Dana

Karma: 121

Dana 7 Oct 2025 20:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: Maybe social media algorithms don’t suck
You can delete Youtube videos from your watch history if you don’t want it to be used for recommendations. I do this. It would be nice to have an easier way to switch through preference profiles than switching accounts though, that seems like a hassle.

Dana 7 Oct 2025 20:40 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: abramdemski’s Shortform
I agree with your assessment of what the problem is, but I don’t agree that is the main point of this post. The majority of this post is spent asserting how ‘ordinary’, smart, and high functioning this victim is and how we can now conclude that therefore everyone, including you, is vulnerable, and AI psychosis in general is a very serious danger. It being suppressed is just mentioned in passing at the start of the post.
I also wonder what exactly is meant by AI psychosis. I mean, my co-worker is allowed to have an anime waifu but I’m not allowed to have a 4o husbando?

Dana 5 Oct 2025 5:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rebecca Dai’s comment on: The personal intelligence I want
Imagine you were to provide full context. Would this affect how the recipient feels about the message? If so, they deserve to have that context. Reaching out to friends for advice is very different from an AI reaching out to you for approval of its message. You didn’t initiate, you didn’t provide any input, and you didn’t put in any effort aside from the single click.

Dana 4 Sep 2025 3:58 UTC
3 points
4
on: Prediction markets are sub-optimal betting vehicles
I’m not sure I follow the argument as to why we should expect less liquidity on prediction markets. Assuming 0 fees and similar volumes, why wouldn’t bookmakers (also) offer similar liquidity at the same ~5% VIG on prediction markets? They can even use it to help balance their books. I would personally offer prediction market liquidity at 5% VIG but Polymarket generally has better rates.
Regarding obscure events, I understand the argument to be that they are using profits from their popular events to subsidize these likely unprofitable obscure events. Why couldn’t a prediction market do the same? Polymarket already has an attempt at doing this, liquidity rewards. Of course that requires some sort of fee to fund long term.
Regarding slippage, why would a sportsbook be able to fill $100k but not external LPs? If a sportsbook is willing to fill it, I’m assuming it’s profitable. Is it that you think the sportsbook will accept more risk than a collection of external LPs? The only other argument I see is insufficient volume to balance the trade which would be an issue in either case. Prediction markets can also just limit the bet size (Like sportsbooks do) to whatever is available at the current price to eliminate slippage.
Predatory Liquidity:
1. Feels wrong to me that you frame orders a few cents above fair as ‘predatory’. That’s what VIG is in sportsbooks, except on every order. It’s just generally not the current price in prediction markets because the current price is generally much closer to fair.
2. I agree with your second example, sniping after a score change. But this is also not fundamental. Polymarket could easily clear the book + suspend for a few seconds after score changes if they have the data feeds (Which they seem to).

Dana 24 Aug 2025 23:17 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: anaguma’s Shortform
Yes. And this actually seems to be a relatively common perspective from what I’ve seen.

Dana 24 Aug 2025 6:41 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: anaguma’s Shortform
“Richard Sutton rejects AI Risk” seems misleading in my view. What risks is he rejecting specifically?
His view seems to be that AI will replace us, humanity as we know it will go extinct, and that is okay. E.g., here he speaks positively of a Moravec quote, “Rather quickly, they could displace us from existence”. Most would consider our extinction as a risk they are referring to when they say “AI Risk”.

Dana 23 Aug 2025 13:32 UTC
4 points
0
on: Could one country outgrow the rest of the world?
Great post.
This sort of superexponential growth vastly increases the amount of energy in the system and it seems to me that this amount of energy could very easily be enough to overcome the activation energy required to split groups (eg, countries) that are generally seen as stable.
If power/wealth becomes much more unevenly distributed within the AGI-owning group (top 1% currently at 67% of total wealth in USA, maybe ~20% of income?), why would they continue to support the rest of the group? Or, why exactly that group and not some other arbitrary group of their choosing? The government enforces/maintains the group boundary. What gives the government power to oppose the elites? The population. If the population is relatively poor, how can they maintain control of the government, and where would its power come from?
If the government cannot enforce the group boundary, decreasing the size of the group can greatly improve the group’s ability to prevent diffusion, and can easily make coordination/shared ideology much stronger.
Ideology seems like it could play major role if groups can be formed/broken at will by elites, and I don’t see why democratic/nationalistic ideologies would be favored in this case.

