All of localdeity's Comments + Replies

It's entirely possible for a highly intelligent person to follow a strategy that is completely fucking idiotic.  Common, in fact.

How different is that from them writing a book about congestion pricing and you reading it? In both scenarios you are basically consuming the outputs of this author's mind.

Well, one difference is that, if you have a question about something the book hasn't specifically addressed in your reading thus far ("How does your theory apply to hotels used by the eclipse-watching crowds in 2017?"), in the first scenario you can just ask the author, but in the second case, after reading the relevant section of the book (and perhaps checking neighboring sections, the ... (read more)

And in Childhoods of exceptional people, the author finds that immersion in boredom was a universal experience:

But this immersion in boredom is also a universal in the biographies of exceptional people. A substantial fraction were completely kept apart from other children, either because their guardians decided so or because they were bedridden with various illnesses during childhood (like Descartes). A spicy hypothesis raised by this is that socializing too much with children is simply not good for your intellectual development. (I’m not going to test tha

What is solitude?

I have thoughts about "loneliness", a related concept:

• There are many kinds of social interaction that you can want, need, or benefit from.  (If we need to distinguish a "want" from a "need", I'd say a "need" is something that causes more negative effects than simple frustration if it's not satisfied.)
  • Interaction types that probably register as a "need" to at least some people: seeing human faces; having fun with friends; discussing your problems with someone; intellectual stimulation; sexual and romantic activities; probably more.
    • I'm

Just because the average person disapproves of a protest tactic doesn't mean that the tactic doesn’t work. Roger Hallam's "Designing the Revolution" series outlines the thought process underlying disruptive actions like the infamous soup-throwing protests.  Reasonable people may disagree (I disagree with quite a few things he says), but if you don't know the arguments, any objection is going to miss the point.  To be clear, PauseAI does not endorse or engage in disruptive civil disobedience, but I discuss it here to illustrate some broa

I would also comment that, if the environment was so chaotic that roughly everything important to life could not be modeled—if general-purpose modeling ability was basically useless—then life would not have evolved that ability, and "intelligent life" probably wouldn't exist.

You have a point, although I don't think having a genuine feeling of despair is a hugely important variable.  As the story goes:

[Method actor Dustin] Hoffman had a grueling scene coming up, where his character hadn’t slept in three days, and Hoffman told [Sir Laurence] Olivier that to prepare for the scene, he too hadn’t slept for 72 hours.

“My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you try acting?”

But more generally, even if you want to teach some kind of set of skills and resilience for dealing with things like "sitting still for hours a day", "doing... (read more)

Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.

If one does accept the premise that feigning enthusiasm is a useful skill, that's still not a good justification of formal education as it exists: it certainly doesn't take 12 years of grade school to teach that skill.

Epistemic status: this is an attempt to steelman the case for the death penalty

...

I do not believe in vengeance or justice. I do however believe in fixing problems. And it's clear the only way to fix this problem is to put such people in positions where they cannot do anyone any harm.

Some people have complained that, when their opponents "steelman" their position, in practice it can mean they steelman a particular argument that is not their main argument.  This struck me as a remarkably explicit and self-aware example of that.

I don't know what the sol... (read more)

I personally recommend that all parents donate to the Localdeity Enrichment Fund, an important yet frequently overlooked cause area.

Whoever wrote that article is confused, since in the table in the section labeled "Analogy vs Simile: The Differences" they have several entries the wrong way around (compared to the two paragraphs preceding it).

