Garrett Baker

Karma: 6,033

I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.

They thought they found in numbers, more than in fire, earth, or water, many resemblances to things which are and become; thus such and such an attribute of numbers is justice, another is soul and mind, another is opportunity, and so on; and again they saw in numbers the attributes and ratios of the musical scales. Since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be assimilated to numbers, while numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.

Metaph. A. 5, 985 b 27–986 a 2.

Garrett Baker 13 Nov 2025 0:23 UTC
15 points
5
on: Please, Don’t Roll Your Own Metaethics
I think this fails to say how the analogy of cryptography transfers to metaethics. What properties of cryptography as a field make it such that you cannot roll your own. Is it just that many people have the experience of trying to come up with a croptographic scheme and failing, meanwhile there are perfectly good libraries nobody has found exploits to yet?

That doesn’t seem very analogous with metaethics. As you say, it is hard to decisively show a metaethical theory is “wrong”, and as far as I know there is no well-studied metaethical theory which has no exploits yet.

So what exactly is the analogy?

Garrett Baker 8 Nov 2025 23:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform

How could this possibly be a good political strategy? Well the voters know that he’s a liar but paradoxically that may make them more likely to vote for him. This is because voters are irrational. Many voters with may believe the Brazen Liar Politician may ultimately favor their special interest, their pet issue while throwing other voter blocs (suckers!) under the bus—after the election.

I don’t think its just voters, this strategy also worked well for Lyndon Johnson in closed doors with party elites. He would tell everyone he was on their side, and they would largely believe him, and know also that he was telling everyone else he was on their side too (he’d make it very obvious to eg those listening in on his calls that he was lying or manipulating the other party).

For Lyndon, this often set him up as a good compromise candidate. It was very difficult to find anyone who was remotely acceptable to both northern and southern democrats at the same time. The south trusted him fully (ultimately incorrectly, but for good reason), and the north would tolerate him.

Maybe there’s a rational agent model here, where if Alice prefers outcome A and Bob prefers outcome B, and they must choose a lottery in ${p A + (1 - p) B | p \in [0, 1]}$ so that $U_{A} (p A + (1 - p) B) = p$ and $U_{B} (p A + (1 - p) B) = 1 - p$ , and if they fail to choose then they get $u_{A}, u_{B} < 0$ utility respectively. If each lottery is a candidate, with lottery $1 A + 0 B$ the candidate honest in their support for $A$ and $0 A + 1 B$ the candidate honest in their support for B, and $p A + (1 - p) B$ for $p \in (0, 1)$ a dishonest candidate with a $p$ probability of actually being pro-A, the Nash bargaining solution here will always support a dishonest candidate.

Note that you get a brazen liar (rather than just an undecided but known to be honest candidate) here because you can be more confident the brazen liar isn’t making secret deals. Or rather, you can be confident they are making secret deals, because they’ve made secret deals with you and you know they’re making secret deals with everyone else too, so you can be confident few if any people have some usefully secret information about their position.

Garrett Baker 6 Nov 2025 5:30 UTC
5 points
0
on: People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals
I think the justifications here come from people attempting to resign themselves to an inadequate world by trying hard to think of reasons why the world actually isn’t inadequate, eg the same sort of psychological bias which causes deathism.

Therefore I also expect that its mostly people on the receiving end of signals who try to justify their behavior, and not people sending the signals.

I’d guess that people trying to send the signals don’t so much try to (intellectually) justify their behavior, but instead just feel put off and annoyed you didn’t pick up on the signal.

Garrett Baker 5 Nov 2025 21:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Richard Horvath’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform

This and the different distribution of ratings (https://shorturl.at/EZJ7L ) implies that the requirements are not absolute, but relative: majority of women aim for a top subsection (probably top decile?) male partner. Hence if all American males magically become one feet taller, likely this filter would increase to ~7 feet.

This is an absurd inference to make on the basis of the linked data. Also, please use the actual url and not a shortened version.

Garrett Baker 5 Nov 2025 20:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard Horvath’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform
This data is not relevant to my point. What would be relevant is the delta between male and female average height in the two countries.

