Aorou

Karma: 102

Aorou 13 Jun 2026 9:33 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: x-risk-themed
Something similar is a common theme in fiction, where a person

1) wants to do good or be seen as doing good
2) gets rejected from the traditional places trying to do good
3) creates their own org or joins one of the untraditional places
4) ends up doing more harm than good

Basically, “the path to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Aorou 9 Jun 2026 8:08 UTC
3 points
0
on: Mnemonic portraits for 19,023 human genes
That was incredible, thank you.
For a molecular biologist, is there a genuine expectation to know as many of the 19,000 as possible? I’d imagine it is a lot more specialized so any one researcher is expected to know a few tens, maybe a hundred genes?
Still, it does feel like a mountain of work to learn about them “manually” versus through narratives with emotions and vividly designed characters. Amazing effort, it’s been on my mind that with the AI explosion we’ll soon see a massive improvement to teaching because we can 1) customize to every student 2) make any topic more fun through methods similar to yours. I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
Again: thank you!

Aorou 15 May 2026 11:35 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Irretrievability; or, Murphy’s Curse of Oneshotness upon ASI
The top comment is indeed similar, but the Dwarkesh podcast excerpt is not the same conversation; it’s about fiction vs nonfiction. My gripe here is about the low quality of the nonfiction.

Aorou 15 May 2026 9:10 UTC
14 points
6
on: Irretrievability; or, Murphy’s Curse of Oneshotness upon ASI
I read this not knowing Eliezer had written it. I thought it was someone trying to imitate his style, and I kept thinking “Man, this style is off-putting” and “this could be edited to be half the length, if not less”.

I have probably read everything Eliezer has written, including the amazing Mad Investor Chaos. Eliezer is the most important influence on my thinking. But the prose here is so unnecessarily condescending and at times somewhat precious, like the way things are named (“disaster monkeys”, “Very Serious Engineer”, “the great seriousness of a decent engineer”, etc). So much of this post is loaded with judgment or pettiness.

The post feels rushed and closer to an unedited rant. Also, repetitive of other posts that made the point more succinctly (one-shotting is hard, people really don’t grasp how hard).
This is the type of writing that will turn off most readers who are not already convinced.

Aorou 27 Dec 2025 22:51 UTC
4 points
−11
on: Good if make prior after data instead of before
I liked this!
Isn’t this post an elaborate way of saying that today’s posteriors are tomorrow’s priors?

As in- all posteriors eventually get baked into the prior.

Aorou 19 Dec 2025 8:49 UTC
2 points
0
on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
For those wondering about Raistlin Majere, this is from Wikipedia:

« Born to a mother prone to trance-like fits and a woodcutter father, Raistlin inherited his mother’s aptitude for magic. He undertook and passed the arduous Test of High Sorcery, but in the process, he acquired white hair and golden skin and was cursed with hourglass eyes which saw the effects of time on all things. His health, while never robust, was ruined further, leaving him weak and subject to frequent bouts of coughing blood. Initially wearing the white robes of good, as the first series progresses Raistlin’s powers increase while his mood and actions darken, he goes to neutral red robes for the majority of the “War of the Lance” series until he adopts the black robes of evil while under the tutelage of “Fistandantilus” during the War of the Lance.
Raistlin, although physically very weak, is extremely intelligent, and possesses uncommonly powerful magical abilities. While ruthless in his pursuit of power, he holds to a code of conduct which repays all debts and protects those disadvantaged through no fault of their own. His relationship with his much stronger, better-liked, and good-natured twin brother Caramon is fraught with tensions as Caramon seeks to protect and shelter his weaker brother while denying his cruelty and penchant for hurting any others while in pursuit of his goals. »

Aorou 25 Nov 2025 0:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
This was SO INTERESTING. In addition to being insanely brave. Thank you.

Aorou 24 Nov 2025 19:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
was exists

typo / grammatical error

Aorou 26 Aug 2025 7:41 UTC
8 points
3
on: Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate
The main advantage for epistemics of working as a moderate is that almost all of your work has an informed, intelligent, thoughtful audience. I spend lots of time talking to and aiming to persuade AI company staff who are generally very intelligent, knowledgeable about AI, and intimately familiar with the goings-on at AI companies. In contrast, as a radical, almost all of your audience—policymakers, elites, the general public—is poorly informed, only able or willing to engage shallowly, and needs to have their attention grabbed intentionally. The former situation is obviously way more conducive to maintaining good epistemics.

This sounds like the streetlight bias, superficially? Just because your audience is intelligent and knowledgeable, doesn’t mean it’s the right audience, and doesn’t mean the stance that led you to them is correct.