It seems to me that you could use the same comparison for either an analogy or a simile.  An analogy would usually be in the present tense, "X is like Y", and followed by more explanation of the concept the analogy is meant to illustrate.  A simile would more frequently be in the past tense as part of a narrative, and more frequently use ... (read more)

The term "privilege" is bad here; prefer "advantage".  "Privilege"—privi-lege, private law—implies that there's an authority deciding to grant it to some people and not others, which would be unjust (since most things that affect intelligence, such as genetics and childhood nutrition, happen long before a person does anything to "deserve" it more than others), which in turn encourages people to get angry and suspicious, and encourages the advantaged to feel embarrassed or even guilty by association when they've done nothing wrong.  Calling it "pr... (read more)

Other reasons:

Biases towards claiming agreement with one’s own beliefs

If the institution is widely trusted, respected, high status, etc., as well as powerful, then if Alice convinces you that the institution supports her beliefs, then you might be inclined to give more credence to Alice's beliefs.  That would serve Alice's political agenda.

Weaker biases towards claiming disagreement with one’s own beliefs

If the institution is widely hated—for example al-Qaeda, the CIA, the KGB—or considered low status, crazy, and so on, then if Alice convinces you tha... (read more)

In Judaism, you're not supposed to marry a non-Jew unless they convert to Judaism (a lengthy process from what I've heard), so I suspect the families on both sides of the deal are usually equally religious.

In any case, googling for "grief and genetic closeness study" yields this:

A Twin Loss Survey was completed by MZ and same-sex DZ twins following loss of a cotwin and nontwin relatives. Twin survivors (N = 612; MZ = 506; DZ, n = 106) included twins whose age at loss was 15 years or older. Participation age was M = 47.66 years (SD = 15.31). Hamilton's incl

Everything you say seems straightforwardly correct or a logical guess.  I'd add:

• I expect identical twin sisters do feel closer to their nieces than non-identical sisters feel to their nieces.  There would probably be a higher degree of discovering that this person just happens to have traits like your own.
• Even from a fully logical "optimize my inclusive genetic fitness" perspective, there is value, all else being equal, in most parent-child relationships that isn't in most aunt-niece relationships.  Because you raised this child, she probabl

I think there's at least decent truth to it.  One study:

This study examines gift giving at Israeli weddings. In accordance with kin selection theory, we hypothesized that wedding guests possessing greater genetic relatedness to the newlyweds would offer greater sums of money as wedding gifts. We also hypothesized that family members stemming from the maternal side (where the genetic lineage has higher kinship certainty) would offer the newlyweds more money than those stemming from the paternal side. Data on the monetary gift sums of the wedding guests

I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal.  I think it's general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner^[1]; but I don't know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz's whole "unihemispheric sleep" thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.

1. ^{^}

   Claude sez: "When n

BTW, on Ziz's obituary someone wrote:

Like Jesus, he will arise from the dead.

not sure if sincere or trolling...

The date on that comment is Jan 30 2025.  Methinks 90% likelihood it's causally downstream from the recent murders and that the poster knows Ziz was never dead.

If you would use genetic studies to guide clinical trial representation for a drug to combat heart disease you would look at the genes associated with heart disease and see that mutations in those genes are evenly distributed in your clinical trial representation. You would not focus on the race with which people self-identify. 

I asked Claude a few questions.  I'll just give snippets of the answers:

1. Are there scenarios where doctors recommend different doses of a medication, or other variations in a medical plan, based on a patient's race?
   1. Yes. &nb

@Friendly Monkey , I'm replying to your reaction:

There are people who require multiple methods of persuasion before they act in the way you want.  One category is decisionmakers for an organization, who have actually been persuaded by intimidation, but they can't just say that, because they would look weak and possibly as though they're defecting against the organization or its aims, so they need to sell it as some high-minded decision they've come to of their own accord.  Or it could be the reverse: decisionmakers who are persuaded by your ideol... (read more)

"A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of $\sqrt{n}$.

The average distance from the starting point is close to $\sqrt{n}$ after n random steps (in 1 dimension).  But I'd characterize that as a speed of $\sqrt{n}/n=1/\sqrt{n}$.  Or you could say "... looks like a directional movement of distance $\sqrt{n}$".

I expect that's about not trusting the foreigners who did the clinical trials (I have heard this)^[1], and not so much about expecting that Americans are biologically different from foreigners.