Dana 15 Jul 2025 16:49 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Is the political right becoming actively, explicitly antisemitic?
To what extent do you differentiate between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism? It seems to be very common to conflate the two, especially with many in the pro-Israel camp actively pushing this notion that they are one and the same. And it’s interesting that your sole concrete example is an attack on the Israeli government. I’m not familiar with Fuentes or Carroll. But anti-Israel sentiment is definitely up dramatically, and there will surely be significant collateral damage due to this. I wonder if we have any metrics which do a good job of disentangling these two.
Also, Ari Ben-Menashe linked both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s father to Mossad, so it’s not like this connection just came out of thin air.

Dana 22 Mar 2025 21:55 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: [deleted-by-moderator]’s comment on: Why Were We Wrong About China and AI? A Case Study in Failed Rationality
I think LW consensus has been that the main existential risk is AI development in general. The only viable long-term option is to shut it all down. Or at least slow it down as much as possible until we can come up with better solutions. DeepSeek from my perspective should incentivize slowing down development (if you agree with the fast follower dynamic. Also by reducing profit margins generally), and I believe it has.
Anyway, I don’t see how this relates to these predictions. The predictions are about China’s interest in racing to AGI. Do you believe China would now rather have an AGI race with USA than agree to a pause?

Dana 22 Mar 2025 16:08 UTC
8 points
5
on: Why Were We Wrong About China and AI? A Case Study in Failed Rationality
I’m not convinced that these were bad predictions for the most part.
The main prediction: 1) China lacks compute. 2) CCP values stability and control → China will not be the first to build unsafe AI/AGI.
Both of these premises are unambiguously true as far as I’m aware. So, these predictions being bad suggests that we now believe China is likely to build AGI without realizing it threatens stability/control, and with minimal compute, before USA? All while refusing to agree to any sort of deal to slow down? Why? Seems unlikely.
American companies, on the other hand, are still explicitly racing toward AGI, are incredibly well resourced, have strong government support, and have a penchant for disruption. The current administration also cares less about stability than any other in recent history.
So, from my perspective, USA racing to AGI looks even more dangerous than before, almost desperate. Whereas China is fast following, which I think everyone expected? Did anyone suggest that China would not be able to fast-follow American AI?

Dana 22 Mar 2025 2:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Rafael Harth’s Shortform
I keep some folders (and often some other transient files) on my desktop and pin my main apps to the taskbar. With apps pinned to your taskbar, you can open a new instance with Windows+shift+num (or just Windows+num if the app isn’t open yet).
I do the same as you and search for any other apps that I don’t want to pin.

Dana 7 Mar 2025 21:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
Well, vision and mapping seem like they could be pretty generic (and I expect much better vision in future base models anyway). For the third limitation, I think it’s quite possible that Claude could provide an appropriate segmentation strategy for whatever environment it is told it is being placed into.
Whether this would be a display of its intelligence, or just its capabilities, is beside the point from my perspective.

Dana 7 Mar 2025 18:09 UTC
10 points
1
on: So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
But these issues seem far from insurmountable, even with current tech. It is just that they are not actually trying, because they want to limit scaffolding.
From what I’ve seen, the main issues:
1) Poor vision → Can be improved through tool use, will surely improve greatly regardless with new models
2) Poor mapping → Can be improved greatly + straightforwardly through tool use
3) Poor executive function → I feel like this would benefit greatly from something like a separation of concerns. Currently my impression is Claude is getting overwhelmed with context, loses track of what’s going on, then starts messing with its long-term planning. From a clean context, its long-term planning seems fairly decent. Same for loops, I would expect a clean-context Claude could read a summary of recent steps constituting a loop and understand that it is in a loop and that it needs to try something else.
E.g., separate contexts for each of battling, navigation, summarization, long-term planning, coordination, etc.

Dana 26 Nov 2024 1:44 UTC
−1 points
−2
on: Crosspost: Developing the middle ground on polarized topics
I interpret the main argument as:
You cannot predict the direction of policy that would result from certain discussions/beliefs
The discussions improve the accuracy of our collective world model, which is very valuable
Therefore, we should have the discussions first and worry about policy later.
I agree that in many cases there will be unforeseen positive consequences as a result of the improved world model, but in my view, it is obviously false that we cannot make good directionally-correct predictions of this sort for many X. And the negative will clearly outweigh the positive for some large group in many cases. In that case, the question is how much you are willing to sacrifice for the collective knowledge.
If you want to highlight people who handle this well, the only interesting case is people from group A in favor of discussing X where X is presumed to lead to Y and Y negatively impacts A. Piper’s X has a positive impact on her beliefs (discussing solutions to falling birth-rates as one who believes it is a problem), and Caplan’s X has a positive impact on him (he is obviously high IQ), so neither of these are interesting samples. There is no reason for either of these to inherently want to avoid discussing these X. Even worse, Caplan’s rejected “Y” is a clear strawman, which begs the question and actually negatively updates me on his beliefs. More realistic Ys are things like IQ-based segregation, resource allocation, reproductive policies, etc.
If I reject these Ys for ideological reasons, and the middle ground looks like what I think it looks like, I do not want to expose the middle ground.

