DanielW

• DanielW 12 Jun 2026 20:16 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: vals tutor’s comment on: If you, a hu­man, can imag­ine red and green be­ing swapped, you are prob­a­bly conscious

  It seems like your complaint is just with the term sense data then, and I don’t see why. You can replace the word sense with “experienced” and the meaning is identical. Sense data refers to the information we obtain through our experienced perceptions. Sense data refers to the experience not the raw information flowing through the nervous system.

  since in fact a larger part of your experience depends on the processing than the inputs.

  I don’t thjnk this is a fact. Our experience is one thing dependent on the entire process. If you cut off the front end, there is no information, if you cut off the backend the same is true.

  Take your example of a camera. Which is more responsible for a photo: the incoming light, the CCD, the wiring (inc. A/​D converter, line driver, frame driver), or the software the converts those signals into a display? Intuitively, my feeling would be the software is the least important (you could derive the information from the raw signals, but not the other way) but as far as understanding what captures the image you have to have the entire process for it to work.

• DanielW 12 Jun 2026 17:56 UTC

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  in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: The Skep­tic, the Bayesian, Em­piri­cism and Claims to Know:

  Yes, I think this is worth pointing out, but what I wanted this to be focusing on the qualitive way people tend to use Bayes in citing their confidence as a percentage (without differentiating the source of their estimate) which gives rise to appearing excessively confident and uncritical.

  Moving it to talk about a beta distribution is just a step back, since before hand Al would have good reason to think the probability was 50% while Bri’s estimate is purely a guess (as she lacks any data to derive the likely outcomes).

• DanielW 12 Jun 2026 17:48 UTC

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  in reply to: vals tutor’s comment on: If you, a hu­man, can imag­ine red and green be­ing swapped, you are prob­a­bly conscious

  Yes the thought experiment is meaningful based on the fact that they are the same. It serves to answer the question “why talk about qualia at all rather than just calling experiences sense data?

  If something is identical, it doesn’t make much sense, imo, to differentiate them like this. It makes more sense to say “sense data is the total product of information transmitted and interpreted by our nervous system” then to say “sense data is the information recorded by our peripheral nervous system, which is experienced by our central nervous system which poses qualia”. The actual sense data we are talking about is our perceptions not the uninterpreted chemical systems. SO it doesn’t make sense to consider them separate entities when talking about the perceived data.

• DanielW 12 Jun 2026 14:51 UTC

  4 points

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  on: If you, a hu­man, can imag­ine red and green be­ing swapped, you are prob­a­bly conscious

  It is not obvious to me that imagining flipping one’s optic nerves is meaningfulling different in terms of our experience than flipping around one’s neurons. If a brain interprets a signal from an optic nerve as recieving red light (when the light is of wave length normally called green) where the signal is from a normal optic nerve, that seems identical in terms of experience to an optic nerve sending a signal that the brain interprets as red because the optic nerves that transmit the signals are switched. It is like saying 1+2 is meaningfully different from 2+1. The ordering doesn’t matter if the end results are indistinguishable. There is no discernible difference in the results so it seems to me they should be thought of as the same, it seems nonsensical to define the first one as something like “experiences from different qualia” and the second as “mere differences from optic nerves.” In no way does the former seem indicative of a deeper difference that I can identify.

• DanielW 12 Jun 2026 3:15 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Ce­lene’s thoughts on consciousness

  I was going to write up an essay earlier on the topic but held off because real work and I saw you had tweeted about doing a write up covering similar topics. It seems to me what people get “wrong” about the zombie, conciousness etc debate is a matter of first principles.

  I think we (understandably) over-empasize definitions sometimes, which becomes a key problem. Try to approach the problem from both directions, from the bottom modeling and applying models to the world and from the top (more akin to Descartes’ approach) observing and making inductive inferences from there. Neither side can provide us strict ‘proof’ but provide useful ways to think about the problem.

  From the bottom up:

  Imagine at the level of first principles modeling the abstract terms without reference to the physical. This is what math is about: I can do calculations using the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2) to make useful calculations of distances when I map that relationship onto real world things. Defining a in terms of real world phenomena would be less than unhelpful.

