xpym

Karma: 167

xpym Apr 2, 2025, 12:49 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: VDT: a solution to decision theory

The problem is that it will not work outside the distribution.

Of course, but neither would anything else so far discovered...

xpym Mar 25, 2025, 2:13 PM
2 points
0
on: Elite Coordination via the Consensus of Power

More generally, we can think of wokeness as a consensus of power under which it was common knowledge that leaders would give in to demands made by left-wing activists.

Not quite right. Demands for outright communism are still not taken seriously, and I don’t expect this to change any time soon. Wokeness is the particular fusion of the “social justice” brand of feminism and BLM, which Dem leaders embraced because it served the moral/ideological function while not fundamentally threatening hard power structures.

A very relevant Scott Alexander’s post that you didn’t mention here is New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed, in which he claimed that New Atheism was a “failed hamartiology”:

We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. [...]

Gradually the Blue Tribe got a little bit more self-awareness and realized this was not a great idea. Their coalition contained too many Catholic Latinos, too many Muslim Arabs, too many Baptist African-Americans. [...]

Between 2008 and 2016, two things happened. First, Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president. Second, Ferguson. The Blue Tribe kept posing its same identity question: “Who am I? What defines me?”, and now Black Lives Matter gave them an answer they liked better “You are the people who aren’t blinded by sexism and racism.”

Again, it was beautiful, simple, and perfect. We were “the reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on blind hatred and prejudice. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by white supremacy and an all-consuming desire to protect their own privilege, and so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the cotton plant in Jamestown. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by bigotry separates us from the Republicans.

The right wing in the West still hasn’t come up with a memetically competitive (but not suicidal) replacement for its own failed hamartiology. Nietzsche observed that God died almost a century and a half ago. Clearly, it’s not easy for conservatives to rebuild their ideology from scratch without that centerpiece. MAGA seems to be the right at its most successful currently, and as far as I can tell, it’s pretty much the “reversed stupidity” of wokeness, so your warning that “there’s no guarantee that the same forces won’t drive them equally crazy” is too coy/belated.

What this suggests is that we need liberalism 2.0: an ideological paradigm robust enough to rein in the excesses of the consensus of culture, but non-coercive enough that it can spread without sparking another culture war.

The more pessimistic among us fear that without a Thirty Years’ War-tier disaster this idea won’t be able to catch on. But, of course, an AI-driven omnicide/rapture/??? could come first… All in all, interesting times.

xpym Mar 11, 2025, 10:36 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: when will LLMs become human-level bloggers?

When I consider the bloggers I actually subscribe to versus those I just occasionally read

It’s amusing that it couldn’t help itself prefacing a reasonable take with an obvious lie, almost as if to make the point better.

Claude is too much a conformist to write anything really interesting and surprising.

Well, so is much of the mainstream media, and yet people seem happy enough to consume that stuff.

xpym Mar 11, 2025, 10:22 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: when will LLMs become human-level bloggers?

what about humans who would do the same thing?

Presumably, this happens: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/12/might-people-on-the-internet-sometimes-lie/

I do often notice how the top upvoted reddit comment in big subs is confidently wrong, with a more correct/nuanced take sitting much lower.

xpym Feb 17, 2025, 11:04 AM
9 points
8
on: Virtue signaling, and the “humans-are-wonderful” bias, as a trust exercise

Insofar as it’s required for you to pretend that people are nicer than they are to be kind to them, I think you should do that. But your impact will be better if you at least note it if that’s what you’re doing

Unlikely to work for Mr. Portman. Living the life of systematic lies and pretension is difficult and cognitively demanding. Being pro-socially self-deceived to some degree is a much simpler strategy, which is probably why evolution converged on it (paired with some amount of psychopathy to balance/exploit excesses).

policy analysis

Most people obviously aren’t cut out for that, and are happier for it, if they live in a reasonably high-trust society.

xpym Jan 17, 2025, 2:47 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: What Is The Alignment Problem?

I bet the person says “no”.

I agree, but I think it’s important to mention issues like social desirability bias and strategic self-deception here, coupled with the fact that most people just aren’t particularly good at introspection.

it’s conflicting desires, not conflicting values

It’s both, our minds employ desires in service of pursuing our (often conflicting) values.

Insofar as different values are conflicting, that conflict has already long ago been resolved, and the resolution is: the action which best accords with the person’s values, in this instance, is to get up.

