All of nim's Comments + Replies

I fear it would be a stupid mistake to pass on the opportunity to inquire: Where does one find the form?

Maybe. I think there's a level on which we ultimately demand that AI's perception of values to be handled through a human lens. If you zoom out too far from the human perspective, things start getting really weird. For instance, if you try to reason for the betterment of all life in a truly species-agnostic way, you start getting highly plausible arguments for leaving bacterial or fungal infections untreated, as the human host is only one organism but the pathogens number in the millions of individuals.(yes, this is slippery slope shaped, but special-casin... (read more)

"Humanity" is a weird word at the moment. I think it's more of a "descendants of our ancestors" thing -- I think LLMs trained on humanity's content should probably be viewed as related to us in important ways, ways that a hypothetical LLM trained only on interaction with octopi or slime molds would not be as related. But this may be a weird view, so let's ignore it henceforth.

I think the "benefit humanity" rule is actually much broader than you're reading it as:

Secondly, as an animal advocate, I want to preserve the opportunity for AI to make a post that

Thank you for sharing this! Does it scale well with varying levels of physical activity for you? Some dietary things tend to be great at higher activity levels and fall apart at lower ones, and vice versa. I'm curious roughly what your current activity level is looking like and whether the boy slop diet thing has worked well at higher/lower levels as well.

Since this post seems a potential gathering place for other extremely easy and nutritionally adequate recipes, I'll also leave my boring-food go-tos here -- these aren't as cheap as yours but they're simi... (read more)

"things that I expect I will be glad I did once I've done them"

I like this definition because it allows 2 different routes toward improvement, which you'll probably need to mix to get the best results:

1. Increase time spent on the activities which are already on your "productive things" list. Taking this to the extreme would likely eliminate load-bearing forms of rest, and drastically increase burnout risks.

2. Improve recovery activities to bring them from "unproductive" to "productive". You hint at this with reading a good book making the "productive"

It certainly is not true on Earth.

Where is it cheaper per item to buy the same food or household good singly rather than in bulk?

Where can you get a single roll of the same toilet paper for less per roll than getting it in a bigger pack? Ok, now what if you need TP and the cash at your disposal at that moment is less than the cost of the bulk pack but more than the cost of the single roll?

When is it cheaper (time + money) to cook one meal at a time versus meal prep for the whole week? OK, now what if you can't afford the whole week's worth of food at on... (read more)

Invert your thesis, from "the rich are so rich because they spend less money" to "the poor are so poor because they spend more money", and it becomes much more defensible. Boots theory captures the "being poor is expensive" element that's true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth -- look at the markups on any household item when it's sold individually rather than in bulk, and then consider what happens to people who don't have what it takes to plan ahead and make bulk purchases.

If we're being particularly literal about things, Ankh-Morpork canonically l... (read more)

Don't people notice the ways that seeing themselves engage in particular behaviors updates their own self-image? The payoff for being polite to language users is that it makes me see myself as the kind of person who is generally polite. The results of being mean and bullying would be that I would come to see myself as the kind of person who is okay with engaging in mean and bullying behavior to get what they want.

Or maybe everybody else has a skill at compartmentalizing which I lack? But I absolutely catch myself applying prompting strategies to human conv... (read more)

Yes please, more please!

Your writing is more enjoyable than that of many native English speakers, and I am one.

Will you do a sequence with more stories?

Tell them the way that's fun to tell, like here, and they leak rationality. The "systematized winning" kind, because it's all rooted in finding ways not to die in situations where statistics would suggest you really ought to.

Think, at least a little, before you act in a new or complex way.

Oh. Is this what they meant by "think before you act"? Because thinking before every action goes exactly as well as you, careful author of that sentence, would expect.

There are at most as many gods as people.

why can't we all have unique pantheons?

Intentional symbolism to place the singularity, start of a whole new everything, in the springtime of the second year?

I would try playing it. Will be interesting to see how it plays at a mostly non-rationalist table :)

We put decades of work into getting software to behave less like databases, and then act surprised when it doesn't behave like a database. C'est la vie.

what set of exercises do you prefer to strengthen and stabilize the rotator cuffs?

I'm not near any gyms and have plenty of space, so I strongly prefer the safety profile of barbell + squat rack. If something goes wrong and I lose control of the weight, it's good to know that there's no way for it to hit me. And part of progressing is sometimes trying a weight that you're only 80% or 90% sure you can actually lift successfully -- I'd much rather the failure mode be clank "whoops!" than however many pounds of iron to the face.

I also find that it's easier to track whether I'm using good form with a barbell vs dumbbells. The cues to moving ... (read more)

eliminate predation.

