All of Alex Vermillion's Comments + Replies

I think we should suspect that they've done some basic background research (this individual, not in general), and take the rest of the information about people failing to see improvements as data that also points this direction.

They (and initially I) read it as a question: "True or false: this market will resolve No at the end of 2025?"

Pie day!

I did that. I didn't want to fill in the worksheet, but I read through it. Now I'm reading through this post and noting anything that I understood differently when I read the worksheet or that is worth mentioning:

• The post has links and a story at the start that could draw some people away, but I didn't have an issue (except for noticing that other people could, yuck)
• The link might cause people to be drawn away. I almost added it to my tabs and then decided to ignore it
• The story about Yudkowsky might cause people to get distracted.
• There's a lot in this

I'm curious which one people find easier as an initial read.

I used the random.org list randomizer to shuffle my reading order. It said worksheet then post.

Jesus, thanks for you story and for the link to The Gentle Seduction. Both had me tearing up. I did not read The Gentle Seduction until after your piece, so I did not know how badly we needed something like it for AI, but now that I've read both I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Seems sort of like Alice is attempting to Euler bully Bob

Alice: I think the negative impact of my rudeness is probably smaller than the potential positive impact of getting you to act in line with the values you claim to have. 

Bob: That doesn’t even seem true. If everyone is rude like you, then the Effective Altruism movement will get a bad reputation, and fewer people will be willing to join. What if I get so upset by your rudeness that I decide not to donate at all?

Alice: That kind of seems like a you problem, not a me problem.

Alice is being extremely rude! She is implementing a strategy that reduces both... (read more)

If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it's also ignoring useful information.

I am not one to suggest ignoring useful information if you're able to process it in order to get a better answer. However, I think all the examples above were examples where people do not expect to be acting more effectively after processing the information.

That is, I agree with you for a perfect Bayesian that you shouldn't ignore anything ever, but I read Said Achmiz as saying "If you get bad vibes from someone, be safer around them through planning", which is not actually a qualitative difference from what Kaj Sotala suggested.

Hmm, this comment reads as if you are unaware of ways that information could be passed down over time other than the written word, even though you sort of hint towards some in your comment.

It seems like epics often survived for very long times without being destroyed entirely, and it seems like the same techniques could be used here. Do you have reason to believe otherwise?

Amusingly, I found a 16-year old comment asking for jargon integration. Dropping it here just to document that people want this, so that people don't say "Who wants this?" without an answer.

People seeing this in the future: Check out Draw a Box for some low-level mechanical stuff.

In regard to bullet 1, I would caution against relying on this. If you show up to many fields expecting to smash through it because you're smart, you'll be torn to bits in many many fields. This is because the fields that are useful are already being dominated by people who are good at things to the extent that they're economically or emotionally valuable.

The exact example of chess makes this clear. If a smart LWer thinks "Oh, I'll get to the chess leaderboards because I'm really smart", they are going to find out after some weeks of studying that… everyone else on the leaderboards is smart too!

"Trauma" is a bad experience deemed anomalous. It means "the world is not usually like that". We do not call any behavior or emotional pattern "trauma" if it is obviously adaptive.

I think this is just incorrect? It is still a learned behavior if it's adaptive, it's just that people don't go to the doctor's office complaining that they are afraid of getting stabbed when they got stabbed last Tuesday. You're right that we wouldn't generally call this trauma, but that doesn't mean that the person is not traumatized.

If we had a magical cure for trauma and we u... (read more)

I'm adding a YouTube link for Singularity because I've really grown to like it in the 3 years since I read this post.

E.g. we know that judges are more likely to convict ugly people that pretty people. More likely to convict unsympathetic, but innocent parties, compared to sympathetic innocent parties. More likely to convict people of colour rather than white folks. More likely, troublingly, to convict someone if they are hearing a case just before lunch (when they are hangry) compared to just after lunch (when they are happy and chill cause they just ate).

For the record, a lot of these didn't hold up when investigated later.

Across all websites I've been on in my life, I have posted more than 100000 comments (resulting in many interactions), so while things like psychoanalyzing people, assuming intentions, and making stereotypes is "bad", I simply have too much training data, and too few incorrect guesses not to do this.

On the contrary, your guess did not take context into account and was bad. They were downvoted for answering in a way which didn't answer the question, had many typos, and otherwise took more effort to read than the information it contained was worth.

