jimmy

Karma: 4,333

jimmy 10 Jan 2026 19:31 UTC
11 points
2
on: The false confidence theorem and Bayesian reasoning

Not uncertainty, but rather high confidence of safety.
Phrased this way, it sounds all “spooky mysterious”, in the way that needs a named theorem and explanation.
Phrased to be easily understood, due to the vast space and few tiny satellites, you are very unlikely to have a collision when blindly throwing darts at this dart board.
I may be maximally ignorant about what tomorrows lottery numbers will be, but I can safely predict that I will not win.
You certainly should not become more confident that 2 satellites are safe, just because you added random noise to the measurements. [...]However, giving each one a random push from its jets increases the actual variation in their paths, likely pushing them away from the previous point estimate of a collision, and thus does make them safer.
And if you add random noise, you don’t get more confident. Like, if you’re cruising along on what appears to be a potential collision course, and then your sensor goes bad and starts giving noisy data, you don’t get more confident that you’re safe. You just get more scared more slowly, in the case that you’re on track to collide.
If you never had any evidence that this unlikely event is about to take place, then of course you can’t magically get to the answer without evidence. Maybe you’re on a collision course and jinking would make you safer. More likely though, you’re just on a “close call” course, and jinking could put you on an actual collision course.
As an outsider with special knowledge, you may be rooting for the satellite to make some random motions, or to not change anything. As an engineer working on a satellite with noisy instruments, you don’t have the privilege of knowing the right answer ahead of time, and you will have no way of firing the rockets only when it’s helpful. If you program your satellites to move randomly, all you will accomplish is wasted fuel.
Imagine if from the inside. You’re handed a revolver and forced to play Russian roulette. Your wife saw the spin and knows whether it landed on a live round and is either praying that you spin again or praying that you don’t. You don’t know where the live round is, and can’t see or hear her. Do you ask to spin the spin the cylinder again? Would it help anything if you did?
The take away is just that if you want to predict rare events, you need evidence. Rare events do happen, if rarely, and unless you collect the evidence you’ll have no choice but to be surprised if it happens to you.

jimmy 23 Dec 2025 17:44 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: EA Yale Destiny Debate Discussion:
I think Trump’s comments about Rob Reiner were not to remotely take his death seriously.
Well of course. Can you honestly not see the difference?

LLMs give us a really useful tool for political conversations where “mind killing” is a real risk. We can now post the entire context to Claude and ask a neutral question like “Does it look like <username> is engaging with arguments that might change his mind, or defending against them?”.

What do you predict Claude will say, and are these predictions validated by experiment?

Or rather, before running that check, what would the appropriate response be if one were to run such a check and not receive ego-syntonic feedback? If I run that check and Claude says “Jimmy’s comments contain the following signs of cognitive dissonance:”, what should I do with that?

jimmy 22 Dec 2025 4:04 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: EA Yale Destiny Debate Discussion:
These are all very different things—both the attacks, and the responses to the attacks.
To get a real parallel to the Kirk situation, you’d have to have someone like Destiny getting publicly assassinated by someone who unironically claims “Destiny was spreading hate and can’t be reasoned with” as justification, right wing media outlets getting caught
cheering, and in that context someone like Ben Shapiro making jokes about how much blood gushed from Destiny’s neck. Thankfully none of this has happened.
Failing to remember the senator shooting is a much different response to a much different situation. The analogy there would be failing to remember the more closely analogous case where the congressmen where shot by a left wing crazy (remember that one?).
The Paul Pelosi situation is different in a few important ways. The fact that Paul Pelosi is still alive and has recovered is pretty significant. So is the fact that the right wing response was to make fun of him for getting attacked by his gay lover, not to cheer.
If, instead of emphatically stating that he had no sympathy for the Trump supporter killed in the attempted assassination of Trump, Destiny had just made a joke that it was probably Trumps gay lover shooting at him, that would be a very different thing. And pretty funny, IMO.
The problem—and I say this as a fan of Destiny, who has enough Destiny-like tendenciess that when I showed his videos to an ex, her response was “He’s been hanging out with you too much”—is that Destiny is losing track of the actual symmetries and how to break them. I laughed at his vampire joke (and was viscerally bothered by Kirk’s killing), and he’s right that you gotta tit when the other guy tats and saying “I’M ONLY TITTING IN RESPONSE TO YOUR TAT! HOW ’BOUT WE STOP!?” does break the symmetry.
But what he loses track of is that the other side also thinks they’re titting in response to “the other guy started it”, and the other side also thinks “BUT WE’RE OBJECTIVELY RIGHT THO!”, and that when he’s insisting that he has no sympathy for the Trump supporters who were killed, that isn’t above the symmetry it’s actually engaging in the thing (and escalation of the thing) that he wants to see less of (from the other side).
I’m glad that he’s pushing back against the expectation of performative sympathy, and performative condemnation, in favor of (sometimes provocative) humor. I’d like to see the humor be more consistently genuine though, and for him to have some actual sympathy under there too instead of succumbing to the contempt attractor and stoking the flames.

