DirectedEvolution

Karma: 12,054

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1

Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox

Correlation may imply some sort of causal link.

For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.

Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink

Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.

Replications show there’s something new under the sun.

Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?

Are they both controlled by what has already begun?

Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?

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DirectedEvolution30 Nov 2025 6:00 UTC

10 points

1 comment2 min readLW link

DirectedEvolution 28 Nov 2025 6:46 UTC
2 points
0
on: Orienting to 3 year AGI timelines
Given this post was written post-election and US gov actions are a key component of the prediction, it’s odd to see the lack of consideration about the character of the particular President and his administration and priorities who’ll be presiding over this scenario should it come to pass. Very hard for me to see reason to expect any predictable response by this government.

DirectedEvolution 27 Nov 2025 18:02 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I sort of agree, but in practice, if I’m only going to have one partner, then I want to reap the benefits of that, which include minimizing the coordination and emotional costs of my partner’s love life. Easiest way to do that is often to look for a partner whose also monogamous.

DirectedEvolution 27 Nov 2025 17:56 UTC
4 points
−4
in reply to: Rana Dexsin’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I mean, that’s kind of obvious right?
Why juggle two jobs that pay the same wage, when ypu could just work twice the hours at one and grow your career much faster?
Why be an absent parent and spouse of two suspicious and frustrated families when you could be the top notch spouse and parent in one?

Kids are always growing and changing, so having more than one kid lets you experience different phases of life at once. Kids spend a lot of time away from parents as they age, so having multiple gives you some ongoing kid time.
Adults have many competing demands and the value of friend time can saturate pretty quickly, so it makes sense to have a lot of friends you can slot in to spare hours.
Poly people say they get a lot of extra value out of having multiple partners—different kinds of conversation, sex, emotional connection, and so on. They seem to experience low enough coordination costs that things work fine, and to find the experiences they enjoy through polyamory to be worth any tradeoffs in other areas of life. Makes sense to me. I just have different experiences and priorities.
Overall, I think people are mainly trying to just optimize the quality of their time on earth as best they know how.

DirectedEvolution 27 Nov 2025 6:54 UTC
13 points
6
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon
It might be worth tracking the hypothesis that people aren’t thinking quite as specifically as you seem to be about banter as a lever to pull to get sex. I for example saw banter and sex as part of a way to explore a potential long term relationship and marriage. Sometimes casual sex would happen instead, and it could sometimes be interesting to explore banter and casual sex for their own sake. But I never really was interested in finding the most efficient ways to get sex from the largest number of casual partners, the pickup artist culture.

DirectedEvolution 27 Nov 2025 1:40 UTC
8 points
2
on: Courtship Confusions Post-Slutcon
Are you exclusively interested in flirtatious banter as a mechanism for initiating casual sex? Or are you interested in other purposes of banter, like finding a marriage partner?

DirectedEvolution 20 Nov 2025 21:55 UTC
2 points
0
on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
Another Gemini 3.0 Thinking flaw in mathematical reasoning: it recommended demonstrating a linear trend by using two sample points.

