My substack: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/
Fiction:
My Twitter: https://x.com/bjarturtomas
LLM policy: None of my posts or comments are written by, or in collaboration with, an LLM. This includes Beauty and the Beast. Occasionally, I will use an LLM for proofreading/research but all words are my own.
Yeah. I prefer not fighting the thought experiment though and thinking of beauty qua beauty. Though perhaps what remains of beauty once it is stripped of all its correlates is perverse.
Tallness is zero sum. But I suspect beauty isn’t. If everyone was more beautiful but the relative differences remained, I think people would be happier. Am I wrong in this? This has policy implications, as once genetic engineering gets better taxing height is likely wise to avoid red-queens races into unhealthy phenotypes. Taxing beauty seems very horrible to me. As beauty is quite beautiful.
Yes. It did a lot of CoT. I don’t recall how long.
I am mostly surprised at the humor being more humory and less humor-like-substancy.
Normative claims describe desired world states. To the extent they are coherent and possible, they cannot be argued against. They are merely a shape the world could be. Descriptive statements make neutral claims about features of the world. Toy examples of each mistake:
“Having no legs is not good; I bet that crippled man has invisible legs.”
“That crippled man has no legs; this must be the way of things and so just and right”
In practice, this tends to be done with themes and processes and not at such a crude, silly level. The stereotypical reactionary might identify selective processes, themselves, as ends. The stereotypical liberal might pretend selective processes don’t exist. The reactionary may be right about his values, and then is not making a mistake here. But in many cases I think they are confusing the descriptive for the normative and do not value what they think they value.
I moved it into my drafts. I published it again for you. I figured it was unlikely to be referenced again and I tend to take stuff down I don’t want people reading as one of the first things on my author’s page.
There is the classic error of conflating the normative with the descriptive, presuming that what is good is also true. But the inverse is also a mistake I see people make all the time: conflating the descriptive for the normative. The descriptive is subject to change by human action, so maybe the latter is the worse of the two mistakes. Crudely, the stereotypical liberal makes the former mistake and the stereotypical reactionary makes the latter.
Yeah. I think you can post anything as a personal post, and the gods of LW may take a fancy to them, as is their preview, and put them on the front page.
Thanks you so much!
I had a very wrong model of what quick takes are. I was thinking like, not good enough for a post, put it in a quick take.
Thanks so much. I am trying to get one out per week, but I might be late again this week.
Interesting; from my perspective, I got really lazy in the end. And another fellow told me yesterday the ending was awful. I do think it is the weakest thing I have posted recently, but people seem to really like it, so what do I know?
I am pretty happy with the last two: https://substack.com/@tomasbjartur
And I do plan to keep writing. I am having fun.
I am a strong believer that nanotechnology is possible, which seems to be a sort of antimeme. And tons of people who should really know better seem to consider the acknowledgement of the physical possibility of Drexlerish nanotech as evidence someone is crazy—it is amusing to look at the AGI takes of these same people five years ago. They are mostly using the exact same idiotic intuitions in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons.
But maybe this being an antimeme is good? Perhaps its best people are holding the idiot ball on the topic? On one hand, I don’t think lying is good, even by omission. And to the extent denying nanotech is load-bearing in their claims that takeoff will be slow (by the Christiano definition) then getting them to see through the antimeme is useful—as an aside I think people do forget that we have seen little evidence so far, at least in terms of economic growth, that we are living in Christiano’s predicted world. I get the impression, sometimes, some people think we have.
But also, we are getting very powerful tools that makes a Drexlarian project more and more plausible, which has its own risks and even indirect risks of increasing available compute. So perhaps we are fortunate nanotechnology is so incredibly low status? As Sama would probably just try to do it if it were not.
I am pretty proud of this one. I think it’s much better than my AI girlfriend story.
I have had the experience of having what felt to me like very good conceptual ideas and then just forgetting them and mourning the loss. Assuming they were actually good, why are insights into the self so impossible to forget? Could one not gain access to the part of the brain that associates and do some violence to those parts of yourself that bring particular pathological truths to mind?
mind using my substack link on the page? just in case anyone wants to sub: https://substack.com/home/post/p-176231351
Suppose you’re a billionaire and you want to get married. However, gold-digging people of the gender you prefer target you. They are good enough at faking attraction that you cannot tell. How should you act? One idea I had was this: pick 10000 random people and then select from there. You will at the very least likely remove most of the world-class dissemblers. Armstrong proposes a similar scheme in Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search.