jimmy 10 Dec 2025 22:33 UTC
9 points
0
on: Childhood and Education #15: Got To Get Out
Actually fighting back effectively can get you in big trouble, and often models many behaviors you don’t actually want. Whereas the techniques you would use against a real bully outside of school, that you’d want to use, don’t work.
In my experience, this isn’t true because fighting back effectively stops escalation before it happens.
I wasn’t bullied in school, but not for lack of attempts. When they threw a ball of paper at me, I’d throw it back. When they asked if I want to fight, I’d say “ok”. This happened many times, and not once did I actually have to fight anyone and therefore never I got suspended. Even the much bigger kid a year ahead of me just didn’t show up to the scheduled fight (thankfully).
Even as an adult, the same approach worked well the one time I was in a bizarre enough situation to need it in a literal sense. The only time I ever got in a real fight was when it was too scary to say “ok” and I tried to run away instead.
To give a more “adult” example, if a neighbor in your apartment complex starts yelling at you for “messing with” the jacuzzi heater, the right posture isn’t to yell back, it’s to just to tell him that you were fixing it, then turn your back on him and go back to enjoying your jacuzzi session until he realizes he’s being a dick and apologizes. It’s absolutely a useful skill that shows up in places that are worth being in.
That doesn’t mean “fight back” won’t get you in trouble, just that you have to make sure you’re doing the right thing. The posture isn’t “Fuck me? No fuck you!”, or “I’m not gonna take your shit anymore!”, it’s “ok”. The former can get you in a lot of trouble—both with bullies and with the school, because it’s actively escalating. The latter deflates attempts to bully really quickly because there’s just no place to put them.
In hindsight, the one time I failed to avoid a fight it’s because I didn’t commit to either “ok” or running. I chose to run, and when they gave chase and started kicking at us I decided “I guess I’m gonna have to fight back”—which they weren’t expecting but by then they didn’t have a graceful exit. Expectation management.
So yes, “just fight back!” is naive and dumb. And “opportunities to learn to stand up for yourself” are of no use if you don’t manage to learn these things. At some point you just gotta pull your kid.

At the same time, there’s something real there too. There is an opportunity, if you manage to rise to it. And it applies to adult life as well in far more subtle ways.

