Jasnah Kholin

Karma: 198

Jasnah Kholin 12 Dec 2025 23:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Crock, Crocker, Crockiest
did you run it? what did you found out?

Jasnah Kholin 12 Dec 2025 21:17 UTC
4 points
3
on: Process Crimes and Pedantic Rules
the thing this post missing is the connection between the Process Crime and Actual Crime. the child have no reason to use the stepstool, beside to eat the cookies, in the vast majority of situations. is it true about lying to banks, or is in situation when Everyone guilty of some crime and the state get to lawfully punish whoever it want, by some criteria that are not written in the law?

this is empirical question with empirical answer, and when i saw disagreements about Process Crimes and Pedantic Rules in real life, it was of the form of “there are legitimate, non-criminal reasons to break this Process Rule” or “this Pedantic Rule is pretty costly to this set or rule-abiding citizens”.

Jasnah Kholin 31 Oct 2025 14:37 UTC
3 points
0
on: Making Exceptions to General Rules
interesting, i came to the opposite conclusion. or, more concretely, i found that there are rules that i can follow 95% of the time, and it’s actually better then follow it 100% of the time, and there are rules when i simply can’t, and i slip all the way down the slippery slope. and a lot of time i can search for differentiator, or more complicated solution.

simple rules need for coordination, when you have about five words. but i have much wider channel to coordinate with future-me, and i should use it to my advantage.

so my lesson was that having rules that are in the form of “never do X” or “always do Y” are almost always bad rules that lack granularity.

instead of “never go sleep after midnight” i can go for “don’t go sleep past midnight, except once a month you can read a book for as long as you want, if you commit to wake up on time at the morning, and go sleep early the next day”.

there are patterns when “breaking” the rule occasionally does not break the habit, and get me more utility (washing the dishes before going to sleep 95% of the time is better then 100% of the time - i get the utility in the rare cases when I’m honestly too tired, and i do not slip on this slope).

now, rules in the form of (1), that lack granularity, lack build-in exceptions, look to me surprisingly stupid. do you really can have only this simple rule? are you sure? did you tried?

you say ” humans tend to heavily biased towards believing that their future selves will make the decisions that they want it to make. ” but it look to me there are symmetrical and opposing biases -toward optimism and toward pessimism. and you just chose bias in the other direction. i prefer calibration.

and claims like (4) look to me like self-fulfilling prophesies. why do you believe that? my experience show that it’s mostly wrong. sometimes it is true, and then i get one of the hard line rules. but most of the time, more granularity is possible and sderiable. and having it, having better rules, is skill that is possible to develop. as is the ability to have exceptions without dismantling the rule.

Jasnah Kholin 31 Oct 2025 13:16 UTC
3 points
0
on: Learn to write well BEFORE you have something worth saying

And once you have a message you actually need to share, you’ll actually be able to express it.

that doesn’t look like good advice to me. or, rather, to make sense, one should assume, a priori, that the day will come when one will have “a message you actually need to share”. this way of thinking proving too much—why shouldn’t I read those trip reports, assuming one day i will need this knowledge, instead?

there are a lot of things one can do with one’s time, and most people don’t come to situations like that. learning to write better because one day i will want to write trip report is bad algorithm to use.

with science, the problem is not that people bad at writing, bad that the system have a standard of how to write, and it’s a bad standard. if good writer tried to have good writing in it’s science paper, they would have been told to rewrite it, to be more “scientific”, so learning to write wouldn’t help.

better advice will be to see what skills one predictably may need in the future, and practice those skills. but, claim, this will not include “writing” for most people.

Jasnah Kholin 25 Oct 2025 20:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yosarian2’s comment on: The American System and Misleading Labels

there is a high correlation between what voters as a whole want on any single narrow issue, and what the outcome of the black box produces.

I’m way to late to the party, but I’m still reading old posts, and this is evidence that other people may too.

this statement is not true, in the country that I live. there are some narrow issues in which there is large public majority, and the black box produce not-correlated output. and this happen for a long period of time.

