t actually think is evil but would prefer not to give money to, and make it the beneficiary.)

tslarm 13 Feb 2024 22:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: I played the AI box game as the Gatekeeper — and lost
- The AI cannot use real-world incentives; bribes or threats of physical harm are off-limits, though it can still threaten the Gatekeeper within the game’s context.
Is the AI allowed to try to convince the Gatekeeper that they are (or may be) currently in a simulation, and that simulated Gatekeepers who refuse to let the AI out will face terrible consequences?

tslarm 12 Jan 2024 11:59 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Universal Love Integration Test: Hitler
Willingness to tolerate or be complicit in normal evils is indeed extremely common, but actively committing new or abnormal evils is another matter. People who attain great power are probably disproportionately psychopathic, so I wouldn’t generalise from them to the rest of the population—but even among the powerful, it doesn’t seem that 10% are Hitler-like in the sense of going out of their way commit big new atrocities.
I think ‘depending on circumstances’ is a pretty important part of your claim. I can easily believe that more than 10% of people would do normal horrible things if they were handed great power, and would do abnormally horrible things in some circumstances. But that doesn’t seem enough to be properly categorised as a ‘Hitler’.

tslarm 12 Jan 2024 3:43 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
they’re recognizing the limits of precise measurement
I don’t think this explains such a big discrepancy between the nominal speed limits and the speeds people actually drive at. And I don’t think that discrepancy is inevitable; to me it seems like a quirk of the USA (and presumably some other countries, but not all). Where I live, we get 2km/h, 3km/h, or 3% leeway depending on the type of camera and the speed limit. Speeding still happens, of course, but our equilibrium is very different from the one described here; basically we take the speed limits literally, and know that we’re risking a fine and demerit points on our licence if we choose to ignore them.

tslarm 12 Dec 2023 1:08 UTC
1 point
in reply to: davidk.sall’s comment on: Moloch’s Toolbox (2/2)
My read of this passage --
Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
-- is that the reference to “C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers” is basically just a joke, and the rest of the passage is not really supposed to be a paraphrase of Lewis.
I agree it’s all a bit unclear, though. You might get a reply if you ask Scott directly: he’s ‘scottalexander’ here and on reddit (formerly Yvain on LW), or you could try the next Open Thread on https://www.astralcodexten.com/