Viliam

Karma: 24,542

Viliam Apr 3, 2025, 1:40 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: quiet_NaN’s comment on: How To Believe False Things
I am not even sure some things can be meaningfully attributed to nature or nurture. Consider the following hypothesis:
- Men and women are equally good at chess if they spend the same time and effort learning it.
- By nature, some men are strongly attracted to chess, but practically no women.
What we would observe in this world is men being better chess players. But saying that it is “by nature” is slightly misleading. There is a causal chain, and only a small part of it is different by nature. Fixing that small part—e.g. by making chess your family hobby with local high status and lots of fun—can dramatically change the outcome. While it remains true that such things practically never happen in normal life. Also that men can naturally be highly motivated without so highly supportive families.
Shortly, if you ask “are men biologically better at chess?” it feels like both saying “yes” and “no” is highly misleading. “No” in theory and in some very rare experiments; but also “yes” in practice, if you let the nature have its way… even in an environment that would be 100% free of sexism, it’s just that no one would optimize their household to make their children play lots of chess.
It’s not just nitpicking for the sake of online debate—the more detailed model allows making better predictions. Society can change, if for some reason (not necessarily wokeness, it could also be e.g. fashion) you made lots of chess clubs for little girls, with lots of fun an emotional support, the results could change. I could even imagine this becoming a social attractor, for example at one day for random reasons rich people would start sending their daughters to chess clubs, and suddenly “send your daughter to chess club” would become a symbol of prestige and many parents would want to do that. And then you would get generations of great female chess players. Maybe.
(Personally, I don’t think that chess is worth doing this, but maybe math or computer science is.)

Viliam Apr 3, 2025, 12:43 PM
8 points
2
on: The Rise of Hyperpalatability
When I tell people about food like Soylent, they often ask “but isn’t it boring to eat the same thing every day”? From my perspective, that is actually a good thing. I don’t want my food to be too exciting, because then I will eat too much of it. (Actually, I want, but I don’t want to want.)
I would be happy to have a grocery store nearby that doesn’t sell any superstimuli. Something that would have shelves full of vegetables and other boring stuff, but no sweets etc. I would be happy to always buy there, to avoid the temptation. But I realize that for the owner, there would be constant temptation to increase their profits by slightly expanding the selection. (Which by the way is something that already happened with Soylent-like products. The first ones, they tried to copy the nutrition recommendations. The next ones, they… tried to join the wave by offering a product very similar but slightly sweeter than their competitors. Keep going this way for a few decades and see where it gets you.)
I wonder how difficult it would be to have the kind of grocery store I imagine by simply buying online, and using some mechanism to filter the healthy foods. The simplest implementation could simply be a blacklist—if I ever regret buying something, or if I predict that I would, there should be a “hide” button that forever removes the product from my screen without a trace. (Could this be implemented as a GreaseMoney script?) I suspect that if many people started using it, the shops would start fighting back, but it would work for some time.

