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All of orellanin's Comments + Replies

A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning

Yes.

I don't get what point you're making here.

6tailcalled2y

It's an example of a trans activist who, when asked whether people who want to coordinate sex-based descrimination should be purged from the discourse and authoritative sources, was like "yeah they just sound like mean busybodies to me". Admittedly I didn't really go into detail (partly because I don't really have any strong examples that I support and want to argue about), so we don't really know whether Pervocracy supports it in all relevant cases.

A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning

orellanin2y40

What seems optimized for smoothness/persuasion?

0green_leaf2y

The author shares how terrible it feels that X is true, without bringing arguments for X being true in the first place (based on me skimming the post). That can bypass the reader's fact-check (because why would he write about how bad it made him feel that X is true if it wasn't?). It feels to me like he's trying to combine an emotional exposition (no facts, talking about his feelings) with an expository blogpost (explaining a topic), while trying to grab the best of both worlds (the persuasiveness and emotions of the former and the social status of the latter) without the substance to back it up.

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

orellanin2y60

Of all the people I have ever met that to my knowledge, have abused intimate partners or strongly crossed consent boundaries in sex/romance - all three are women.

If women are as dangerous as men or more, why do you feel the lack of fear towards you devalues your sexualness or cleverness or agency or something? I mean I can construct the reason given what you say, but it looks like a big confusing tower of gettier case indirection.

The information they are using is that I am a woman, and therefore I am harmless because women are harmless.

I think Ben's... (read more)

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

orellanin2y10

I'm not convinced that clothes are an unambiguous signal, and just saying so might be clearer. That said, once you send this signal to cis girls, do they change their behavior? If not, I doubt this is important info that they were actually lacking.

1Sinclair Chen2y

no, but it is a faster signal, and idk it feels like the right "type" of message, being a vibes based thing that does not require conscious discussion or deliberation. attention is a valuable resource! I have ever discussed weird gender thoughts with my friends, some of whom are cis women. I think people in college treated me differently for looking queer and people in my adult life in berkeley / SF don't. hard to tell tho

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

orellanin2y10

What do you think they might be tracking that Sinclair isn't?

(Also, Sinclair made the comparison between staying with her and walking alone at night for half an hour. Her friend could just have been the friend being wrong about the risk of the latter. Do you think that's what happened? Also, maybe the risk of walking alone might not have been the real reason, maybe the friend just wanted more time with Sinclair. Sinclair, do you think that's what happened?)

2Sinclair Chen2y

the story is intentionally vague to not leak personal info but yes, I did think and continue to think that she enjoyed spending time with me.

Benquo2y*116

Examples of info she might have had:

She was hoping to have sex with Sinclair, so theit sexual advances would not have been unwelcome.
Harassment from acquaintances of her social class is more common than stranger assault but much less likely to be severely bad - acquaintance assault is socially constrained and thin-tailed, stranger assault is deviant and fat-tailed - which is not adequately captured by the statistics.
She’s not the sort of person who can be easily traumatized by, or would have a hard time rejecting, unwanted advances.
Sinclair is in fact

... (read more)

3A1987dM2y

e.g. his demeanor, and the way other people at the meetups who've known him for longer than she has treat him

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

orellanin2y72

- sure, I guess a lot of my personality traits are more man-like. ambition, high libido. idk why cis girls are comfortable around me, I think they are wrong.

That's interesting, I'd like to understand what you mean by them being wrong. Have you tried to give cis girls the information you think they're lacking, or to talk about this explicitly with them? How do they react?

If they're wrong to be comfortable around you and do it anyways, what kinds of harms are they incurring?

4Sinclair Chen2y

Thinking about it a bit more, I have a more direct answer: The info cis girls lack is that I am highly sexual, into girls, and am formerly a guy. A tasteful, tactful, and succinct way to provide this information is to dress in a way that is stereotypically slutty, lesbian, and trans. I follow this aesthetic to some degree already. If I really cared I could just follow it more.

7Sinclair Chen2y

An example that comes to mind is that a few years ago, my friend (17F) was riding with me (23) on the subway from Berkeley back to San Francisco late at night, and she asked if she could stay over at my place instead of getting off at her stop so she didn't have to walk half an hour alone in the middle of the night back to her place. This struck me as a profound misunderstanding of base rates of assault by strangers, and an underestimate of the relative danger of some "some person in the rationalist community who you have seen at like 3 meetups." Look I want people to trust me. But if I don't earn that trust it feels like they're being naiive, or devaluing my sexualness or cleverness or agency or something. I know it's strictly good for me for people to think I am good and I really shouldn't complain about it.

