Benaya Koren

Karma: 25

Benaya Koren 22 Oct 2025 1:26 UTC
4 points
2
on: On Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast With Andrej Karpathy
I’m petty sure that when he talks about the damage of knowledge to intelligence he doesn’t mean that the intelligence shouldn’t have this knowledge in generation time. Rather, the issue in training—which you may ver well call a skill issue—is that by default local ad hoc explanations create superficial predictive success and get in the way of more general explanations. So the issue isn’t having less knowledge, but rather having less early memorization.

Benaya Koren 20 Oct 2025 17:39 UTC
3 points
0
on: Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
expect such a crisis to have at most modest effects on timelines to existentially dangerous ASI being developed
It may by my lack of economics education speaking, but how can it it be the case? Are current timelines not relying heavily on the ability of the labs to raise huge capital for building huge datacenters and for paying many people who are smarter than current frontier models to manually generate huge amounts of quality data? Wouldn’t such a crisis make it much harder for them, plausibly beyond what makes direct economic sense, due to what responsible investers think a responsible invester is expected to do?

Benaya Koren 23 Aug 2025 12:34 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Benaya Koren’s comment on: Underdog bias rules everything around me
Also, while the pro Israeli map is plausibly about being the underdog, I’m not sure that it is the point of the pro Palestinian one. I think that one try to say that they were robbed of what was rightfully their—not that they are weaker. And even the pro israel map is very likely about “arabs already have enough land”—if it was about power, Iran and other non arab Muslim countries would be included

Benaya Koren 23 Aug 2025 12:26 UTC
1 point
0
on: Underdog bias rules everything around me
I’m not convinced that there is that deep a phenomenon here. Many of the examples are current, and may be explained just as well by current ideologies that focus on “power dynamics” or want everyone to have equa power. Or by the somewhat plausible heuristic that groups are amoral and will therefore use their power unfairly.

Benaya Koren 15 Oct 2024 9:48 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian
I don’t think that this solution gives you everything that you want from semantic categories. Assume for example that you have a multidimensional cluster with heavy tails (for simplicity, assume symmetry under rotation). You measure some of the features, and determine that the given example belongs to the cluster almost surely. You want to use this fact to predict the other features. knowing the deviation of the known features is still relevant for your uncertainty about the other features. You may think about this extra property as measuring “typicality”, or as measuring “how much does it really belong in the cluster.

Benaya Koren 15 Oct 2024 9:25 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: Why I’m not a Bayesian

Grammatically, the most obvious interpretation is a universal quantification

Here I mostly agree

I think it’s best to put such qualified language into your statements from the start.

Here I don’t, for the same reason that I don’t ask about “water in the refrigerator outside eggplant cells”. Because pragmatics are for better or worse part of the language.

Benaya Koren 6 Aug 2024 21:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Circular Reasoning
Would very much like to read such a post. I have the basic intuition that it is a soft form of “witness” (as in complexity/cryptography), but it is not very developed.

Benaya Koren 6 Aug 2024 10:33 UTC
2 points
0
on: Circular Reasoning
I think it would be helpful, when dealing with such foundational topics, to tabu “justification”, “validity”, “reason” and some related terms. It is too easy to stop the reduction there, and forget to check what are their cause and function in our self-reflecting epistemic algorithm.

The question shouldn’t be whether circular arguments are “valid” or give me “good reason to believe”, but whether I may edit the parts of my algorithm that handle circular arguments, and as a result expect (according to my current algorithm) to have stronger conviction in more true things.

Your bayesian argument, that if the claim was false the circle is likely it to end in contradiction- I find convincing, because I am already convinced to endorse this form of bayesian reasoning. Because as a normative it has properties that I have already learned to make sense according to earlier heuristics that were hopefully good. Including the heuristic that my heuristics are sometimes bad and I want to be reasonably robust to that fact. Also, that this principle may not be implemented absolutely without sacrificing other things that I care about more.

Benaya Koren 3 Aug 2024 13:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Benaya Koren’s comment on: Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict
5 disagree and no dislikes on a rare political position—if only the rest of the world was that sane.

Benaya Koren 21 Jul 2024 6:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gesild Muka’s comment on: I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
Hi, just saw the old thread. Anyway as an Israeli my answer is strongly 2, though it depends what you mean by ideology. The maximum that most Israelis would be willing to give due to national security considerations is less than she minimum that Palestinians are willing to get due to national pride and ethos—in terms of land degree of autonomy, and mostly solution for the descendants of the 1948-9 refugees inside Israel

Benaya Koren 26 Jun 2024 16:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict

From the US perspective far easier to just deliver an ultimatum on settlement building full stop

The question is different: is such an ultimatum more likely to be accepted?

the fewer settlers, the fewer troublemakers

It is not my impression that the troublemakers come from Ariel.

