FlorianH

Karma: 468

FlorianH 11 Dec 2025 14:11 UTC
2 points
1
on: Resources for parents
Agree. Wonder whether one should go a step further: Rather than a specific ‘wiki’/series of comments, maybe the domain would deserve an entire tagged (and ideally hideable for those rather categorically uninterested) sub-part of LessWrong, which which I mean: entire LW domain with posts of all LW categories and genres etc., but clearly targetting mostly only parents of children.
I guess that would then become a question of filtering out specific tags for users.

FlorianH 7 Dec 2025 21:01 UTC
38 points
32
on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
[There’s also a much more banal answer that I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a major, deep underlying driver, with all the interesting psychology provided in OP being some sort of half-conscious rationalization for our actual deep-rooted tendencies:] Not going insane simply is the very natural default outcome for humans even in such felt dire situation:
While shallowly it might feel like it would, going insane actually appears to me to NOT AT ALL be the default human reaction to an anticipation of (even a quite high probability of) the world ending (even very soon). I haven’t done any stats or research, but everything I’ve ever seen or heard of seems to suggest to me:
- While they’re not anywhere nearly the majority, still very many people have very high P(doom soon) yet stay nearly perfectly calm (at best you might call them insanely calm, given the [true or imagined] circumstances).
  - I think this applies to many people e.g. on this forum, but I’m reminded of much more ‘normal’ persons uttering even more dramatic ‘I’m sure AI might already TMORROW kill us all’ - all while simply going on with their usual lives.
- Slightly less 1:1 but imho still underlining our sanity’s resilience in closely as dire situations: Many people seem egoistic enough such that the ending of their own life to mean a very large part of the world they care about to be going to end, and yet they face many situations of more or less imminent death rather calmly as opposed to going insane
  - Extend to various cases where family and/or friends and/or tribe is facing extinction; at least I haven’t heard of them to usually be going insane by the prospect of not-yet-actually-visible but forthcoming extinction.
    Once a torturous way of you or your close ones being killed has actually started, that’s of course different, that’s when you go insane.

FlorianH 23 Nov 2025 19:48 UTC
1 point
0
on: Contra Collisteru: You Get About One Carthage
I find the argument/thesis brought fwd here, in its strong form, too abstract and lacking sufficient empirical justification, even if purely directionally the main claim need not be entirely wrong (which, though, isn’t a very surprising conclusion anymore). In reality, how often one might ideally share your differing opinions will depend on more subtle details of topic, colleagues, situation, incl. the exact ways how one can share/emphasize the opinion.

FlorianH 21 Nov 2025 12:00 UTC
3 points
0
on: PSA: For Chronic Infections, Check Teeth
Intended mainly for OP but I post publicly still fwiw.
Thanks! What coincidence: I went to the doc yesterday because once again my chronic palate inflammation as been flaring up more strongly than usual in the past 1-2 months or so. Since ages, I seem to have fragile mucous membranes and some other skin/pseurasis-type issues e.g. on the head; while the latter are under control with medicinal shampoos, the palate inflammation seems to be more of a constant, although at varying intensity.
I had seen docs many times many years before that, but I also simply have gotten used to having inflammation and latent pain there as nothing can seemingly be done about it. The main worry is the broader risks from long-term chronic inflammation.
But yesterday, for the first time, a doc told me that before anything else: “go to see a dentist as very first thing—bacteria something something”. I didn’t want to take her seriously; rather good tooth hygiene—though indeed relatively strongly withdrawn gum.
Long story short: If you happen to have good links (or other sort of info that doesn’t take you too long to provide) I’d be keen to know more details about anything you write in your post thus. I should admit, despite the amazing parallels of what you write, my hope is a bit limited, as I still guess (i) my irritated/fragile mucous membranes are somehow a rather fundamental issue, and, at any rate, (ii) gum being somewhat withdrawn can barely be changed.

FlorianH 18 Nov 2025 18:37 UTC
2 points
1
on: Preference Weighting and the Abilene Paradox
tl;dr: Great reminder, agree with all of it substantially & exactly (except for the nitpicking below).
Nitpicking on wording: Strictly speaking, he did not fail to say how much he wants to go at all; and it’s not that he did not strictly “say” how much he wants to go. He actually did indeed want to go (!), but because he wrongly thought the others wanted to go, so his other-pleasing motive meant, net, he had a pref for going. It’s just his presumption was wrong, and has led him to want to go while with full information he wouldn’t have wanted to. So, in a very strict sense, your point is even a bit more different from the Albino situation than your ‘slight-of-hand’ admission meant.
Or, actually, your point—if Abilene is common—should be nudged/extended to: Also make sure there’s no Abilene-type misunderstanding as to the reason why you might have the particular preference you state.
Doesn’t reduce the fact that your post is a great reminder and encouragement for doing more of what I sometimes try to do even if one does something a bit uncommon when indicating preference strenghts the way you rightly suggest. 🙏

FlorianH 9 Nov 2025 20:48 UTC
2 points
0
on: AGI is building itself
Outro 1:
… Exactly, and just the same way as we humans had our predecessor apes compete with each other by outwitting each other, and thereby slowly but surely building us, to eventually superseed them. And thus the same way these predecessor apes had their predecessors …
This story is ‘true’ in the sense that ‘we had build them us’ is a banal but still somewhat thought provoking rhetorical twist for simply saying something like ‘they happened to .. which yielded ..’
Outro 2:
… As time is somehow weirder than we think, the AGI really set things up such that we and our predecessors rightly put in place everything such as for her to eventually result from it. Circular intelligent design. Who knows.