Dana 6 Nov 2024 17:26 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
I agree with you that people like him do a service to prediction markets: contributing a huge amount of either liquidity or information. I don’t agree with you that it is clear which one he is providing, especially considering the outcome. He did also win his popular vote bet, which was hovering around, I’m not sure, ~20% most of the time?
I think he (Theo) probably did have a true probability around 80% as well. That’s what it looks like at least. I’m not sure why you would assume he should be more conservative than Kelly. I’m sure Musk is not, as one example of a competent risk-taker.

Dana 5 Nov 2024 17:33 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
A few glaring issues here:
1) Does the question imply causation or not? It shouldn’t.
2) Are these stats intended to be realistic such that I need to consider potential flaws and take a holistic view or just a toy scenario to test my numerical skills? If I believe it’s the former and I’m confident X and Y are positively correlated, a 2x2 grid showing X and Y negatively correlated should of course make me question the quality of your data proportionally.
3) Is this an adversarial question such that my response may be taken out of context or otherwise misused?
The sample interviews from Veritasium did not seem to address any of these issues:
(1) They seemed to cut out the gun question, but the skin cream question implied causation, “Did the skin cream make the rash better or worse?”
(2) One person mentioned “I Wouldn’t have expected that...” which implies he thought it was real data,
(3) the last person clearly interpreted it adversarially.
In the original study, the question was stated as “cities that enacted a ban on carrying concealed handguns were more likely to have a decrease in crime.” This framing is not as bad, but still too close to implying causation in my opinion.

Dana 22 Oct 2024 3:26 UTC
1 point
0
on: Distinguishing ways AI can be “concentrated”
I do not really understand your framing of these three “dimensions”. The way I see it, they form a dependency chain. If either of the first two are concentrated, they can easily cut off access during takeoff (and I would expect this). If both of the first two are diffuse, the third will necessarily also be diffuse.

How could one control AI without access to the hardware/software? What would stop one with access to the hardware/software from controlling AI?

Dana 16 Oct 2024 19:09 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
I’ve updated my comment. You are correct as long as you pre-commit to a single answer beforehand, not if you are making the decision after waking up. The only reason pre-committing to heads works, though, is because it completely removes the Tuesday interview from the experiment. She will no longer be awoken on Tuesday, even if the result is tails. So, this doesn’t really seem to be in the spirit of the experiment in my opinion. I suppose the same pre-commit logic holds if you say the correct response gets (1/coin-side-wake-up-count) * value per response though.

Dana 16 Oct 2024 18:44 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
Halfer makes sense if you pre-commit to a single answer before the coin-flip, but not if you are making the decisions independently after each wake-up event. If you say heads, you have a 50% chance of surviving when asked on Monday, and a 0% chance of surviving when asked on Tuesday. If you say tails, you have a 50% chance of surviving Monday and a 100% chance of surviving Tuesday.

Dana 16 Oct 2024 18:41 UTC
7 points
1
on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
I would frame the question as “What is the probability that you are in heads-space?”, not “What is the probability of heads?”. The probability of heads is ¹⁄₂, but the probability that I am in heads-space, given I’ve just experiences a wake-up event, is ¹⁄₃.
The wake-up event is only equally likely on Monday. On Tuesday, the wake-up event is 0%/100%. We don’t know whether it is Tuesday or not, but we know there is some chance of it being Tuesday, because ¹⁄₃ of wake-up events happen on Tuesday, and we’ve just experienced a wake-up event:
P(Monday|wake-up) = ²⁄₃
P(Tuesday|wake-up) = ¹⁄₃
P(Heads|Tuesday) = ⁰⁄₁
P(Heads|Monday) = ¹⁄₂
P(Heads|wake-up) = P(Heads|Monday) * P(Monday|wake-up) + P(Heads|Tuesday) * P(Tuesday|wake-up) = ¹⁄₃