alkjash

Karma: 5,210

alkjash 3 Sep 2025 0:14 UTC
6 points
−4
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
The way I feel about this reply is “I am an adaptation-executor, not a fitness optimizer”? Your reading is a perfectly valid psychoanalysis of my perfectionism around comments sections and compulsions to reply, but as far as I recall my internal dialogue stopped at “this is quite a tiresome minor emergency, I will have to tread several steps more carefully than usual in replying.”
Let me reiterate that my previous reply is expanding on the reasons I personally found interacting with Said difficult. None of our conversations were remotely ban-worthy behavior.

alkjash 2 Sep 2025 21:29 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: mesaoptimizer’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
Am I correct in stating that the main reason it is unpleasant and scary is because you felt socially threatened in those moments? As in, your standing in the social group you considered LessWrong to be, and that you considered that you were a part of? And a part of the obligation to reply involved a feeling of wanting to defend yourself and your standing in the group, especially since a gigantic part of what gives someone status in a sphere like LW is your intellectual ability, or your ability to be right, or to not look dumb at the very least?
This may be a relevant factor, and I can be rightfully accused of being too status-conscious and neurotic about such things, but I don’t think it’s really the issue. For one, I honestly expect to come out of most interactions with Said having won status points, not lost them.
One of the main reasons is his general snideness. Let me try to spell out a couple things.
1. I unfortunately inhabit and am socially adjusted to a huge swath of the world where the discourse norms require that [nothing that could be perceived as negative/directly contradictory is ever said publicly of anyone]. I come to LW to take a cold shower once in a while, to be woken up from the hostile epistemic jungle I live in. Within this analogy, afaict Said operates under the norm that absolute zero is the perfect temperature, and that’s a little too cold for me.
In any other culture/relationship I participate in, if someone communicated to me in the style that Said takes, for example making a literature search through my published work and making point-by-point rebuttals of claims therein, it would be an extreme shock (now I recognize that this exact example is extremely unfair as he is responding to my direct negative characterization of his behavior, but imo the top-level post contains enough better examples). My mind would immediately jump to [this person is out to get me e.g. fired] or [I have really committed a catastrophic and irreversible error]. Over the years here, perhaps three quarters of my brain have acclimated to the idea that the discourse norms that LWers follow, and Said follows extremely, is a reasonable way to have a conversation, and the other quarter is still screaming in terror.
2. On another level, I personally relate to LW as a casual forum for truth-seeking-related banter, emphasis on the word casual. Especially as someone who emphasizes [originality] and [directional correctness] over [correctness per se], I find the conversations that Said leads me into to be hostile to the way I think out loud. I like to have conversations where we both toss back and forth 99 vaguely truthy-sounding ideas and one of them happens to be a deep insight, and the other 98 are irrelevant or verifiably false and immediately brushed under the rug. However, if I try to converse with Said like this, every comment I make is directed into an scrutinization of the 98 irrelevant/false things. In my world, if I have produced one true, interesting insight in all of this, I’ve made progress. In my model of Said’s, I have sinned 98 times.
I do realize point 2 is not the way LW is intended to operate, and this mode of banter is absolutely not compatible with serious discussions of people’s long-term reputations with consequences on the level of multi-year banning. Let nobody ever give me moderator privileges beyond my personal blog. I am not using this frame at all to justify said banning. I am only using it to explain why I personally prefer it.

alkjash 2 Sep 2025 12:13 UTC
20 points
6
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I am surprised there are so few—perhaps in that calculation I was mistakingly tracking some comments you made in other posts that I didn’t directly participate in.

Nevertheless, every single example you bring up above was in fact unpleasant for me, some substantially so—while reasonable conclusions were reached (and in many cases I found the discussion fruitful in the end), the tone in your comments was one that put me on edge and sucked up a lot of my mental energy. I had the feeling that to interact with you at all was to an invitation to be drawn into an vortex of fact-checking and quibbling (as this current conversation is a small example of).
It is not surprising to me that you find all of these conversations unobjectionable. To me, your entrance to my comment threads was a minor emergency. To you, it was Tuesday.