jimmy 7 Dec 2025 19:21 UTC
23 points
8
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
The point is that “maintaining sanity” is a (much) higher bar than “Don’t flail around like a drama queen”. Maintaining sanity requires you to actually update on the situation you find yourself in, and continue to behave in ways that make sense given the reality as it looks after having updated on all the information available. Not matching obvious tropes of people losing their mind is a start, but it is no safe defense. Especially since not all repeated/noticeable failure modes are active and dramatic, and not all show up in fiction.
For example, if there’s something to David Gross’s comment that the wretched journalist was actually giving you an opening because they saw importance in what you had to say about the situation, blowing off a genuine opening to influence the discourse on AI safety while calling it “doing nothing” would not be sane. Preemptive contempt has a purpose in bounded rationality, but it’s still a form of pushing away from the information the journalist has to offer. It can make sense within a grand plan that weights this journalist low, but that requires a grand plan.
How do you actually orient to the world, now that we are what we are? Are you still working to bring about the good outcome? If so, what’s the grand plan that ties everything together? Sharing that seems important for helping people retain sanity. Have you given up? If so, what is the overarching plan that drives how you choose to interact with the world? Because you still have to decide what to do with your time.
This is a hell of a problem to orient to, and I don’t know that any of us get to say we’re doing it sanely. It’s a high bar to strive towards.
The trope that this post and comment match to me isn’t one that shows up in science fiction. It’s a real bitch to wrestle free from, because the whole premise has to do with protecting stability of sense making by pushing away from challenging updates with avoidance and contempt, and the whole project fails if it doesn’t turn meta and resist awareness of the trope. I notice that even writing and rewriting this comment to be minimally threatening of stability without holding back content, it’s going to be a tough one to engage with to the extent that there isn’t a preexisting superstructure regulating contact with reality to maintain stability while minimizing the cost of missed updates.
Which is certainly a possibility. As is leveraging the skill of becoming genre savvy as new patterns emerge (“trope dodging”).
So if this contempt provokes contempt quickly, I’m sorry. My best isn’t always good enough, which is kinda the possibility we’re all wrestling with here.

jimmy 29 Nov 2025 9:40 UTC
2 points
0
on: To write better, just explain it to someone
Any thoughts on what to do if “just explain it to someone” turns into a long back and forth dialog?

jimmy 26 Nov 2025 7:12 UTC
11 points
10
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Alignment will happen by default. What’s next?
The distinction between what might be called “lying” and “bullshitting” is important here, because they scale with competence differently.
It was pretty interesting watching this develop in my kids. Saying “No!” to “Did you take the cookie from the cookie jar?” is the first thing you get, because it doesn’t require a concept for “truth” at all. Which utterance postpones trouble? Those are the sounds I shall make!

Yet for a while my wife and I were in a situation where we could just ask our younger kid about her fight with our older kid, because the younger kid did not have a concept for fabricating a story in order to mislead. She was developed enough to say “No!” to things she knew she did, but not developed enough to form the intention of misleading.
The impression I get from LLM is that they’re bullshitters. Predict what text comes next. Reward the one’s that sound good to some dumb human, and what’s gonna come out? We don’t need to postulate an intent to mislead, we just need to notice that there is no robust intent to maintain honest calibration—which is hard. Much harder than “output text that sounds like knowing the answer”.

It takes “growing up” to not default to bullshit out of incompetence. Whether we teach them they’ll be rewarded by developing skillful and honest calibration, or by intentionally blowing smoke up our ass is another question.

jimmy 16 Nov 2025 18:26 UTC
4 points
0
on: The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1
I like this post because it takes things you can only learn by “actually doing things”, and then presents them in ways that can be generalized.
My above description is false, actually. I’ve been saying that you are trying to hit the limit without going over. Actually, fast drivers hover at the limit. They oscillate between a little bit under and a little bit over. [...]
They find the limit by probing for it, dancing at it.
This part in particular, because the default assumption is “Oh no, can’t cross the limit!”, yet this is true about a lot of things.
Also, even if you’re just driving to visit your grandma and not pushing the limits of traction, a traction aware driver will drive differently than your average driver. For example, it’s quite common to approach a red light at their current driving speed, only to start braking harder and harder at the end. Which is a foolish use of the safety margin, and also slower than the person who brakes gently and early, and therefore is more likely to still have momentum when the light turns green.