Garrett Baker 5 Nov 2025 0:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Basically yes. His staff likely coulda predicted this (eg there were a few circumstances where out of anger he did some small civil rights stuff, then backed off when he cooled down & looked at the political repercussions), and possibly Lady Bird, but no other senator or member of the public had any reliable way to predict this for the reasons you state.

Garrett Baker 4 Nov 2025 23:20 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
It seems extremely net-positive for civil rights, but mainly through the mechanism of it making Lyndon Johnson a viable candidate for president while maintaining his stature with the southern democrats, leading ultimately to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This can be seen as a generalizable lesson only insofar as you think weak bills like that are typically passed by Lyndon Johnson-like figures playing 4d political chess ultimately for altruistic reasons. Without that effect, it mostly seemed bad, it likely actually decreased the number of black voters, and did not decrease the south’s ability to filibuster the senate against civil rights (which was the main mechanism by which civil rights bills were unable to pass), eg they filibustered away another civil rights bill in 1959 or something. Plus, if not for Lyndon Johnson ultimately being pro-civil rights, it would have put someone decidedly anti-civil-rights into the presidency.

Garrett Baker 4 Nov 2025 23:17 UTC
3 points
−3
in reply to: Tomás B.’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform

Tallness is zero sum

Why is tallness zero sum? Tallness is part of male beauty standards, so if guys were taller that’d be great for everyone.

Garrett Baker 4 Nov 2025 16:33 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Adam Scherlis’s comment on: FTL travel and scientific realism

Also, I don’t really know why people think the ANEC or something similar has to be true.

My impression is that its because if it is violated, you get a bunch of crazy shit, like warp drives and perpetual motion (without breaking energy conservation). Plus, it makes the math a lot easier. You need some boundary condition to apply the field equations, and that’s an extremely reasonable one.

Garrett Baker 3 Nov 2025 18:06 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Human Values ≠ Goodness

Insofar Albert is a sociopath, or is in one of those moods where he really does want to screw over someone else… I would usually say “Look man, I want you to pursue your best life and fulfill your values, so I wish you luck. But also I’m going to try to stop you, because I want the same for other people too, and I want higher-order nice things like high trust communities.”. One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.

This seems incoherent to me? I’d like it if all the sociopaths are duped by society into not pursuing their values, that’s great for my values, and because they’re evil I’d rather them not pursue their best life. However I still support distinguishing between goodness and human values for the same general-purpose reasons why often, even if its possible in principle to use some piece of information for evil, its still often better to spread & talk about that information than not.

More generally I think people are too quick to use the phrase “One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.” Yes, you can’t argue against the utility function, but if someone has a bad utility function and is unaware what that utility function is, I’m not going to dissuade them from that (unless I think they’ll be happy to cooperate with me on bettering both our goals if I do, but sociopaths are not known for such behavior). That’s part of stopping them.

Garrett Baker 2 Nov 2025 16:44 UTC
17 points
7
on: FTL travel and scientific realism
There’s a simpler way to get FTL in your sci-fi books, and that’s to assume the existence of negative mass and create an Alcubierre drive, which is indeed a well-known and correct solution to Einstein’s equations (if only you grant negative mass).

The reason not to expect negative mass to exist is much weaker than reasons not to expect relativity to generalize, mainly being that it violates a typical assumption of general relativity, effectively that energy density is nowhere negative. However such assumptions have been violated before, eg due to dark energy, and in my understanding, it’s not fundamental to the Einstein field equations themselves.

Garrett Baker 30 Oct 2025 20:48 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform

To clarify, I listed some of Williamson’s claims, but I haven’t summarised any of his arguments.

I think even still, if these are the claims he’s making, none of them seem particularly relevant to the question of “whether the mechanisms we expect to automate science and math will also automate philosophy”.