Viliam Apr 3, 2025, 12:05 PM
11 points
5
on: How prediction markets can create harmful outcomes: a case study
The part about misinformation is very important, and unlike assassination markets it seems to be in a blind spot of the rationalist community.
I suspect that most people here perceive the prediction markets through the mistake theory perspective: “people try to do their best at predicting outcomes, some of them make honest mistakes, prediction markets create a financial incentive to get it right (or to become less confident about your predictions)”. A collective effort similar to scientific research, but distributed, open for everyone, and allocating money to the best researchers.
And that is true… kind of. In the same sense as the traditional market is a collective effort to produce goods for everyone at an affordable price, if possible.
That also is kinda true, but it also fundamentally misinterprets the gears of the situation by conflating “what typically happens at a free market” with “what motivates the participants in the market”. Some of them might be motivated by the desire to provide cheap goods for everyone, but most of them are probably there in order to make money, preferably lots of money. The fact that free markets often make things cheap is a good news for the customers, but the producers are not necessarily happy about it, any many use various tricks to avoid this outcome.
Free market is great for the new entrepreneurs, because it allows them to join the game. Free market is bad for the established entrepreneurs, because it allows their competitors to join the game. This is why established entrepreneurs often looks for ways to keep their dominance on the market (other than merely providing better products at lower costs), such as regulatory capture. Instead of collective effort, free market would be better described as an impersonal force pushing the participants towards the outcomes they do not really prefer.
Now apply the same logic to the prediction markets.
The fact that prediction markets provide good predictions is nice, but the true motivation of many participants is simply to make lots of money. This will be even more true than today if prediction markets become more popular. If at some moment anyone will be able to spend their savings on prediction markets, we could expect that most people will be there for the money, and from their perspective “providing correct prediction” will be like “providing cheap goods”—maybe something that can’t be avoided, but not their ideal outcome.
On the prediction market, you make money when people vote against you. Therefore, even if you are a super-forecaster and regularly make correct bets, your profit is maximized when other people are wrong. If your budget is large enough so that you could make millions (or even billions) on the prediction market (in the hypothetical future with trillions of dollars in prediction markets), it would be rational for you to spend lots of money to make sure that as many people as possible are wrong.
The tobacco companies tried to make people wrong about the dangers of smoking. Now imagine companies just as rich, and just as evil, trying to make you wrong about… well, everything they can bet on. They don’t even have to grow the tobacco and make the cigarettes in order to get rich; they can just as conveniently bet on other people’s tobacco, cigarettes, vaccination, autism, whatever.
In theory, prediction markets can push people towards sanity, by rewarding correct predictions and punishing incorrect predictions. In practice, prediction markets would also create huge financial incentives for unethical companies to push people in the opposite direction (so that they can then take their money in the market). It is not obvious to me which force would turn out to be stronger in real life.
“But won’t people stop betting on the prediction markets if they lose predictably?” No they won’t. First, gamblers already keep losing and they don’t stop. Second, if betting on a wrong but strongly held belief will feel emotional good at the moment of betting, even if it loses some money later, it may be worth it, emotionally. Not everything needs to be profitable: whenever you buy a cookie, you lose some money, but you still enjoy the cookie; perhaps the irrational people will enjoy placing their predictably wrong bets the same way.
The current prediction markets are systematically biased, because many forecasters there are motivated by the prestige, instead of / in addition to money. People willing to sacrifice prestige for money would bet slightly differently. They would actually probably often create new accounts, just to reduce the effect of “I know that this person is almost always right, so I hesitate to bet against them”. They would want you to perceive them as idiots instead, because that will encourage you to bet against them. They would want you to believe that they are acting completely stupid.
As a hypothetical scenario, imagine a super-forecaster who predicts that something will happen with probability X, and then creates a new account to make that bet with $1000000, adding some insane comment such as: “I prayed to Jesus to make me rich, and Jesus told me to bet that the value is 12.34, because chapter 12 verse 34 in the Bible mentions money, and I trust Jesus enough to put my lifetime savings here”. Then they would create another new account that bets $100 dollars against the position, saying “come on, this is so silly that this is practically free money!” And they they would share that screenshot on social networks. In my opinion, as a profit maximizing move, this would be more instrumentally rational than what participants in the prediction markets are doing these days (except for this guy).

Viliam Apr 3, 2025, 11:02 AM
2 points
0
on: On Pseudo-Principality: Reclaiming “Whataboutism” as a Test for Counterfeit Principles
Sometimes the difference is in the intention, and it’s difficult to prove to an outside observer. Consider this:
a) The sheriff ignores crimes done by white people, and only responds to crimes done by black people.
b) The sheriff receives 5 phone calls telling him that 5 different crimes are happening in different parts of town at approximately the same time. Unable to handle all of them, sheriff chooses one of them at random, arrives there and arrests the person. The person happens to be black. The sheriff didn’t know this before arriving there.
As I described it, the former is obvious racism, the latter is perfectly okay. Yet they may seem the same.
In this specific situation, we could tell the difference by long-term observation, because these things happen repeatedly and if the sheriff always happens to choose the 1 in 5 crimes with the black person, that just sounds unlikely. The problem is, we cannot apply the same logic to the kind of thing that happens once in a lifetime.