jimmy 15 Nov 2025 20:55 UTC
8 points
0
on: Don’t use the phrase “human values”
The problem with talking about things is that we don’t really have a good shared ontology of how “preferences”/”desires”/”values”/etc work, and they don’t work the way people think they do.
Basically everything is way more context dependent than anyone realizes—as in, “I only wanted to go to the store because I thought it had the food I wanted”, to give a trivial example. But that food you had a preference for is subject to change as your bodies needs for nutrients changes. Even things like people’s identities as “asexual” or “straight” are prone to update with the evidence we come across.
So then you try to say “Well, that’s ‘tastes’, when I talk about ‘values’ I mean things like ‘autonomy’”. Except that kind of thing is merely instrumental as well—stabilized by motivated blind spots about how useless autonomy can be in the right contexts. And then the right contexts come along, and your “values” shift. Which can sound like “Oh no! Value drift!” from the outside, but once you get there, it’s just “Oh no, that store was closed. It’s my recognition of that which has changed”.
Then you try to retreat to “Okay, but pain is bad. Like, by definition!”. Except it isn’t, because masochists. Which aren’t even uncommon, with how many people like spicy food, and hard massages that “hurt in a good way”.
The last step seems to be avoidance of suffering, saying “Ah, right, pain isn’t suffering” but suffering is the definition of bad!. Except we choose that too! Suffering is what we choose in order to stave off the loss of hope. Often without realizing it, so we can get stuck with unproductive suffering which really is good to eliminate, but it’s something we choose nonetheless. And becoming conscious of it can allow more deliberate choice between hopelessness and continued suffering.
The whole thing is hard to make sense of, so it’s kinda “Of course people are going to use terms in unclear and conflicting ways”. When you say people should talk about things like “Their own preferences”, are you referring to their preference to go to the store, or to eat the food that they believe the store has for them? Or something upstream of that? When you talk about “normative values”, what the heck is that, exactly? If it’s “The thing that we should value”, then what exactly is that ‘should’ being used to distract from? Do we have any shared and accurate idea of what this means, descriptively speaking?
I think we need more deliberate study of how human tastes/desires/wants/values/etc change or don’t, before we’re going to have smooth hiccup-free communication on the topic. I agree with you that these terms conflate things, but I don’t think we have the option of not conflating things yet. So I’m nudging away from “Just use clear language and then everything will be clear” and towards “notice what your concepts might be hiding, and how much ambiguity is necessarily left”.

jimmy 15 Nov 2025 1:15 UTC
19 points
4
on: The Charge of the Hobby Horse
While I understand the frustration, I’d rather have more hobby horse riders here. If I ever say something to inspire the charge of a hobby horse, I want that correction.
Because I might get lazy. Or imprecise. The “correction” might be something I immediately recognize as “obviously true”, and want to say “Yeah yeah, that’s what I meant”. But it might not be what I said, and I may have been underweighting the importance of that little “nitpick” when I was writing. After all, that why there’s the charging of the hobby horse; the other person doesn’t think it’s some unimportant nitpick. And neither do the LW voters, in the cases you highlight.
Maybe it’s not.
If we try to discourage people from correcting real errors or misleading representations in the text, simply because the person pointing it out is unusually perceptive in this area, or is unusually aware of the importance of this kind of mistake, then we are in effect saying that we don’t want to hear from people who are uniquely suited to correcting specific errors. “Sorry, Eliezer, you’ve been riding this AI hobby horse too much. We agree that making an unfriendly superintelligence would be bad, which is why we’re going to make it friendly. Can’t we move on and build it now?”.
That doesn’t cut it when the issue actually is important, and often the awareness of these things falls on few people. “What is a woman?” exploded into such a huge issue that I’m glad we have our resident “hobby horse rider” here, with skin in the game, motivated to do very careful thinking and call out what he sees to be errors on our part. If he’s wrong he’s wrong, which is a different criticism. If he’s right though, I’d rather amend or clarify my writing to the satisfaction of the person who makes getting this particular thing right their thing. It might save me from mistakes I don’t properly appreciate.
The qualifier “to the satisfaction of the other person” is important here. I know you think you’ve gotten things close enough. Likely so do the other authors in your examples. I also know that the hobby horse riding commenters disagree, and so does the audience—at least in these cases. And that if you can’t pass their ITT you can’t know if you’re missing something that validates their perspective and invalidates yours. And that if you can, they won’t continue to think you don’t get it, and therefore won’t have reason to post those “unnecessary” comments.

jimmy 13 Nov 2025 21:45 UTC
8 points
0
on: What’s so hard about...? A question worth asking
I wonder how often questions like “What makes one race car driver faster than another” have a different answer from “What makes all race car drivers way faster than you”.

