Coafos

Karma: 185

Coafos 21 Jul 2025 17:02 UTC
1 point
0
on: Against Infrabayesianism
They’re in conflict with the unmeasurable unknown part of the world. As I read it (correct me if I’m wrong), if there is only a single probabilistic model (bayesian reduction?) then it will follow the expected maximum.

If there are multiple possible models, then it will assume the worst model. But to assume better, something like Kierkegaard’s leap of faith needed, believeing a model not based on reason. I mean, the infra-parts tries to say something about very unknown models, so it’s somewhat on the boundary of reason, and it’s possible that the logical apparatus stops.

Coafos 1 Jul 2025 6:29 UTC
2 points
0
on: CoafOS’s Shortform
Trolling is not a Socratic dialogue

The (ancient) Greek form of debate or dialogue was based on the notion of common good. If ONE of the participants feel bad about it, then EVERYONE loses it. Yeah, during the dialogue the partner (opponent?) will look dumb, but afterwards they reach a conclusion, they learn something and part happily.

Trolling on the other hand is just a quick crack at the other’s worldview. The point is provoking a response from other’s, not educating and lifting them up. The motive of ending with MUTUAL respect is missing.

Like, dialogue is a martial art; you can fight with it but point is mastering one’s own body. On the other hand trolling is pure optimization for K.O. punch. Pure optimization in the misalignment sense: The troller would even hurt/humiliate themselves if it would lead to a quicker victory.

There is the notion of singular truth in the world, but accepting this cuts back too. Two side goes into the debate, one side comes out, and they will have truth. It is of course your side. Does the debate optimizes for truth?

If the truth is independent of the participants (e.g. correct interpretation of quantum mechanics), then one (of course the other) side goes into the debate with a clearly losing position. By trying to defend their villanious statements, they have to lie about the world, and muddy the waters. With chance they could win, and only repeated debate could lead to a statistical conclusion.

If the truth is dependend on the participants, (e.g. Lighthaven’s colorscheme is bad. We should paint the whole blue/green, let’s have a debate on it.), the the truth doesn’t even exists prior to the debate. An outcome will be reached, but will it become accepted as truth? The losing side can ask always ask for a remach, until concensus is reached.

For something to accepted by a concesus, a not warring dialogue is faster method. And while a dialogue has the goal of not necessery truth but a social concensus, by allowing the participants to freely abandon positions which they no longer hold, over time people will argue only defendible positions, which is the truth.

However, truth is only a byproduct, and power dynamics sometimes can overwrite it. Yet dialogue is the best I know. If you a quicker-faster-easier way to reach the truth, please let me know.

Coafos 8 Apr 2025 12:54 UTC
1 point
0
on: CoafOS’s Shortform
So-called “natural selection” is just the survivorship bias of intelligent design.

Coafos 13 Feb 2025 22:55 UTC
1 point
0
on: Moral Hazard in Democratic Voting
The Nash equilibrium is
The Nash equilibrium is a solution for non-cooperative games. Politics, almost by definition, is about cooperation. Cooperative games are a superset of non-cooperatives, because in the case of no communication it reduces to one.
The word “signalling” in virtue signalling is a form of communication. Democracy has many forms, the most common is representative democracy. In it, the voter does not choose a policy directly, but chooses a delegate. The job of the delegate is to learn about the world (for example economics), and make a decision based on this information. If the decision is bad for the voters, the they will be replaced in the next election. The moral hazard for delegates happens if for the delegate the cost of losing their job is lower then the cost of making a bad decision.
From the voters perspective it means that a potential delegate should show that they understand the world and make good decisions, a.k.a. they should signal their virtues. If the voter understands the world and capable of making better decisions than current delegates, than they should run for an office. The moral hazard happens, if the cost of running for office is greater than the cost of the current delegates making bad decisions.
Our democracies are not perfect: the cost of a delegate losing their job is quite low, and the cost of running for office is quite high. But the problem does not lie in mass ignorance. You awknowledge that learning about economics has costs. The same can be said about arts, literature, physics, social sciences, or ecology. It is not possible for everyone to learn all these subjects, but it is possible to select a few of our best to learn about them. The tragedy of commons would happen if everyone would need to learn about boring (for them) subjects for years.
Nevertheless, I agree with your conclusion, that in good places you are held indvidually accountable, becase it would clearly show your virtues. Writing longform posts about economics shows that you are capable of understanding the world, and given the post’s contents, you think that you are able to make better decisions than the current political delegates. Have you considered becoming/are you a political activist?
P.S.: Fish reserves might be in a bad state right now, but it’s not all coordination failures. International fishing agreements happen. I recommend this book: “Game Theory and Fisheries Management: Theory and Applications”.

