ani norborger

• ani norborger 23 Dec 2025 1:17 UTC

  −30 points

  −11

  on: Toss a bit­coin to your Light­cone – LW + Lighthaven’s 2026 fundraiser

  It’s interesting that when we went to the Beijing Academy of AI and got their presentation on how they think about AI risk safety governance, they were talking about autonomous replication and augmentation. They were talking about CBRN and all the same sort of terms.

  
  i had a long angry and bitter comment towards less wrong i have decided not to post.
  i am a longtime reader of hpmor and this is my alt.
  i also belong to republican party of taiwan (kuomintang)
  
  i feel like if you guys are so good at building website you should just go ahead and build the new USA government without asking for permission, just like the founding fathers did long ago, just like the taiwanese anarchists like audrey tang.
  if you need a new convention idea, how about Con Con II—constitutional convention two.
  
  i do not trust the democratic party of america, but then again i do not trust anyone.
  if you run out money, i will lend my software engineering services to you for free, but i do want equity. i will build lesswrong from scratch if need be. what i will not do is donate to help support your hospitality business. i can just uh go buy nightlife stuff in san francisco you know. i could WORK nightlife lol.
  
  didn’t you guys try this with REACH already? what about frontier tower? mox? isn’t this like a pretty commoditized service? what you are trying to compete with hilton? did you even bother to steal the hilton manual and buy the same soaps they buy and stuff?
  
  listen folks. the center of rational thought is … there is no center. there are smart bright people everywhere. most folks are already ready and willing to fight the killer robots if you just tell them what to do.
  
  i feel like you should just launch your own crypto token at this point.
  yudkowsky coin or something.
  
  i want to fight for lesswrong. i want to like, go become a professor at my alma mater for 20 years instead of making the big bucks in the valley. but this isn’t a movie and there’s no mi6 there’s no agents of shield, there’s just us. we saw covid coming, and we were right, then we stayed afraid too long and we were wrong, and now i think you are too afraid of ai but some people are not afraid enough and mostly it’s just like people don’t have a clear view of wtf is gonna happen but we have to build SOMETHING to keep industry going to get abundance and stuff.
  
  i think the fearmongering of the recent book is anti helpful and net negative.
  this is probably the wrong place to argue it. but it is my main crux i think. i am personally mad and maybe i’ll go write the HPMOR epilogues myself about it. harry will become defense professor and die at the end of year 2 and never fulfil any of his promises, but the world will go on.

  What links here?

  • gustaf's comment on zroe1′s Shortform by zroe1 (7 Jan 2026 9:53 UTC; 20 points)

• ani norborger 11 Nov 2025 21:30 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Where’s my magic sword?

  Sometimes the patient has a small cut.

  
  In this case once you hand them the band-aid the patient is more qualified than you, so it’s all good.

• ani norborger 3 Sep 2022 21:39 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: bfinn’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity of demon­strat­ing & voting

  I think this EA forum post explaining Shapley Values encapsulates my current opinion better than my comments above.

• ani norborger 18 Nov 2018 11:20 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: bfinn’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity of demon­strat­ing & voting

  Actually I was saying that if only tie breaks matter, then in the case of a tie-break, everyone who voted for the losing party also saves 10,000 lives each. Because if they didn’t vote against saving lives, then it wouldn’t be a tie break, and then no individual would save any lives at all.

  Of course, I don’t actually believe that—I think voting matters even if it wouldn’t break a tie.

  In the scenario where you vote last in the tie-break, it is true everything depends on you. But everything depended on everyone else too, even though they already voted. In terms of expected utility of your decision, you get to tell your utility function that you saved 10,000 lives. In terms of moral credit though, everyone who voted SAVE still gets a fraction of the credit, because without their vote you couldn’t have done it.

  Let’s consider a smaller scale vote, like a supreme court decision. Even if you know exactly how other justices will vote, and you know it’s going to be 5-3 not including you, well your decision still matters, and not just for signalling reasons. 6-3 is different from 5-4 because in the former case, two of the five would have to flip in order for it to change and in the latter case, only one of the five would have to flip for it to change. Even if everyone knew how everyone else was going to vote ahead of time, still each justice’s preference for one ruling over another still matters.

  Also, I don’t think it makes sense to say that one ballot matters more than another ballot, based solely on the order that they are counted. Votes are votes.