Viliam Apr 3, 2025, 10:45 AM
4 points
2
on: More Fun With GPT-4o Image Generation
Popularity of fake Ghibli can make actual Ghibli studio more popular. But I am afraid it’s only because Ghibli studio is already a well-known thing.
Imagine a new previously unknown human artist developing a new style that for some reason many people like a lot. What is going to happen? First, no one is going to wait a few years for a new AI that is trained on that art. Instead, they will give the AI a few pictures as an example, and say “transform this photo of me and my dog into a picture made using this style”. Then they will publish the result.
But now we have a new picture, or maybe dozen new pictures, that have approximately the same style as the original human artist, who probably isn’t even mentioned in the Instagram post or blog that published the pictures. Other people will take these pictures as inputs, and ask the AI to “transform my photo in this style”. The style may become widely popular, but the original human may very likely be ignored. Even worse, their work will no longer be perceived as original, merely as “yet another instance of the recent internet fashion wave”.

Viliam Apr 1, 2025, 5:36 PM
2 points
0
on: Efficiency as a 2-place word
Was this article inspired by the Department of Government Efficiency?

Viliam Apr 1, 2025, 3:46 PM
2 points
0
on: Sam Altman’s sister claims Sam sexually abused her—Part 7: List of Annie’s online accounts, References
Seems like you have collected lots of material, and have spent a lot of time thinking about it… but ultimately I don’t feel any closer to actual answers than after the Part 1.

Viliam Apr 1, 2025, 1:41 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: avturchin’s Shortform
I have achieved higher quality answers by using the magical words: “give me multiple options, then compare them and choose the best one”.
But next time I will try to iterate the best one—maybe something like “suggest five improvements to the option above, and choose the best one”.

Viliam Mar 30, 2025, 2:40 PM
26 points
21
on: How I talk to those above me
Yeah, there are two different cultures, and it is important to know which one is at your job. For some people, following this advice could cost them their jobs.

Viliam Mar 30, 2025, 1:48 PM
3 points
4
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: I, G(Zombie)
Yeah, same here. This feels like a crossover between the standard Buddhist woo and LLM slop, sprinkled with “quantum” and “Gödel”. The fact that it has positive karma makes me feel sad about LW.
Since it was written using LLM, I think it is only fair to ask LLM to summarize it:
Summary of “Eliminative Nominalism”
This philosophical essay introduces Eliminative Nominalism (EN), a theoretical framework that extends Eliminative Materialism (EM) to address what the author considers its foundational oversight: the conflation of first-order physical description with second-order representational structure.
Core Arguments
1. Mind as Expressive System: The mind is a logically expressive system that inherits the constraints of formal systems, making it necessarily incomplete (via Gödel’s incompleteness theorems).
2. Consciousness as Formal Necessity: Subjective experience (“qualia”) persists not because it reflects reality but because its rejection would be arithmetically impossible within the system that produces it. The brain, as a “good regulator,” cannot function without generating these unprovable formal assertions.
3. Universe Z Thought Experiment: The author proposes a universe physically identical to ours but lacking epiphenomenal entities (consciousness), where organisms still behave exactly as in our universe. Through parsimony and evolutionary efficiency, the author argues we likely inhabit such a universe.
4. Beyond Illusionism: Unlike EM’s “illusionism,” EN doesn’t claim consciousness is merely an illusion (which presupposes someone being deceived) but rather a structural necessity—a computational artifact that cannot be eliminated even if metaphysically unreal.
Implications
- Consciousness is neither reducible nor emergent, but a formal fiction generated by self-referential systems
- The persistence of qualia reflects the mind’s inherent incompleteness, not its access to metaphysical truth
- Natural language and chain of thought necessarily adhere to formalizable structures that constrain cognition
- The “hard problem” of consciousness is dissolved rather than solved
The essay concludes that while EN renders consciousness metaphysically problematic, it doesn’t undermine ethics or human experience, offering instead a testable, falsifiable framework for understanding mind that willingly subjects itself to empirical criteria.
So, I guess the key idea is to use the Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to explain human psychology.
Standard crackpottery, in my opinion. Humans are not mathematical proof systems.