DirectedEvolution 20 Nov 2025 19:17 UTC
4 points
0
on: Evrart Claire: A Case Study in Anti-Epistemology
Discussion on anti-epistemology might benefit from the concept of semiotics, the study of signs: “an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else.”
In anti-epistemology, people use signs to communicate meaning that diverges from a straightforward literal interpretation, often its opposite. I offer a tasty meal to see if you’ll be suspicious enough to reject it as possibly poisoned, which means you might be a trustworthy criminal associate. I tell jokes to see if you’ll laugh, which means you’re too comfortable, don’t know your place at the bottom of the hierarchy, and need a public reprimand. I say something absurd and offensive, to see if you’re also willing to say the kind of absurd and offensive things that are capable of warping social dynamics.
In general, I tell you things, see if you can reliably translate them into the opposite meaning by observing your behavior, and gradually increase your access to high risk/reward criminal, immoral, or stigmatized opportunities if I can tell you’re understanding this coded language correctly (and demonstrating that you’re contaminating yourself with culpability while being capable enough not getting caught). Perversion of such signs is necessary for the sustenance of the criminal or outsider society, and therefore are deontologically imperative, obligatory. It can’t be straightforward encryption, both because encryption can be unambiguously cracked and because that would limit the ability to onboard outsiders, who wouldn’t understand how to decrypt and for whom it would be too risky to teach them how to decrypt.
Rationalists get called “quokkas,” I think, not because they naively believe the signs they’re exposed to are all literally meant as true, but because they want to live in a world where all signs are literal, and their strategy to achieve that world is to treat all signs as literally true, as if that could make it so. When everybody can see the signs aren’t literally meant as true, it can make what rationalists intend as a form of activism appear as naivete, tilting at windmills, or dangerously confrontational with the underlying coded order, particularly when the perversion of the literal meaning of the sign is so widely understood that treating its literal meaning as primary is actually confusing to most people.
There’s been some writing on LessWrong recently about paranoia. What I’m saying here can sound paranoid, but paranoia implies having false, fearful beliefs about the world. Instead, I think people often have true, non-fearful beliefs about the world, just based on non-literal but commonplace meanings of signs. The boss says you don’t have to do X, you clearly understand he means you do have to do X, so you do X, and you keep your job. It might be scary or harmful to have to do X, but you’re correctly, clearly understanding that you’re being told that you do in fact have to do it to keep your job. You’re not paranoid. You are reading the sign backwards, as intended. Boss wouldn’t have mentioned not doing X if he hadn’t intended you to do it, or would have conveyed the doing of X as being attached to a threat of retribution. Everybody understands they’re surrounded by an enormous number of conspiracies all the time, and it’s not so much frightening as an extremely irritating slog to parse them and try and complete their goals.

DirectedEvolution 19 Nov 2025 22:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
They still have to choose whether to optimize for an AI coding agent that can upgrade established codebases, or whether the vision is to replace ~all existing codebases with AI-generated and AI-maintained code. The former is my use case, auditing and improving existing niche scientific software, but the latter makes more sense to me as a way to get the maximum leverage out of this technology in the long run.

DirectedEvolution 19 Nov 2025 18:44 UTC
7 points
−2
on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
Gemini 3.0 has a serious problem for coding. Instead of making the minimal changes I ask for in a code base, it will completely rewrite the code, choosing entirely new algorithms, new variable names, and so on. Most recently, the changes were worse—I’d already settled on a numerically stable approach to computing Pearson correlation coefficients, and Gemini reverted to a numerically unstable method.

DirectedEvolution 19 Nov 2025 18:04 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: Jemist’s Shortform
I like Gradient Giving. “A gradient is the direction of fastest increase” would have also been a good explanation and literally reflects what they’re trying to do. It rhymes with “radient,” which sounds optimistic.

DirectedEvolution 18 Nov 2025 21:21 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: GradientDissenter’s Shortform
I claim you misread his original comment, as stated. Then you scolded him based on that misreading. I made the case you misread him via quotes, which you ignored, instead inviting me to ask him about his intentions. That’s your responsibility, not mine! I’d invite you to check in with him about his meaning yourself, and to consider doing that in the future before you scold.

DirectedEvolution 18 Nov 2025 20:58 UTC
2 points
0
on: I’m scared.
Has anyone else had experience with a similar type of fear? Does anyone have suggestions as to an appropriate response?
I think you have to make some personal decisions:
- To what extent are my feelings something I can control over the long run, via therapy or medication, or by choosing my environment, activities, my line of work?
- How important is wellbeing to me? Do I sometimes sacrifice wellbeing in order to pursue other goals? Is that a necessary tradeoff, or do I just not have the skill right now to both feel well and work effectively on my other goals?
- What other goals, if any, should I prioritize that might compete with maximizing my wellbeing? How should I trade off one against the other?
Nobody has a definitive answer to any of these questions.

