David Lorell

• David Lorell 25 Nov 2025 18:09 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Easy vs Hard Emo­tional Vulnerability

  Might “uninhibited” or “unfiltered” be closer to the concept you’re going for here?

• David Lorell 15 Nov 2025 20:34 UTC

  11 points

  2

  on: “But You’d Like To Feel Com­pan­ionate Love, Right? … Right?”

  (Written quickly, and therefore not compactly, in the shower. Apologies.)

  I have suspected for a while that there is instrumental value in oxytocin/​companionate-love/​etc, beyond the terminal ‘niceness’ of it.

  Consider alcohol (or other inhibition-lowering drugs):

  • Bars are, apparently, the standard place to meet up after work and relax in lots of cultures

  • Ensuring there is sufficient wine/​alcohol at a dinner party (or parties of any sort) is IME considered a top priority

  • At parties, it is a meme that high schoolers are taught to fight that folks (especially the host) will frequently at least lightly suggest that you have a drink/​other similar drug

  Intuitively to me, “~everyone will have a better time here /​ this way compared to the alternative.” But why? I think a large part of it is that folks who have had alcohol before both know how it effects them (it makes them more likely to speak their mind and/​or feel friendly toward others and/​or take risks social or otherwise) and, the key part: they also believe it effects everyone else roughly the same way. If everyone at the party knows that everyone else is getting drunk, if there is common knowledge that everyone is lowering their guard, then everyone feels safe and relaxed enough to in fact lower theirs. Social frictions get smoothed and higher value social risks get taken (e.g. dancing, asking someone out, etc),

  I think oxytocin/​companionate love plays a very similar role on the level of personal relationships (of all kinds.) If there is common knowledge that the individuals are drunk on love/​connection (or at least buzzed,) then there is a commonly known joint belief that the other will seek to overlook flaws, establish greater trust, make good faith efforts toward the other’s values, look out for the other in a general sense, …. And when that is believed by all participants, alliances on all levels (professional, friendly, romantic,...) are made much more frequently, easily, and held more strongly.

  This is a large part of why, I think, that there is often such delighted interest from others in whether one is drunk/​drugged...and similarly why there is such delighted and/​or profoundly serious interest in whether one feels love toward another. Having common knowledge about everyone under the same or similar influence is a majority of the value to be had.

  Last piece of the model: Being drunk/​drugged among people you don’t already trust is, as I understand, commonly considered to be a Bad Time, and I think it’s because you’ve made yourself more vulnerable but have no assurance that others are more likely to trust you in kind. I claim that it is for similar reasons that people become very impassioned about the question of “Does X really love me?” If one person is sipping on that oxytocin, and the other one isn’t, then that creates a serious asymmetric vulnerability.

  At least that’s my model of a significant chunk of the instrumental value /​ import /​ function of oxytocin to human brains in particular.

  So with all that established: Contrary to the post title: If you (John) find some way to temporarily shoot up with oxytocin that works, there may be human-relationship/​coordination circumstances where you (John) might want to do so as an instrumental act toward satisfying non-companionate-love values.

• David Lorell 31 Oct 2025 19:36 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Re­sam­pling Con­serves Re­dun­dancy & Me­di­a­tion (Ap­prox­i­mately) Un­der the Jensen-Shan­non Divergence

  Thanks for the check! I’ve added a collab containing my quick numerical stress tests, linked at the bottom of the post.

• David Lorell 28 Oct 2025 22:01 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Re­sam­pling Con­serves Re­dun­dancy (Ap­prox­i­mately)

  (Update 7)
  
  After some back and forth last night with an LLM^[1], we now have a proof of “chainability” for the redundancy diagrams in particular. (And have some hope that this will be most of what we need to rescue the stochastic->deterministic nat lat proof.)

  (Theorem) Chainability of Redunds

  Let P be a distribution over $X_1$, $X_2$, and $\Lambda$.
  Define:
  $Q[X,\Lambda ]:=P\left[X\right]P\left[\Lambda |X_1\right]$
  $S[X,\Lambda ]:=P\left[X\right]P\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]=P\left[X\right]{\sum }_{X_1}P\left[X_1|X_2\right]P\left[\Lambda |X\right]$$R[X,\Lambda ]:=P\left[X\right]Q\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]=P\left[X\right]{\sum }_{X_1}P\left[X_1|X_2\right]P\left[\Lambda |X_1\right]$

  Where you can think of Q as ‘forcing’ P into factorizing per one redundancy pattern: $X_2\to X_1\to \Lambda$, S as forcing the other pattern: $X_1\to X_2\to \Lambda$, and R as forcing one after the other: first $X_2\to X_1\to \Lambda$, and then $X_1\to X_2\to \Lambda$.