Jasnah Kholin 25 Oct 2025 17:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jotto999’s comment on: A common failure for foxes
For the rest of this comment, I’m going to restrict “fox” to “good-scoring generalist forecaster”
why? this is very much not how I understand it, and I find it hard to even generate hypothesis to how you came to this conclusion. which make the rest of the comment seem irrelevant and missing the point.

foxes are people who go to people that have some big theory, and telling them they are wrong, everyone who try to have one theory is wrong, they should have many theories in their toolbox and use the more appropriate.

basically I understood it as Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking.

restricting foxes to good-scoring generalist forecaster is even more weird. like… why? bad scoring are not foxes? it’s look to me like trying to rig the game.

Jasnah Kholin 25 Oct 2025 12:46 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: spkoc’s comment on: Save the kid, ruin the suit; Acceptable utility exchange rates; Distributed utility calculations; Civic duties matter
I opened a tab with this comment as something I want to answer too, when an opportunity arise for that. it was two years now, and the tab remain open. I wrote two post about that in my blog, and clarified my thinking about the issue a lot. and yet, I still believe what I believed then, although hopefully I’m more capable to express this. not sure if that, English is hard. but, it’s worth trying.

here is my opinion, in its most simple form: one should not be cooperation bot.

if I have repeated opportunities to pay 1 unit to get someone 10 units, and they have the same option, it’s better for us both to make those trades. but if the other people refuse to do that, they take happily the provided 10 units and then not give up 1 unit to give me 1, I should stop.

that is the Morality as “Coordination”, vs “Do-Gooding” distinction.

and this is what I remember I want to write to you, 2 years ago, and didn’t succeeded on the first try. you call for Civic Duty look to me as call to cooperate even if the other side defect, call to create cooperation-cooperation equilibrium, while ignoring that other people not cooperating.

there is no such thing as acceptable exchange rate, that is the wrong category. there is an option to enter agreement to cooperate, to exchange 1 unit of mine for 10 or 100 or 1000000 of yours if the opportunity arise. and the right thing to do is tit-for-tat with forgiveness. and it’s definitely not being cooperation bot. and deciding that if the exchange rate is high enough you must take it, it’s you civic duty, is just calling people to be cooperation bots, and punish those who don’t do that, while ignoring the important difference between those who enter the agreement and those who don’t.

***

I don’t really engage with this comment. I don’t think it react to the concept I tried, and failed, to communicate, so I tried again.

but I can say that from my current ontology, when I see Morality-as-Coordination and Morality-as-Do-Gooding as two very different things, the claims about local governments look confused to me. there is “charity” that is coordination, and there is charity that is do-gooding, and those are different things.

most of that governments do is not do-gooding, it’s coordination, with elements on insurance.

Jasnah Kholin 25 Oct 2025 12:30 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Free Speech and Triskaidekaphobic Calculators: A Reply to Hubinger on the Relevance of Public Online Discussion to Existential Risk
small and very belated comment to comment (6): I did, actually believe in things and do things because of the decision theory. I sometimes had the impulse myself, but considered it childish and stupid and basically irrational, as in the past i saw people implement “spite” in really bad way.

then I encountered the decision theory on that, and evidence that people react to incentives more then I thought (I’m not sure if it’s a crux—I endorse doing the correct thing even when the relevant people don’t react to incentives).

so I changed my mind. I endorse the feeling you describe when it arise, but i still naturally pretty low on it. I still behave accordingly, though.

It’s not exactly supportive evidence for your claim, but it feel to me like it close enough, so I wanted to write here—that it’s possible and desirable to change one’s behaviour to do the right decision-theoretical thing. especially in the direction of not negotiating with terrorists.

so I did actually change my behaviour.

Jasnah Kholin 25 Oct 2025 8:12 UTC
3 points
0
on: “Yes, and—” Requires the Possibility of “No, Because—”
One of the best forums I knew was homeschooling place, that was officially anti-vax. it was really bad at true-seeking, but I learned there so much. it turned out there are a lot of things that doesn’t get said in places that are no default-collaborative. my models of people and societies much better because I was there. and also I leaved when I couldn’t endure the idea that I’m bad and wrong for pointing out obvious falsehoods.

