espoire

Karma: 106

espoire 29 Apr 2026 8:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: SatvikBeri’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
I think you’re being overly charitable. I don’t think anyone knows anything about nhPredict. I think they just have a strong “CEO = guilty-by-default” prior. The closest thing to an argument I’ve seen undergirding the “eat the rich” meme soup is “X, Y, and Z billionaires are actively getting people killed” completely skipping the question of whether that’s representative of all wealthy folks, skipping to: therefore “kill all billionaires”.

espoire 17 Apr 2026 18:52 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: pjohn’s comment on: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
I’ve definitely encountered situations where it was important to prefix the numeric info when working with humans, specifically. (Though my original remark was facetious; I only say “dollars sign after the numerals” as a matter of taste, not as implied because it’s instrumental in any way.)
When leading World of Warcraft raids, calling “Use Bloodlust in 20 seconds” gets VERY different results from calling “In 20 seconds, use Bloodlust”. Indeed, the timing information in the former cannot usually be heard over the Bloodlust sound effect itself.

espoire 29 Mar 2026 21:23 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: oligo’s comment on: My hobby: running deranged surveys
Speaking from experience, maybe gender transition ought to raise that specific concern.
At my legal name change hearing, I was asked to affirm that I wasn’t attempting any fuckery like trying to outrun a debt or something. Which I was not. I had no debts save for whatever credit card spending from the same month, which I’d pay off in full end-of-month, same as every month.
…but since then, having an old unused name that immediately reveals the party trying to find my old name as being not-approved-by-me has been surprisingly helpful. It’s significantly downgraded the effectiveness of political donation seekers, pollsters, and scammers calling looking to speak to my old name. I’ve had people call both physically at the front door, and call the phone of other people I now live with, get asked for [old name] and get turned away with variants of “nobody with that name lives here.”
If I really was trying to outrun something, this seems like it’d be pretty helpful! I just wish I could find out what they’d wanted; it leaves me curious.

espoire 26 Mar 2026 7:45 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?
Chiming in with another causal mechanism: hot soup lets off steam. Humid air in general plays nicer with our lungs, and can noticeably help when people are having a cough, or having trouble breathing. I sometimes use “just have them sit over a canteen of steaming-hot water” as a palliative for both issues.

espoire 22 Mar 2026 15:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Dentin’s comment on: Age changes what you care about
I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.
Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans and have the authors’ briefly-mentioned hoped-for effect of reversing age-related mental decline in “healthy” individuals. Apart from that, simply knowing how well things are going has been very emotionally uplifting. I sense that you, too, see the incredible progress, else “50% of death within the next 4 decades” seems like a weirdly-low estimate. My current hope is that AGI capabilities basically halt soon, because it’s my impression that a business-as-usual future solves aging in time for me and the younger generations.
May I ask where specifically you’re donating? I haven’t reconsidered where I give my money in over a decade, and it occurs to me that maybe I ought to.

espoire 22 Mar 2026 15:25 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MSRayne’s comment on: Predicting Parental Emotional Changes?
I retained the ability to believe and act upon the belief that children need to be allowed the freedom to make sub-critical mistakes. I think if you were to go into it averse to smothering children, believing-in taking children seriously, etc., that those beliefs will survive the process.

espoire 22 Mar 2026 15:18 UTC
3 points
0
on: Predicting Parental Emotional Changes?
I think merely taking estradiol for gender transition triggered the caring-terminally-about-children effect for me. Possibly related: my blood estradiol levels got too high for a while, and I essentially had a pregnant woman’s hormone mix, for a while.
I’d previously liked kids somewhat, enjoyed teaching, enjoyed playing with them. Now they’re aggressively cute, makes me actively happy to notice children being happy or learning with or without my involvement, etc.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 9:05 UTC
1 point
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on: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
Oh, the British figured this out, too?
I also put the dollars sign after the numerals, *where it belongs*.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 8:47 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution
human sexuality itself is immoral and forcibly modifies humans to not have sexual organs or desires
I must have one of my 100 morality bits missing, because this seems weird but not bad to me.
…but point taken.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 8:35 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution
Re: no human training/test separation:
Epistemic status: random thought I just had, but what if there kind of is. I think maybe dreaming is the “test” part of the training cycle: the newly updated weights run against outcome predictions supplied by parts of the system not currently being updated. The being-updated part tries to get desirable outcomes within the dream, and another network / region plays Dungeon Master, supplying scenario and outcomes for given actions. Test against synthetic test data, supplied by a partially adversarial network.
I feel like, if true, we’d expect to see some kind of failures to learn-from-sleep in habitual lucid dreamers? Or reduced efficacy, anyway? I wonder what happens in a learning setup which is using test performance to make meta training decisions, if you hack the test results to erroneously report greater-than-actual performance…? Are there people who do not dream at all (as distinguished from merely not remembering dreams)?
This model of “what even is a dream, anyway?” makes a lot more predictions/retrodictions than my old model of “dreams are just the qualia of neuronal sub populations coming back online as one wakes up”.

espoire 21 Mar 2026 8:22 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jdp’s comment on: Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution
Wow. Thanks a lot for that. Your depiction of brain architecture in particular makes a lot of sense to me. I also feel like I finally understand-enough-to-program-one the stable diffusion tool I use daily, after following up on “latent diffusion” from your mention of it.
Still. I feel like my brain has learned an algorithm that is of value itself apart from its learning capability, that extracting meaningful portions of my algorithm is possible, and that using it as a starting point, one could make fairly straightforward upgrades to it — for example adding some kind of direct conscious control of when to add new compiled modules — upgrades which could not be used by an active learning system, because e.g. an infant would fry their own brain if given conscious write access to it.
I’m convinced: “just learning specific specialized networks wired together in a certain way” could really be all there is to understand about brains. And my confidence in “but there exists some higher ideal intelligence algorithm” has fallen somewhat, but remains above 0.5.
And it actually sounds like you’re calling out a specific possible path forward (for raw capabilities): narrow AI that can handle updating its weights where needed.

espoire 11 Mar 2026 5:43 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Caleb Biddulph’s comment on: Secondary forces of debt
Huh, I’d only noticed the one instance, but now I’m noticing it even in other articles. Color me curious!

