DanielFilan

• DanielFilan 3 Dec 2025 6:00 UTC

  6 points

  3

  in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform

  I think it’s not just that it’s slower/​deeper: my personal sense (which might be just a thing of not requiring much medical care between the ages of 5 and 30) is that the pace at which awesome new stuff is happening in medicines I can buy got much faster in the last few years. If my perception is right, it seems like that requires some explanation of “bio is slower/​deeper and also 40 years ago there was a massive breakthru that took 40 years to percolate”, and not just “bio is slower/​deeper”.

• DanielFilan 3 Dec 2025 5:56 UTC

  11 points

  2

  on: MIRI’s 2025 Fundraiser

  This year, we received a $1.6M matching grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which means that the first $1.6M we receive in donations before December 31st will be matched 1:1. We will only receive the grant funds if it can be matched by donations.

  Does anyone know (i.e. actually know, not just have a speculative guess) why SFF does this sort of thing? Naively it seems like a weird way to operate from a perspective of maximizing the good done by their donations. Is the reasoning something like “if other people donate to MIRI, that increases our estimate of how valuable MIRI is, and so we want to donate more to it”?

• DanielFilan 3 Dec 2025 5:53 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform

  I wonder if it’s a thing where it’s taking a while for those things to hit. Like, mRNA vaccines are only a couple of years old, GLP-1RAs are in a gradual process of being rolled out, etc. If I think of the category of “awesome newish bio stuff I’d like to use”, it seems like most of it becomes widely available to consumers in the near future or last 5 years, with the exception of statins.

• DanielFilan 28 Nov 2025 17:08 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Con­sider not donat­ing un­der $100 to poli­ti­cal candidates

  Another relevant consideration: I donated some money to political candidates and now I have a bunch of spam emails that cost me more than $3 of annoyance to deal with

• DanielFilan 8 Nov 2025 16:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Au­gus­tine of Hippo’s Hand­book on Faith, Hope, and Love in Latin (or: Claude as Pan­doc++)

  Thanks for the bug report! I set the links to just /​pdfs/​augustine_enchiridion.pdf (and analogous) and didn’t realize that would break with cross-posting. Should be fixed now.

Au­gus­tine of Hippo’s Hand­book on Faith, Hope, and Love in Latin (or: Claude as Pan­doc++)

• DanielFilan 30 Sep 2025 20:37 UTC

  9 points

  3

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What SB 53, Cal­ifor­nia’s new AI law, does

  You can always be more incentivized to do or avoid things! (no comment on this specific example)

• DanielFilan 29 Sep 2025 21:03 UTC

  9 points

  2

  on: AI Safety Field Growth Anal­y­sis 2025

  Based on my recollections of being around in 2015, your number from then seems too high to me (I would have guessed there were at most 30 people doing what I would have thought of as AI x-risk research back then). Can I get a sense of who you’re counting?

• DanielFilan 29 Sep 2025 20:57 UTC

  12 points

  0

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  Answer from the abstract of the paper Kat linked in a parallel comment:

  Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods.

• DanielFilan 29 Sep 2025 20:54 UTC

  5 points

  3

  in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  In particular, vegans/​vegetarians are more likely to be left-wing, and left-wing people in the US have higher rates of mental illness.

• DanielFilan 23 Sep 2025 21:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing SB53.info

  Thanks for making this! For what it’s worth, it looks like 22757.12(d) requires developers to be somewhat transparent about risks from internal deployment, which seems quite interesting to me and I’m surprised didn’t make the summary.

MATS 8.0 Re­search Projects

• DanielFilan 26 Aug 2025 16:22 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: DanielFilan’s Short­form Feed

  I wonder if “discourse in such a way that your interlocutor, if they decided to adopt good faith, could easily deal with you (or otherwise leave)” gets you the benefits of “assume good faith” without the drawbacks of asking you to sometimes assume false stuff?

• DanielFilan 26 Aug 2025 6:49 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Some­body in­vented a bet­ter bookmark

  How do these hold up in backpacks /​ luggage bags? I’m worried they’d catch on stuff and tear pages more than other bookmarks (that can be pushed totally into the book).

• DanielFilan 26 Aug 2025 4:04 UTC

  9 points

  0

  on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  And if the stakes are even higher, you can ultimately try to get me fired from this job. The exact social process for who can fire me is not as clear to me as I would like, but you can convince Eliezer to give head-moderatorship to someone else, or convince the board of Lightcone Infrastructure to replace me as CEO, if you really desperately want LessWrong to be different than it is.

  I don’t plan on doing this, but who is on the board of Lightcone Infrastructure? This doesn’t seem to be on your website.

• DanielFilan 25 Aug 2025 20:44 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  Like, I guess I have never heard the term “civil justice” used instead, and I don’t know of a better term that clearly spans both

  Just realized I never responded to this—I would just use the term “civil law” (as I did). For a term that covers both, “the legal system” perhaps, altho it’s a bit too broad, and you’re right that there’s not a great option.

• DanielFilan 25 Aug 2025 20:42 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  I can’t comment on how things work in Germany, since they have a very different structure of law (that my guess is English-language terms are not well-designed for), but:

  I agree one could maybe make some argument that it’s not “criminal justice” until you “commit a crime by violating a civil court order”

  This is what I think—in particular, the “criminal justice system” is the system that involves dealing with crimes, and the “civil law system” is the system that involves dealing with civil wrongs. You’re correct that they relate, but there are enough distinctions (who brings cases, proof standards, typical punishments, source of the laws) that I think it makes sense to distinguish them. I further think that most people with enough context to know the difference between civil and criminal law would not guess that a similarly informed person would use the term “criminal justice system” to cover civil law.

• DanielFilan 25 Aug 2025 20:01 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  Relevant evidence from the Wikipedia page on Criminal justice:

  Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have committed crimes[...]

  The criminal justice system consists of three main parts:

  1. Law enforcement agencies, usually the police

  2. Courts and accompanying prosecution and defence lawyers

  3. Agencies for detaining and supervising offenders, such as prisons and probation agencies.

  Civil law lacks parts 1 and 3.

• DanielFilan 25 Aug 2025 19:59 UTC

  2 points

  2

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  I would not use the term “criminal justice” to describe civil law, since civil law deals with civil wrongs rather than crimes.

• DanielFilan 25 Aug 2025 19:50 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  A classical example of microeconomics-informed reasoning about criminal justice is the following snippet of logic.

  If someone can gain in-expectation $X$ dollars by committing some crime (which has negative externalities of $Y>X$ dollars), with a probability $p$ of getting caught, then in order to successfully prevent people from committing the crime you need to make the cost of receiving the punishment ($Z$) be greater than $\frac{X}{p}$, i.e. $X<p\ast Z$.

  Note that this is more centrally an example of micro-informed reasoning about the role of punitive damages in civil law, not criminal law, as illustrated by this classic article making basically this argument about punitive damages.