I don’t think you can seek true without pointing out at false thing and saying they are false. but also, this way of thinking tend to be blind to all of the things that can exist only in places where there is good faith assumption. there is a lot of sharing of information, of ability to say or write socially forbidden truths.

and I think most places are far far away from the Pareto front.

the way to collaboratively say “I don’t understand” include demonstrating Good Faith—trying to come up with two hypotheses, trying to understand in a way legible to the people reading it.

you can disagree without blocking. more effort needed to be invested, and it’s coordination problem, without norms it can lead to bad places when the less busy person win without regard to truth.

but when it works, it works better then the bad-faith-allowing place. disagreements with good faith are harder, but are more rational.

I’m thinking a lot about the way that my good faith heuristics, that I got from place that was atrocious at truth-seeking, is so good at promoting it. this is because it forbid very frequent failure mode of irrationality. people who decided the other side is enemy tend to interpret things not in the most correct way, but in the most strawman-y way. it’s very very bad, and it’s dynamic that prevent thinking and understanding.

Jasnah Kholin 24 Oct 2025 14:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: </rant> </uncharitable> </psychologizing>
the “it will be used i status based asymmetry” claim look to me like general counterargument to any norms at all. in the same time, it pessimistic in way tat look unjustified to me. there are rules that enforced more or less neutrally, and i see no reason to assume the worst here. LessWrong is not actually the sort of places when the popular kids never get called out.

while the emoticons suggestion is interesting, it’s missing the point of building mental habits. like asking myself if I’m dreaming is practice for lucid dreaming. having other people do that loss that benefit. it’s also loss the saving throw of avoiding escalating by apologizing,

Jasnah Kholin 24 Oct 2025 14:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: robo’s comment on: </rant> </uncharitable> </psychologizing>
I actually disagree, it may be true about the other parts of the prefix, but reading something that is tagged as uncharitable rant would make me less inclined to get mad and react uncharitably. the point of the tagging things as rants is to prevent the dynamic when emotions mindkill people and discussions, and saying something is unfair at the beginning produce different emotional reaction.

also, the last time i encountered that sort of prefix it was at part of long post, and was much less hard to parse, as i had context. and it prevented the need to going back to understand what was intended, thing that is cognitively costly, too.

the question is if something is worth it. reading long posts is more cognitively costly then watching tiktok videos. and yet, here we are. something being costly is not enough to avoid it.

Jasnah Kholin 23 Oct 2025 16:09 UTC
12 points
1
on: The Doomers Were Right

Can anyone reading this truly deny that those warnings came true from the doom sayer’s perspective?

yes. your arrow of causality look backwards to me - I don’t see divorce destigmatization - > more divorce. in the divorce case it’s clearly more divorce → destigmatization. i don’t remember where to find the posts about how the laws that allow divorce came after the spike in divorce, and not the other way around.

there is important point here. i only recently re-evaluate my opinion on TV and decided the doomers was right there. but it sure look to me you over-generalize and give very dubious examples here, without evidence.

do TV destroyed the ability to read complex text? are you sure? because I don’t. I will need to see some statistics about that.

and it’s important, those subtleties you just wave away. there is a great difference between world where destigmatization - > more divorce and world where more divorce → destigmatization.

looking on the various ways that doomers was right, partially right and partially wrong. and just straightforwardly wrong can teach interesting things. but we can’t learn it if you round both being right and being wrong to being basically right!

Jasnah Kholin 23 Oct 2025 14:47 UTC
2 points
0
on: Do One New Thing A Day To Solve Your Problems
maybe i took all the low hanging fruit or something, but doing entire new thing every day is A LOT. like, the things i have to do and didn’t, it’s because they are hard and take more then 5 minutes. also, i can’t even check if it worked, and i don’t actually have so many things to do!

like, do you really expect to have 365 small things to do? because that suggestion sounds like applause lights to me—designed to be hard to say “actually, that’s insane!”, while being totally unrealistic.

also, i agree with Taylor. there are things like fixing small problem, and there are things that are constant energy expenditure, and equivocating them create only confusion, and the ability to pretend that hard things are easy, and then be confused when they actually hard.

Jasnah Kholin 18 Oct 2025 17:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
See, my leading hypothesis is that you inclined to make negative interpretations, without noticing you are doing it or that there are alternative, and without checking what interpretation is more likely. I think this because i saw you doing it twice.

so saying that you did look on the alternative, that you considered both options and then chose one, is already giving new information. although, you didn’t actually said you did that.