I know from experience that “riding the limits of traction” is the first 90% that most people don’t get, but how often is the last ten percent just chasing diminishing returns on the same thing, and how often is it a completely new skill that becomes relevant once you handle the “easy part”?
For example, using long range rifle shooting as an example, the answer to the former is “reading wind”. But if you simply hand a rifle to someone who has never shot before, wind won’t be the reason they miss. They still have to learn how to stabilize a rifle, calculate drop, etc.
But yes, interesting set of questions either way.

jimmy 11 Nov 2025 21:46 UTC
2 points
0
on: Learning information which is full of spiders
This is a normal consequence of intending at a level that requires more control than we actually have. Which is a normal consequence of not yet perceiving the interrelation and structure of expectation and control
When we control things, the effect of our control is to make our desired outcome expected—for if we can’t hit the center of the target even in expectation, then by definition we aren’t in control. “Expecting” an outcome goes hand in hand with aiming to “control to” or “manifest” an expectation.
When the room is too cold, we think “Brr… it shouldn’t be this cold in here!” and then go turn the heat up until room’s temperature meets our expectations. Okay, fine.
But then what happens when your mom might have cancer?
You’ve been expecting her to not have cancer, and you want to be able to keep this expectation because who wants their mom to have cancer? So you might focus on the desired world state where your mom has no cancer, acting to do what you can to bring it about. You focus on manifesting no cancer in the biopsy—and know this will fail, so you get this error signal that tells you it’s not working in expectation. And then often in reality.
This resistance to letting go comes because we have something to lose. And there’s something to fighting this fight. “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
At the same time, it doesn’t always work. And the suffering it entails points to our expectations actually being wrong. We’re strongly expecting to not see cancer in the biopsy AND we know that this expectation is likely to be falsified. That hint we can update on.
I wish I could have certainty that my mom doesn’t have cancer. Of course I wish that. Who wouldn’t? At the same time, my mom might actually have cancer, and there ain’t shit I can do about what’s already true.
What I can do, is make sure her life does not get cut short unnecessarily. Not “My mom doesn’t have cancer [dammit!]”, but “My mom is going to live as long, healthy, and happy as a life is as absolutely possible. Because I’m going to make sure of it”. I’m sure you, too, want to make sure your mom lives as long, healthy, and happily as absolutely possible. And you can act so as to make sure she does.
When that’s your frame, where’s the spider?
How do you feel about checking the biopsy, now?
For that matter, how do you feel about not checking the biopsy now?
Interesting, right?
So what do you do about the growing aversion to information which is unpleasant to learn?
To answer this directly, I notice. Like, really notice, and sit with it, and then notice what changes as a result as I realize what the implications are and allow the updates to flow through me.
Not “notice-and-then-do-this-instead!” because that’s often prematurely jumping to try to a control a thing with insufficient perspective, when the problem itself is caused by trying to jump too quickly to control a thing without sufficient perspective.

So step one is to notice.
And to actively monitor whether I’m trying to “do something about it!”, because I already know I don’t want to jump to that. Not that I want to “Do-something-about-trying-to-do-something!”, just “I don’t want to do things that are stupid, lol”.
Notice what the existence of this ugh field is telling me. Okay, I already know my expectations are bad. They won’t be fulfilled, in my already existing meta-expectation.
What changes?
What doesn’t?
Specifically, I look to what I’m realizing I can’t control, and to what of value I still can control. And then reorient to that, so that I stop putting ineffectual claw marks on the things that’s a goner at the expense of attending to what can still be saved.
So, “Hm. I notice that I don’t want to see what’s in this email, because I already suspect it will be what I don’t want to see. Okay, what don’t I want to see. Okay, yeah, I don’t want to see that. Of course I don’t want to see that. What if I do see that? What might I want to do about that”?

