abramdemski

Un­der­stand­ing Trust: Pro­ject Update

• abramdemski 15 Jan 2026 22:21 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Sodium’s comment on: Tak­ing LLMs Se­ri­ously (As Lan­guage Models)

  Yes, I think what I’ve described here shares a lot with Bengio’s program.

Tak­ing LLMs Se­ri­ously (As Lan­guage Models)

• abramdemski 22 Dec 2025 21:20 UTC

  5 points

  1

  on: Google seem­ingly solved effi­cient attention

  The closest we can get is a little benchmark where the models are supposed to retrieve “a needle out of a haystack”. Stuff like a big story of 1 million tokens and they are supposed to retrieve a fact from it

  This isn’t “the closest we can get”. Needle-in-a-haystack tests seem like a sensible starting point, but testing long-context utilization in general involves synthesis of information, EG looking at a novel or series of novels and answering reading comprehension questions. There are several benchmarks of this sort, EG:
  
  https://​​epoch.ai/​​benchmarks/​​fictionlivebench

  https://​​nyu-mll.github.io/​​quality/​​

  https://​​www.scrolls-benchmark.com/​​

• abramdemski 30 Nov 2025 21:36 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Roman Malov’s comment on: Does SI Dis­fa­vor Com­pu­ta­tion­al­ism?

  This is my inclination, but a physicalist either predicts that the phenomenology would in fact change, or perhaps asserts that you’re deluded about your phenomenal experience when you think that the experience is the same despite substrate shifts. My understanding of cube_flipper’s position is that they anticipate changes in the substrate to change the qualia.

  From a physicalist’s perspective, you’re essentially making predictions based on your theory of phenomenal consciousness, and then arguing that we should already update on those predictions ahead of time, since they’re so firm. I’m personally sympathetic to this line of argument, but it obviously depends on some assumptions which need to be articulated, and which the physicalist would probably not be happy to make.

Inkhaven Retrospective

Does SI Dis­fa­vor Com­pu­ta­tion­al­ism?

• abramdemski 28 Nov 2025 20:08 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: abramdem­ski’s Shortform

  Today’s Inkhaven post is an edit to yesterday’s, adding more examples of legitimacy-making characteristics, so I’m posting it in shortform so that I can link it separately:

  Here are some potential legitimacy-relevant characteristics:

  • The reasoning is logically valid.

  • The assumptions of the argument are credible (this splits into many characteristics we can name:)

    • The assumptions are simple.

    • There are few assumptions.

    • The assumptions have very few degrees of freedom.

    • The assumptions are agreed upon by many humans.

    • The assumptions are a strong consensus in the relevant field(s).

    • The assumptions are very probable according to best existing models.

    • The assumptions have high-quality citations backing them up.

    • The assumptions have been very useful (EG productive axioms in mathematics).

    • The assumptions are not jointly contradictory.

  • The reasoning is probabilistically valid.

    • The reasoning is not Dutch-bookable.

    • The reasoning is very difficult to Dutch-book (bounded cognition).

    • The reasoning is accuracy-maximizing.

    • The reasoning is a plausible extension of logic.

  • The reasoning employs credible priors.

    • The prior is close to human priors, or priors humans justifiably endorse.

    • The priors have rigorous frequentist justification (EG probability of a prime number based on the prime number theorem).

    • The priors have empirical validation.

    • The priors have a maximum-entropy justification.

    • The priors are dominant over other priors one might want to use.

  • The probability of the conclusion is very high.

  • The argument is very strong as a statistical test.

    • The bias is low.

    • The variance is low.

    • Confidence intervals are small.

    • The test has a low false positive rate.

    • The test has a low false negative rate.

    • The test is the best test to use out of alternative tests.

    • Robustness to outliers.

    • Robustness to a variety of distributions.

    • Good rate of convergence.

  What links here?

  • Inkhaven Retrospective by abramdemski (30 Nov 2025 21:25 UTC; 40 points)

Le­gi­t­i­mate Deliberation

• abramdemski 27 Nov 2025 16:51 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: In­finites­i­mally False

  Yeah, the logic still can’t handle arbitrary truth-functions; it only works for continuous truth-functions. To accept this theory, one must accept this limitation. A zealous proponent of the theory might argue that it isn’t a real loss, perhaps arguing that there isn’t really a true precise zero, that’s just a model we use to understand the semantics of the logic. What I’ll say is that this is a real compromise, just a lesser compromise than many other theories require. We can construct truth-functions arbitrarily close to a zero detector, and their corresponding Strengthened Liar will be arbitrarily close to false.

On Im­pact Certificates

• abramdemski 27 Nov 2025 2:37 UTC

  7 points

  1

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  Seems to me like both.

• abramdemski 26 Nov 2025 22:48 UTC

  18 points

  11

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  No disagreement with the broad statements, but I note that your words do not particularly register the point that good conversation itself might be a turnon and lack thereof a turnoff? IE your post presents a puzzle: what’s with the banter → sex thing? I’m suggesting that many people might want to talk first as an inherent preference. Sure, there might be ways around that, but you weren’t asking for something with no loopholes, you were asking about the banter → sex thing.

• abramdemski 26 Nov 2025 20:20 UTC

  23 points

  11

  on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  Not really an experienced player of the relevant games, but I personally have turned down an obvious sex invitation with someone who I was otherwise interested in because too little conversation (and don’t regret this choice). I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with. I feel like a lot of the intrigue of an intimate encounter is conversational intimacy. I’ve never experienced the chat at party → sex pipeline, however. Only [chat online for multiple months]->sex.

Evolu­tion & Freedom

• abramdemski 25 Nov 2025 22:46 UTC

  LW: 28 AF: 10

  18

  AF

  on: Align­ment will hap­pen by de­fault. What’s next?

  I also don’t believe that insider trading is immoral. Insider trading increases the accuracy of the stock prices available to the public, which is the public good that equity trading provides. For this reason, prediction markets love insider trading. The reason it’s illegal is to protect retail investors, but why do they get privileged over everyone else? Another reason insider trading is immoral is that it robs the company of proprietary information (if you weren’t a limb of The Company, you wouldn’t know the merger is happening). That’s fair, but in that case doing it officially for The Company should be allowed, and it’s not. In this example ChatGPT arguably helped steal information from LING, but did so in service of the other company, so I guess it’s kind of an immoral case—but would be moral if LING is also insider-trading on it.

  The problem with insider trading, in my view, is that someone with an important role in the company can short the stock and then do something really bad that tanks the value of the company. The equilibrium in a market that allows insider trading involves draconian measures within the companies themselves to prevent this sort of behavior (or else, no multi-person ventures that can be publicly traded).

  This is an instance of the more general misalignment of prediction markets: whenever there’s something on a prediction market that is quite improbable in ordinary circumstances but could be caused to happen by a single actor or a small number of people, there’s profit to be made by sewing chaos.

  What links here?

  • Align­ment will hap­pen by de­fault. What’s next? by Adrià Garriga-alonso (25 Nov 2025 7:14 UTC; 99 points)

Mar­ket Truth

• abramdemski 24 Nov 2025 16:40 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Informality

  all the relationships between components, etc, I made “explicit”

  Is there a typo here? “are made explicit” perhaps?

  or that there is some set of rules such that following those rules (/​modifying the expression according to those rules) is guaranteed to preserve (something like) the expression’s “truth value”?

  That’s correct. More generally (since the concept also applies to noun phrases) guaranteed to preserve its “value” whatever type that may be. This “value” is something like what-it-points-at, semantic reference.

Informality

Mar­ket Logic II