Shoshannah Tekofsky

• Shoshannah TekofskyMay 28, 2025, 9:35 AM

  23 points

  0

  in reply to: Tao Lin’s comment on: Sea­son Re­cap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000

  Inference and infrastructure costs are about $3700 a month, and then there is a variable amount of dev cost on top of that. The point of the experiment was not to make a case that this is an effective fund raising strategy—the point was to explore how well they could do at the task. Which, I think, is surprisingly well :)

• Shoshannah TekofskyMay 28, 2025, 9:34 AM

  20 points

  0

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Sea­son Re­cap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000

  Thanks!

  Hard to say how much they would have raised as anon humans. A few considerations that come to mind:

  • The agents led with the fact that they are agents where ever they interacted with humans

  • They were suspended from reddit and twitter for being bots

  • They crafted fundraising messages focussed on the effectiveness of the given charities and honesty about they themselves being AI agents.

  • Some people have an aversion to agents/​bots

  • We haven’t asked the people who donated why they did so, and I hesitate to speculate about their motives.

  • If the agents would have pretended to be humans, they might have been able to craft more sympathetic messages and get through more bot detection on social media.

  • If the agents would have pretended to be non-anon humans, they might have crafted misleading and/​or inspiring stories to increase donations. Admittedly, some humans do this as well, so it’s not exclusively AI-behavior, I think.

  • Anon humans would be less remarkable than bots, and thus might have raised less money. Not sure.

  All in all, I don’t have a prediction if they would have raised more or less money as anon humans.

Sea­son Re­cap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000

• Shoshannah TekofskyDec 28, 2024, 4:30 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Let­ter from an Alien Mind

  Oh super valid! I live in the Netherlands which is very densely populated

• Shoshannah TekofskyDec 27, 2024, 6:11 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Archimedes’s comment on: Let­ter from an Alien Mind

  I agree your example is a better analogy. What I was trying to point to was something else: how the decision to remove detail from a navigational map feels to me experientially. It feels like a form of voluntary blindness to me.

  In the case of the subway map, I’d probably also find a more accurate and faithful map easier to parse than the fully abstracted ones, cause I seem to have a high preference for visual details.

Let­ter from an Alien Mind

• Shoshannah TekofskyDec 5, 2024, 9:06 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: skunnavakkam’s comment on: Ex­plore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

  Thanks! Glad to hear it :D

Teach­ing My Younger Self to Pro­gram: A case study of how I’d pass on my skill at self-learning

• Shoshannah TekofskyNov 30, 2024, 5:17 PM

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: (The) Light­cone is noth­ing with­out its peo­ple: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser

  Oh shit. It’s worse even. I read the decimal separators as thousand separators.

  I’m gonna just strike through my comment.

  Thanks for noticing … <3

• Shoshannah TekofskyNov 30, 2024, 8:21 AM

  8 points

  0

  on: (The) Light­cone is noth­ing with­out its peo­ple: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser

  As someone who isn’t really in a position to donate much at all, and who feels rather silly about the small amount I could possibly give, and what a tiny drop that is compared the bucket this post is sketching...

  I uh … sat down and did some simple math. If everyone who ever votes (>12M) donates $10 then you’d have >$120 million covered. If we follow bullshit statistics of internet activity, where it’s said 99% of all content is generated by 1% of all people, then this heuristic would get us $1.2M from people paying this one time “subscription” fee. Now I also feel, based on intuition and ass-numbers, that LW folk have a better ratio than that, so let’s multiply by 2 and then we could get a $2.4 million subscriber fee together from small donations.

  Now on the pure power of typical mind … I personally like people knowing when I do a nice thing—even a stupidly small thing.

  So I’m commenting about it.

  I find this embarrassing, and I’m working through the embarrassment to make it easier for others to farm this nutrient too and just normalize it in case that helps with getting a critical mass of small donations of the $10 variety.

  Basically my point to readers is: ‘Everyone’ paying a one-time $10 subscription fee would solve the problem.