1. ^{^}

   Specifically, someone with some knowledge told me that the FDA knows that there are some countries where the trials are completely untrustworthy.  And that there was a political decision where they said, "If we disallow trials from some countries but not others, there will be much complaining and we'll probably be called racists", and solved the issue by disallo

Let's see what the base rate for murder is.  After some googling... Since the "clearance rate" for homicides is 50% (as of a recent year), even if we know there were N murders, it's hard to say how many distinct murderers there were.  But some source says it's a small percentage of murderers who kill again, so let's just assume that N murders = N murderers.  Both "taking the homicide rate (7.5 per 100k per year in 2022) and multiplying by a lifetime (we'll say 80 years)", and "googling for the percentage of deaths that are caused by homicide... (read more)

I'd point out that the magnitude of the "exploitation" is the magnitude of the incentive for market players to find the better solution.  If Bob is the one guy for whom making him wear a tuxedo isn't worthwhile, and if it's close to worthwhile—e.g. him wearing it produces $4000 of value to the company over the time he wears it—then that's $1000 being left on the table.  If there are 100 employees being "exploited" like Bob, for whom making them wear tuxedos is extremely wasteful—say it produces only $100 of value for them to wear tuxedos—then the... (read more)

Some related scenarios are discussed in my post here, e.g. when popularity ≈ beauty + substance, and if popularity and beauty are readily apparent then you can estimate substance.

There had been a study comparing the effects of moderate protests vs extreme protests, in hypothetical situations (the study participants would e.g. read a fictional article describing the activities of a protest group), and concluded that "Extreme Protest Actions Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements":

How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions—protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both—typically reduce support for social movements. Across

Smart people are often too arrogant and proud, and know too much.

I thought that might be the case.  If you looked at GPT-3 or 3.5, then, the higher the quality of your own work, the less helpful (and, potentially, the more destructive and disruptive) it is to substitute in the LLM's work; so higher IQ in these early years of LLMs may correlate with dismissing them and having little experience using them.

But this is a temporary effect.  Those who initially dismissed LLMs will eventually come round; and, among younger people, especially as LLMs get... (read more)

Using LLMs is an intellectual skill.  I would be astonished if IQ was not pretty helpful for that.

For editing adults, it is a good point that lots of them might find a personality tweak very useful, and e.g. if it gave them a big bump in motivation, that would likely be worth more than, say, 5-10 IQ points.  An adult is in a good position to tell what's the delta between their current personality and what might be ideal for their situation.

Deliberately tweaking personality does raise some "dual use" issues.  Is there a set of genes that make... (read more)

On a quick skim, an element that seems to be missing is that having emotions which cause you to behave 'irrationally' can in fact be beneficial from a rational perspective.

For example, if everyone knows that, when someone does you a favor, you'll feel obligated to find some way to repay them, and when someone injures you, you'll feel driven to inflict vengeance upon them even at great cost to yourself—if everyone knows this about you, then they'll be more likely to do you favors and less likely to injure you, and your expected payoffs are probably higher t... (read more)

What is categorized as "peer pressure" here?  Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don't conform?  I'm guessing not.  But how about implicit threats?  What if you've heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don't conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined?  In any situation that you could call "peer pressure", I imagine there's always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.

The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be "Do yo... (read more)

The thing that comes to mind, when I think of "formidable master of rationality", is a highly experienced engineer trying to debug problems, especially high-urgency problems that the normal customer support teams haven't been able to handle.  You have a fresh phenomenon, which the creators of the existing product apparently didn't anticipate (or if they did, they didn't think it worth adding functionality to handle it), which casts doubt on existing diagnostic systems.  You have priors on which tools are likely to still work, priors on which unde... (read more)

One argument I've encountered is that sentient creatures are precisely those creatures that we can form cooperative agreements with.  (Counter-argument: one might think that e.g. the relationship with a pet is also a cooperative one [perhaps more obviously if you train them to do something important, and you feed them], while also thinking that pets aren't sentient.)