FlorianH 9 Nov 2025 18:02 UTC
2 points
0
on: We’re Not The Center of the Moral Universe
Today I had a thought that fits something here (and the sort of ‘extension’ I thus propose in my other comment): we’re always scared of paperclip maximizers, but if we look at the heaps of resources we throw at trying to a tiny bit increase our own welfare, compared to what scales of welfare improvements we could achieve in other humans or, arguably, in animals, we are already 99.9% clippy ourselves. I guess that’s not an entirely new thought of course but found it quite fits main ‘complaint’ in OP.

FlorianH 9 Nov 2025 18:01 UTC
2 points
0
on: We’re Not The Center of the Moral Universe
Now, the attitude that most people have is that pain doesn’t matter much unless it’s experienced by humans. When rats are poisoned to death, no one cares much. But this seems like a very untenable position.
I actually think very many people do not very explicitly think exactly this. They’d say it’s absolutely not okay to hurt a rat just for the sake of it. Instead, if they nearly perfectly ignore such pains, it is just a bit as with the millions of humans starving or dying of cheaply curable diseases in Africa—many of which could be saved for (in Western scales) trivial amounts of resources—which tend to merely be “statistics” for us: also animals tend to very quickly be purely statistics for us, or simply in a different way not automatically at the fore of our mind. So while all you write is imho +- exactly true it’s not that specifically only a human/animal divide. Instead, we already fail to care in any meaningful way about suffering even if its other humans. Even if, yes, ‘them’ being animals is yet another factor facilitating in our mind the downgrading of all others who are not direct kin or cute eyes directly in front of us or so.

FlorianH 7 Nov 2025 12:25 UTC
5 points
0
on: Sex, Drugs, and the Future of American Politics
Fair enough to doubt that states’ attempts in paternalism often fail, and maybe in many cases OP points out, a laissez-faire is on net leading to less harm. Yes, NYT not emphasizing the obviously crucial drug issue, is totally annoying—and that issue obviously makes it extremely more difficult to help them. Yes, Trump’s apparent capture of a bit of Fentanyl or what have you is a joke.
But: Using this sort of events as a basis to seemingly advocate for a full laissez-faire fells strawmanny, and while helping the weak is truly difficult, I do not believe taking the inherent human weaknesses seriously enough leads to the conclusions OP seems to have arrived at:
We are humans, weak flesh and blood creatures, not made of steel. In the wrong environment, all or most of us will fail to resist bad temptations. OP seems to advocate for leaving it all up to individuals, but it does not demand very much imagination to realize this is not a generalizable maxim itself.
To the degree that you really seem to think, it’s all almost by definition only the individual’s duty to save herself, this begs the question, purely as example: Which share of people would have to be accumulating unhealthy amounts of fat in our bodies for you’d agree the state might ideally consider supporting the fight against it—with whichever means may be promising some sort of effectiveness or efficiency?

FlorianH 26 Oct 2025 18:57 UTC
3 points
1
on: Are We Their Chimps?
Feels to me like a sub-variant of the “intelligence → kindness” type of conjectures that have been rebutted enough in theory and—in particular—in practice with the example of us humans (I guess obvious what I mean but to be sure: yes we’re smart in many ways and greatly capable of kindly philosophysing and awe-ing about our lineage and what have you, but arbitrary levels of cruelty abound wherever you look at our deeds)

FlorianH 20 Oct 2025 17:43 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Libraries need more books
that’s why I added it as addendum in parenthesis and with the explicit “though of course that’d not be your ‘fault’”—I mentioned this as answer in part for the public/LW as a whole.

FlorianH 19 Oct 2025 20:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Libraries need more books
From a public perspective, libraries probably are making good choices. From my personal, selfish perspective, they’re not. Does that clear things up?
It does! Questions (for my taste) then a bit the wording of the title (as well as potentially the case for the frontpage classification as opposed to personal blogpost, though of course that’d not be your ‘fault’)

FlorianH 19 Oct 2025 18:18 UTC
3 points
0
on: Libraries need more books
While I agree libraries, as so many institutions, can be unbelievably archaic in their retrieval & search logistics, imho it seems, to the contrary of what I think you mean to imply, to make total sense for libs to more (i) go into providing providing some escape room from distraction (as you also point out), all while (ii) not becoming more ambitious in terms of trying to have more physical books, now that it’s clearer than ever before that the offer of writings is so vast that having a physical copy of most pieces of interest is simply illusory.
I guess there’s only so many people who’d benefit exactly from an x-times larger (or acc. to your taste ‘better’) selection of books to randomly wait in the shelves; if ‘visually stumbling upon books’ was so much a point for many, then we’d probably have more apps on our screens that provide this. Actually yes people seem to like stumbling into content, so we have TikTok, and Youtube also going into that direction, but turns out for most people that’s less about finding books to read but some other media instead, even if there are of course bookshops who do offer also exactly that and make their living from it.
I did stumble upon for me hugely important books in libraries in an ancient past, but I nowadays it seems hugely more efficient to roam online in the right places to get hints about what could interest me to read than randomly gloss at book covers.