• ani norborger 14 Nov 2018 7:36 UTC

  12 points

  0

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Is Not Sys­tem­atized Winning

  In one sense, “Rationality” is used to signify that something is part of the community that is associated with EA, Lesswrong, SSC, rationalist tumblr, secular solstice etc. If someone asked me “I have a successful life, what use is Rationality?” in this sense, I would probably reply there might not be any use at all. I happen to like rationalist tumblr and SSC and I like going to the SSC meetups at David Friedman’s house, but you may or may not. Whatever floats your boat.

  Now, if somebody ACTUALLY asked me “what use is rationality?” then I might say that I think education (not just schooling) is important because it helps us make better decisions, or I might say that scientific progress helps bring about new technologies that save lives and increase wealth. Or maybe, depending on context I may say something specific like “you’re not going to solve your emotional issues with your ex by wishful thinking” or “if you don’t understand your code how are supposed to debug it?” but only if I actually think they need to improve this region of their map in order to achieve their goals. If someone says, “No wait, what I really meant is, what use is instrumental rationality?” and actually means it, I would just facepalm because they’re essentially asking why they should bother trying to get better at achieving their goals.

  My point, is regarding what rationality actually is, I see no reason to exclude things that aren’t part of Lesswrong et al. in trying to achieve my goals or in trying to learn. Should there be a community that is focused on giving people the cognitive skills to become more knowledgeable and more formidable? Yes, but we are not the only the only community focused on that, nor should we be. This is okay.

• ani norborger 7 Nov 2018 8:41 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity of demon­strat­ing & voting

  I don’t get the sentiment of “your vote only matters if it would be an exact tie otherwise.” By that logic, if the outcome of a US presidential election would either save 10,000 lives or not, then the altruistic thing to do is to get the vote as close ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ as possible, so that every voter can save 10,000 lives each for a total of 3 trillion lives saved, as opposed to the normal outcome, where no lives are saved at all.

• ani norborger 24 Jul 2018 6:05 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Pro­ce­du­ral Knowl­edge Gaps

  Don’t know if anyone still follows this 7 year old thread but-

  I strongly recommend Marie Kondo’s book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The gist is you declutter by category of item instead of by room: first do all of the dishes, then do all your clothing items, then books, etc. For instance, to declutter your closet, take out all the clothes and sort into two piles: clothes that make you happy and clothes that don’t.

  I’ve also found that goodwill will accept lots of different kinds of items not just clothes.

  And remember, it’s not about becoming angry about all the useless garbage you have in your house, but about choosing to keep what makes you happy and being surrounded by lovely things that you appreciate.

• ani norborger 27 May 2017 5:24 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Dragon Army: The­ory & Char­ter (30min read)

  This post makes me miss my days in marching band, or in the Boy Scouts. Honestly it doesn’t sound all that authoritarian. Can you not accomplish the same thing using a traditional organization and a meeting place? Why does it have to be a house?

• ani norborger 27 May 2017 5:06 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Dragon Army: The­ory & Char­ter (30min read)

  The food policy strikes me as one of the more trivial and unimportant parts of the proposal. I’m not saying you’re taking it too seriously—I think that shared living spaces should have clear rules about who gets to eat what. It’s just that this particular food policy seems easily to change without changing the core “authoritarian” structure of the Dragon Barracks.

  Funny story by the way, I really like it.

• ani norborger 8 Dec 2016 3:55 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: sen’s comment on: Mak­ing in­ten­tions con­crete—Trig­ger-Ac­tion Planning

  I personally found this post to be quite insightful. I previously made plenty of vague goals that I never did, such as “apply for internships”, “fill out this form”, and shower more often.” I have heard the advice “set specific goals” before, but the idea of turning vague goals into if-then” goals has never occurred to me before.

  Of course, since I just read this post a few minutes ago, I don’t know whether the idea actually translates into increased productivity or not.

• ani norborger 3 Dec 2015 5:15 UTC

  −1 points

  0

  on: LessWrong 2.0

  Maybe rss feeds?

• ani norborger 18 Oct 2015 19:58 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: MichaelHoward’s comment on: The “Spot the Fakes” Test

  I just performed this experiment assuming I wouldn’t be able to discern tap water from water cooler water, but I was able to—my tap water is slightly more metallic tasting.

• ani norborger 10 Apr 2015 6:24 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Bor­ing Ad­vice Repository

  Link for the video doesn’t work

• ani norborger 7 Nov 2014 5:03 UTC

  28 points

  0

  on: 2014 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Done, but I’m afraid the fingertip measurements were not very precise