I’d rather put it as a routine conflict eventually getting resolved in a predictable way.

Another example: if someone says “I want to act in accordance with my values” or “I don’t always act in accordance with my values”, we recognize these as two substantive claims. The first is not a tautology, and the second is not a self-contradiction.

Indeed, but I claim that those statements actually mean “I want my value conflicts to resolve in the way I endorse” and “I don’t always endorse the way my value conflicts resolve”.

xpym Jan 17, 2025, 10:21 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: What Is The Alignment Problem?

the feeling of my head remaining on the pillow is motivating, but the self-reflective idea of myself being in bed is demotivating

This seems to be an example of conflicting values, and its preferred resolution, not a difference between a value and a non-value. Suppose you’d find your pillow replaced by a wooden log—I’d imagine that the self-reflective idea of yourself remedying this state of affairs would be pretty motivating!

xpym Dec 25, 2024, 10:48 AM
8 points
3
in reply to: Carl Feynman’s comment on: What are the strongest arguments for very short timelines?

For at least six months now, we’ve had software assistants that can roughly double the productivity of software development.

Is this the consensus view? I’ve seen people saying that those assistants give 10% productivity improvement, at best.

In the last few months, there’s been a perceptible increase in the speed of releases of better models.

On the other hand, the schedules for headline releases (GPT-5, Claude 3.5 Opus) continue to slip, and there are anonymous reports of diminishing returns from scaling. The current moment is interesting in that there are two essentially opposite prevalent narratives barely interacting with each other.

xpym Dec 20, 2024, 7:45 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Effective Altruism FAQ

the principles of EA imply that

The principles of Christianity not only imply that, they clearly spell it out: “If you want to be perfect, then go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor”, and yet Christianity was uncontroversial in the West for centuries, and the current secular “common sense” morality hasn’t diverged particularly far. EAs just take ostensibly common sense principles far too seriously compared to the unspoken social consensus, in a way that’s cringe for normal people. Critics don’t really have a principled response to the core EA ideas either, but they don’t want to appear morally delinquent, so they generally try to dismiss EAs without seriously engaging.

xpym Dec 17, 2024, 2:02 PM
2 points
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on: Circling as practice for “just be yourself”
When circling was first discussed here, there was a comment that led to a lengthy discussion about boundaries, but nobody seemed to dispute its other main claim, that “it is highly unlikely that [somebody] would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have [group] sex with”. Do you agree with that statement, and if so, do you think that the circling/sex analogy is invalid?

xpym Dec 9, 2024, 1:10 PM
1 point
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on: Neutrality

And it may not be our permanent condition. The future may hold something more like a “foundation” or a “framework” or a “system of the world” that people actually trust and consider legitimate.

Our current condition is a product of our material circumstances, and those definitely aren’t permanent in their essential character, as many people have variously noted. Things are still very much in flux, and any eventual medium-to-long term frameworks would significantly depend on (possibly wildly divergent) trajectories that major trends will take in the foreseeable future. Of course, even marginal short-term improvements to the memetic hellscape would be welcome, but seriously expecting something substantial and lasting is premature.

xpym Nov 29, 2024, 12:18 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: You are not too “irrational” to know your preferences.

Though generally it doesn’t seem to me like social stigma would be a very effective way of reducing unhealthy behaviors

I agree, as far as it goes, but surely we shouldn’t be quick to dismiss stigma, as uncouth as it might seem, if our social technology isn’t developed enough yet to actually provide any very effective approaches instead? Humans are wired to care about status a great deal, so it’s no surprise that traditional enforcement mechanisms tend to lean heavily into that.

I think generally people can maintain healthy habits much more consistently if their motivation comes from genuinely believing in the health benefits and wanting to feel better.

Humans are also wired with hyperbolic discounting, which doesn’t simply go away when you brand it as an irrational bias. (I do in general feel that this community is too quick to dismiss “biases” as “irrational”, they clearly were plenty useful in the evolutionary environment, and I’d guess still aren’t quite as obsolete as the local consensus would have it, but that’s a different discussion.)

xpym Nov 29, 2024, 12:00 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: DaystarEld’s comment on: You are not too “irrational” to know your preferences.

But I don’t think this is always true

Neither do I, of course, but my impression was that you thought this was never true.

But this still doesn’t justify the assertion that “expressing” the preference is “wrong.”