My only remaining concrete hypothesis is “overzealous autocorrect”, but I’m reasonably sure that’s not the answer.

espoire 8 Mar 2026 0:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Caleb Biddulph’s comment on: Secondary forces of debt
I’d assume it’s a typo on some unfamiliar-to-me keyboard layout.

espoire 4 Mar 2026 10:56 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: brambleboy’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty
Disagree?
The version of ‘honest’ that I have would highly rank a cherry-picked or even fabricated narrative optimized specifically for improving the truth of the belief that it creates.
That’s a bit beyond my skill and indeed not something I trifle with for fear of psychic damage (I discovered many many years ago that I’m susceptible to lying addiction, and freeing myself of the addiction was long and difficult), but were I greater than I am, I would endorse strategies like that.

espoire 13 Feb 2026 5:53 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Mechanisms too simple for humans to design
Indeed, that’s my personal theory as to why retrotransposons haven’t accumulated disastrously at the species level and driven us to extinction already: sperm with more DNA damage typically lose the race to an egg, and eggs with too much DNA damage are more likely to result in a failed implantation or early miscarriage or similar.

espoire 10 Feb 2026 5:58 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Rabin’s Paradox
That’s more-or-less the thought process I went through when answering. I can’t pay 100$, nor could I pay 1000$, so if either case occurs, there’s a big extra cost attached in the form of “wait, now what? Do I need to get a loan? How do I do that?” [actually implement the plan] / or similar plans. +110$ is not enough to cover that extra cost, never mind the expected +5$. But +BIGNUM easily clears the ~fixed extra cost on the loss branch.

Turning hypotheticals over in my head and going only on feel, I think my point of indifference lands somewhere between a −100/+500 bet and a −100/+1000 bet, which might actually be too low. Going negative on money, even by double digits adds a lot of costs.

espoire 9 Feb 2026 6:19 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Parenting: “Try harder next time” is bad advice for kids too
That was quite the interesting read, thanks for the link.
A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn’t getting them wrong at random; there’s something missing in their understanding
This in particular struck me, in that it harshly conflicts with my own experience, but explains a lot about other people.
When I was a kid getting arithmetic questions wrong, I really was getting them wrong at random. I’d execute the whole computation correctly and then my fingers would write a wrong numeral. Or I’d read a wrong numeral, but execute correctly from there.
It was hugely frustrating, and indeed continues to be so. My comprehension always raced far ahead of my ability to actually execute reliably.
My progress through mathematics was rate-limited primarily by my ability to develop (and remember to deploy; my memory was also virtually nonfunctional) mental error-correcting codes.
Always, throughout school, I had about a 90% accuracy rate on problems at the frontier of what the teachers would allow me to attempt. When learning multiplication, I was working with something like a 10% error rate over a 1-digit by 1-digit multiplication. Later in Trigonometry, I may have had something like a 0.5% per-operation error rate, but on a 20-odd step problem, that would still come out to about 10% errors, and so on.
I never knew it was different for other people! Thanks for sharing.

espoire 9 Feb 2026 1:21 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: silentbob’s comment on: The Third Fundamental Question
thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic
In my case, the implicit intuitive version of that process seems not to be provided by my brain, so my options are: sub-LLM-quality pattern completion, or explicit conscious social simulation and strategy search. People seem to prefer the latter, even when told I’m doing that. …although I suppose if I were better at conscious people-steering I imagine that might change. Even with effort I’m pretty mediocre at it.

espoire 9 Feb 2026 1:13 UTC
1 point
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on: The Third Fundamental Question
I feel like these three are part of a larger class of very useful questions to consider, which many people do not automatically consider, consciously or otherwise.

The version that springs to mind that wasn’t mentioned above: “What are my goals, and am I furthering them?”

I find the “how do I think I know X”, “why am I doing X”, and “what happens if I do X” versions are pretty much autopilot for me, especially the third one — but I basically never think about whether the thing I’m trying to do actually attaches to my broader goals without some kind of external prompting. I think perhaps different people need more or less manual effort/practice to correctly employ each of these ideas.

Expanding the Sazen of “what are my goals, and am I furthering them?”:
I repeatedly make mistakes of the following form. As an example, say I’m playing a board game with a few friends, some of whom are new. It’s not unusual for me to explain the game, then once the game begins I get absorbed in the process, play to the limits of my ability, crush the new player(s), and then they have a bad time and never want to play that game again. Oops!
Locally, I took pretty good actions pursuing a local goal (have fun, test my skills, satisfy the game’s objective), but pretty awful actions for the broader goal of “introduce a new friend to this game”.
Left on autopilot, my problem solving system will shed context aggressively, enabling it to solve a simpler problem with less effort. Stopping and consciously asking “hey, what are my goals actually? What larger goal do those goals serve?” seems to fix this issue for me, when I remember to do so.

espoire 4 Jan 2026 8:58 UTC
2 points
−1
on: The Problem with Democracy
Will this become a sequence of essays? I’d be interested to hear your take on the fundamental questions at length.