Another is that some people's approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma is to decide "Anyone who's sufficiently similar to me can be expected to make the same choice as me, and it's best for all of us if we cooperate, so I'll cooperate when encountering them"; and some of them may figure that sentience alone is sufficient similarity.

So, the arithmetic and geometric mean agree when the inputs are equal, and, the more unequal they are, the lower the geometric mean is.

I note that the subtests have ceilings, which puts a limit on how much any one can skew the result.  Like, if you have 10 subtests, and the max score is something like 150, then presumably each test has a max score of 15 points.  If we imagine someone gets five 7s and five 13s (a moderately unbalanced set of abilities), then the geometric mean is 9.54, while the arithmetic mean is 10.  So, even if someone wer... (read more)

1. IQ scores do not measure even close to all cognitive abilities and realistically could never do that.

Well, the original statement was "sums together cognitive abilities" and didn't use the word "all", and I, at least, saw no reason to assume it.  If you're going to say something along the lines of "Well, I've tried to have reasonable discussions with these people, but they have these insane views", that seems like a good time to be careful about how you represent those views.

2. Many of the abilities that IQ scores weight highly are practically unim

thinks of IQ as an index that sums together cognitive abilities

Is this part not technically true?  IQ tests tend to have a bunch of subtests intended to measure different cognitive abilities, and you add up—or average, which is adding up and dividing by a constant—your scores on each subtest.  For example (bold added):

The current version of the test, the WAIS-IV, which was released in 2008, is composed of 10 core subtests and five supplemental subtests, with the 10 core subtests yielding scaled scores that sum to derive the Full Scale IQ.

Interesting.  The natural approach is to imagine that you just have a 3-sided die with 2, 4, 6 on the sides, and if you do that, then I compute A = 12 and B = 6^[1].  But, as the top Reddit comment's edit points out, the difference between that problem and the one you posed is that your version heavily weights the probability towards short sequences—that weighting being 1/2^n for a sequence of length n.  (Note that the numbers I got, A=12 and B=6, are so much higher than the A≈2.7 and B=3 you get.)  It's an interesting selection effect.

T... (read more)

I can also come up with a story where obviously it's cheaper and more effective to disable all of the nuclear weapons than it is to take over the world, so why would the AI do the second thing?

Erm... For preventing nuclear war on the scale of decades... I don't know what you have in mind for how it would disable all the nukes, but a one-off breaking of all the firing mechanisms isn't going to work.  They could just repair/replace that once they discovered the problem.  You could imagine some more drastic thing like blowing up the conventional exp... (read more)

why most perfect algorithms that recreate a strawberry on the molecular level destroy the planet as well.

Phrased like this, the answer that comes to mind is "Well, this requires at least a few decades' worth of advances in materials science and nanotechnology and such, plus a lot of expensive equipment that doesn't exist today, and e.g. if you want this to happen with high probability, you need to be sure that civilization isn't wrecked by nuclear war or other threats in upcoming decades, so if you come up with a way of taking over the world that has higher certainty than leaving humanity to its own devices, then that becomes the best plan."  Classic instrumental convergence, in other words.

The political version of the question isn't functionally the same as the skin cream version, because the former isn't a randomized intervention—cities that decided to add gun control laws seem likely to have other crime-related events and law changes at the same time, which could produce a spurious result in either direction.  So it's quite reasonable to say "My opinion is determined by my priors and the evidence didn't appreciably affect my position."

90% awful idea: "Genetic diversity" in computer programs for resistance to large-scale cyberattacks.

The problem: Once someone has figured out the right security hole in Tesla's software (and, say, broken into a server used to deliver software updates), they can use this to install their malicious code into all 5 million Teslas in the field (or maybe just one model, so perhaps 1 million cars), and probably make them all crash simultaneously and cause a catastrophe.

The solution: There will probably come a point where we can go through the codebase and pick r... (read more)

To me, that will lead to an environment where people think that they are engaging with criticism without having to really engage with the criticism that actually matters. 