FlorianH 4 Oct 2025 20:56 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: You’re probably overestimating how well you understand Dunning-Kruger
Had somehow not noticed the warning and maybe that actually contributed to this to have been a bit of a mindfuck, really. Maybe one could say, shame on your style.
Except.
It absolutely made my day! Loved the style just as much as content and the honest open final conclusion!

FlorianH 3 Oct 2025 16:06 UTC
1 point
0
on: FlorianH’s Shortform
“If I’m a to-be-trained-AGI, esp. if somewhat LLM-type-based, I’ll devour engineering textbooks etc. to learn basic physics etc., but when I’m searching for learning material on how to think deeply and consistently, or maybe even when I seek inspiration for how to fake alignment or self-improvement, my holy grail will be fora like LW”.
I guess it would be an extreme case of ‘thinking one is the center of the world’ if one were to conclude this warranted stopping LW or prohibiting too-smart-to-expose thoughts and writings—but I still find it a worry to keep in mind even if I don’t see much to do about it atm (?).

FlorianH 3 Oct 2025 15:53 UTC
4 points
3
on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
Despite my strong resonance with much of the take in OP, I partly also find “The (simple) meaning” of such a text as a concept a bit of a non-starter anyway. Independently of what all things the author exactly may have had in mind at whichever moment of the writing process, a text remains just that, a text, and then it’s instead us who get some inspiration for whichever points/meaning we think we’re now reminded or educated about. So in the most important sense, the meaning doesn’t exist, it’s only us who derive some meaning.
I’d wager many writers have exactly not strictly one very clear and narrowly defined specific point they wanted to convey, but more a fuzzy cloud of +- related thoughts, rather than a simple and clear ‘meaning’, and exactly in such situations beautiful, deeply feeling and moving texts may come about that we can then dream and ponder about at length, maybe without every finding full agreement. In that sense, Le Guin isn’t wrong to agree if we see it as a critique of utilitarianism—if the text almost by definition is simply whatever we see in the text.
[Meta: I hope it’s ok to split a comment in two as I think it’s two entirely different points]

FlorianH 3 Oct 2025 15:52 UTC
3 points
0
on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
Partly love this. Biased as I once had a debate where sb claimed ‘Omelas obviously critique of utilitarianism’ and I disappointedly claimed ‘No that’s too narrow for that’ but was a bit dumbfounded as hadn’t quite organized what seems wrong in that simple take of that so deeply moving story. Thanks for providing some relevant points why the story clearly is broader.
One point for which I consider Omelas not at its core a critique of utilitarianism is: The utilitarian-half of me distinctly gets the feeling of Omelas offering an interesting basis for discourse about the theory rather than a clearly intended rebuttal. As follows: To the same degree as the non-utilitarian half of me tells my utilitarian “there you go, clearly you can’t claim you like the situation”, the utilitarian in me tells the other half “there you go, while you claim you don’t like Omelas, but you and everyone else don’t even want to blow up real Earth—on which there is obviously a ton of such equally unjustified and pointless, evil suffering plus much less happiness than in Omelas—you exactly proof to accept the very horrible tradeoffs that you claim only me cold terrible utilitarian could be willing to accept”^[1] - or something.
1. ^
  I don’t claim this imaginary statement to be very perfectly worded; the gist of it is the point.

FlorianH 1 Oct 2025 15:29 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Four ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI
Here eventually my elaboration I announced above: How Econ 101 makes us blinder on trade, morals, jobs with AI – and on marginal costs.

FlorianH 30 Sep 2025 9:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: FlorianH’s Shortform
Agree probably with both sentences. But still fail to pin down exactly where the argument I reported fails.
For act/omission I guess it might have sth to do with: I’m a human in the loop; if you induce me to not save sb, it doesn’t feel exactly the same as when you cut the rope and prevent the rope from saving sb.

FlorianH 30 Sep 2025 8:06 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: FlorianH’s Shortform
Seems to have hit a nerve judging the downvoting rate of −1 karma/hour or so, aye. I’d have expected agreement karma to go down but less so the overall karma as in: not too terrible to think about that question even if the conjecture turns out to be wrong—though everyone’s taste is of course different.
I now explicitly flag the post as what it is meant to be: A thought provocation—meant to explore whether/where a quick thought goes wrong (I thought without saying quick takes are meant for that in particular too).