Coafos 8 Dec 2024 1:14 UTC
2 points
1
on: Algebraic Linguistics
An arbitrary constant you expect to multiply by.
Usually, k is not just an arbitrary real number, but an integer, like in $c o s [(2 k + 1) π] = - 1$ .
For arbitrary constants to multiply by I think $λ$ (lambda, greek letter) is used.

Coafos 2 Jun 2024 22:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Seth Herd’s Shortform
I think this is a good object level post. Problem is, I don’t think MIRI is at the object level. Quote from the comm. strat.: “The main audience we want to reach is policymakers.”
Communication is no longer a passive background channel for observing a world, but speech becomes an action changing it. Predictions start to influence the things they predict.
Say AI doom is a certainty. People will be afraid, and stop research. Few years later doom doesn’t happen, everyone complains.
Say AI doom is an impossibility. Research continues, something something paperclips. Few years later nobody will complain because no one will be alive.
(This example itself is overly simplistic, real-world politics and speech actions are even more counterintuitive.)
So MIRI became a political organization. Their stated goal is “STOP AI”, and they took the radical approach to it. Politics is different from rationality, and radical politics is different from standard politics.
For example, they say they want to shatter the overton window. Infighting usually breaks groups; but during that, the opponents need to engage with their position, which is a stated subgoal.
It’s ironic that a certain someone said Politics is the Mind-Killer a decade ago. But because of that, I think they know what they are doing. And it might work in the end.

Coafos 30 May 2024 17:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: CoafOS’s Shortform
How to be the smartest person in the world:
Let’s say A is smarter than B if A knows about topic X, but B doesn’t.
Step 1: Let’s say you don’t know about quantum biology. But Charlie knows, because they currently do a phd in it.
Step 2: Go to Charlie. Say: “I heard about quantum biology, and it sounds interesting. Could you give quick intro on it?”
Step 3: Charlie says (eager to talk about the cool idea they found): “Sure. Quantum biology is [two hour forty-seven minute long monologe].”
Step 4: Important! Listen to it.
Step 5: BOOM! Now you also know about quantum biology.
Repeat it for every topic. If you partition humanity along every topics, you will always be in the in-the-know part. By Zorn’s lemma^[1] you will be one of the smartest person in the world.
To be fair, in real life there are time and energy bounds, not everyone has time to talk about their topic, and active listening can be a hard mental work. But it worked for me a surprising amount of times. Well, surprising at first, then I adjusted my expectations.
1. ^
  actually you might not need Zorn’s lemma for this, but it sounds so cool

Coafos 26 Mar 2023 23:17 UTC
2 points
−1
on: Don’t take bad options away from people
Taking a bad option away might be worse for a person, but will be much better for the people. These regulations (no selling organs or sex) exists, becuse in a free market there would be a race-to-bottom which would not increase human values.

Suppose we allow selling sex for rent. The number of rentable apartmants stays the same; however, there will more demand for them, because some people can now pay for them by non-monetary means. Because of this, the rent prices will increase, and that would just accelerate the rent-problem.

While exchanging kidneys for medical treatment is OK for me, it should not be mixed with the standard money market. The forces of money markets usually optimize for dollar value, which could be decoupled from human wellbeing. The result would be a worse state for everyone.

Also: If the rent is so high, why can’t a developer build a new complex? They could rent it out and would very fastly pay for itself. It would increase the number of flats and lower rents. These bad options try to solve a supply issue from demand side.

Coafos 6 Feb 2023 2:36 UTC
6 points
0
on: SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation)
Searched PsyNet on Google, and I think PSYNet refers to the netcode for RocketLeague, a popular game. Maybe they pulled text message logs from somewhere; based on the “ForgeModLoader” token, it’s plausible.

Alternative guess is this, a python library for online behavioural experiments. It connects to Dallinger and Mechanical Turk.

On Google, the string “PsyNetMessage” also appeared in this paper and at a few gpt2 vocab lists, but no other results for me.

