Garrett Baker

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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 Oct 13, 2025, 8:44 PM
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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.

Garrett Baker Oct 13, 2025, 8:01 PM
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on: Reasons to sign a statement to ban superintelligence (+ FAQ for those on the fence)
I don’t know the methodology behind how the statement you have has been drafted, I don’t think you even mention the statement directly in this post, but I will say that I think the correct methodology here is not to first come up with a statement, and then email it out and ask a bunch of researchers whether they’d sign it. That is a recipe for exactly what you’re encountering here. The researchers you’re reaching out to have a very different perspective on public communication and how they’d like to represent their beliefs than you do, in your role as de-facto public relations managers in this project.

That is a good thing! We would like our researchers to primarily be thinking on simulacra level 1, and that means they will sign very different statements than what may seem optimal from the media’s perspective.

However, as you point out, it can also be a bad thing, and decrease the PR manager’s ability to… well… manage.

That is why I believe the solution is to first email out the main researchers who you’d like to sign the statement, and ask what sorts of statements they would be willing to sign. What properties must the statement have in order for them to be comfortable putting their name below it. Then you create a statement which you know will have at least some base of support among researchers. You should expect a reasonable amount of iteration & compromise here, and not to, on your first try, create a statement for which everyone you want to sign signs.

I will say also that it seems likely this is how the CAIS statement was drafted too. They spent (if I remember right) quite a while work-shopping it. That statement (to my knowledge) did not just appear out of the aether in its current state. It took work and compromise to get it.

Again, I don’t know whether you actually fell for the trap I mention, but it seems likely given the pushback you’re getting

Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #53 (Tuesday 10/14)

Garrett Baker, Aella, Ronny Fernandez, Ben Pace and Eneasz

Oct 13, 2025, 6:59 PM

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Garrett Baker Oct 10, 2025, 8:30 PM
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in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Stars are a rounding error
¯\(ツ)/¯, but if you could...

Garrett Baker Oct 10, 2025, 6:31 AM
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on: Stars are a rounding error
On the subject of “capturing dark energy” (I don’t think this technically captures any energy previously existing), my favorite proposal is to connect distant galaxies together with strings, and use the resulting tension to turn a turbine. In principle your limit would then only be the strength and length of your intergalactic rope.

See Mining Energy in an Expanding Universe for what I think is the earliest proposal for this idea.

Garrett Baker Oct 9, 2025, 7:29 PM
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in reply to: jm1121’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
How?

Garrett Baker Oct 8, 2025, 9:15 PM
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in reply to: testingthewaters’s comment on: Jan_Kulveit’s Shortform

I think you are partially sanitywashing the positions of your company with regards to the blogpost.

I did not read Matthew’s above comment as representing any views other than his own.

Garrett Baker Oct 8, 2025, 5:28 PM
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in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: The Origami Men
There seem to be no organised religions that ever managed to hold it for long before falling into rose-tinted fatalism, no group who stand before god and bargain
Hm, I got the opposite impression from reading this sequence of blog posts from Bret Devereaux on ACOUP
The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge. Let’s start with an analogy:
Let’s say you are the leader of a small country, surrounded by a bunch – let’s say five – large neighbor countries, which never, ever change. Each of these big neighbors has their own culture and customs. Do you decide which one is morally best and side with that one? That might be nice for your new ally, but it will be bad for you – isolated and opposed by your other larger neighbors. Picking a side might work if you were a big country, but you’re not; getting in the middle is likely to get you crushed.
No. You will need to maintain the friendship of all of the countries at once (the somewhat amusing term for this in actual foreign policy is ‘Finlandization‘ – the art of bowing to the east without mooning the west, in Kari Suomalainen’s words). And that means mastering their customs. When you go to County B, you will speak their language, you wear their customary dress, and if they expect visiting dignitaries to bow five times and then do a dance, well then you bow five times and do a dance. And if Country C expects you to give a speech instead, then you arrive with the speech, drafted and printed. You do these things because these countries are powerful and will destroy you if you do not humor whatever their strange customs happen to be.
[...]
Ah, but how will you know what kind of speech to write or what dance to do? Well, your country will learn by experience. You’ll have folks in your state department who were around the last time you visited County B, who can tell you what worked, and what didn’t. And if something works reliably, you should recreate that approach, exactly and without changing anything at all. Sure, there might be another method that works – maybe you dance a jig, but the small country on the other side of them dances the salsa, but why take the risk, why rock the boat? Stick with the proven method.
But whatever it is that these countries want, you need to do it. No matter how strange, how uncomfortable, how inconvenient, because they have the ability to absolutely ruin everything for you. So these displays of friendship or obedience – these rituals – must take place and they must be taken seriously and you must do them for all of these neighbors, without neglecting any (yes even that one you don’t like).
This is how these religions work. Not based on moral belief, but on practical knowledge (I should point out, this is not my novel formulation, but rather is rephrasing the central idea of Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods (2008), but it is also everywhere in the ancient sources if you read them and know to look). Let’s break that down, starting with the concept of…

Garrett Baker Oct 8, 2025, 4:40 PM
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in reply to: Dom Polsinelli’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
idk about you, but the characters in my dream act nowhere near how real people act, I’m just too stupid in my dreams to realize how inconsistent and strange their actions are.

Garrett Baker Oct 8, 2025, 4:09 PM
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in reply to: Daniel C’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
Doesn’t such a discretization run into the fermion doubling problem?