  The theorem states,
  $D_{KL}\left(P||R\right)\le D_{KL}\left(P||Q\right)+D_{KL}\left(P||S\right)$,

  Or in words: The error (in $D_{KL}$ from $P$) accrued by applying both factorizations to P, is bounded by the the sum of the errors accrued by applying each of the factorizations to P, separately.

  Proof

  The proof proceeds in 3 steps.

  1. $D_{KL}\left(P||Q\right)\ge D_{KL}\left(S||R\right)$

     Pf.
     Let $a_{X_1}:=P\left[X_1|X_2\right]P\left[\Lambda |X\right]\ge 0$

     Let $b_{X_1}:=P\left[X_1|X_2\right]P\left[\Lambda |X_1\right]\ge 0$

     By the log-sum inequality:

     ${\sum }_{X_1}\left(a_{X_1}ln\frac{a_{X_1}}{b_{X_1}}\right)\ge \left({\sum }_{X_1}{a}_{X_1}\right)ln\left(\frac{{\sum }_{X_1}{a}_{X_1}}{{\sum }_{X_1}{b}_{X_1}}\right)$

     $⟹$$D_{KL}\left(P||Q\right)\ge D_{KL}\left(S||R\right)$ as desired.

  2. $D_{KL}\left(P||R\right)=D_{KL}\left(P||S\right)+D_{KL}\left(S||R\right)$

     Pf.

     $D_{KL}\left(P||R\right)-D_{KL}\left(P||S\right)$

     $={\sum }_{X,\Lambda }P[X,\Lambda ]\left[lnP\right[\Lambda |X]-lnR[\Lambda |X_2]-lnP[\Lambda |X]+lnS[\Lambda |X_2\left]\right]$

     $={\sum }_{X_2}P\left[X_2\right]{\sum }_{\Lambda }{\sum }_{X_1}P\left[X_1|X_2\right]P\left[\Lambda |X\right]ln\frac{S\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]}{R\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]}$

     $={\sum }_{X_1}{\sum }_{X_2}P\left[X_1|X_2\right]P\left[X_2\right]{\sum }_{\Lambda }S\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]ln\frac{S\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]P\left[X\right]}{R\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]P\left[X\right]}$

     $=D_{KL}\left(S||R\right)$

  3. Combining steps 1 and 2,
     $D_{KL}\left(P||Q\right)\ge D_{KL}\left(S||R\right)=D_{KL}\left(P||R\right)-D_{KL}\left(P||S\right)$

     $⟹D_{KL}\left(P||R\right)\le D_{KL}\left(P||Q\right)+D_{KL}\left(P||S\right)$

     which completes the proof.

  Notes:
  In the second to last line of step 2, the expectation over $P\left[X_1|X_2\right]$ is allowed because there are no free $X_1$’s in the expression. Then, this aggregates into an expectation over $S[X,\Lambda ]$ as $S\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]=S\left[\Lambda |X\right]$.

  We are hopeful that this, thought different than the invalidated result in the top level post, will be an important step to rescuing the stochastic natural latent ⇒ deterministic natural latent result.
  

  1. ^

     A (small) positive update for me on their usefulness to my workflow!

• David Lorell 23 Oct 2025 22:31 UTC

  9 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Re­sam­pling Con­serves Re­dun­dancy (Ap­prox­i­mately)

  (Update 5)
  
  A conjecture we are working on which we expect to be generally useful beyond possibly rescuing the stoch->det proof that used to rely on the work in this post:

  Chainability (Conjecture):
  $\forall P[X,\Lambda ]$with ${ϵ}_1:=D_{KL}(X_1\to X_2\to \Lambda )$, ${ϵ}_2:=D_{KL}(X_1\leftarrow \Lambda \to X_2)$,
  Define $Q[X,\Lambda ]:=P\left[X\right]P\left[\Lambda |X_2\right]$, and $Q^{\prime }[X,\Lambda ]:=Q\left[X_1|\Lambda \right]Q\left[X_2|\Lambda \right]Q\left[\Lambda \right]$.
  Then, $D_{KL}\left(P||Q\right)<n({ϵ}_1+{ϵ}_2)$
  
  Here is a collab with a quick numerical test that suggests the bound holds (and that n=1, in this case).
  