On Bing/DuckDuckGo it outputted a lot more Reddit threads with RocketLeague crash logs. The crash logs are full of messages like [0187.84] PsyNet: PsyNetRequestQue_X_1 SendRequest ID=PsyNetMessage_X_57 Message=PsyNetMessage_X_57, so I guess it’s an RL (as in RocketLeague) thing. It was also found in some (clearly) GPT-generated texts.
What links here?
- SolidGoldMagikarp III: Glitch token archaeology by mwatkins (14 Feb 2023 10:17 UTC; 91 points)

Coafos 17 Jan 2023 4:09 UTC
8 points
0
on: Curing insanity with malaria
The world is a complicated and chaotic place. Anything could interact with everything, and some of these are good. This post describes that general paralysis of the insane can be cured with malaria. At least if they do not die during the treatment.

If late-stage syphilis (general paralysis) isn’t treated, then they probably die 3-5 years with progressively worse symptoms each year. So even when 5-20% of the died immediately when the treatment started, they still had better survival rates in one and five years. A morbid example of an expected value choice: waiting for a certain long death vs taking a chance at a short or longer possible lifetime.

If they were allowed to choose at all, where the “they” means the patients. The post mentions that Wagner-Jauregg maybe hasn’t asked for consent when he tried his experiments. But this is on par for the age, early XX. century hasn’t considered mentally ill patients human. Anyway, at this point, I disagree with the tone of the post, which may support human experimentation without consent. I mean, the guy just tried a bunch of diseases on terminally ill because of a fight-fire-with-fire theory and randomly found one which somewhat works.

He got a Nobel for this discovery, and a few years later he supported eugenics and anti-Semitism. Nowadays we don’t use it because somebody else discovered penicillin and half of medicine was solved. We know a bit more about malaria. We don’t know why this therapy worked and other high-temperature methods don’t. The guy got a few places named after him in Austria.

The article is well-researched. Does it carve reality at its joints? I don’t feel like it describes a reliable and ethical scientific process. But maybe sometimes you just can’t, because the world is a complicated and chaotic place.
What links here?
- Raemon's comment on The 2021 Review Phase by Raemon (20 Jan 2023 20:54 UTC; 8 points)
- Raemon's comment on Highlights and Prizes from the 2021 Review Phase by Raemon (27 Jan 2023 23:35 UTC; 2 points)

Coafos 17 Jan 2023 2:36 UTC
55 points
0
on: Elephant seal 2

What does this post add to the conversation?

Two pictures of elephant seals.

How did this post affect you, your thinking, and your actions?

I am, if not deeply, but certainly affected by this post. I felt some kind of joy looking at these animals. It calmed my anger and made my thoughts somewhat happier. I started to believe the world can become a better place, and I would like to make it happen. This post made me a better person.

Does it make accurate claims? Does it carve reality at the joints? How do you know?

The title says elephant seals 2 and contains 2 pictures of elephant seals, which is accurate. However, I do not think it carves reality because these animals don’t have joints. I know it from experimental evidence: I once interacted with a toy model of a seal and it was soft and fluffy and without bones.

Is there a subclaim of this post that you can test?

no

What followup work would you like to see building on this post?

You wouldn’t guess it, but I have an idea...

Coafos 17 Jan 2023 2:10 UTC
12 points
0
on: Social behavior curves, equilibria, and radicalism
I was always surprised that small changes in public perception, a slight change in consumption or political opinion can have large effects. This post introduced the concept of the social behaviour curves for me, and it feels like explains quite a lot of things. The writer presents some example behaviours and movements (like why revolutions start slowly or why societal changes are sticky), and then it provides clear explanations for them using this model. Which explains how to use social behaviour curves and verifies some of the model’s predictions at the same time.

The second half of the post bases a theory on what an ideal society would look like, and how should you act on a radical-conformists axis. Be a radical except if only radicals are around you is a cool slogan for a punk band, but even he writes that he’s gonna do a little trolling. I feel like there are some missing assumptions about why he chooses these curves.

In the addendum, there are references to other uses in the literature, which can be used as a jumping point for further understanding. What I’m missing from this post is the discussion of large networks. Everyone knows everyone in a small group, but changes propagate over time for large ones; it also matters if someone has few or many connections. There is also some kind of criticality in large networks too, but it’s a bit different. Also, the math gets much more complicated, in fact, graph criticality results are few and hard, and most places use computer simulations instead of closed equations. All in all, I think social behaviour curves are a simple and good tool for understanding an aspect of social reality.
What links here?
- Raemon's comment on The 2021 Review Phase by Raemon (20 Jan 2023 20:54 UTC; 8 points)
- Raemon's comment on Highlights and Prizes from the 2021 Review Phase by Raemon (27 Jan 2023 23:35 UTC; 2 points)

Coafos 15 Jan 2023 23:20 UTC
8 points
0
on: Deliberate Play
There are lots of anecdotes about choosing the unused path and being the disruptor, but I feel this post explains the idea more clearly, with better analogies and boundaries.