  What is conciousness in such a model? You might say your model includes some functions that model themselves and you are calling that conciousness, okay how helpful is that to understanding the world? How well does it map on to what we see in the world?

  My senses are aware of something, call it qualia perhaps, does this map on to the same term?

  We can think of our senses from the top down instead:

  “I” have this experience. What is the basis for the experience? It seems to be have strong causal ties to neurological activity which and responses to stimulus which I can observe from my nervous system and brain studies. Okay, do others have an analogous experience? Well they, like me, report having something similiar, and when we cut open their brains and look at how they respond to stimuli so it is reasonable to say that the explanation that best fits those observations is that there are analogous experiences going on in them. Okay, do animals have the same? Well, they seem to share the same mechanism and many of the responses to stimuli to various extents, some are nearly identical to us. Some seem to also be able to perform similiar tasks which require responding to stimuli and modeling themselves. So to varying extents we can deduce with various confidences this data is best explained by some sort of analogous experience. Okay what about a camera? Not so much, the same analyses cannot be applied. How about an LLM? Maybe we see some of the same actions, possibly we even can get it modeling itself, but we don’t have the same mechanisms and at a granual level the responses to stimuli are quite different (they lack nervous systems, of course) so we cannot deduce an analogous experience.

  ------

  After all that we are left with the “so what?” What does it mean if something is concious? Are we going to apply what we infer to utilitarian calculations and say “if i infer you have qualia, then I place utility on your experience so it is wrong to kill and eat you, but if you lack qualia then your experience is without utility so if it improves my utility killing and eating you is a good thing, actually”? Does your understanding of the world with it lead to different policies and approaches? These involve quite a bit of subjective reasoning, so I will leave any reader to try to think them through and answer themselves.

• DanielW 11 Jun 2026 23:35 UTC

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  in reply to: rnollet’s comment on: The Skep­tic, the Bayesian, Em­piri­cism and Claims to Know:

  Not sure what you mean by that.

  I think I should have discussed the implicit point about information states more explicitly, I sort of assumed it was a point people familiar with probabilities would understand but I think not enumerating the point made my post more confusing.

  When we talk about probability in determined and determinist states depends on information states.

  The probability of it being tails at the point the question is asked is 100% since it landed tails up and heads down. But Al and Bri don’t have the information to make that assessment, so instead they have to assess the probability another way. What Al is estimating is not the “real world probability of this particular event” but instead “if I found myself in a situation with the same knowledge, how often in those situations would I expect the coin to be heads up or tails up?” His estimate of 51% of the time it would be heads up would correct and reasonable in the frequentist view in the but wrong to the real world.

  By contrast, Bri’s estimate of 90% is likely unreasonable but correct to the real world data.

  The point being that bad priors can appear correct when generally wrong. As a consequence, priors that are not objectively verified should be viewed with a great deal more skepticism even if they may appear to be correct. I had another section which I was too lazy to finish writing up (as it really should be done more mathically rigorously) extending this to causal implications through the example of monkey’s using typewriters. I might get around to it at some point.

• DanielW 10 Jun 2026 18:10 UTC

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  in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: DanielW’s Shortform

  Might make it longer at some point, as there are a lot more nuances, but in case you are interested, I made a post discussing the use of decision theory and my view about how FDT fails to provide the same use, even utilizing the real world cases that Yudkowsky tends to cite for preferring FDT: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​ALvpivH4Ys6Jp7CKK/​​the-disutility-of-fdt-on-utility-functions-and-voting

• DanielW 10 Jun 2026 1:41 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: The Di­su­til­ity of FDT: on Utility Func­tions and Vot­ing, In­sights from Be­hav­ioral Eco­nomics and De­ci­sion Theory

  It is to prescribe behaviors which I expect to be similar to ethical ones, like “Don’t loot the other universe even if it’s inhabited only by a paperclip optimizer”.

  Also (apologies for the double comment), while directionally correct, I think this may be a bit of a misrepresentation of the aim of their decision theory (Yudkowsky and Soares would have to clarify their exact intent).