Ok, I'll bite -- who was doing the predation, and what are you suggesting ought to happen to those creatures?

I agree that adding preventable new suffering is bad, but I don't follow that into any obviousness that it's good to meddle deeply in nature's feedback loops. To oversimplify, let's imagine a button that releases a virus which painlessly inflicts all living beings with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain. I think it would be bad to push that button, but the way you're describing suffering creates a ment... (read more)

guerrilla, not gorilla, warfare :)

a good read. thank you.

have you ruled out the powdered peanut butter options? They tend to come in at under half the calories of regular PB, while getting pretty close in replicating the flavor and texture. Assuming you're serious about the psychological impact of removing all peanut butter products from your diet, at least.

Feels to me like at the moment, the "character layer" handles transforming a "you" into an "I". I find it conspicuously absent in smaller models running locally, though maybe the absence is just more obvious with CoT than without it.

I've also noticed that the "training data" we get as humans is primarily focusing on or contextualized relative to ourselves, whereas the parts you're referring to as ground layers don't really have a concept of the LLM as an entity so they tend to assume they're humans on that level.

saw a post from zvi on twitter yesterday, "remember that this corner of the world has a very different outlook than most other corners. if you don't have random day-to-day ai queries what are you even doing all day?", in reply to someone asking "who the fuck has random day-to-day ai queries?" (yes, i looked at that on my phone and typed it out, because my twitter account for following tpot people lives only on my phone, and my lw account lives only on a device with a real keyboard, and getting the link from point A to point B would have been even more hass... (read more)

I have a lot of elderly neighbors. Alcoholism's been a major factor in about half the deaths in the past few years. The runners-up in this popularity contest are cannabis of the grow-it-on-the-sly strength, and opioids because they're nasty but people tend to start them later in life.

If we're being literal about drugs as "non-caloric chemicals we ingest to modify our physiology", the most popular drug in the elderly is probably a blood pressure med of some kind.

I'm not claiming that we've solved any substance abuse! I'm claiming that you and Dalrymple appear to be ignoring the potential lessons we can learn from the equilibrium that society has reached with the most widely used and abused modern intoxicant. The equilibrium doesn't have to be perfect, nor to solve every problem, in order to be a relatively stable and well-tolerated compromise between allowing individual freedom and punishing misbehavior.

Similar stuff that's worked for me includes:

• lock the notifications down completely. Every notification on your phone should be something your ideal self cares about -- usually direct human contact. Might help to differentiate between "public" vs "private" apps -- "public" apps aren't allowed notifications because it's the algo pushing stuff on you, whereas "private" apps are allowed notifications because they consistently represent an actual human who you've invited to contact you.
• Model your engagement with content as training your algorithm. Just as yo

Alcohol is also a drug. If Dalrymple really means "drugs" when he says "drugs", it would follow that he's advocating for prohibition to protect alcoholics from themselves.

We seem to have found a relatively tolerable equilibrium around alcohol where the substance is widely available, the majority of individuals who can enjoy it recreationally are free to do so, and yet it's legally just as intolerable for an intoxicated person to harm others as it would be for a sober person to take the same actions. Some individuals have addiction problems, and we have var... (read more)

One lens to view AI is as a prediction engine -- predict what color to make each pixel, predict what word to put next.

Whoever is first to applying this predictive skill to stock markets will probably make immense amounts of money. Then again, people are probably already trying to do this, which creates a situation unlike that from which we derive the historic data to train on, which might render it impossible?

On the gripping hand, large slow and powerful institutions want to make the numbers go up and to the right.

I've also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.

FWIW, this is likely to be a worse problem with a meal replacement than a protein bar, and a worse problem with a protein bar than a frozen option.

bring to work

That adds complexity. Are there social norms at work which necessitate eating with others? If so, having a shake or similar every day may not meet those needs.

I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening

Are you aware of the concept of OMAD (one meal a day)? I don... (read more)

we do not have a robot that is perfectly capable of executing the "saving grandma" task

Do you mean to imply that humans are perfectly capable of executing the "saving grandma" task?

Opening a door in a burning building at the wrong time can cause the entire building to explode by introducing enough oxygen to suddenly combust a lot of uncombusted gases.

I'm not convinced that there exists a "perfect solution" to any task with 0 unintended consequences, though, so my opinions probably aren't all that helpful in the matter.

I notice that I am confused: I experience comparable price and convenience, and superior subjective experience of eating, by purchasing pre-made frozen meals and microwaving them. I experience comparable price and superior travel convenience by throwing a protein bar in my bag on the way out the door.