Also that provides an incentive for those who live in the settlements to come to an agreement on a two state solution since that will free up their land for further building.

Here our perception of people from Ariel may differ in the other direction: do you see them support any two states solution that a Palestinian agreed to, under any realistic circumstances?

Benaya Koren 26 Jun 2024 14:29 UTC
1 point
−9
on: Book Review: Righteous Victims—A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict

End settlement construction. Full stop

I think some nuance is missing here. I agree that the settlements were a bad idea to begin with, and that expanding to new areas is bad. But the israeli cities like Ariel in the west bank are not going anywhere, nor places like Oranit. Given that you and I know that, it must be very visible to the Palestinians and other stakeholders—maybe even by building those places even denser, while keeping other areas visibly empty and ready for land swaps. Nothing is worse for peace than unrealistic expectations.

Benaya Koren 8 Jun 2024 21:40 UTC
7 points
5
in reply to: Orpheus16’s comment on: Response to Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness”

the “policymaker prior” is usually to think “if there is a dangerous, tech the most important thing to do is to make the US gets it first.”

This sadly seem to be the case, and to make the dynamics around AGI extremely dangerous even if the technology itself was as safe as a sponge. What does the second most powerful country do when it see its more powerful rival that close to decisive victory? Might it start taking careless risks to prevent it? Initiate a war when it can still imaginably survive it, just to make the race stop?

find institutional designs and governance mechanisms that would appeal to both the US and China I’m not a fan of China, but actually expect the US to be harder here. From the point of view of china, race means losing, or WWIII and than losing. Anything that would slow down ai give them time to become stronger in the normal way. For the US, it interacts with politics and free market norms, and with the fantasy of getting Chinese play by the rules and loose.

Benaya Koren 7 Jun 2024 12:06 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Benaya Koren’s Shortform
My understanding is that under Georgism the state is supposed to be payed for value increases, not for usage. And that it can’t just kick you out and put someone else in a long as you pay its honest estimate of the value increase. So it is still not the same as the state owning a land and being able to sell it to the next user.

Benaya Koren 7 Jun 2024 12:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: robo’s comment on: Benaya Koren’s Shortform
Right, missed that it makes your being there renting. How fast would the spiral be in your estimation? How fast would you lose the house in normal circumstances? By the way, I’m not sure that the tax is universally less than the rent. My understanding is that land speculation in Israel is mostly about expeting the prices to keep going up rather than the current rent.

Benaya Koren 6 Jun 2024 0:22 UTC
1 point
0
on: Benaya Koren’s Shortform
There is a possible objection to Georgism: “what if I bought a house, and it’s value have risen, so now I can’t afford the tax?” I thought about a simple solution, and would like to read thoughts about it: instead of taking money, the state could gradually own more and more of the property. When the property owners dies and their children are adults, the state will sell its share of the property or take its worth from the inheritance.

Benaya Koren 17 Oct 2023 6:35 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
I’m not sure whether our disagreement comes from different perceptions of specific populations/parties in Israel, or from you writing about current positions while I meant to write about the positions before the attack. Today, I sadly agree that it is far more than 1%. I hope and expect that the change is mostly temporary, and hope that it will not bring us to do things that we will be too ashamed of in the meanwhile.

Benaya Koren 12 Oct 2023 14:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yovel Rom’s comment on: I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
I don’t see how getting Hezbollah involved increases the impact on the Saudi deal, except by making Palestinians suffer worse casualties. Hezbollah has much less Saudi sympathy than the Palestinians. It is also a more valuable pawn to sacrifice, if your goal is just to get pictures of Israel killing arabs.

Benaya Koren 11 Oct 2023 22:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yovel Rom’s comment on: I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
About the Lebanon situation, I’m much more sure that it will make Palestinian casualties rise than that it will make Israeli casualties rise. My impression (from public information) is that Israel is capable of destroying both Hammas and Hizballah pretty quickly if it is willing to play dirty enough. And my impression about Israel is that it care about ethics, but not enough to allow an existential threat to exist. So in such situation I expect Israel to be super aggressive against Gaza in order to end it quickly and focus on Lebanon.

Benaya Koren 11 Oct 2023 22:07 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yovel Rom’s comment on: I’m a Former Israeli Officer. AMA
Yes. Then again, eventfull 17 years passed and minds could change (I don’t think it happened to be honest)