I stand by the claim that a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site involved you—this is not a high bar. I do not recall another user with whom I had more than one.
I remain confused as to whether banning you is the correct move for the health of the site in general. The point I was trying to make was along the lines of [for a class of writers like alkjash, removing Said Achmiz from LessWrong makes us feel more relaxed about posting].

alkjash 30 Aug 2025 21:15 UTC
9 points
0
on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
It’s been many years since I’ve been active on LW, but while I was, Said was the source of a plurality of my unpleasant interactions on this site. Many other commenters leveraged serious criticisms of my writing, but only Said consistently ruined my day while doing so.

I cannot say whether this decision was right in the end, but will attest that seeing this post made me happy.

alkjash 19 Jun 2025 18:43 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Anton’s comment on: Hammertime Day 5: Comfort Zone Expansion
I’m still here occasionally, best of luck expanding (which is maybe importantly different from going outside?) that comfort zone!

alkjash 7 Jan 2025 1:27 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Meal Replacements in 2025?
I appreciate the effort but am hoping to solve this problem in an afternoon (if not five minutes) and forget about it, instead of acquiring the correct language to think about things or a full theory of diet and nutrition.

alkjash 6 Jan 2025 22:21 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: nim’s comment on: Meal Replacements in 2025?
My thought process goes like: on most weekdays I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening. Time savings and convenience are the main concerns I suppose.
The first solution that came to mind was to try Soylent/Mealsquares/Huel for a month and cross my fingers, ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ it just goes well and solves the problem. I posted to see if there were any obvious considerations I was missing, or clear standout options to try first.
Pre-made frozen meals and protein bars are also plausibly acceptable meal replacement options.
On a first pass frozen meals register as bulky and hard to store a month of at a time, and not something I’d bring to work. I’ve also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.
Protein bars seem mostly fine, but my vibe check is that meal replacements are basically enlightened protein bars? Like, maybe the nutrition profile is better and they are packaged in sizes more suitable for full meals?

alkjash 30 Dec 2024 17:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Peter Berggren’s comment on: Hammertime Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying about theoretically rational agents. I think the content of my post was [there are a bunch of circumstances in which humans are systematically irrational, sunk cost fallacy is on net a useful corrective heuristic in those circumstances. Attempting to make rational decisions via explicit legible calculations will in practice underperform just following the heuristic.]
To spell out a bit more, imagine my mood swings cause a large random error term to be added to all explicit calculations. Then if the decision process is to drop a project altogether at any point where my calculations say the project is doomed, then I will drop a lot of projects that are not actually doomed.

alkjash 30 Dec 2024 14:16 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Peter Berggren’s comment on: Hammertime Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith
I still don’t understand. Your valuation of the project will still change over time as information actually gets revealed though. The probability the project will turn out worthwhile can fluctuate.

alkjash 30 Dec 2024 2:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Peter Berggren’s comment on: Hammertime Day 8: Sunk Cost Faith
I don’t follow. As a project progresses it seems common to acquire new information and continuously update your valuation of the project.

alkjash 12 Dec 2024 13:53 UTC
3 points
1
on: Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams
I taught game theory at Princeton and wish I’d seen this explanation beforehand, excellent framing.

alkjash 11 Jan 2024 13:44 UTC
11 points
6
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Setting the Zero Point
In the territory, bad event happens [husband hits wife, missile hits child, car hits pedestrian]. There is no confusion about the territory: everyone understands the trajectories of particles that led to the catastrophe. But somehow there is a long and tortuous debate about who is responsible/to blame [“She was wearing a dark hoodie that night,” “He should have come to a complete stop at the stop sign”, “Why did she jaywalk when the crosswalk was just 10 feet away!”].