Garrett Baker 30 Oct 2025 0:09 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform
Williamson seems to be making a semantic argument rather than arguing anything concrete. Or at least, the 6 claims he’s making seem to all be restatements of “philosophy is a science” without ever actually arguing why “a science” makes philosophy equivalently easy than other things labeled “a science”. For example, I can replace “philosophy” in your list of claims with “religion”, with the only claim that seems iffy being 5
1. Religion is a science.
2. It’s not a natural science (like particle physics, organic chemistry, nephrology), but not all sciences are natural sciences — for instance, mathematics and computer science are formal sciences. Religion is likewise a non-natural science.
3. Although astrology differs from other scientific inquiries, it differs no more in kind or degree than they differ from each other. Put provocatively, theoretical physics might be closer to religion than to experimental physics.
4. Religion, like other sciences, pursues knowledge. Just as mathematics peruses mathematical knowledge, and nephrology peruses nephrological knowledge, religion pursues religious knowledge.
5. Different sciences will vary in their subject-matter, methods, practices, etc., but religion doesn’t differ to a far greater degree or in a fundamentally different way. (6) Religious methods (i.e. the ways in which religion achieves its aim, knowledge) aren’t starkly different from the methods of other sciences.
6. Religion isn’t a science in a parasitic sense. It’s not a science because it uses scientific evidence or because it has applications for the sciences. Rather, it’s simply another science, not uniquely special. Shmilliamson says, “Religion is neither queen nor handmaid of the sciences, just one more science with a distinctive character, just as other sciences have distinctive character.”
7. Religion is not, exceptionally among sciences, concerned with words or concepts. This conflicts with many religious thinkers who conceived religion as chiefly concerned with linguistic or conceptual analysis, such as Maimonides, or Thomas Aquinas.
8. Religion doesn’t consist of a series of disconnected visionaries. Rather, it consists in the incremental contribution of thousands of researchers: some great, some mediocre, much like any other scientific inquiry.
But of course, this claim is iffy for philosophy too. In what sense is philosophical knowledge not “starkly different from the methods of other sciences”? A key component of science is experiment, and in that sense, religion is much more science-like than philosophy! Eg see the ideas of personal experimentation in buddhism, and mormon epistemology (ask Claude about the significance of Alma 32 in mormon epistemology).

I’m not saying religion is a science, or that it is more right than philosophy, just that your representation of Williamson here doesn’t seem much more than a semantic dispute.

In particular, the real question here is whether the mechanisms we expect to automate science and math will also automate philosophy, not whether we ought to semantically group philosophy as a science. The reason we expect science and math to get automated is the existence of relatively concrete & well defined feedback loops between actions and results. Or at minimum, much more concrete feedback loops than philosophy has, and especially the philosophy Wei Dai typically cares about has (eg moral philosophy, decision theory, and metaphysics).

Concretely, if AIs decide that it is a moral good to spread the good word of spiralism, there’s nothing (save humans, but that will go away once we’re powerless) to stop them, but if they decide quantum mechanics is fake, or 2+2=5, well… they won’t make it too far.

I’d guess this is also why Wei Dai believes in “philosophical exceptionalism”. Regardless of whether you want to categorize philosophy as a science or not, the above paragraph applies just as well to groups of humans as to AIs. Indeed, there have been much much more evil & philosophically wrong ideologies than spiralism in the past.

Garrett Baker 21 Oct 2025 0:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform
Well Orpheus apparently agrees with me, so you probably understood the original comment better than I did!

Garrett Baker 19 Oct 2025 14:33 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Fabien Roger’s comment on: Fabien’s Shortform
The pardon example does not at all seem very targeted, the constitution doesn’t even say that weird shit needs to happen before it can be used, and my impression is (though I haven’t done a review of the literature) that much of the time it’s used for nepotism and cronyism, so that one’s friends, families, and political allies don’t have to obey the laws. Recently its been used as a defense for the president himself to avoid laws and justice.

Yes, comparatively its less dumb than things of the form “the president can decide whether there’s an emergency x and then under those circumstances they get a whole bunch more power”, but its still a great tax on the principle of equality under and rule of law.

That this power was used against Nixon is special because it was the president helping their political enemies, it is clearly, on its face, a bad thing to set such a precedent that once president one is not subject to laws anymore because other presidents will bail you out.