Maybe, “Why does it seem like whatever I do, people will get pissed at me?”. “Is that actually true?”. “If not, what kind of unseen-stupid am I being to systematically fail like this?”. “If so, is that okay?”.
The exact sequence and form might change, but the underlying theme is to be really attentive to what feedback I’m getting and where I might be flinching away from updating on this feedback, because all of this struggle results from failing to attend to something with the attention it deserves. The model I’m comparing to, to highlight sources of error, is one where my expectations aren’t predictably violated, there’s no innate tension underlying everything as a result, and any tension gets released by retreating from obstinate control towards more nuanced and obtainable goals after grieving what must be grieved—and not what must not.

jimmy 7 Nov 2025 23:23 UTC
7 points
0
on: Did you know you can just buy blackbelts?
I see the point you’re getting at, and I agree that there’s a real failure mode here about I’ve been annoyed in similar ways. Heck, I kinda think it’s silly for people to show up to promotions to receive the black belt they earned, but that’s a separate topic.
At the same time, there’s another side of this which is important.
At my jiu jitsu gym there’s a new instructor who likes doing constraint led games. One of these games had the explicit goal of “get your opponents hands to the mat” with the implicit purpose of learning to off balance the top player. I decided to be a little muchkin and start grabbing peoples hands and pulling them to the mat even when they had a good base.
I actually did get social acclaim for this. The instructor thought that was awesome, and used it as an example of how he wanted people to play the games. In his view, as in mine, the point of the game is to explore how you can maneuver to win at the game as specified, without being restrained by artificial limitations which really ought to be accounted for in the game design.
If the new instructor would have tried to lecture us about playing to some underspecified “spirit” of the rules instead of the rules as he described them—and about how we’re not earning social points with him for gaming the system—and was visibly annoyed about this… he would have been missing the point that he’s not earning social points with me, and likely not with the others either. And I wouldn’t much care for winning points with him, if that’s how he were to respond. It’s a filter. A feature, not a bug.
Breaking the game is to be encouraged, and if playing the game earnestly doesn’t suit the intended purpose, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. In his case, the game wasn’t so broken so as to ruin the game so it turned out to be more fun and probably more useful than I had anticipated. Maybe it wasn’t quite optimal, but it was playable for sure. In your case, the broken game is the sign that calibration isn’t what we care about—because that annoying shit was calibrated, and you weren’t happy about it. What we need is a better scoring rule that weights calibration appropriately. Which exist!
Any time we find ourselves annoyed, there is a learning opportunity. Annoyance is our cue that reality is violating our expectations. It’s a call to update.

jimmy 6 Nov 2025 19:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: XelaP’s comment on: I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point
Larger effects are easier to measure, and therefore quicker to update on. I didn’t take concerns of “too much sweets” very seriously, so i had no restraint whatsoever.

The clearest updates came after wildly overconsuming while also cutting weight. I basically felt like shit which is probably a much exaggerated “sweet tired”, and never ate swedish fish again. And snickers bars before that.

Since then the updates have been more subtle and below the level of what’s easy to notice and keep good tabs on, but yes “sweet tired”. Just generally not feeling satisfied and fulfilled, and developing more of that visceral distaste for frosting that you have as well, until sweets in general have a very limited place in my desires.