Garrett Baker Oct 6, 2025, 10:18 PM
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in reply to: Jozdien’s comment on: niplav’s Shortform
I get a conversation not found error when clicking on your first link

Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #52 (Tuesday 10/7)

Garrett Baker, Aella, Ronny Fernandez, Ben Pace and Eneasz

Oct 6, 2025, 6:30 PM

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Garrett Baker Oct 4, 2025, 8:23 PM
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in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
In my opinion, the usual utilitarian reading also ignores this aspect too though. The usual reading says that each person has the choice between accepting or rejecting the utilitarian logic, but a rejection of the utilitarian logic doesn’t look like leaving the city, leaving the child to suffer. It looks like actively fighting to bring the child out into the sunlight.

Garrett Baker Oct 4, 2025, 7:47 PM
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in reply to: Tobias H’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
idk if you saw my second comment, but I think this explains it

Those who walk away are those who are even able to live in a non-Omelas, those who are able to imagine even the possibility of not having a hidden evil at the heart of a perfect world. The reader who does not walk away from Omelas, lives in Omelas and has lived in Omelas for their whole life, in the sense of mentally inhibiting the world in which any Omelas must have the tortured child. Those who walk away are therefore the very few who are able to reject that mental world, leave it, and achieve all the good rather than just the good that comes at a tragic cost.

This makes sense, especially given when Le Guin says “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all.”. If she did describe it, the reader (who has not yet themselves left Omelas) would assume that place also has some horrible secret, and so her attempt would fail.

Garrett Baker Oct 4, 2025, 5:19 AM
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in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
Another interpretation of “those who walk away”: Those who walk away are those who are even able to live in a non-Omelas, those who are able to imagine even the possibility of not having a hidden evil at the heart of a perfect world. The reader who does not walk away from Omelas, lives in Omelas and has lived in Omelas for their whole life, in the sense of mentally inhibiting the world in which any Omelas must have the tortured child. Those who walk away are therefore the very few who are able to reject that mental world, leave it, and achieve all the good rather than just the good that comes at a tragic cost.

This fits both the literal people who walk away in the story—they walk away because they imagine there is a land that is nicer, that doesn’t have a tortured child at its heart—and the reader metaphorically—they also walk away because they imagine a nicer world and believe that can be achieved without sacrifice.
What links here?
- Garrett Baker's comment on Omelas Is Perfectly Misread by Tobias H (Oct 4, 2025, 7:47 PM; 8 points)

Garrett Baker Oct 3, 2025, 4:34 AM
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in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
I agree, but also, like, I think its good to notice the skulls here. This bias isn’t equivalent to utilitarianism, but often justifies itself on utilitarian grounds, and utilitarians… don’t necessarily seem like they do all that much to try to stave off such biases when making their decisions or advocating for their moral frameworks. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me utilitiarians often revel in their ability to make hard moral tradeoffs rather than their ability to try to think of ways to get all of what they want without having to trade anything off (which is what the “steel utilitarian” would do).

Garrett Baker Oct 3, 2025, 1:54 AM
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on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
(note the following is me explaining my interpretation, not explaining my beliefs)

I think its a criticism of utilitarianism via a criticism of our inability to take just good things seriously. The whole point of (at least certain kinds of) utilitarianism is that we are in triage every second of every day. The Ones Who Walk Away is a denial of actions and worlds that are just good, the assertion that every decision is a trolley problem, and every good you do comes at the expense of bad you neglected to avert.

Omelas seems more likely given a tortured child at its heart for the same reason we find the assertion that an action which has a horrible consequence is nevertheless good. This is the same implicit logic used to defend actions taken for “the greater good”, and an implicit claim about the psychology of people taking bad actions “for the greater good”. That people find it more likely they can have a positive impact if there’s an obvious negative consequence to their action, the bias which has caused the most horrible atrocities we know of.

Those who walk away therefore are those who try not to fall for this bias. Both metaphorically, the reader who says “no, I don’t think you need to torture a kid to get a perfect world”, and literally, those who live in Omelas and say “no, I don’t think we ought to live in a society which tortures a kid”.

Garrett Baker Oct 3, 2025, 1:37 AM
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on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread

Try to find any article, paper, or blog post that lays out this reading. I haven’t found one (but there is sometimes someone in the comments who seems to get it).

Ozy argues the same thesis as you do here.

Garrett Baker Oct 2, 2025, 8:28 PM
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Beyond the Zombie Argument
You may disagree with Eliezer, but that does not change what he thinks. Perhaps you think “we are zombies wrt. free will—we say we have it for reasons other than having it.”, but that is a very different claim than Eliezer thinks this or that Eliezer should think this.

Garrett Baker Oct 2, 2025, 7:30 PM
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Beyond the Zombie Argument
Here is what he says about “compatibilism” in the above linked article

“Compatibilism” is the philosophical position that “free will” can be intuitively and satisfyingly defined in such a way as to be compatible with deterministic physics. “Incompatibilism” is the position that free will and determinism are incompatible.

My position might perhaps be called “Requiredism.” When agency, choice, control, and moral responsibility are cashed out in a sensible way, they require determinism—at least some patches of determinism within the universe. If you choose, and plan, and act, and bring some future into being, in accordance with your desire, then all this requires a lawful sort of reality; you cannot do it amid utter chaos. There must be order over at least those parts of reality that are being controlled by you. You are within physics, and so you/physics have determined the future. If it were not determined by physics, it could not be determined by you.

here he argues directly against “To be able to determine the future in a way that is itself determined falls short of being able to steer to a future of your choosing.”, so I suggest you read the article before saying you know what Eliezer thinks!

Garrett Baker

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #53 (Tues­day 10/​14)

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #52 (Tues­day 10/​7)

Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #53 (Tuesday 10/14)

Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #52 (Tuesday 10/7)