Garrett Baker 19 Oct 2025 5:02 UTC
8 points
5
in reply to: Fabien Roger’s comment on: Fabien’s Shortform

It is interesting how the US Constitution has contingencies for “things can be weird, so the US president can do weird things in response”. For example the history of US pardons (including the pardon of Nixon) was surprising to me. I wonder how much AI specs and RSPs should include this kind of targeted exception to regular process.

This seems like exactly the wrong lesson to take? If you’re the president, you want the ability to do weird things when things get weird, but if you’re creating a system to contain the president, you really don’t want to give them the ability to do weird things when things get weird, indeed it is a standard play when turning a democracy into a dictatorship to suspend laws due to emergencies and other exceptions.

Given our RSPs and RLHF constitutions are meant to be systems to contain AI labs and models, it does not seem good to have “if things are going weird, do tf you want” clauses. If nothing else, things will get weird, that is all but guaranteed so if you have such a clause, the whole framework becomes just “do tf you want”.

I also just really don’t know how you can look at Trump and say “wow, people sure were real smart when they gave the president all those emergency powers and stuff, weren’t they?”

Garrett Baker 18 Oct 2025 22:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
That was not in fact your original point. Before you said,

rationality thinks wisdom is intelligence

Garrett Baker 18 Oct 2025 20:21 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
I don’t think either EAs or rationalists think about or in terms of wisdom at all.

EA is not philosophically unified enough to have an answer to the question “what is wisdom”, and rationalists (at their best) would just respond with “Of what decision relevance is this ‘wisdom’ thing you talk about?” or “Standard definitions seem to conflate wisdom with several things which seem relatively distinct eg knowing what you want, knowing about the world, and knowing how to achieve what you want”.

Garrett Baker 17 Oct 2025 23:34 UTC
15 points
16
in reply to: Orpheus16’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform
I would otherwise agree with you, but I think the AI alignment ecosystem has been burnt many times in the past over giving a bunch of money to people who said they cared about safety, but not asking enough questions about whether they actually believed “AI may kill everyone and that is a near or the number 1 priority of theirs”.

Garrett Baker 13 Oct 2025 20:44 UTC
5 points
−2
on: Water Above the Ocean
It matters whether you grow rice (needs irrigation funded and controlled by a larger group, and coordination of when you drain your fields) or wheat (more suitable for family farms), as studies have shown (including quasi-experimental work).
The “quasi experimental” study is in my opinion very silly. Here are their descriptions of the tests of cultural differences they ran
To test individualism:
Participants drew circles to represent the self and their friends in a diagram of their social network. Later, we measured the size of the self circle and the average of the friend circles.
To test loyalty/nepotism:
The task asks people to imagine going into a business deal with a friend, who then lies during the deal, which causes the participant to make less money in the deal. Participants can punish the friend for their dishonesty by paying a small amount of money to delete money from their bank account (paying 0–100 RMB to delete 0–1000 RMB [US$148]). In another scenario, the friend is honest, and they can reward the friend by paying to add money to their bank account. Crucially, participants completed two identical scenarios with a stranger. Thus, participants completed four scenarios in total (reward/punish friend/stranger). We analyzed whether participants treated the friend better than the stranger, even though the friend and the stranger acted the same. Treating the friend better could be seen positively as loyalty or negatively as nepotism.
To measure categorical vs relational thought style:
We measured holistic thought with the 14-item picture version of the triad task. In each triad, farmers saw a target object, such as the rabbit in Fig. 2. Then they chose one of two other objects to pair with it, such as a dog or carrot. One pairing belongs to the same abstract category (rabbits and dogs are mammals), and one pairing shares a functional relationship (rabbits eat carrots). We calculated the percentage of relational pairings as a measure of holistic thought.
I’d expect (and Claude agrees) there have been extensive & rigorous study made of each of these properties in the field of psychometrics, which makes their use of these tests unnecessary & strange. If one was charitable they could say that they wanted to use tests which had previously been correlated with rice-dominated/wheat-dominated farming areas, or that the relevant psychometric tests perhaps weren’t translated to Chinese.