This is a possible outcome, especially if the above tactic were the only tactic to be employed.  That tactic helps reduce ignorance of the "other side" on the issues that get the steelmanning discussion, and hopefully also pushes away low-curiosity tribalistic partisans while retaining members who value deepening understanding and intellectual integrity.  There are lots of ... (read more)

I want to register high appreciation of Elizabeth for her efforts and intentions described here. <3

The remainder of this post is speculations about solutions.  "If one were to try to fix the problem", or perhaps "If one were to try to preempt this problem in a fresh community".  I'm agnostic about whether one should try.

Notes on the general problem:

• I suspect lots of our kind of people are not enthusiastic about kicking people out.  I think several people have commented, on some cases of seriously bad actors, that it took way too long to a

Issues in transcript labeling (I'm curious how much of it was done by machine):

• After 00:07:55, a line is unattributed to either speaker; looks like it should be Timothy.
• 00:09:43 is attributed to Timothy but I think must be Elizabeth.
• Then the next line is unattributed (should be Timothy).
• After 00:14:00, unattributed (should be Timothy).
• After 00:23:38, unattributed (should be Timothy)
• After 00:32:34, unattributed (probably Elizabeth)

Grammatically, the most obvious interpretation is a universal quantification (i.e. "All men are taller than all women"), which I think is a major reason why such statements so often lead to objections of "But here's an exception!"  Maybe you can tell the audience that they should figure out when to mentally insert "... on average" or "tend to be".  Though there are also circumstances where one might validly believe that the speaker really means all.  I think it's best to put such qualified language into your statements from the start.

Are you not familiar with the term "vacuously true"?  I find this very surprising.  People who study math tend to make jokes with it.

The idea is that, if we were to render a statement like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" into formal logic, we'd probably take it to mean the universal statement "For all X such that X is a colorless green idea, X sleeps furiously".  A universal statement is logically equivalent to "There don't exist any counterexamples", i.e. "There does not exist X such that X is a colorless green idea and X does not s... (read more)

to the point where you can't really eliminate the context-dependence and vagueness via taboo (because the new words you use will still be somewhat context-dependent and vague)

You don't need to "eliminate" the vagueness, just reduce it enough that it isn't affecting any important decisions.  (And context-dependence isn't necessarily a problem if you establish the context with your interlocutor.)  I think this is generally achievable, and have cited the Eggplant essay on this.  And if it is generally achievable, then:

Richard is arguing against

Presumably anything which is above 50% eggplant is rounded to 100%, and anything below is rounded to 0%.

No, it's more like what you encounter in digital circuitry.  Anything above 90% eggplant is rounded to 100%, anything below 10% eggplant is rounded to 0%, and anything between 10% and 90% is unexpected, out of spec, and triggers a "Wait, what?" and the sort of rethinking I've outlined above, which should dissolve the question of "Is it really eggplant?" in favor of "Is it food my roommate is likely to eat?" or whatever new question my underlying pur... (read more)

The edges of perhaps most real-world concepts are vague, but there are lots of central cases where the item clearly fits into the concept, on the dimensions that matter.  Probably 99% of the time, when my roommate goes and buys a fruit or vegetable, I am not confounded by it not belonging to a known species, or by it being half rotten or having its insides replaced or being several fruits stitched together.  The eggplant may be unusually large, or wet, or dusty, or bruised, perhaps more than I realized an eggplant could be.  But, for many pu... (read more)

I would be surprised if grocery stores sold edge cases... But perhaps it was a farmer's market or something, perhaps a seller who often liked to sell weird things, perhaps grew hybridized plants.  I'll take the case where it's a fresh vegetable/fruit/whatever thing that looks kind of eggplant-ish.

Anyway, that would generally be determined by: Why do I care whether he bought an eggplant?  If I just want to make sure he has food, then that thing looks like it counts and that's good enough for me.  If I was going to make a recipe that called fo... (read more)