jchan

Rub­ber stamp errors

• jchan 22 Apr 2026 14:56 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Bruce Lewis’s comment on: Call for machers

  Couldn’t this just be a tag here on lesswrong?

  It could be, but for whatever reason it isn’t. I suppose I should heed my own advice and create it? (I only now realized I’m able to do that.) There you go: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​w/​​meetup-writeups

  But this doesn’t help with local discoverability unless there’s also a specific tag for each individual meetup group, and I’m not sure I’m ready to be the one to open those floodgates myself. Also, writing up notes that are up to the quality standards of LW articles is a lot of work. It’s much easier to write down brief bullet points, but these may be not-very-useful to people who aren’t part of the local community that produced them.

  If you assume there’s a primary author of such a writing, isn’t lesswrong’s draft-sharing function already good enough?

  Not sure what you mean by this; can you elaborate?

• jchan 22 Apr 2026 14:15 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Tim H’s comment on: Clique, Guild, Cult

  Splitting a guild in half may be difficult because some number of close 1:1 connections are going to be broken no matter where the line is drawn. Instead what may end up happening is that the guild undermines its own unifying principle and shatters into dozens of small cliques, and now there are 0 guilds.

  The unfortunate reality (and what motivated me to write this post) is that sometimes an organization will find itself constrained by its past choices, with no viable way forward. A guild of 200 may wish it could’ve been two guilds of 100 instead, but the time to make that decision was when they were contemplating adding their 101st member, not now. (Similarly, a group of 60 may find itself in “embarrassed cult” territory and wish it could become a guild, but really they should’ve done that a long time ago.)

  Maybe the ideal setup for a large community would be something like the “colleges within a university” system, where the university has a rule that each college may not grow beyond a certain size. So, as the existing colleges fill up, there will be a growing population of unaffiliated hangers-on who will eventually be able to form their own college.

  (Again, I’m only speculating here since I have no personal experience with groups this large.)

Call for machers

• jchan 20 Apr 2026 14:50 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: If a room feels off the light­ing is prob­a­bly too “spiky” or too blue

  The world got ugly when we invented LEDs

  I don’t know if it’s just me, but whenever I see lone, undiffused LEDs (such as on string lights or light strips), it is immediately obvious that they’re LEDs because of the “aliasing” or “shimmering” effect I see when my eyes saccade back and forth. This is a stroboscopic effect and so even the best CRI doesn’t prevent this. For this reason (and on the recommendation of this article) I’ve made sure to only get incandescent string lights for my own use.

  (Sometimes when I see a Christmas tree strung up with LED lights, I can even tell that half of the bulbs are on a circuit whose cycle is 180 degrees out of phase with the other, because the lights shimmer in opposite directions.)

Fear of crowd­ing out

• jchan 17 Apr 2026 16:20 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: So­ciety is a so­cial con­struct, pace Arrow

  That’s fair; I’m trying to gesture at a certain cluster of rhetoric I sometimes come across, and I may be caricaturing or strawmanning by calling it “logical positivism”:

  • Treating “X is a social construct” as the end, not the beginning, of the conversation, as if nothing else meaningful can then be said about X

  • Or, asserting that social-construct-statements are simply false (example, though not to pick on that article too much; that’s just one I remember from recently)

  A sentence like “The Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives” is not “false”, but it’s not “truth-apt” either. It also wouldn’t really make sense to apply the Litany of Tarski: “If the Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives, then I desire to believe that the Congress of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives...”. Maybe I think Congress should consist of one house, or three, or should be abolished, but this is unrelated to any belief about an underlying “reality” that this statement somehow fails to correspond to.

  You can cash out “The Congress… does consist of...” into empirical observations, but I think people speaking imprecisely may confuse this with the “shall” version.

  To give the analytic tradition its due, the concept of illocutionary acts was later developed to cover statements like this, but it would be hard to fit it into the framework of “classic” logical positivism (i.e. that everything is either an empirical fact, or a tautological relation of ideas, or else meaningless).

• jchan 17 Apr 2026 14:13 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: We live in a society

  I wonder how this generalizes to decisions that aren’t just about electing candidates, but involve a combinatorial explosion of possible courses of action. E.g.: “We can have our conference on either Friday or Saturday. We can invite Professor Alice as a keynote speaker, or Senator Bob, but Senator Bob is only available on Saturday. If it’s Saturday we can invite both, but then we must choose another item to delete from the agenda. Or we could have a session on both Friday and Saturday, but then we must raise the ticket price by $X...”

  In a typical Robert’s-Rules meeting the outcome will sometimes depend in a fairly arbitrary way upon the order in which the various alternatives were suggested. Approval voting wouldn’t have that problem, but may become inefficient if combinatorial decisions like this come up a lot.

So­ciety is a so­cial con­struct, pace Arrow

We live in a society

• jchan 14 Apr 2026 14:39 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: JohnofCharleston’s comment on: Clique, Guild, Cult

  How about this as a synthesis:

  

  (This is speculative on my part, since I have no personal experience with groups like this.)

  A group of type #5 is really no cult at all (since there’s no leader), but a “mob” as you say. I was only calling it a “fractious cult” because the most common way to end up there is a large cult suddenly becoming much more egalitarian upon the loss of their leader. But I suppose it could also result from a guild growing too rapidly and carelessly. In any case, a mob is inherently unstable, and will quickly decay into something else.

  In a perfect guild, every member carries around a mental model of every other member, which they consult whenever acting on behalf of the group. This can only work up to a size of 150, since it’s simply not possible to carry around more mental models than that (hence Dunbar’s Number). Therefore it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate broad sweeping authority to “standing committees” (etc.) that are less-than-perfectly accountable to the group, and have to use their own judgement in a lot of cases. Plenary meetings become increasingly rare and performative. In that respect it starts to take on certain culty characteristics, and so it’s an “imperfect guild”. On the other hand it’s not really a cult either; I don’t know where that boundary is. It may overlap with #8 somewhat.

  The significance of the “phase boundaries” is that it takes a lot of “energy” to pass through them, and so groups will often break up or stagnate rather than do this. This is why the direction of the slope is meaningful. So e.g. when a growing clique approaches Robert’s Limit from the left, the more egalitarian-leaning members will believe it’s imperative to cross the boundary now (i.e. draw up a guild charter), whereas the more authoritarian-leaning members will think this is unnecessary. Therefore the group will either try to avoid exposing the division by ceasing to grow, or else break up, thus bouncing off the boundary.

  Likewise, I imagine that when a growing guild approaches Dunbar’s Limit from the left, the authoritarian members will already be exceeding their mental-modeling-capacity and will thus think it’s necessary to cross the boundary (by appointing a standing committee or whatever), whereas the egalitarian members will insist on stretching their mental-modeling-capacity as far as possible in order to avoid compromising the “perfection” of the guild.

• jchan 13 Apr 2026 18:38 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: JohnofCharleston’s comment on: Clique, Guild, Cult

  I could see a similar/​opposite point that you don’t need structure in small cliques, but with someone ’lightly in charge” you can avoid structure up to 25-30.

  Yeah, I think this is what I’m getting at. Robert’s Rules says there’s no real point in formality if the group is about 12 or fewer; this defines the minimum size at which the group will think adopting formal rules is a good idea. More authoritarian groups can postpone that discussion till later.

  I’m more confused about the Dunbar number curving, even in fairly authoritarian systems you should still be able to know and maintain personal relationships with other members of the group. There’s also the implication that a Guild could be a reasonable format for 50-100 people if mostly egalitarian, but hits size limits as the leader takes on more authority, which seems the opposite of what I’d expect.

  My intuition is: That line represents the point at which people start thinking “This bureaucratic structure is too cumbersome to get anything done with this many people; we therefore need strong leaders who can act through personal authority rather than merely bureaucratically-delegated authority.” I.e., the guild starts turning into a cult. And the population threshold at which people will give up on the guild structure will be lower the more authoritarian the culture.

  Example, but only by analogy since it’s not really an “association” in the same sense—Because of their egalitarian culture, towns in New England will maintain an “open town meeting” form of government (which functions like a guild) up to a population of about 6,000 or so, whereas in less egalitarian parts of the country a village will incorporate itself into a town with a mayor (which is sort-of like a cult) at a much lower population threshold.

  (Maybe the name is confusing. I’m being a bit cheeky calling the line “Dunbar’s Limit”, since it’s named after its x-intercept, i.e. “Dunbar’s Number”, which is just the number 150. That is, you can have 150 personal acquaintances regardless of whether you’re in a guild or a cult; it’s just that 150 is the point at which even the most staunch egalitarians will give up on trying to keep it a guild.)

  I’m less sure about what the clique/​cult boundary represents. Maybe that’s more of a gradual transition.

Clique, Guild, Cult

• jchan 21 Feb 2026 1:15 UTC

  13 points

  5

  in reply to: omegastick’s comment on: How To Es­cape Su­per Mario Bros

  I think analyzing the “Signal” is the key. It’s an output, and so it is not causally upstream of anything else, but it is evidently not necessary to play the game, so it stands in need of an explanation. And its modality (analog waveforms) is clearly unlike anything else in the machine. The narrator would be able to deduce the concept of “music” by noticing that the frequencies relate to each other by factors of 2^(1/​12) that often seem to approximate small whole-number ratios like 3:2 and 5:4. From this it can conclude that the intended users of the machine have some sensory modality that directly perceives waves and does some kind of Fourier analysis of their frequencies, and which is likely distinct from the modality by which the “screen” is perceived.

  I don’t know where this gets you exactly, since periodic waveforms can have any number of physical explanations, but it seems a lot closer to the physical world than anything else here.

• jchan 12 Feb 2026 20:59 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Cop­ing with Deconversion

  

  I think some of the comments suggesting you cobble together an “ersatz religion” ^[1] are misguided—it will always feel like a fake, inferior substitute for the real thing, because that’s what it is. Instead I suggest: read up on a wide variety of perspectives from different cultures and historical periods, and try to imagine how they feel from the inside. Then you might see that the very concept of “religion” is rather more fuzzy and contingent than you may have thought, and you’ll feel less of a sense that you’re missing something important.

  1. ↩︎

     This motivated me to start writing an explainer about “ersatzness” which I think is a useful concept in general. It’s not ready yet, but the above crudely-drawn visual aid conveys the essence of it.

• jchan 28 Jan 2026 1:38 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Warty’s comment on: Disagree­ment Comes From the Dark World

  I like to call this Cassandra/​Mule discourse.

• jchan 15 Jan 2026 14:26 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Derek DeHart’s comment on: Back­yard cat fight shows Schel­ling points pre­ex­ist language

  Assuming the claim is true, where do you go from here?

  Potential answers:

  • This can motivate us to look more closely at animal behavior and evolutionary history to help us understand how humans behave in territorial conflicts (as alluded to in that book I mentioned) - because if human territorial behavior is not fundamentally linguistic in nature, then there’s no reason to suppose it’s unique to humans.

    • By contrast, in an area of human behavior that clearly is linguistic, e.g. storytelling, studying animals won’t tell us much.

  • The problems of philosophy are iatrogenic ^[1] . So maybe if you haven’t spent a lot of time getting yourself confused by debating metaethics, this conclusion seems trite to you; but for some of us it helps dissolve the confusions we acquired earlier. (For example, I used to favor the position that moral statements are purely logical, analytic truths like those of mathematics, and so any attempt to justify them by empirical observation or “human nature” is immediately suspect.)

  • More speculatively: People have been talking recently about LLMs engaging in negotiations. But LLMs are not animals, but purely linguistic entities. So what they’re doing may differ from what humans do in some important way.

  1. ↩︎

     See also Aaronson: “the world needs good philosophers, if for no other reason than to refute bad philosophers!”

• jchan 15 Jan 2026 13:44 UTC

  24 points

  9

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Back­yard cat fight shows Schel­ling points pre­ex­ist language

  If that’s the case, then isn’t it an astonishing coincidence that the negotiated boundary just so happens to coincide with the fence?

  Some experiments that would more clearly test the use of Schelling points:

  1. If instead of a fence we have an even more trivial boundary marker, like a line of 4-inch-wide curb stones, do the animals still use that as their boundary? (Prediction: Yes)

  2. If the boundary marker is surreptitiously moved slightly to one side, do the animals respect the new location, or do they continue using the old location? (Prediction: New location, until the deviation from the original line becomes significant, at which point the disfavored party will breach it.)

  3. If the boundary marker is removed entirely, do the animals start fighting again? (Prediction: Yes)

• jchan 14 Jan 2026 18:13 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Derek DeHart’s comment on: Back­yard cat fight shows Schel­ling points pre­ex­ist language

  “non-verbal bargaining is the default from which explicit bargaining emerges when it’s insufficient”

  The point I’m gesturing at is more abstract than this—it’s not that tacit bargaining is literally prior to explicit bargaining, in the sense that everyone always starts tacit and then resorts to explicit if that fails. I’m saying that tacit bargaining is “conceptually” prior to explicit bargaining; i.e.:

  • We can observe a world where tacit bargaining takes place without even the possibility of explicit bargaining (i.e. the world of cats).

  • However, (I claim) we cannot imagine the opposite. Explicit bargaining cannot take place without the background possibility of tacit bargaining, because otherwise the words used in the attempted explicit bargaining would have no meaning.

  Is there an example you can share between humans who otherwise could engage in explicit bargaining that reinforces the non-verbal bargaining you observed in the cats?

  I haven’t actually read this, but there’s a book on this subject, The Territorial Imperative, whose Wikipedia summary is interesting and provocative. The author argues that human territorial behavior is essentially the same as that of animals, and so the verbiage we pile on top of it is less relevant to understanding what goes on in human conflicts than observations of animals.

Back­yard cat fight shows Schel­ling points pre­ex­ist language