I will say on my part that in Facebook I frequently have the experience of reading comments when it looks like they didn’t read the post they commented on, and I didn’t have this impression here.

and also that the “obviously help such pretenders evade better” is yet another example of the “making negative assumptions”. like… you do understand it’s not obvious, yes? that your negative assumptions look obviously wrong to me, and that you provide exactly zero evidence, and what is worse, that it doesn’t look like you understand that “providing evidence” is something you should do?

do you notice that negative interpretation step you are doing? because what I want is for you to stop doing it for short time, but… do you see there is a thing you are doing, and you can do something else instead?

because, it’s actually pretty hard to communicate when you jump to some wrong conclusions every comment, but it doesn’t look you can the jumps.

and going that “your comment assuming wrong negative interpretation” each time is not working. I say and you assume A-> B and then replay to B and if I try to replay instead of meta-replay, it would have looked like… “But I didn’t say B, or C, or D, and the options are not F or G, I actually think H, and also, you can’t claim B C D without any reason, and you didn’t react in any way to A, which is the thing I actually said”.

Jasnah Kholin 11 Oct 2025 9:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
see, I actually assumed everyone obviously read it all before commenting, before I saw your comment. WHY you assume they didn’t? why you assume they/we pretending?

I say nothing about people who read and didn’t comment and have no idea from where this weird misunderstanding, and the accusation came from.

at this point I have the hypothesis you inclined to assume bad path where there are none, and then jump to accusations before checking if it even true. I saw zero evidence to people commented without reading, but you rise the hypothesis and then behave as if you encountered some evidence to it being true.

where is the part, when after thinking about it, you search for evidence?

Jasnah Kholin 9 Oct 2025 15:53 UTC
4 points
2
on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
I encountered the correct read—about the inability of people to believe in Utopia—more then once although i don’t remember where. i think the story do both of those things.

also, i have really boring of an answer: because the story lack details. i have no problem to imagine dath ilan, and without tortured children.

Jasnah Kholin 8 Oct 2025 16:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Yeah, legit, i avoided do it second time myself :-)

Jasnah Kholin 7 Oct 2025 19:56 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
somewhere in the comments, about how he talked about it with the professor. it’s not STRONG evidence, if you say you are not convinced I will not say it unreasonable. the next step would have been to decide what are the right kind of evidence, and then ask for them.

Jasnah Kholin 7 Oct 2025 12:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
1. I wasn’t suggesting this at all. i consider ¹⁄₄ equivalent to 75% (and dislike to use the / character because it move when I change languages, and this is annoying). i find this claim weird—i use percentage all the time and people generally understand that 75% means quarter.
2. this is the sort of discussion that we should have! he did provide some evidence, though little.
  i once had classwork that should done in pair, that i get 90 ad grade and my teammate get 60 (i think? some numerical equivalent of F). and i was reigned with him freeloading, i just dislike all this school teamwork things. but the teacher noticed that i’m the only one who did work. so it’s my experience it’s not hard to notice who do what part of the work.
3. true, but irrelevant. when someone saying they did all or almost all precision is irrelevant. you don’t get the difference between 90% and 50% by being imprecise.

Jasnah Kholin 6 Oct 2025 15:44 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
healthy environment, the operate on the first level of simulacra, talk and think about what people did, actually, in the world, not about what people feel. feelings belong to the third level.

saying John was wrong, and actually didn’t did disproportional amount on the work invite factual discussion. talking about who feel what invite… i dunno, some weird l3 shenanigans, in which what someone feel is relevant argument, EVEN IF THEY ARE WRONG.

in some black-box, looking on algorithmic intent sense, the reason to talk about what they feel they dud, and not what they did, is to obscure the difference, to give the feelings power, place in the discussion as legitimate argument, even when the feeling is wrong, and if it counts, it should count against the person.

the sentence “It is likely that they felt they did more useful work than John felt they did.” is the sort of sentence that that jump to me as dangerous in that way, as talking about the feelings, on them and John, instead of what actually happened.

this remind me anecdote i read in the comments in certain blog. , both romantic partners believe that they do most of the housework, but then they decide to check, and it turned out one of them right and one of them wrong, one person was doing 75% of the work, and the other 25%. both of them was feeling they did most of the work. the one who did 25% of the work felt they did most of the work. so what?