  Decision theories, including FDT, take utility functions as external to the theories themselves. If an agent gained utility by anti-social, destructive acts, every decision theory would prescribe positive values to those acts by definition. I don’t think FDT is intended to contradict this definition (indeed, their paper implicitly seems to accept it). Where I think you are directionally correct is that it aims to recommend the decision that would optimize utility from cooperating where greater (the first dilemma they describe in their paper is a clear example of this). If one’s ethical values are encapsulated within a utility function, than whatever optimizes utility should also be the most ethical (and if you are a utilitarian, the optimal ethical and optimal utility decisions are definitionally identical).

• DanielW 10 Jun 2026 1:12 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: The Di­su­til­ity of FDT: on Utility Func­tions and Vot­ing, In­sights from Be­hav­ioral Eco­nomics and De­ci­sion Theory

  I should have been clear there, I wasn’t trying to imply that the descriptive utility was a claim they made. i meant that in the sense that “it fails to serve a purpose which traditional decision theories are intended for (and are useful at)” not that “it fails to serve the purpose it is designed for.”

  I would argue it fails on its own terms (at least sometimes) as a normative theory (which is a stated goal for the theory given by Yudkowsky & Soares) but as you say it isn’t trying to be a descriptive theory. It not being useful as a descriptive theory is just a point of comparison of its merits against traditional models.

  Edit: Also, in case it isn’t obvious, I have an economic background so my primary interest in it would be if it outperforms the uses of decision theory (both normative and descriptive) in economics.

The Di­su­til­ity of FDT: on Utility Func­tions and Vot­ing, In­sights from Be­hav­ioral Eco­nomics and De­ci­sion Theory

The Skep­tic, the Bayesian, Em­piri­cism and Claims to Know:

• DanielW 2 Jun 2026 16:00 UTC

  3 points

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  on: DanielW’s Shortform

  I was thinking of doing more research and a write up, but someone may have covered it or knows of a good reference (I have seen there is some related discussions here on uncertainty and Bayesian updating).

  Priors are not all equal, there is a big (rather obvious) difference between a prior that is based on empirical data and quantitatively robust models, and priors that are based on personal guesses and intuitions. Personally, with my own empirical and skeptical training as background, I find conflating these somewhat unhelpful and giving the appearance of having more confidence than one really should at times (that is, having a 90% confidence derived from empirical analysis seems very different than having a 90% confidence derived from unenumerated priors).

  Is there a good discussion anyone is aware of delineating these? It seems often, particularly among those applying bayesian updating to lay settings, priors are not clearly differentiated on an evidentiary basis.

• DanielW 1 Jun 2026 14:57 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  I think it depends on what you are including by analogy, when making general cases, we have to pretty much exclusively deal with analogs.

  The most basic case might be stated as:

  1. If ∀x(a⊃x⊢b) ⊃ ∀y(a⊃y⊢b)

  2. y1⊢a

  3. ∴ y1⊢b

  That is, e.g.

  1. If all for all convicted criminals, killing someone implies they are bad, then for cops killing someone implies they are bad.

  2. Officer Bob killed someone.

  3. Therefore, officer Bob is bad.

  If it is the case that for convicted criminals killing someone is only bad because, e.g., there wasn’t a justification, then (1) is false (and you would have to include that as a qualifiers to make it true). But it is trivial to accept as true.

• DanielW 1 Jun 2026 6:39 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: Lizard­men are Not Con­stant—A In­tro­duc­tory Primer to Think­ing about Sur­vey Data

  Thank you for the references! Aella’s case is interesting a very good example of how design matters to how you should think about the problem, particularly her statement (emphasis added):

  in general whenever I’ve asked variations on this set of questions, the number of correct votes roughly increases with the difficulty of the problem, before hitting a ceiling when the difficulty is too high, and slowly decreases with that difficulty.

  In a lot of survey design the opposite is a much larger problem, particularly if you incentivize responses (i.e. paying people for completing the survey). The more complex you make a question, the more often you will have lazy respondents just pick the first question instead of engaging with what is being asked. Because she is just posing a twitter poll with little incentive to answer, I imagine most lazy respondents simply do not read the question.