Zoe Curzi's Experience with Leverage Research

orellanin3y80

Hi! In the past few months I've been participating in Leverage Research/EA discourse on Twitter. Now there is one Twitter thread discussing your involvement as throwaway/anonymoose: https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1585319237018681344 (with a subthread starting at https://twitter.com/ohabryka/status/1586084766020820992 discussing anti-doxxing norms and linking back to EA Forum comments).

One piece of information that's missing is why you used two throwaway accounts instead of one (and in particular, why you used one to reply to the other one, as all... (read more)

7RyanCarey3y

Hi Orellanin, In the early stages, I had in mind that the more info any individual anon-account revealed, the more easily one could infer what time they spent at Leverage, and therefore their identity. So while I don't know for certain, I would guess that I created anonymoose to disperse this info across two accounts. When I commented on the Basic Facts post as anonymoose, It was not my intent to contrive a fake conversation between two entities with separate voices. I think this is pretty clear from anonymoose's comment, too - it's in the same bulleted and dry format that throwaway uses, so it's an immediate possibility that throwaway and anonymoose are one and the same. I don't know why I used anonymoose there. Maybe due to carelessness, or maybe because I lost access to throwaway. (I know that at one time, an update to the forum login interface did rob me of access to my anon-account, but not sure if this was when that happened).

Occupational Infohazards

orellanin3y130

Sorry, I'm having difficulty parsing the second paragraph here. Who's "he", and who's "we"?

"Infra-Bayesianism with Vanessa Kosoy" – Watch/Discuss Party

orellanin4y10

Oof sorry for the delay!

Yes it looks like that's it. I didn't realize that once you hardcoded all the odd bits as some list L, the hypothesis "all even bits are 0 and the odd bits are L and then all 1s" isn't actually much simpler than the hypothesis "the even bits are length(L) 0s and then all 1s, the odd bits are L and then all 1s".

With this confusion out of the way, I'll try to dig deeper into the sequences and then report back what infra-Bayesianism does about this...

"Infra-Bayesianism with Vanessa Kosoy" – Watch/Discuss Party

orellanin4y10

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "fails" here, but I'm pretty sure the Solomonoff prior should be fine at predicting the even bits (in the sense that once you reveal a large number of bits of the sequence, it is overwhelmingly likely that that the Solomonoff prior will assign a very high probability that the next even bit is a zero).

Am I simply wrong about how the Solomonoff prior works, or do I just have a lower standard for "success" or "failure" here?

2DanielFilan4y

I think you are wrong to think that it's overwhelmingly likely that Solomonoff will predict the even bits well.

"Infra-Bayesianism with Vanessa Kosoy" – Watch/Discuss Party

orellanin4y10

Confusion about what Solomonoff priors can’t do:

“Even bits are all zero, odd bits are random”: The Turing machine that writes zero to all even bits and writes some hardcoded string to all odd bits is simpler than the Turing machine that writes one long hardcoded string, so it seems to me that the Solomonoff prior should learn that the even bits are all zero
- The discussion there seemed to bleed into "what if the string of odd bits is uncomputable", which I think of as a separate field of confusion, so I'm still confused what intuition this example is suppose

... (read more)

2Diffractor4y

Re point 1, 2: Check this out. For the specific case of 0 to even bits, ??? to odd bits, I think solomonoff can probably get that, but not more general relations. Re: point 3, Solomonoff is about stochastic environments that just take your action as an input, and aren't reading your policy. For infra-Bayes, you can deal with policy-dependent environments without issue, as you can consider hard-coding in every possible policy to get a family of stochastic environments, and UDT behavior naturally falls out as a result from this encoding. There's still some open work to be done on which sorts of policy-dependent environments like this are learnable (inferrable from observations), but it's pretty straightforward to cram all sorts of weird decision-theory scenarios in as infra-Bayes hypothesis, and do the right thing in them.

2DanielFilan4y

Well you had the misfortune to listen to a podcast where I was asking the questions, and I didn't understand infra-Bayesian learning theory and was too afraid to ask.

2DanielFilan4y

If the even bits are computable and the odd bits aren't, the whole sequence isn't computable so Solomonoff (plausibly) fails. You might hope that even if you can't succeed at predicting the odd bits, you could still succeed at predicting the even bits (which on their own are eminently predictable).