  The trick is mostly to help each other generate the activation energy to do this thing. If it helps to post, high five, or wave about it, please do! Visibility of small donations may help activation energy and get critical mass! Group action is awesome. Using your natural reward centers about it is great! <3 Hi :D Wanna join? ^_

  Thanks, abstractapplic, for noticing the first error in my calculation: It’s number of votes, not number of people voting. Additionally I noticed I applied the power of dyslexia to the decimal point and read that as an thousand separator. So ignore the errored out math, give what you can, and maybe upvote each other for support on giving as much as possible?

  PS: I would prefer if actually big donators would get upvoted more than my post of error math. Feel free to downvote my post just to achieve a better ordering of comments. Thanks. <3
  
  PPS: Note to the writer—Maybe remove decimal numbers entirely throughout the graphs? This is what it looked like for me, and led to the error. And this image is way zoomed in compared to what I see naturally on my screen.

  

• Shoshannah TekofskyNov 29, 2024, 2:22 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jesse Richardson’s comment on: Is School of Thought re­lated to the Ra­tion­al­ity Com­mu­nity?

  Thanks for the explanation! Are you familiar with the community here and around Astral Codex Ten (ACX)? There are meetups and events (and a lot of writers) who focus on the art and skill of rationality. That was what led to my question originally.

• Shoshannah TekofskyNov 7, 2024, 4:54 PM

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Ex­plore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

  This made me unreasonably happy. Thank you :D

• Shoshannah TekofskyNov 5, 2024, 3:09 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Ex­plore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

  Thank you for the in-depth thoughts!

• Shoshannah TekofskyNov 5, 2024, 3:06 PM

  7 points

  3

  in reply to: markusrobam’s comment on: Ex­plore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

  Thank you!

  It was a joke :) I had been warned by my friends that the joke was either only mildly funny or just entirely confusing. But I personally found it hilarious so kept it in. Sorry for my idiosyncratic sense of humor ;)

• Shoshannah TekofskyOct 15, 2024, 7:45 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Is School of Thought re­lated to the Ra­tion­al­ity Com­mu­nity?

  Oh cool!

  I was asking for any connection of any type. The overlap just seemed so great that I’d expect there to be a connection of some sort. The Clearer Thinking link makes sense and is an example, thank you!

• Shoshannah TekofskyOct 15, 2024, 2:18 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Is School of Thought re­lated to the Ra­tion­al­ity Com­mu­nity?

  Oh and also, thank you for checking and sharing your thoughts! :)

• Shoshannah TekofskyOct 15, 2024, 2:18 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Is School of Thought re­lated to the Ra­tion­al­ity Com­mu­nity?

  I didn’t look deeply in to the material, but good branding gives people a good feeling about a thing, and I think rationality could use some better branding. In my experience a lot of people bounce off a lot of the material cause they have negative associations with it or it’s not packaged in a way that appeals. I think even if (I didn’t check) the material is too superficial to be useful as content, it’s still useful to increase people’s affinity /​ positive association with rationality.

[Question] Is School of Thought re­lated to the Ra­tion­al­ity Com­mu­nity?

• Shoshannah TekofskyOct 13, 2024, 2:50 PM

  13 points

  0

  on: Parental Writ­ing Selec­tion Bias

  Yeah, I can second this entire sentiment. I try to write up parenting tricks that work for me that are clearly not going to reflect negatively on my kids, or will even feel too personal. And then I realized that a lot of the most valuable information that I could read as a parent, I’ll never find cause a parent with high integrity is not going to write down very negative experiences they had with their kids and all the ways they failed to respond optimally. It reminds me a little of Duncan’s social dark matter concept.

• Shoshannah TekofskyOct 11, 2024, 10:53 AM

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: MakoYass’s Shortform

  Oh this is amazing. I can never keep the two apart cause of the horrible naming. I think I’m just going to ask people if they mean intuition or reason from now on.