• DanielW 1 Jun 2026 2:47 UTC

  4 points

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  on: Lizard­men are Not Con­stant—A In­tro­duc­tory Primer to Think­ing about Sur­vey Data

  @Karl Krueger, thank you for the typo corrections and reacts! I deleted the “linked landlines” part since it was confusing and added nothing, but, for reference, I was referring to a practice of address-based sampling (ABS) where addresses are sometimes matched out to landlines to make it easier to contact them for responses. These often leads to particular sampling bias (which can sometimes be addressed by creating separate sets of addresses that can be matched and those that cannot). It is sort of a middle ground between randomly sampling addresses and landline surveys (randomly sampling numbers has a lot of issues).

  Since surveys using landlines are generally more prone to bogus responses, I had referenced that in my example, but on reflection is a needless nuance that doesn’t change the point being made.

  I will probably try to reword a few things pursuant to some other areas you marked tomorrow, time permitting.

• DanielW 1 Jun 2026 0:35 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: cdt’s comment on: Lizards and Less Wrong Jar­gon—A Brief Cri­tique of Convention

  I should probably have gone through and edited it more or at least done another pass or two (unfortunately, I am behind on more important IRL things), but if you are curious I did the write up I was thinking of here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​kvtE9Md9Z8i8PyLm6/​​lizardmen-are-not-constant-a-very-brief-introductory-primer

Lizard­men are Not Con­stant—A In­tro­duc­tory Primer to Think­ing about Sur­vey Data

• DanielW 31 May 2026 15:16 UTC

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  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Viliam’s Shortform

  My understanding is that they have fairly low but non-trivial false positives rates and false negative rates (in the range of <1% though false negative rates vary depending on the LLM, and can be higher if other methods are used to avoid detection). Useful for a lot of purposes, but if you use it as a default test on things at scale, you regularly will make mistakes in both directions.

  For a decent study on the pretty low rates: https://​​www.nber.org/​​papers/​​w34223

• DanielW 30 May 2026 17:56 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: cdt’s comment on: Lizards and Less Wrong Jar­gon—A Brief Cri­tique of Convention

  Thanks!

  Unclear why people perceive this comment as emotional

  If I had to guess, I think using bold may have given that impression style wise? Also, I was pretty blunt in places—I do call him flat out ‘wrong’ . I wanted to highlight those things as I believed gwern was fundamentally misunderstanding what I said (e.g. his statement “You just think that the survey must be accurate” is just wrong, I do not think that).

  The use of “lizardman constant” here seems to conflate many sources of measurement error in surveys in a way that it didn’t upon the original definition.

  I do think I made a mistake by not including a discussion of sources of issues and terminology in literature in my original post and I took for granted, (which, in my defense, gwern does as well though I think he gets it wrong), that readers would be familiar with the description Scott Alexander gave in his 2013 essay. I am doing another write up which I think I will make into a post trying to explain better how to think about survey data (it is something I work with a lot professionally and am quite familiar with).

  I thought it would be more intuitive to a reader that the issues a non-probabilistic opt-in survey is vulnerable to (including bogus respondents) are not interchangeable with the issues a metareview of longitudinal surveys matched against diagnosis data are likely to face.

• DanielW 30 May 2026 14:58 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Lizards and Less Wrong Jar­gon—A Brief Cri­tique of Convention

  Thank you! I hadn’t seen that piece of his. I absolutely agree with him there, though he actual even goes a bit further than I would in places (example below). Case studies (even fictional ones) can be useful for illustrating examples and providing more engaging moral lessons but they should not be used in place of actually engaging with an argument on its terms (or refuting the terms, oc). It seems there is a habit of doing just that in some spaces that has developed.

  I would *suspect* in Yudowsky’s case it is in large part driven by there being more demands on his time, as he has become more popular and taken more roles in his organizations and advocacy.

  A story is never a rational attempt at analysis, not even with the most diligent science fiction writers, because stories don’t use probability distributions. I illustrate as follows...

  This seems to me to be a bit too strong of a case. You can have a story that contains a rational attempt at analysis and not all rational analyses, imo, require a formal probability distribution (as a side point, often, I would actually argue, formal probability distributions are better avoided where there is not strong enough evidence to justify preferring one distribution to another, besides different a priori intuitions).