Viliam Mar 28, 2025, 9:49 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Tan’s comment on: Daniel Tan’s Shortform
Is it possible that the AI was actually told in the prompt to generate those specific answers?
(People on internet do various things just to get other people’s attention.)

Viliam Mar 27, 2025, 10:03 PM
10 points
3
on: Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model
A few months ago I complained that automatic translation sucks when you translate between two languages which are not English, and that the result is the same as if you translated through English. When translating between two Slavic languages, even sentences where you practically just had to transcribe Cyrillic to Latin and change a few vowels, both Google Translate and DeepL succeeded to randomize the word order, misgender every noun, and mistranslate concepts that happen to be translated to English as the same word.
I tried some translation today, and from my perspective, Claude is almost perfect. Google Translate sucks the same way it did before (maybe I am not fair here, I did not try exactly the same text), and DeepL is somewhere in between. You can give Claude a book and tell to translate it to another language, and the result is pleasant to read. (I haven’t tried other LLMs.)
This seems to support the hypothesis that Claude is multilingual in some deep sense.
I assume that Google Translate does not prioritize English on purpose, it’s just that it has way more English texts that any other language, so if e.g. two Russian words map to the same English word, it treats it as strong evidence that those two words are the same. Claude can see that the two words are used differently, and can match them correctly to corresponding two words in a different language. (This is just a guess; I don’t really understand how these things work under the hood.)

Viliam Mar 25, 2025, 9:37 PM
2 points
1
in reply to: Mohit Gore’s comment on: Mohit Gore’s Shortform
What would be your proposed alternative to Harry Potter fanfiction? Something else fan fiction? Original fiction? Not a fiction?
As I see it, choosing the Harry Potter universe that many readers already know allows it to use the contrast between how the different versions of Harry Potter behave.
Harry Potter in the books is frankly an idiot. Every year the most powerful dark wizard is trying to murder him, and he always only survives because he gets lucky… and yet the only thing he worries about is quidditch. Voldemort doesn’t seem very smart either; his only smart move in the entire series was making the horcruces. Otherwise he is just a bully who can say “avada kedavra” faster than anyone. It seems like if he really tried to kill Harry, then Harry wouldn’t have a chance. Seriously, if you can possess people, including teachers at Hogwarts, how difficult it would be to say “Harry, come here” and then stab him with a knife? The entire society of wizards seems to have a huge collective blind spot about doing anything that does not involve magic. Which is weird, considering that many students are coming from muggle families.
So I guess if your message is that people are idiots, it can be well delivered in a fan fiction from the universe where all people are idiots, and the book had millions of readers who didn’t mind this fact, probably because in similar circumstances they also would have acted the same way.

Viliam Mar 25, 2025, 9:18 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Raemon’s Shortform Feed
Are there many people who pay for 3 Saturdays and then skip one? I would be surprised.
What age is the target group? An adult person can probably easily find 3 free Saturdays in a row. For a student living with parents it will probably be more difficult, because it means 3 weekends when the parents cannot organize any whole-weekend activity.

Viliam Mar 25, 2025, 8:40 PM
10 points
0
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: rhollerith_dot_com’s Shortform
How about “make computers stupid again”?