To achieve a goal you have to build a lot of skills (deliberate practice) and apply them when it is really needed (maximum performance). Less is talked about searching for the best strategy and combination of skills. I think “deliberate play” is a good concept for this because it shows that strategy research is a small but important part of playing well.

Coafos 15 Jan 2023 23:01 UTC
7 points
0
on: Bad names make you open the box
I think this post points towards something important, which is a bit more than what the title suggests, but I have a problem describing it succinctly. :)

Computer programming is about creating abstractions, and leaky abstractions are a common enough occurrence to have their own wiki page. Most systems are hard to comprehend as a whole, and a human has to break them into parts which can be understood individually. But these are not perfect cuts, the boundaries are wobbly, and the parts “leak” into each other.

Most commonly these leaks happen because of a technical/physical simplification like forgetting that a byte overflows at 255 or electrons have travel time. However, these leaks could happen due to social simplifications too, like getTodayPosts means “the things that get put on the top of the feed” for one and “the things which had the most engagement today” for another. Social errors are often downplayed in technical circles, which is why I think this post has an important message.

Coafos 15 Jan 2023 22:03 UTC
3 points
0
on: Concentration of Force
I think this post describes an important idea for political situations.

While online politics is a mind-killer, it (mostly) manages to avoid “controversial” topics and stays on a meta-level. The examples show that in group decisions the main factor is not the truth of statements but the early focus of attention. This dynamic can be used for good or bad, but it feels like it really happens a lot, and accurately describes an aspect of social reality.

Coafos 2 Jan 2023 22:48 UTC
17 points
5
on: Opportunity Cost Blackmail
If you heard “good is the enemy of the great”, then also consider “perfect is the enemy of good”.

Have you factored in the cost of task switching and meta-strategy research? A lot of economic theory trivializes the energy required for thinking, which might be correct for larger entities, but it’s an important factor for individual humans.

Switching to a different worldview and re-evaluating your options takes a non-negligible amount of mental energy. Learning about new opportunities and hearing new strategies also takes time. If you’re optimizing for doing good instead of collecting opportunities, then there could be a point where just doing your current best is better than the expected values of new ideas if you add the processing costs into them.

Coafos 26 Dec 2022 2:50 UTC
2 points
0
on: It’s time to worry about online privacy again
Thanks for the post, it’s an important update on the state of information warfare.

Privacy can be thought of as a shield. If you build a wall against small-arm spam, then it’s ok, but if you try to build an underground bunker, then it’s weird because only Certified Good Guys have access to advanced weapons. Why are you trying to protect yourself against the Certified Good Guys?

What changed is that thanks to AI advancements in the last few years, it become possible to create homemade heat-seeking infomissiles. Suddenly, there are other arguments for building bunkers.

Coafos 22 Dec 2022 1:17 UTC
5 points
0
on: You become the UI you use
Have you heard that the medium is the message? It was written before the internet happened, and said that society becomes tv-like or radio-like if it watches a lot of tv or radio.

It is interesting to see how this idea applies to the internet. I agree with you on that we should not handle the internet as a block, because each side has it’s artifacts. I think there should be more explaration of ideas, but on other sites. LW in it’s current form suited for long essay type posts, which I think is good for it’s stated purpose, methodical discussion of ideas.

Coafos 20 Dec 2022 21:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: CoafOS’s Shortform
It’s evening, the sun is set. A man walks up to a scholar:
“Scholar, the sun rose yesterday and today morning. Will it rise again tomorrow?”
“Man, I don’t know, it’s kinda dark right now. Have you heard about the no free lunch theorem?”

Coafos 12 Dec 2022 1:38 UTC
4 points
2
on: A crisis for online communication: bots and bot users will overrun the Internet?
Marketers, scammers and trolls are trying-to control the internet bottom-up, joining the ranks of the users and going against internet institutions. While it’s a problem (a possibly big one), a worse situation is when the internet instutions themselves start using LLMs for top-down control. For a fictional example, see heaven banning.

Coafos

Trolling is not a Socratic dialogue

How to be the smartest person in the world: