Jasnah Kholin

Karma: 85

Jasnah Kholin 12 Sep 2023 8:59 UTC
1 point
in reply to: meedstrom’s comment on: Public beliefs vs. Private beliefs
it sometimes happen in conversations, that people talk past each other, don’t notice that they both use the word X and mean two different things, and behave as if they agree on what X is but disagree on where to draw the boundary.

from my point of view, you said some things that make it clear you mean very different thing then me by “illegible”. prove of theorem can’t be illegible to SOMEONE. illegibility is property of the explanation, not the explanation and person. i encountered papers and posts that above my knowledge in math and computer science. i didn’t understand them despite them being legible.

you also have different approach to concepts in generally. i don’t have concept because it make is easier for people to debug. i try to find concepts that reflect the territory most precisely. that is the point of concepts TO ME.

i don’t sure it worth it go all the way back, and i have no intention go over you post and adding “to you” in all the places where it should be add, to make it clearer that goals are something people have, not property of the teritory. but if you want to do half of the work of that, we can continue this discussion.

Jasnah Kholin 17 Aug 2023 12:30 UTC
1 point
on: Slack for your belief system
this is one of the posts when i wish for three examples for the thingy described. because i see two options:
1. this is weakman of the position i hold, in which i seek the ways to draw a map that correspond to the territory, and have my estimations of what work and what no, and disagree with someone about that. and the someone instead of providing evidence that his method providing good predictions or insights, just say i should have more slack.

all you description on why believe in things sounds anti-Beysian. it’s not boolean believe-disbelieve. update yourself incrementally! if i believe something provide zero evidence i will not update, if the deviance dubious, i will update only a little. and then the question is how much credence you assign to what evidence, and methods to find evidence.
2. it’s different worlds situation, when the post writer encountered problem i didn’t.

and i have no way to judge that, without at least one, and better more, actual examples of the interaction, better linked to and not described by the author.

Jasnah Kholin 9 Aug 2023 13:22 UTC
1 point
on: Addendum to applicable advice
list of implicit assumptions in the post i disagree with:
- that there are significant amount of people that see advise and their cached thought is “that can’t work for me”.
- that this cached thought is bad thing.
- that you should to try to apply every advice you encounter to yourself.
- that it’s hard.
- that the fact that it hard is evidence that it’s good and worthy thing to do.
- that “being kind of person” is good category to think in, or good framing to have.
i also have a lot of problems with the example—which is example of advise that most people try to follow but shouldn’t, and should think about their probability of success by looking on the research and not by thinking that “you can be any kind of person”—statement whose true value is obviously false.

Jasnah Kholin 7 Aug 2023 8:33 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Limits to Legibility
this is not how the third conversation should go, in my opinion. instead. you should say inquiry your Inner Simulator, and then say that you expect that learning GTD will make them more anxious or will work for two weeks and then stop, so the initial investment in time will not pay off, or that in the past you encountered people who tried and it make them to crash down parts of themselves, or you expect it will work to well and lead to burnout.

it is possible to compare illegible intuitions—by checking what different predictions they produce, by comparing possible differences in the sorting of the training data.

in my experience, different illegible intuitions come from people see different parts of the whole picture, and it’s valuable to try to understand better. also, making predictions, describe the differences between word when you right and world when you wrong, having at least two different hypotheses, is all way to make the illegible intuitions better.

Jasnah Kholin 25 Jul 2023 6:35 UTC
3 points
on: Your Utility Function is Your Utility Function
One of the things that I searched for in EA and didn’t find, but think should exist: algorithm, or algorithms, to decide how much to donate, as a personal-negotiation thing.
There is Scott Alexander’s post about 10% as Schelling point and way to placate anxiety, there is the Giving What You Can calculation. but both have nothing with personal values.
I want an algorithm that is about introspection—about not smashing your altruistic and utilitarian parts, but not other parts too, about finding what number is the right number for me, by my own Utility Function.
and I just… didn’t find those discussions.

in dath ilan, when people expect to be able to name a price for everything more or less, and did extensive training to have the same answer to the questions ‘how much would you pay to get this extra’ and ‘how much additional payment would you forgo to get this extra’ and ‘how much would you pay to avoid losing this’ and ‘how much additional payment would you demand if you were losing this.’, there are answers.

What is the EA analog? how much I’m willing to pay if my parents will never learn about that? If I could press a button and get 1% more taxes that would have gone to top Giving Well charities but without all second order effects except the money, what number would I choose? What if negative numbers were allowed? what about the creation of a city with rules of its own, that take taxes for EA cause—how much i would accept then?

where are the “how to figure out how much money you want to donate in a Lawful way?” exercises?

Or maybe it’s because far too many people prefer and try to have their thinking, logical part win internal battle against other, more egotistical ones?

Where are all the posts about “how to find out what you really care about in a Lawful way”? The closest I came about is Internal Double Crux and Multi-agent Model of the soul and all its versions. But where are my numbers?

Jasnah Kholin 20 Jul 2023 9:21 UTC
1 point
0
on: A few more ants and grasshoppers
so, I’m in the same time happy there is an answer, but can’t be happy with the answer itself. which is to say, i tried to go and find the pints i agree with, and find one after another point of disagreement. but i also believe this post deserve more serious answer, so i will try to write at least part of my objections.

i do believe that x-risk and societies destroying themselves as thy become more clever then wise is a real problem. but i disagree with the framing that the ants are the ones to blame. it’s running from the problem. if grasshoppers are to grow, even if slower, they too may bring atomic winter.

and you just… assume it away. in the way of worst Utopian writing, where societies have features that present-people hate and find bad but somehow everyone happy and no one have any problems with that and everything is okay. it’s just… feel cheap to me.

and if you assume no growth at all, then… what about all the people that value growth? there are a lot of us in the world. if it’s actually “steady-state existence”, not sustainable growth but everything stay the same way… it’s really really really bad by my utility function, and the one good thing i can say about that, is that state doesn’t look stable to me. there were always innovators and progressors. you can’t have your stable society without some Dystopian repression of those.

but you can have dath ilan. this was my main problem with the original parable. it was very black-and-white. dath ilan didn’t come to the ants and ask for food, instead it offered it. but it definitely not table state. and to my intuition, it’s look both possible and desirable.

and it also doesn’t assume that the ants throw away decision theory from the window. the original parables explicitly mentioned it. i find representation of ants that forego cooperation in prisoner dilemma strawmanish.

but beside all that, there is another, meta-point. there was prediction after prediction for pick-oil and the results, and they all proved wrong. so are other predictions for that strand of socialism. from my point of view, the algorithm that generating this predictions is untrustworthy. i don’t think Less Wrong is the right place for all those discussions.

and i don’t plan to write my own, dath-ilani replay to the parables.

but i don’t think some perspectives are missing. i think they was judged false and ignored afterwards. and the way in which the original parables felt fair to the ants, and those don’t, is evidence this is good rule to follow.

it’s not bubble, it’s the trust in the ability for fair discussion, or the absent of trust. because discussion in which my opinions assumed to be result of bubble and not honest disagreement… i don’t have words to describe the sense of ugliness, wrongness, that this create. it the same that came from feeling the original post as honest and fair, and this as underhanded and strawmanish.

(all written here is not very certain and not precise representation of my opinions, but i already took way too much time to write it, and i think it better to write it then not)

Jasnah Kholin 17 Jul 2023 12:48 UTC
1 point
on: Save the kid, ruin the suit; Acceptable utility exchange rates; Distributed utility calculations; Civic duties matter
this would be much closer to the Pareto frontier then our curren social organization! unfortunately, this is NOT how society work. if you will operate like that, you will loss almost all your resources.

but it’s more complicated then that—why not gate this on cooperation? why should i give 1 dollar for 2 of someone else dollars, when they will not do that for me?

and this is why all this scheme doesn’t work. every such plan need to account for defectors, and it doesn’t look like you address it, anywhere.

on the issue of politics—most people who involve in politics make things worse. before declaring that it’s people duty to do something, it’s important to verify this is net-positive thing to do. if i look on people involved in politics and decide that less politics would have been better to society, then my duty is to NOT get involved in politics. or at least, not to get involved more then the level that i believe is the right level of involvement.

but… i really don’t see how all this politics even connected to the first half of the post, about the right ratio of my utility : other person utility?

Jasnah Kholin 17 Jul 2023 8:08 UTC
1 point
on: Both or Nothing
regarding the first paragraph—Eliezer not criticizing the Drowning Child story in our world, but in dath ilan. dath ilan, that is utilitarian in such questions, when more or less everyone is utilitarian when children lives are what at stake. we don’t live in dath ilan. in our world, it’s often the altruistic parts that hammer down the selfish parts, or warm-fuzzies parts that hammer down the utilitarian ones as heartless and cruel.

EA sometimes is doing the opposite—there are a lot of stories of burnout.

and in the large scheme of things, what i want is a way to find what actions in the world will represent my values to the fullest—but this is a problem when i can’t learn from dath ilan, that have a lot of things fungible, that are not in Earth.

Jasnah Kholin 27 May 2023 8:02 UTC
1 point
on: Lies Told To Children
So i read a lot of dah-ilani glowfics the previous weeks, and yet, i didn’t guess right. i didn’t stop to put numbers on it, so i can in retrospective (and still not sure it’s actually good idea to put numbers on all things). and it was 0.9 that the stroy is about kid losing trust in adults because they was told a lie, and 0.3 that after that, it turned out they should trust adults and this distrust is bad (like teens that think all drugs are not dangerous because adults exaggerate the harm of the less-harmful ones). in that situation, i was basically 50-50 divided if the Aesop is about the importance of bounded trust for the reader, that should see themselves as the kid, or that lying to children is bad, and the reader should not do that.

i did realized it’s dath illan and experiment some time after. and now i even more curious to what dath ilan would do with people like me, who see lying as Evil. not try to change them—the utilityfunction is not up to grabs.

i’m pretty sure typical minding make my attempts to do that sub-optimal. i just find it hard to imagine society when most people actually OK with that state of affairs. but my attempts at imagining trust broken and things go bad feel unrealistic, an-dath-ilani to my sense of how-dath-ilan-is. for example, this: https://pastebin.com/raw/fjpS2ZDP doesn’t strike me as realistic. i expect dath ilan can use the fact the Keepers Are Trustworthy for example, to swear to a child they will never ever pull such experiments on them, and the child believe that. i expect dath ilan check in younger age how children react to that sort of thing, that is standard on dath-ilani education, and stop if they see it bad for some kid.

and yet… the utilityfunction is not up to grabs. and for some reason, this “fact” about dath ilan is somehow more bad then, for example, the places where dath ilan allow people lack of reflection so they can remain themselves and not go full Keeper. i disagree there and find it wrong, but it strike me as difference in prioritization, when here it’s look like our utilityfunctions are opposite in this small section.

i see lies and deceptions as Evil, even of sometimes it can be traded off, and society with more slack will use it to lie much less, almost never. dath ilan LIKE it’s clever experiments and lies children should figure out for themselves. and i would have expected that Keepers would be the type of people that HATE such lies with fury of a thousand suns. so in the end, i remain confused, and feel like dath ilan is somewhat world-where-people-like-me-doesn’t-exist. which, most Utopias just ignore uncomfortable complications, but dath ilan is much better then most. and i can’t really believe dath ilan heredity-optimized to not have people that hate lying and being lied to.

so in the end, i just confused.

Jasnah Kholin 10 May 2023 9:16 UTC
1 point
in reply to: meedstrom’s comment on: Public beliefs vs. Private beliefs
this also describe math. like, the mote complicated math that have some prerequisites and person that didn’t take the courses in collage or some analog will not understand.

math, by my understanding of “legibility”, is VERY legible. same about programming, physics, and a whole bunch of explicitly lawful but complicated things.

what is your understanding about that sort of things?

Jasnah Kholin 9 May 2023 19:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Investigating Fabrication
I already have them in my reading list, but after that post i plan to epub them and read them soon.

Jasnah Kholin 9 May 2023 13:11 UTC
4 points
on: Investigating Fabrication
this is extremely good post. it example and illustrate the sort of mental-moves i believe is needed for rational thinking, of the variety of “know thyself”. those things are even harder then normal to communicate, and i find this post manage to do that, and manage to give me useful information, and give me example of how such introspection can happen. i really impressed!

Jasnah Kholin 23 Apr 2023 6:32 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
somewhere (i can’t find it now) some else wrote that if he will do that, Said always can say it’s not exactly what he means.

In this case, i find the comment itself not very insulting—the insult is in the general absent of Goodwill between Said and Duncan, and in the refuse to do interpretive labor. so any comment of “my model of you was <model> and now i just confused” could have worked.

my model of Duncan avoided to post it here from the general problems in LW, but i wasn’t surprised it was specific problem. I have no idea what was Said’s model of Duncan. but, i will try, with the caveat that the Said’s model of Duncan suggested is almost certainly not true :

I though that you avoid putting it in LW because there will be strong and wrong pushback here against the concept of imaginary injury. it seem coherent with the crux of the post. now, when I learn the true, i simply confused. in my model, what you want to avoid is exactly the imaginary injury described in the post, and i can’t form coherent model of you.

i suspect Said would have say i don’t pass his ideological Turning test on that, or continue to say it’s not exact. I submit that if i cannot, it’s not writing not-insultingly, but passing his ideological turning test.

Jasnah Kholin 20 Apr 2023 7:01 UTC
11 points
8
in reply to: Drake Morrison’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
i think we have very different models of things, so i will try to clarify mine. my best bubble site example is not in English, so i will give another one—the emotional Labor thread in MetaFilter, and MetaFilter as whole. just look on the sheer LENGTH of this page!

https://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor

there are much more then 3 comments from person there.

from my point of view, this rule create hard ceiling that forbid the best discussions to have. because the best discussions are creative back-and-forth. my best discussions with friends are - one share model, one ask questions, or share different model, or share experience, the other react, etc. for way more then three comments. more like 30 comments. it’s dialog. and there are lot of unproductive examples for that in LW. and it’s quite possible (as in, i assign to it probability of 0.9) that in first-order effects, it will cut out unproductive discussions and will be positive.

but i find rules that prevent the best things from happening as bad in some way that i can’t explain clearly. something like, I’m here to try to go higher. if it’s impossible, then why bother?

I also think it’s VERY restrictive rule. i wrote more then three comments here, and you are the first one to answer me. like, i’m just right now taking part in counter-example to “would find it surprising if you needed more than 3 comments per day to share examples, personal experiences, intuitions and relations.”

i shared my opinions on very different and unrelated parts of this conversation here. this is my six comment. and i feel i reacted very low-heat. the idea i should avoid or conserve those comments to have only three make me want to avoid comment on LW altogether. the message i get from this rule is like… is like i assumed guilty of thing i literately never do, and so have very restricted rules placed on me, and it’s very unfriendly in a way that i find hard to describe.

like, 90% of the activity this rule will restrict is legitimate, good comments. this is awful false positive ratio. even if you don’t count the you-are-bad-and-unwelcome effect i feel from it and you, apparently, not.

Jasnah Kholin 19 Apr 2023 11:01 UTC
0 points
on: Explaining Capitalism Harder
i don’t think it will go more productive. explaining harder is not my default mode. my default mode is more close to your suggestions, and so i can tell from experience it’s NOT productive. what happen next is Fabricated Options, and refusal to react rationally to evidence.

like, i can remember ONE time when i got sensible reaction. and there are locally-infamous situation when socialist politician agreed that their proposal was tried and the results was bad, only to use the same proposal afterwards.

the standard failure mode i have with socialists in discussion is ignoring or outright denying bad consequences. the good version is accepting the price and prefer this version, or having wildly different frame and so different model and predictions. and most of political discussions are bad—capitalists tend to replay in slogans and ignore evidence of socialists policies working, too.

maybe it’ss different worlds or inverting every advise situation. because when i read the title, i was sure the post will be about explaining capitalism harder, because in my experience, this is the helpful thing people need to do more, while your proposal for different strategy is the current, inefficient one.

Jasnah Kholin 19 Apr 2023 7:54 UTC
8 points
−2
in reply to: Drake Morrison’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
i find the fact that you see comments as criticism, and not expanding and continuing the building, is indicative of what i see as problematic. good comments should most of the time not be critisim. be part of the building.

the dynamic that is good in my eyes, is one when comments are making the post better not by criticize it, but by sharing examples, personal experiences, intuitions, and the relations of those with the post.

counting all comments as prune instead of bubble disincentivize bubble-comments. this is what you want?

Jasnah Kholin 18 Apr 2023 18:04 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
(3) i didn’t watch the movie, nor i plan to watch it, but i read the plot summary in Wikipedia. and I see it as caution against escalation. the people there consistently believe that you should revenge on 1 point offense at 4 points punishment. and this create escalation cycle.

while i think most of Duncan’s writing is good, the thing when i think he consistently create bad situations, is in unproportional escalations of conflict, and inability to just let things be.

once upon a time if i saw someone did something 1 point bad and someone reacting in 3 point bad thing, i would think the first one is 90% of the problem. with time, i find robustness more and more important, and now i see the second one more problematic. as such. i disagree with your description of the movie.

the plot is one people doing something bad, other refuse to punish him, and a lot of people that escalate things, and so, by my standards, doing bad things. LOT of bad things. to call it a chin reaction is to not assign the people that doing bad unproportional escalating things agency over their bad choices. it’s strange for me, as i see this agency very clearly.

Jasnah Kholin 18 Apr 2023 16:04 UTC
2 points
3
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
“I do generally wish Duncan did more of this and less trying to set-the-record straight in ways that escalate in IMO very costly ways”

strongly agree.

Jasnah Kholin 18 Apr 2023 15:46 UTC
3 points
5
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
I actually DO believe you can’t write this in not-insulting way. I find it the result of not prioritizing developing and practicing those skills in general.

while i do judge you for this, i judge you for this one time, on the meta-level, instead of judging any instance separately. as i find this behavior orderly and predictable.

Jasnah Kholin 18 Apr 2023 14:10 UTC
5 points
−1
on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads
So this is the fourth time I am trying to write a comment. This comment is far from ideal, but I feel like I did the best as my current skill in writing in English and understanding such situations allow.

1. I find 90% of the practical problems to be Drama. as in, long, repetitive, useless arguments. if it was facebook and Duncan blocked Said, and then proceeded to block anyone that was too much out of line by Duncan-standards, it would have solved 90% of Duncan-related problems. if he would have given up already on making LW his kind of garden, it would have solved another 9%.

2. In my ideal Garden, Said would have been banned long ago. but it is my believe (and i have like five posts waiting to be written to explain my framework and evidence on that, if i will actually write them) that LW will never be something even close to my or Duncan’s Garden (there is 80%-90% similarity in our definitions of garden, by my model of Duncan).

In this LessWrong, he may remain and not be blocked. It is also good that more people will ignore his comments that predictably start a useless argument. aka—if i will write something about introspective, i expect Said comment to be useless. a also expect most third and after comments in thread to be useless.

In better LW, those net-negative comments would have been ignored, downvoted, and maybe deleted by mods. while the good ones upvoted and got reactions.

3. Duncan, I will be sad if you leave LW. I really enjoy and learn from your posts. I also believe LW will never be your Garden. i would like you to just give up already on changing LW, but still remain here and write. I wish you could have just… care less about comments, assume that 90% of what is important in LW is posts, not comments. Ignore most comments, answer only to those that you deem good and written in Goodwill. LessWrong is not YOUR version of Garden, and will never be. but it has good sides, and you (hopefully) can choose to enjoy the good parts and ignore the bad ones. while now it looks to me like you are optimized toward trying things you object to and engage with them, in hope to change LW to be more to your standards.