I do agree that the word “wrong” doesn’t feel appropriate here, something like “ill-advised” might work better instead. If you’re a sadist, or a pedophile, making this widely known is unlikely to be a wise course of action.

xpym Nov 29, 2024, 10:34 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DaystarEld’s comment on: You are not too “irrational” to know your preferences.

I do not believe preferences themselves, or expressing them, should ever be considered wrong

Suppose that you have a preference for inflicting suffering on others. You also have a preference for being a nice person, that other people enjoy the company of. Clearly those preferences would be in constant conflict, which would likely cause you discomfort. This doesn’t mean that either of those preferences is “bad”, in a perfectly objective cosmic sense, but such a definition of “bad” doesn’t seem particularly useful.

xpym Nov 29, 2024, 10:06 AM
3 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: You are not too “irrational” to know your preferences.

Now it would certainly be tempting to define rationality as something like “only taking actions that you endorse in the long term”, but I’d be cautious of that.

Indeed, and there’s another big reason for that—trying to always override your short-term “monkey brain” impulses just doesn’t work that well for most people. That’s the root of akrasia, which certainly isn’t a problem that self-identified rationalists are immune to. What seems to be a better approach is to find compromises, where you develop workable long-term strategies which involve neither unlimited amounts of proverbial ice cream, nor total abstinence.

But I think that quite a few people who care about “health” actually care about not appearing low status by doing things that everyone knows are unhealthy.

Which is a good thing, in this particular case, yes? That’s cultural evolution properly doing its job, as far as I’m concerned.

xpym Nov 20, 2024, 4:29 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
My biggest problem with the trans discourse is that it’s a giant tower of motte-and-baileys, and there’s no point where it’s socially acceptable to get off the crazy train.

Sure, at this point it seems likely that gender dysphoria isn’t an entirely empty notion. Implying that this condition might be in any way undesirable is already a red line though, with discussions of how much of it is due to social contagion being very taboo, naturally. And that only people experiencing bad enough dysphoria to require hormones and/or surgery could claim to be legitimately trans is a battle lost long ago.

Moving past that, there is non-binary, genderfluid, neo-genders, otherkin, etc, concepts that don’t seem to be plausibly based in some currently known crippling biological glitch, and yet those identities are apparently just as legitimate. Where does it stop? Should society be entirely reorganized every time a new fad gains traction? Should everybody questioning that be ostracized?

Then there’s the “passing” issue. I accept the argument that nowadays in most social situations we have no strong reasons to care about chromosomes/etc, people can successfully play many roles traditionally associated with the opposite sex. But sexual dimorphism is the entire reason for having different pronouns in the first place, and yet apparently you don’t even have to try (at all, let alone very hard) to “pass” as your chosen gender for your claim to be legitimate. What is the point? Here the unresolved tension between gender-critical and gender-affirming feminism is the most glaring.

xpym Nov 20, 2024, 3:15 PM
1 point
−1
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
I’d say that atheism had already set the “conservatives not welcome” baseline way back when, and this resulted in the community norms evolving accordingly. Granted, these days the trans stuff is more salient, but the reason it flourished here even more than in other tech-adjacent spaces has much to do with that early baseline.

Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson have both said that the intellectual case for atheism is strong, and both remain very popular on the right.

Sure, but somebody admitting that certainly isn’t the modal conservative.

xpym Nov 19, 2024, 12:31 PM
21 points
16
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
A more likely explanation, it seems to me, is that a large part of early LW/sequences was militant atheism, with religion being the primary example of the low “sanity waterline”, and this hasn’t been explicitly disclaimed since, at best de-emphasized. So this space had done its best to repel conservatives much earlier than pronouns and other trans issues entered the picture.

xpym Oct 20, 2024, 12:59 PM
3 points
0
on: Overcoming Bias Anthology
Is this related to the bounty, or a separate project?

xpym Oct 8, 2024, 9:34 AM
3 points
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in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian

Furthermore, most of these problems can be addressed just fine in a Bayesian framework. In Jaynes-style Bayesianism, every proposition has to be evaluated in the scope of a probabilistic model; the symbols in propositions are scoped to the model, and we can’t evaluate probabilities without the model. That model is intended to represent an agent’s world-model, which for realistic agents is a big complicated thing.

It still misses the key issue of ontological remodeling. If the world-model is inadequate for expressing a proposition, no meaningful probability could be assigned to it.