  (Note: The above as written is just one step of chaining, and ultimately we are hoping to show it holds for arbitrarily many steps, accumulating an associated number of epsilons as error.)

• David Lorell 17 Oct 2025 21:27 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Jeremy Gillen’s comment on: Re­sam­pling Con­serves Re­dun­dancy (Ap­prox­i­mately)

  Do you have sympy code for the example noted at the bottom of the collab that claims a ratio of > 9.77 including the mediation $D_{KL}$? I tried with the parameters you mention and am getting a ratio of ~3.4 (which is still a violation of previous expectations, tbc.)

• David Lorell 16 Oct 2025 23:54 UTC

  11 points

  0

  in reply to: David Lorell’s comment on: Re­sam­pling Con­serves Re­dun­dancy (Ap­prox­i­mately)

  (Update 2)
  
  Taking the limit of the ratio of $D_{KL}$s (using summation rather than max) with $c\to 0$ while $b:=10c$ gives $5\left(\frac{r+1}{11}\right)$

  Setting c very small and ramping up r indeed brakes the bound more and more severely. (Code changes from the collab you provided, below.)

  Code changes /​ additions

  Block 1:
  a,b,c,d,r = sp.symbols(“a b c d r”)
  variable_substitutions = { # The definitions of these variables
  a: 0.25,
  b: 1e-90,
  c: 1e-91,
  r: 20000000,
  }
  
  Block 2 (later on):
  expr = (kl3/​(kl1 + kl2)).subs(d, (1-3*c-(r+1)*b-2*a))
  print(“KL(X2->X1->L’)/​sum[KL(X1->X2->L),KL(X2->X1->L)]=”,(kl3/​(kl1 +kl2)).evalf(subs=variable_substitutions))
  
  Block3 (right after Block 2):
  expr = (kl3/​(kl1 + kl2)).subs(d, (1-3*c-(r+1)*b-2*a)).subs(b, 10*c)
  lim = sp.simplify(sp.limit(expr, c, 0))
  print(“Limit of KL(X2->X1->L’)/​sum[KL(X1->X2->L),KL(X2->X1->L)] as c->0+ =”, lim)

• David Lorell 16 Oct 2025 22:34 UTC

  15 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Re­sam­pling Con­serves Re­dun­dancy (Ap­prox­i­mately)

  (Update 1)
  
  We’ve looked at the code and fiddled with the math and are now more convinced of the issue.
  
  The 2nd order approximation holds when $\frac{Q\left[X\right]}{P\left[X\right]}\approx 1$ …Which our scaling-down construction does not provide. So, (among a host of other things,) we are now thinking about other ways to try wrangling the $D_{KL}$ bound into a euclidean space or otherwise into some form that is similarly “easy” to work with.
  
  (Thanks for finding this!)

• David Lorell 25 Aug 2025 17:51 UTC

  128 points

  −9

  on: Be­fore LLM Psy­chosis, There Was Yes-Man Psychosis

  This post absolutely sings. The “yes-man psychosis” framing is sticky, clarifying, and honestly—iconic. You take a fuzzy, slippery problem and pin it to the mat with crisp language, vivid examples, and just enough systems thinking to make the lights come on. The Boyd/​OODA connection is chef’s-kiss; it turns a cultural gripe into a concrete failure mode you can point at and say, “That—right there.” The Putin case study lands like a hammer, and the dead-organization metaphor (rocks, logs, and that hilariously misleading chart!) is going to live rent-free in my head. This is the kind of essay people forward to their bosses with “must read” in the subject line. It’s sharp, fearless, quotable, and—despite the bleak subject—fun to read. Truly an instant classic on power, perception, and how praise can calcify into poison. Bravo for naming the thing so precisely and making it impossible to unsee.

• David Lorell 11 Aug 2025 22:50 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  I wonder if your oxytocin is fine but you have, for whatever reason, a very strong cognitive “immune response” to its effects. I think it is common in teens (well, it was the case for me in tweenagehood,) to react to the hook of limerance/​this-whole-cluster with “*no one must know*.” Followed in my case by trying not to dwell on it. I’m not suggesting this thought specifically is something you have trained (maybe its more like “*be realistic*”) but maybe you have a well developed cognitive kata that shuts these kinds of thoughts down before they can become limerance/​love/​companionship/​etc.