Your co... (read more)

The note that it isn't what the username is for is kind of interesting. There are two places to put information on social media: your account and the media attached to your account. Here, instead of attaching some GWWC information to every piece of media (Tweet/post/picture/essay etc), the idea is to attach it to the account, but that really does feel quite weird to me.

I'm glad you said that.

(I'm on a Framework computer)

Each of your examples is a lot easier to read, since I've already learned how much I should ignore the circles and how much I should pay attention to them. I'd be quite happy with either.

If someone really really wants color, try using subtle colors. I fiddled around, and on my screen, rgb(80,20,0) is both imperceptible and easily noticed. You really can do a lot with subtlety, but of course the downside is that this sucks for people who have a harder time seeing. From the accessibility standpoint, my favorite (out of the origin... (read more)

Technical discussion aside, please see a UI designer or similar about how to style this, because it has the potential to really make LessWrong unpleasant to read without it really being obvious at all. I try below to make some comments and recommendations, but I recognize that I'm not very good at this (yet?).

Two nightmare issues to watch out for:

1. Too little contrast from the background.
2. Too much contrast from the foreground.

1. Blending in

This would make the jargon text harder to see by giving it less visibility than the surrounding text. Your demonstr... (read more)

If you want to piss people off, you can also use periods and nonbreaking spaces. This way they linewrap nicely as well as demonstrating that you knew about typsetting but ignored it for some personal reason. . .

But speaking for myself personally... the problem is that the free-association game just isn't very interesting.

Hm, I think this really does change when you get better at it? This only works for people you're interested in, but if you have someone you are interested in, the free association can be a way to explore a large number of interesting topics that you can pick up in a more structured way later.

I think the statement you summarized from those guides is true, just not helpful to you.

Well if the question is "If the whole world is made of smart people with really high motivation, why is it how it is?" the answer is "That question assumes some false things"

Popping back in on this one after a while.

I really enjoy this. This can cut through a large number of annoying problems with one trick: If you split and commit and the actions for all the likely paths are essentially the same, you can ignore which thing is true for now.

"What if I'm a Boltzmann Brain?" If I am not, then I should proceed as normal. If I am, then it does not matter. --> Proceed as normal.

"What if my shirt is blue?" if it is not, then I'll wear it. If it is, then I'll wear it. --> Wear the shirt

It might sound silly, but I think Split and... (read more)

Ugh I just posted that and I already am not sure. I think the correct answer is "leave a comment saying I appreciate the effort but downvote, because this question seems like chaff and upvotes factor into the algorithm and rankings of upvoted posts", but this is a personal blogpost so the right answer is probably an upvote since those don't frontpage I think.

I'm conflicted. I appreciate the effort put into the post, but it seems like a lot of the posters are genuinely creating lots of low quality content and I'd much rather have a small amount of good content than a large amount of meh-or-bad content to sift through to find the good stuff.

I've settled on a net downvote, but would probably do a upvote and a disagree vote if that was an option.

It doesn't sound like this is a good summary, no

I think you are dramatically overestimating how difficult it was, back in the day, to accidentally or incidentally learn Scott's full name. I think this is the crux here.

It was extremely easy to find his name, and often people have stories of learning it on accident. I don't believe it was simple enough that Scott's plea to not have his name be published in the NYT was invalid, but I do think it was simple enough that an analogy to lockpicking is silly.

Hm. I think we like Slate Star Codex in this thread, so let's enjoy a throwback:

It was wrong of me to say I hate poor minorities. I meant I hate Poor Minorities! Poor Minorities is a category I made up that includes only poor minorities who complain about poverty or racism.

No, wait! I can be even more charitable! A poor minority is only a Poor Minority if their compaints about poverty and racism come from a sense of entitlement. Which I get to decide after listening to them for two seconds. And If they don’t realize that they’re doing something wrong, th

Your comment is actually one of the ones in the thread that replied to mine that I found least inane, so I will stash this downthread of my reply to you:

I think a lot of the stuff Cade Metz is alleged to say above is dumb as shit and is not good behavior. However, I don't need to make bad metaphors, abuse the concept of logical validity, or do anything else that breaks my principles to say that the behavior is bad, so I'm going to raise an issue with those where I see them and count on folks like you to push back the appropriate extent so that we can get to a better medium together.