Possible reasons one might prefer a meal replacement over comparably easy "real" food include:

• less waste? a powder mixed into a drink would trade the hassle of washing a reusable bottle for the trash creation of discarding a disposable bottle
• Flavor/texture

Depth of specialization to the individual is an interesting question. I suspect that if this was a mature field, we'd have names for distinct subtypes of assistant skillset -- like how an android app dev isn't quite the same as an ios app dev, although often one person can do whichever skillset a situation demands.

I suspect that low-skill candidates would gravitate toward one assistance subtype or another, and lack of skill would show up in their inability to identify which subtype a situation calls for and then adapt to it. But on taskrabbit, we don't need the same tasker to be good at picking up groceries and also building furniture, as long as we're clear enough about which task we're asking for...

Oops! I only realized in your reply that you're considering "reliability" the load-bearing element. Yes, the hiring pipeline will look like a background noise of consistent interest from the unqualified, and sporadic hits from excellent candidates. You're approaching it from the perspective that the background noise of incompetents is the more important part, whereas I think that the availability of an adequate candidate eventually is the important part.

I think this because basically anywhere that hires can reliably find unqualified applicants. For a role ... (read more)

Joining the few places that will have leverage over what happens.

I agree that this is good if one has sufficient skill and knowledge to improve outcomes. What if one has reason to suspect that joining a key AI lab would be a net negative toward their success, compared to if they hired someone else? For instance I interview disproportionately well compared to my actual efficacy in tech roles -- I get hired based on the best of my work, but that best work is a low percentage of my actual output (f which most is barely average and some is conterproductive), so it seems like someone in my situation might actually do harm by seeking greater leverage?

Could you share an example of a specific discussion that exemplifies what you're looking for? I'd hazard a guess that such an example might come from bluesky or mastodon at the moment. But starting from something concrete would give a first set of examples of how people actually benefit from discussing at your target level of abstraction without slipping out of it, as you've noticed that much discussion seems to do.

Counterexample: financially self-sufficient individual who is curious about the work that the thinker is doing, and wants to learn more of how it is done.

Interesting! I'm way out in the middle of nowhere, and experience suggests that the greatest benefits of intellectual co-location happen with physical co-location as well. I wonder if there would be interest in a program with some overlap across airbnb or farm stays, where one visits a spot out in the woods with decent internet but few distractions, and stays for a while (a week or two sounds like a plausible guess to start iterating from) with a host who assumes a metacognitive role in the project that one is working on. It seems quite appealing from a ho... (read more)

Interesting -- my experiences are similar, but I frame them somewhat differently.

I also find that Claude teaches me new words when I'm wandering around in areas of thought that other thinkers have already explored thoroughly, but I experience that as more like a gift of new vocabulary than emotional validation. It's ultimately a value-add that a really good combination of a search engine and a thesaurus could conceptually implement.

Claude also works on me like a very sophisticated elizabot, but the noteworthy difference seems to be that it's a more skilled... (read more)

This is a fascinating case study of Claude as a thought tool -- I'm guessing you were using speech to text and it pulled its stunt of grabbing the wrong homophones here and there? It picked "heal" as "heel" more often than I'd expect in any other situation.

How did you prompt on getting the essay out? My first approach to doing a similar experiment in essay-ifying my Claude chats would be to copy the entire chat into a new context and ask for summary... but that muddles the "I" significantly.

Yep. I'd also add a couple other factors that seem to play into the prepper object negativity memeplex:

• "an object solves this problem" is something of a cognitive stop sign to most people -- tabooing the "object solved it" concept forces more accurate thinking about what one's options would be without the object
• prepper proclivities seem to have a substantial overlap with hoarding disorders. With any hoarding comorbidity, "i have the object" does not imply "I can find the object and retrieve it in good condition".

needn't clutter up the comments on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h2Hk2c2Gp5sY4abQh/lack-of-social-grace-is-an-epistemic-virtue, as it's old and a contender for bestof, but....

what about the negativity bias??!!

if humans naturally put x% extra weight on negative feedback by default, then if i want a human to get an accurate idea of what i'm trying to communicate, i need to counteract their innate negativity bias by de-emphasizing the negative or over-emphasizing the positive. if i just communicate the literal truth directly to someone who still has the neg... (read more)

I notice that I am surprised: you didn't mention the grandfather problem situation. The existence of future lives is contingent on the survival of those peoples' ancestors who live in the present day.

Also, on the "we'd probably like for our species to continue existing indefinitely" front, the importance of each individual life can be considered as the percentage of that species which the life represents. So if we anticipate that our current population is higher than our future population, one life in the present has relatively lower importance than one life in the future. But if we expect that the future population will be larger than the present, a present life has relatively higher importance than a future one.