The problem is that we mean a bunch of different things simultaneously by blame/responsibility:
1. Causality. The actual causal structure of the event. [“If she’d worn a reflective vest this wouldn’t have happened,” “If your left headlight wasn’t broken you’d have seen her.”]
2. Blame. Who should be punished/shamed in this situation. This question already branches into a bunch of cruxes about the purpose and effectiveness of punishment.
3. Responsibility. What is the most effective way of preventing such events in the future? [“If we passed a law that all pedestrians wear reflective vests it would halve incidents like this”, “How about we institute mandatory pedestrian-sighting courses for drivers, and not blame the victim?”]
People argue about the same event with different causal models, different definitions of blame, and different notions of responsibility, and the conversation collapses. Fill in your own politically-charged example.

Setting the zero point seems to be one “move” in this blame game [if the default is that all drivers take pedestrian-sighting courses, then you’re to blame if you skipped it. if the default is that all pedestrians must wear reflective vests, then you’re to blame if you didn’t wear one.]

alkjash 6 Dec 2023 21:50 UTC
11 points
3
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Originality vs. Correctness
I don’t have a complete reply to this yet, but wanted to clarify if it was not clear that the position in this dialogue was written with the audience (a particularly circumspect broad-map-building audience) in mind. I certainly think that the vast majority of young people outside this community would benefit from spending more time building broad maps of reality before committing to career/identity/community choices. So I certainly don’t prescribe giving up entirely.

ETA: Maybe a useful analogy is that for Amazon shopping I have found doing serious research into products (past looking at purchase volume and average ratings) largely unhelpful. Usually if I read reviews carefully, I end up more confused than anything else as a large list of tail risks and second-order considerations are brought to my attention. Career choice I suspect is similar with much higher stakes.

alkjash 20 Sep 2023 19:55 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: A Pear With legs’s comment on: Write
Seeing patterns where there are none is also part of my writing process.

alkjash 27 Jan 2023 23:48 UTC
8 points
0
on: Assigning Praise and Blame: Decoupling Epistemology and Decision Theory
This paper of mine answers exactly this question (nonconstructively, using the minimax theorem).

alkjash 26 Jan 2023 18:54 UTC
4 points
0
on: Setting the Zero Point
I feel there is an important thing here but [setting the zero point] is either not the right frame, or a special case of the real thing, [blame and responsibility are often part of the map and not part of the territory] closely related to asymmetric justice and the copenhagen interpretation of ethics.

alkjash 22 Jan 2023 1:59 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Rock, Paper and Scissors: A Game Theory View
Afaict, the first simple game is not the prisoner’s dilemma, nor is it zero-sum, nor is the prisoner’s dilemma zero-sum.

alkjash 17 Jan 2023 20:50 UTC
3 points
1
on: Wisdom Cannot Be Unzipped
This is not intended as a criticism in any way, but this post seems to overlap largely with https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k9dsbn8LZ6tTesDS3/sazen.
[Edit: After looking at the timestamps it looks like that post actually came out after, anyway it might be an helpful alternative perspective on the same phenomenon.]

alkjash 10 Jan 2023 23:22 UTC
4 points
0
on: Review AI Alignment posts to help figure out how to make a proper AI Alignment review
Is it just me or are alignment-related post titles getting longer and longer?

alkjash 10 Jan 2023 4:07 UTC
11 points
1
on: Cup-Stacking Skills (or, Reflexive Involuntary Mental Motions)
This post has a lot of particular charms, but also touches on a generally under-represented subject in LessWrong: the simple power of deliberate practice and competence. The community seems saturated with the kind of thinking that goes [let’s reason about this endeavor from all angles and meta-angles and find the exact cheat code to game reality] at the expense of the simple [git gud scrub]. Of course, gitting gud at reason is one very important aspect of gitting gud in general, but only one aspect.
The fixation on calibration and correctness in this community trades off heavily against general competence. Being correct is just a very special case of being good at things in general. Part of Duncan’s ethos is that it’s possible to learn [the pattern of gitting gud], and furthermore this is more important and consistent than learning how to be good at one particular arbitrary skill.