Aorou 24 Jul 2025 8:47 UTC
5 points
0
on: Love stays loved (formerly “Skin”)
Just want to say I absolutely loved the story you wrote with Lintamande between Carissa and Altarrin. Thank you for that 🙏🏻

Aorou 14 May 2025 7:15 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we still need qualitative breakthroughs for AGI
Idk if I’m the only one here, but I use LLMs for coding and I have disabled memory. This wasn’t really an educated move, but after having an AI completely hallucinate in one chat and get the problem or the code at hand totally wrong, I’m afraid its misunderstanding will contaminate its memory and mess up every new chat I start.
At least with no memory I can attempt to rewrite my prompt in a new window and hope for a better outcome. It forces me to repeat myself a lot, but I now have systems in place to briefly summarize what my app does, show the file structure, and explain the problem at hand.

Aorou 14 May 2025 7:04 UTC
3 points
0
on: Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we still need qualitative breakthroughs for AGI
It doesn’t seem to be an uncommon experience that a model is given e.g. a piece of code with a bug in it and asked to find the bug, and then it keeps repeatedly claiming that it “found” the bug and offering revised code which doesn’t actually fix the problem. Or have anything to do with the problem, for that matter.

My personal insanity generator. Sigh.

Aorou 13 May 2025 8:24 UTC
2 points
0
on: Learned pain as a leading cause of chronic pain
Thanks for putting this on my radar :)

A few thoughts.

TLDR several reasons to be suspicious of PRT and its creator, but anecdotally it seems to ~work on me.

The negative first:
- The leading study in favor of PRT (Ashar et al 2021) had 151 participants (a third on which they did PRT, another third on which they did normal pain therapy, and a control). The measured effect was very large (which to me is suspicious). Importantly, it has not been replicated yet.
  (This is not to say it has failed to replicate)
- I’m now reading Gordon’s book. As someone who’s been in a semi-cult and who’s also paid a lot of attention to wannabe gurus and other scammers in the fields of therapy, group therapy, pain relief etc, I can say that this book has a lot of the signs. For instance, Gordon claiming that he cures everyone. This is highly suspicious to me.
  Generally speaking, the book has an aura of “this cures everything and everyone, now buy my programme” that other scammers in the field have. This is of course not to say that I’m convinced he’s a fraud. But it’s a dark orange flag.
- In a more intuitive way, I just feel resistant to believe that telling your brain “this is fine” will make the pain go away. Isn’t the brain a super complex machine that you can’t just talk to? </rant>
The positive:
Because as Ruby said this has “Big if true” energy, I do want to give this a shot.
Your article definitely peaked my interest: I’ve had two types of chronic pain over the last year.
First on my foot sole after playing a lot of tennis, which pushed me to stop. Even after I stopped tennis, the pain (mild) lasted for months, flaring especially when walking.
Second in the form of mild headaches I now have every day, pretty much since I had my first real intense migraine 3 months ago. I’ve gotten rid of the foot pain, but the headaches are still very real.
- Since reading your post, whenever I get the start of a headache (usually a 2 or ³⁄₁₀ intensity), I tell myself something like “all is fine, I’m ok, this is not painful, you can relax”… and it kind of works?
  I’d say the headache intensity goes down to a 0.5 or ¹⁄₁₀.
So while I’m highly suspicious, I’m surprised it’s had some positive effect on my pain already.
I’d love to see more replication studies.

Aorou 20 Dec 2024 17:19 UTC
1 point
0
on: Peacewagers so Far
Super glad I landed on your post! Just ordered the game.

Aorou 13 May 2024 10:31 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject
Alexey Guzey, walkthrough of his computer setup and productivity workflow.
- Founder of New Science. Popular blogger (eg, author of Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors).
It seems like Guzey has changed his mind about a bunch of things, including needing all those huge monitors.
Makes me think this video is no longer relevant.
Blogpost

Aorou 11 Jun 2023 10:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade
So you’re saying that for running, it’s better to do a more intense (uphill) shorter duration run, than a less intense (flat terrain) longer duration run?
If I understand that correctly, it would imply that, for cardio, the rule is reverse the one for weights: “heavier” for “less reps”?

Aorou 10 Jun 2023 10:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade
WRT cardio, besides rowing more, I also do more of my running up hills, as it substantially lowers impact and allows higher volume.
What do you mean by ‘impact’ in this context?

Aorou 21 May 2023 12:02 UTC
1 point
0
on: An Unexpected Victory: Container Stacking at the Port of Long Beach
Peterson

Petersen*

Aorou 11 May 2023 21:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Hell is Game Theory Folk Theorems
After giving it some thought, I do see a lot of real-life situations where you get to such a place.

For instance-
I was recently watching The Vow, the documentary about the NXIVM cult (“nexium”).
In very broad strokes, one of the core fucked up things the leader does, is to gaslight the members into thinking that pain is good. If you resist him, don’t like what he says, etc, there is something deficient in you. After a while, even when he’s not in the picture so it would make sense for everyone to suffer less and get some slack, people punish each other for being deficient or weak.

And now that I wrote it about NXIVM I imagine those dynamics are actually commonplace in everyday society too.

Aorou 11 May 2023 21:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Most people should probably feel safe most of the time
Thanks for pointing to your clarification. I find it a lot clearer than the OP.