Viliam Mar 25, 2025, 8:39 PM
2 points
0
on: Privateers Reborn: Cyber Letters of Marque
The actions and statements of this current Trump administration show more support than ever for bold governance such as revitalizing letters of marque.
Against Russia? (As far as I know, most cyber attacks come from there.) In my opinion, unlikely.

Viliam 25 Mar 2025 19:26 UTC
5 points
−1
on: Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?
I suspect that many people in the rationalist community have a blind spot about prediction markets, and see them as some kind of cooperative effort to make true predictions.
Instead, from the financial perspective, they are zero-sum games, and the best players play accordingly. If making the correct prediction is the winning move, so be it. If it is something else, that works, too.
I suspect that anonymous prediction markets (where people cannot get famous as superforecasters, only either gain or lose money) would make even better predictions that the current ones where many people have a conflict of interest.

Viliam 25 Mar 2025 14:45 UTC
2 points
0
on: Probability Theory Fundamentals 102: Source of the Sample Space
I don’t think I’m interested. You didn’t update at all based on our previous bet.
That should make you more interested (financially) in betting against the person.

Viliam 24 Mar 2025 10:23 UTC
2 points
0
on: Socially Graceful Degradation
So, as I see it, the best case is when the skill degrades gracefully (provides the benefits even if other people are unaware of it or doing it wrong); and the second best case is if it has tests, so you know when you can safely use it, and when you need to switch to some plan B.
In case of rationality, I think there is “individual rationality” and “group rationality”. Some things you can do alone, for example keep a diary of your predictions. You can get more benefit from talking to other rational people, but there is also the risk that they turn out to be not that rational and their advice actually harmful. (And I am not just talking about LW-style rationality here, but generally when you should take advice from people around you.) So you should check what the people around you are sane about, and only take that kind of advice from them; with everything else you are probably better using common sense / outside view.
I am also thinking about constructivist education, which works great when it does, but it does not degrade gracefully. (If you have a stupid teacher, it is better if he or she just follows a good textbook, rather than trying to guide the pupils’ cognitive processes.) How can we derive the benefits where we can, but also avoid the degradation? Probably some kind of certification. But this requires an ability to admit things like “this method cannot scale, because we do not have enough teachers who would pass the certification”.

Viliam 24 Mar 2025 9:33 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Solving willpower seems easier than solving aging
I don’t have a coherent theory of motivation, because when I look at myself, it seems that different parts of my life work quite differently.
For example, when I used to write SF, the social motivation was very important. I had friends who liked SF books and movies, we talked about that a lot, many of us hoped to write something good one day. So I had a community, and an audience. My first attempts had some small success, which inspired me to work harder and achieve more. And then… at some moment this all went down in flames… skipping the unimportant details, I think my mistake was becoming visibly more successful than some people in our community who had higher social status than me, so I got the “status slap-down” and the community became much less friendly towards me, and I lost an important source of motivation. For some time I was motivated by a desire to prove them wrong (for example I avoided a soft blacklist by publishing my story under a pseudonym), but gradually writing stopped being fun, and I stopped writing.
For an opposite example, I am interested in mathematics. Sometimes I read a textbook, do some exercises, try to figure something out. I would prefer to have people around me willing to discuss these topics, but the fact that I don’t doesn’t stop me at all.
Somewhere in the middle is programming. I am motivated to learn new things, but I am not motivated to finish my projects, and I suspect that having an audience would help here.
I guess I find learning intrinsically rewarding, but producing things requires a social reward (which I need to receive during the process, not only after having completed the product).
With regards to homeostasis, I think I have always tried to achieve more, it’s just that my energy and motivation are very limited (more than previously now that I have kids). When I have some free time, I try new things, but often I feel too tired just trying to survive the day. That is, this is partially about me, and partially about my environment. Of course, a stronger internal drive can compensate for a less friendly environment, but a friendly environment can also make a great difference.

Viliam

Summary of “Eliminative Nominalism”

Core Arguments

Implications