DirectedEvolution 18 Nov 2025 17:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: GradientDissenter’s Shortform
Michael’s comment started with “I agree”, therefore implying that the things he was saying were somehow reflective of my personal opinion
Michael’s comment started with a specific point he agreed with you on.
I agree that this is an important thing that deserved more consideration in Eric’s analysis
He specifically phrased the part you were objecting to as his opinion, not as a shared point of view.
FWIW I wouldn’t say “trustworthiness” is the most important thing, more like “can be trusted to take AI risk seriously”, and my model is more about the latter.

DirectedEvolution 6 Nov 2025 7:24 UTC
20 points
5
on: People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals
Plausible deniability explains some too-subtle signals. I see people’s false ideas that their subtle signals are legible as a sign of desperation. It’s frustrating to have desire you’re too afraid to show plainly. The idea that you can telegraph your desires clearly enough to be understood, yet so subtly that you can’t get “caught,” may be a reassuring thought for some people in this situation. Perhaps people who often feel this way make a game of it, like the Slytherin necklace?

DirectedEvolution 25 Oct 2025 6:35 UTC
20 points
5
on: The Doomers Were Right
You can cherry pick examples of doomers being right and wrong. There have been doomers about nuclear war, wrong so far. About various religious apocalypses, wrong wrong wrong. Overpopulation and famine, wrong-oh!

Homosexuality hasn’t legitimated bestiality or pedophilia, in fact we have perhaps a more vigorous anti-pedophile movement now than ever before—I saw a guy on a motorcycle on the freeway a month or two ago whose sweatshirt read “kill your local pedophile” on the back. In the past, mass rape in the wake of war and marital rape was normal and expected worldwide, or we weren’t even equipped with the moral frame and language to condemn it.
We have little evidence TV et al destroyed people’s ability to read so much as gave them many alternatives to it. Anki makes it easier than ever before to memorize poems, should you choose to.
Were people in the past specifically worried about the dissolution of the marriage format, or were they worried about certain healthy and fulfilling relational dynamics for which “marriage” was a convenient label? Unclear, and that’s a lot of difficult history to hash out if you were to try. And if the latter; then are we so sure things haven’t improved? The past appears to be full of thoroughly toxic marriages, as well as prematurely dead spouses.

I could go on, but I don’t think there’s a point. This post is implicitly about AI doomers, and it’s trying to score points lazily by this weird sort of “our team has always been right, doesn’t that seem intuitively correct to you?” anecdotalism. This is the sort of thing an AI enthusiast could easily point to as an example of bad doomer criticism of AI accelerationism that may inappropriately increase their confidence, even as it appears to be intended to do for the doomers. Sigh.

DirectedEvolution 25 Oct 2025 6:07 UTC
12 points
6
on: The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy [Linkpost]
Every holder of a controversial opinion ought to be able to answer “who is your best critic?” with the name of a person they’d endorse listening to at length.

DirectedEvolution 21 Oct 2025 5:59 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: d_el_ez’s comment on: Give Me Your Data: The Rationalist Mind Meld
Better I think would be to talk about a few of the points from the book that you thought were most important. This shows you understood the book and which bits might be most interesting to your interlocutor.

DirectedEvolution 19 Oct 2025 16:59 UTC
13 points
2
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Give Me Your Data: The Rationalist Mind Meld
I work in medical research and know many healthcare practitioners. They often share anonymized stories about their patients and higher level summaries of patterns they see across their patient population or in their institution.

I couldn’t learn to be a doctor from these occasional stories, but I understand the intimate details of their work much better than I would from articles, especially the social side.

For example, my geneticist friend’s complaints about companies selling unregulated genetic tests helped me understand why doctors are so much more conservative than researchers when it comes to new and unregulated medical tech. Researchers see developing new tests as innovation, doctors as often injecting more noise and confusion into an already overwhelming system.

That was a crucial insight for me as a biomedical researcher thinking about how to make a clinical impact.

DirectedEvolution 19 Oct 2025 16:49 UTC
3 points
0
on: Give Me Your Data: The Rationalist Mind Meld
Communities like HN and some subreddits that have a mind meld culture are wonderful resources. I bookmark those comment sections for technologies I’m considering using or ideas about how to code, and consider the comment section a critical component of the post they’re discussing.

DirectedEvolution

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