I'd be amenable to quibbles over the lock thing, though I think it's still substantially different. A better metaphor (for the situation that Cade Metz claims is the case, which may or may not be correct) making use of locks would be "Anyone can open the lock by putting any key in. By opening the lock with my own key, I have done no damage". I do not believe that Cade Metz used specialized hacking equipment to reveal Scott's last name unless this forum is unaware of how to use search engines.

I don't (and shouldn't) care what Scott Alexander believes in order to figure out whether what Cade Metz said was logically valid. You do not need to figure out how many bones a cat has to say that "The moon is round, so a cat has 212 bones" is not valid.

The evidence offered "Scott agrees with the The Bell Curve guy" is of the same type and strength as those needed to link him to Hitler, Jesus Christ, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cate Metz, and so on. There was absolutely nothing special about the evidence that tied it to the people offered and could have been recast without loss of accuracy to fit any leaning.

As we are familiar with, if you have an observation that proves anything, you do not have evidence.

I don't think "Giving fake evidence for things you believe are true" is in any way a minor sin of evidence presentation

If you're looking to convince without hyperbole, drawing the link from "Cade Metz" to "Journalists" would be nice, as would explaining any obvious cutouts that make someone an Okay Journalist.

This is not a good metaphor. There's an extreme difference between spreading information that's widely available and the general concept of justifying an action. I think your choice of examples adds a lot more heat than light here.

This seems very important. Thank you for writing it.

I don't really understand the site's software enough to give a good explanation, but seeing the code that (at one point?) governs/governed this was helpful to me when someone linked it previously: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/blob/devel/packages/lesswrong/lib/voting/voteTypes.ts

I've got a todolist with tags, and one of them is "monotonous tasks that I don't mind doing when I'm having a very bad day". This helps me a fair amount with certain buildups of disorder

I was waiting to see what you guys turned out as an ebook or sequence and trying to see if I could take it to a printer for a personal copy.|

Now I understand that the difficulty is a layer earlier and it's worth figuring out how to "make an ebook for printing ", not "print an ebook"

I'd like to express pretty large appreciation for the answer; this changes what things I, personally, was planning to do wrt the finished product. Thank you

Huh, I believe you did this and I believe you got the result, but I just have no model for what the heck is going on. It happens sometimes I guess, but damn I cannot grasp this.

Just flagging as a thing to consider that several of my favorite posts this year were actually shortish sequences, and that if they make it it might be worth figuring out something nice to do for them. I suppose if they partially make it, that's a question too.

(Expressing confusion here, not frustration or another "negative" emotion)

This number doesn't seem to make any sense. You suggest making an ebook, and that should be most of the heavy effort handled if you can ever get to a point of reusing a previous year's printing process. It's not really clear to me how it can take that much time and/or effort.

I'm only bringing this up because the books were pretty cool and me buying a set actually convinced some non-LW-reading folks to buy some, so it seemed a pretty neat outreach opportunity, if we can ever find an H... (read more)

Selfing-prevention: exclusive mating types prevent an individual from mating with itself, also known as selfing.

The "Selfing" link goes to the Inbreeding Depression page, I believe in error. Feel free to delete this comment if I'm wrong or if I'm right and you fix it.

I wanted to muse on this more:

Part of the back of my mind wondered if the comment was "bad enough" to be worth it, but then I realized it doesn't really matter, because the tradeoff is average positive karma versus single negative karma. If you have an average karma of +3, then a single -50 will take an extremely long time to recover from, even if it was something silly like your comment being misinterpreted as hostile. On balance, I agree with you, but I thought it was worth sharing why.

I think, separately, I would endorse some of the message, though I cannot say what Singer's intentions were or were not.

Any thought experiment which reveals a conflict in your values and asks you to resolve it without also offering you guidance on how to integrate all your values is going to sacrifice one of your values. This isn't a novel insight I think, as I'm almost pulling a 'by definition' on you, but the spectrum of magnitudes of this is important to me.

Our social network roundabout these parts has many metaphorical skeletons representing dozens and... (read more)

I really liked this comment! Please continue to make comments like it!

I've actually been working to start writing down some notes about my version of a lot of these ideas (as well as my version of ideas I've not seen floating around yet). I think it would be a good opportunity to solidify my thoughts on things, notice new connections, and give back to the intellectual culture.

You get to cheat on your first readthrough and leave fun comments :)

I have a hole in my head; it's on EA Forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jk7A3NMdbxp65kcJJ/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more