This sounds to me like a compelling case for parental anonymity online. When you write publicly about your children under your real name, anything you say can be found when some searches your child's parent's name.

If you shared each individual negative story under a new pseudonym, and each account shared only enough detail to clarify the story while leaving great ambiguity about which family it's from, the reputational risks to your children would basically vanish.

This seems to work as long as each new account is sufficiently un-findable from your real name, for whatever threshhold of findability you deem appropriate.

"entry-level" may have been a misleading term to describe the roles I'm talking about. The licensure I'd be renting to the system takes several months to obtain, and requires ongoing annual investment to maintain once it's acquired. If my whole team at work was laid off and all my current colleagues decided to use exactly the same plan b as mine, they'd be 1-6 months and several thousand dollars of training away from qualifying for the roles where I'd be applying on day 1.

Training time aside, I am also a better candidate than most because I technically hav... (read more)

Plan B, for if the tech industry gets tired of me but I still need money and insurance, is to rent myself to the medical system. I happen to have appropriate licensure to take entry-level roles on an ambulance or in an emergency room, thanks to my volunteer activities. I suspect that healthcare will continue requiring trained humans for longer than many other fields, due to the depth of bureaucracy it's mired in. And crucially, healthcare seems likely to continue hurting for trained humans willing to tolerate its mistreatment and burnout.

Plan C, for if SH... (read more)

I'll get around to signing up for cryo at some point. If death seemed more imminent, signing up would seem more urgent.

I notice that the default human reaction to finding very old human remains is to attempt to benefit from them. Sometimes we do that by eating the remains; other times we do that by studying them. If I get preserved and someone eventually eats me... good on them for trying?

I suspect that if/when we figure out how to emulate people, those of us who make useful/profitable emulations will be maximally useful/profitable with some degree of agen... (read more)

Do you happen to know whether we have reason to suspect that the aldehyde and refrigerator approach will be measurably less effective for future use of the stored brains, vs conventional cryopreservation? 

The step of "internally yell LOOOOOP" seems silly enough that it just might work. I'll try adding it to my own reaction; I'm presently at a level where I'm moderately skilled at noticing loops but I don't yet reliably connect that awareness to a useful behavior change.

Killing oneself with high certainty of effectiveness is more difficult than most assume. The side effects on health and personal freedom of a failed attempt to end one's life in the current era are rather extreme.

Anyways, emulating or reviving humans will always incur some cost; I suspect that those who are profitable to emulate or revive will get a lot more emulation time than those who are not.

If a future hostile agent just wants to maximize suffering, will foregoing preservation protect you from it? I think it's far more likely that an unfriendly agent ... (read more)

Building on the step of analyzing the circumstances, I find it very helpful to ask the zookeeper question:

If someone was keeping an animal as I am keeping myself, what would I think of them?

"Don't treat people worse than we treat critters" seems like it should be a low bar, but very often failing the zookeeper test goes hand in hand with failing other tests presented to me by the circumstances. But the zookeeper test has concrete answers for how to resume passing it, which are often more actionable than other tasks.

I wouldn't call it "no big deal" to lose it... but losing something that's on track to scale and grow its impact seems like a different order of magnitude of loss from losing something that performed beautifully in a microcosm without escaping it.

In parallel, I wouldn't call it any less of a loss to lose a local artist than a globally recognized one, but it's a very different magnitude of impact.

I made my initial comment in the hope that someone could either explain how actually it had a wider impact than I understood from the post, or retrospect on why it... (read more)

It feels like a loss, yes, but a small loss, like a single building of architecture eroding into the sea.

It does not feel like a loss of the hope for more similar schools, to me, because it existed for how long and yet spawned how few spinoffs?

If it was going to change the world at scale by existing, it sounds like it had plenty of time to do that. Why didn't it? Why wasn't individual love and appreciation for it enough to coordinate efforts to create more such schools?

Certainly, for the few who would have been very very lucky and gotten in if it hadn't en... (read more)

If You Can Climb Up, You Can Climb Down

Mostly true, but the edge cases where this is untrue for adults are interesting:

• Climbing up may damage the thing you're climbing (rock, tree) and render it impossible to return by the same route
• Steep and slippery surfaces can be more dangerous to hike down than to hike up, because gravity is in your favor for arresting uncontrolled upward motion but exacerbates uncontrolled downward motion
• Without a spotter, we tend to have better line of sight to things above us than to things below
• If fatigue or injury is incurred on the climb up, one's physical abilities may not be sufficient for the climb down