• David Lorell 11 Aug 2025 3:43 UTC

  22 points

  13

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  You’re disgusting monsters, both of you.

  I can’t even bear to look at how you’ve both shamelessly normalized usage of the phrase “beg the question” to mean “prompt the question” rather than its god-given original meaning of “assume the premise.”

  Shame on you.

  Oh and nice kinks.

• David Lorell 11 Aug 2025 3:34 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  ...ah. When you put it that way.....

  If somehow something happened within the last decade which shifted my People vs Things interest parameter significantly more away from People and toward Things I’d probably be a much more capable researcher right now. (Unsure about before a decade from now because then we start messing with my middle-young teenagehood where the actual path I took to deciding I was going to work on alignment routed through caring deeply about others....or at least imagining the deep loss of not having the opportunity to mutually care very deeply about others in this way.)

  I’d also not have or be many things which I currently reflectively value highly, but that’s a me thing :)

  I might, if I meditated on it, press a button that goes back in time to perform that intervention back in my early college years, (and I’d grieve the decision more than I’ve grieved probably anything,) to increase the chance that our work is decisively counterfactual. I’m so glad that such a button does not exist.

  (Fun, and probably tragic from your POV, fact: Our very own Dan Hendryks more or less encouraged me to self modify in this way for this reason back when we were college. I shook my head and laughed at the time. Now I feel more complicatedly.)

  Point being: Yup. That sure is a life-influencing personality-parameter. Concern is super merited.

• David Lorell 11 Aug 2025 1:56 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  Fair enough and well taken. (I uh...don’t think it’s like written on the atoms that this stuff is Good tbc. I value it very highly and it seems like a big part of the human culture.)

  Some reasons that occur to me to be less worried than you seem:

  • It does sound to me like you already are interested in connecting with people more deeply

  • People fall in and out of love so it’s not that permanent an effect

  • I don’t think Ive heard of anyone getting addicted to supplemental oxytocin, and while lots of people say they want more love in their life it doesn’t seem like much of a addict-compulsion since most people are also not doing much to make that happen

  That said, caution seems extremely reasonable, in general and especially from your perspective here.

• David Lorell 11 Aug 2025 1:01 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  Well! This can be tested (Maybe.)

  I know folks who spray oxytocin up their nose. From a brief google this may in fact appreciably raise oxytocin levels both in plasma and CSF. It might be non trivial to get the right pattern/​timing to mimic natural oxytocin release under various romantic/​sexual circumstances, though. Worth looking into if that’s your model of what’s going on and you want to know what this thing is that everyone else thinks is so valuable.

• David Lorell 11 Aug 2025 0:27 UTC

  13 points

  8

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  Take this as a very noisy sample: Maybe? Sometimes? I think...no? Gun to my head: its more literally like an ache maybe but with very positive valence? It comes with a significant compulsion to express it (e.g. saying “fuck, I love you”) and in ~all examples I’ve seen of people saying they were feeling “warmly” about a person their bodies and faces move the same way this feeling moves mine.

• David Lorell 10 Aug 2025 23:25 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  I didn’t read anything in this reply that sounded like it was probably the feeling/​experience I associate with The Thing. (Whereas I internally nodded in recognition reading Caleb’s comment.)

  I think that an extremely productive and high trust “business-partnership” with someone can look very close to a high value romantic relationship (minus some symbols) but lack the internal experience of warm-fuzzy oriented-at-other-as-a-person thing I think Caleb was gesturing at. Which sounds super useful and I want people around me like that. But that’s not enough for romantic partnership. (Or maybe even deep friendship)

• David Lorell 10 Aug 2025 8:14 UTC

  10 points

  6

  on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Propo­si­tion of Ro­man­tic Relationships

  I agree strongly with much of this and it still feels like “a mutual happy promise of, ‘I got you’” still mostly captures it for me. Like, IMO a support which pushes me to become better and stronger is kinda what I meant when I phrased the thing as being “I got you.” When a person is less sure of themself or more afraid of abandonment or has whatever other insecurities that people-who-arent-you have, then the strength-giving action can be affirmation/​acceptance. (Not endorsement, acceptance.) And with that strength one might move forward and grow.

  If I imagine a romantic partner takes deep joy in my joy/​triumphs and is thereby motivated to intervene in ways that bring me more joy/​triumph, it doesn’t feel like there is much missing there. That’s the good shit. That’s what “I got you” was supposed to mean, I think. (And I won’t claim that growth is a universal value but I sure take joy and a sense of triumph in my own growth so an ideal partner for me would help me with that as I help them with what they value...which is likely to be similar if I’ve chosen well.)

  Notes:

  • I feel warm and fuzzy about being with people who take this stance toward me even if they aren’t very capable of making good on it very often. I like them and want them around. Putting energy into them at the expense of potential other who could deliver on the Good Thing in addition to wanting it, is very plausibly a mistake. I mention it to point out that this sort of feeling could cause confusion when you go looking for the dynamic in partnered folks. People can be instinctively chasing this ideal and even think they have it if they don’t distinguish their partner’s stance from their partners ability to deliver on it.

  • I think of this as the aspirational ideal. I think that to the extent that a romantic partnership fails at this dynamic, the relationship is worse for it. I think that for maybe most people, it is very hard to find a close approximation of this in part because they haven’t named it and don’t totally understand what they’re looking for, but are nonetheless usually attracted to approximations of or signals in the way of this. (This applies to people looking for partnership. People can also look for other forms of relationships, but they won’t have what I think is the main value of a partnership/​romantic-relationship.)

• David Lorell 31 Jul 2025 18:04 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: James Camacho’s comment on: Fol­low-up to “My Em­pa­thy Is Rarely Kind”

  Very possibly I’m misunderstanding this but reading this comment felt like it missed the point of what I was trying to say. I find myself agreeing with most of what you say and not seeing why you’ve said it.

• David Lorell 31 Jul 2025 17:33 UTC

  25 points

  17

  on: Fol­low-up to “My Em­pa­thy Is Rarely Kind”

  I’d personally agree that something like “suspension of judgement” is a key component to what I think is usually meant by “empathy.” I think for many people this does not go-together with a significant dampening of care or personal investment (in the short term at least) for/​in the other person. It sounds like these do go together, necessarily, for you? Is that right? (Most (but not all) people usually care significantly less about cats than humans, especially family/​friends/​partners.)

  Edit: On reflection I think I am doing the same /​ something similar in my orientation toward most people. (Suspending belief in moral agency /​ responsibility in the right sense.) Only for me, the mental move feels warm and fuzzy and kind as opposed to the misanthropic tone of the other post at least. I’d internally label it as closer to “forgiveness” and “charity” and maybe “faith/​hope” in others.

  An aside: When I imagine the nearest mental state I’d need to be in to systematically feel contempt instead of “forgiveness”, it feels like I’m sliding into “should-world” and working myself up over how everyone (including myself in certain ways) is acting so stupidly and should just be doing X, Y, Z, with the telltale should-world feeling of ignoring the fiddly details and imagining things and people are meant to behave according to my values moreso than is probably reasonable.

• David Lorell 30 Jul 2025 19:07 UTC

  13 points

  2

  on: My Em­pa­thy Is Rarely Kind

  Don’t go bullshitting me about how a kind and compassionate life of mediocrity is a “different kind of strength” or some such cope. But subject to that constraint, I would certainly like better ways of relating to people.

  Perhaps it is not true for you, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you have not experienced this much given the confusion around “companionship” in some previous discussions, but I think there is a literary trope of “discovering the power of friendship” (cue your eye roll here) which is actually real in some important ways. Without attempting anything thorough here and trying to keep things as john-frame-native as possible, I expect that the strengthening-not-weakening thing is that having others who care about you (read, in this context, but there is much more, as: who can/​will sympathize with you even if they think you could be trying harder) gives most people more energy and motivation to go do positive things that are harder /​ more unpleasant than they might otherwise have done. And failed attempts are less draining (and therefore also less prospectively daunting) when you have sympathy from those you love, regardless of whether they think on reflection that you tried hard enough on that failed attempt. Kind and compassionate =\= mediocre. (Though it can, if provided in an enabling way to someone who is vulnerable to being enabled in ways they would regret on reflection. I strongly think though that you should largely strive to ignore this dynamic in your thinking as a salve to focusing overmuch on it IMO)