It’s not a process like “Oh, I felt bad, so therefore I shall resist my cravings for sugar”, it’s “Ugh, frosting is gross” because it tastes like feeling tired and bad.

jimmy 6 Nov 2025 19:35 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point
That’s the right first question to consider, and it’s something I was thinking about while writing that comment.
I don’t think it’s quite the right question to answer though. What I’m doing to generate these explanations is very different than “Go back to the EEA, and predict forward based on first principles”, and my point is more about why that’s not the thing to be doing in the first place more than about the specific explanation for the popularity of ice cream over bear fat.
It can sound nitpicky, but I think it’s important to make hypotheticals concrete because a lot of the time the concrete details you notice upon implementation change which abstractions it makes sense to use. Or, to continue the metaphor, picking little nits when found is generally how you avoid major lice infestations.
In order to “predict” ice cream I have to pretend I don’t already know things I already know. Which? Why? How are we making these choices? It will get much harder if you take away my knowledge of domestication, but are we to believe these aliens haven’t figured that out? That even if they don’t have domestication on their home planet, they traveled all this way and watched us with bears without noticing what we did to wolves? “Domestication” is hindsight in that it would take me much longer than five minutes as a cave man to figure out, but it’s a thing we did figure out as cave men before we had any reason to think about ice cream. And it’s it’s sight that I do have and that the aliens likely would too.
Similarly, I didn’t come up with the emulsification/digestion hypothesis until after learning from experience what happens when you consume a lot of pure oils by themselves. I’m sure a digestion expert could have predicted the result in advance, but I didn’t have to learn a new field of expertise because I could just run the experiment and then the obvious answer becomes obvious. A lot of times, explanations are a lot easier to verify once they’ve been identified than they are to generate in the first place, and the fact that the right explanations come to mind vastly more easily when you run the experiment is not a minor detail to gloss over. I mean, it’s possible that Zorgax is just musing idly and comes up with a dumb answer like “bear fat”, but if he came all this way to get the prediction right you bet your ass he’s abducting a few of us and running some experiments on how we handle eating pure fat.
As a general rule, in real life, fast feedback loops and half decent control laws dominate a priori reasoning. If I’m driving in the fog and can’t see but 10 feet ahead, I’m really uninterested in the question “What kind of rocks are at the bottom of the cliff 100 feet beyond the fog barrier?” and much more interested in making sure I notice the road swerving in time to keep on a track that points up the mountain. Or, in other words, I don’t care to predict which exact flavor of superstimuli I might be on track to overconsume, from the EEA. I care to notice before I get there, which is well in advance given how long ago we figured out domestication. I only need to keep my tastes tethered to reality so that when I get there ice cream and opioids don’t ruin my life—and I get to use all my current tools to do it.
I think this is the right focus for AI alignment too.
The way I see it, Eliezer has been making a critically important argument that if you keep driving in a straight line without checking the results, you inevitably end up driving off a cliff. And people really are this stupid, a lot of times. I’m very much on board with the whole “Holy fuck, guys, we can’t be driving with a stopping distance longer than our perceptual distance!” thing. The general lack of respect and terror is itself terrifying, because plenty of people have tried to fly too close to the sun and lost their wings because they were too stupid to notice the wax melting and descend.
And maybe he’s not actually saying this, but the connotations I associate with his framing, and more importantly the interpretation that seems widespread in the community, is that “We can’t proceed forward until we can predict vanilla ice cream specifically, from before observing domestication”. And that’s like saying “I can’t see the road all the way to the top of the mountain because of fog, so I will wisely stay here at the bottom”. And then feeling terror build from the pressure from people wanting to push forward. Quite reasonably, given that there actually aren’t any cliffs in view, and you can take at least the next step safely. And then reorient from there, with one more step down the road in view.
I don’t think this strategy is going to work, because I don’t think you can see that far ahead, no matter how hard you try. And I don’t think you can persuade people to stop completely, because I think they’re actually right not to.
I don’t think you have to see the whole road in advance because there’s a lot of years between livestock and widespread ice cream. Lots of chances to empirically notice the difference between cream and rendered fats. There’s still time to see it millennia in advance.
What’s important is making sure that’s enough.
It’s not a coincidence that I didn’t get to these explanations by doing EEA thinking at all. Ice cream is more popular than bear fat because of how it is cheaper to produce now. It’s easier to digest now. Aggliu was concerned with parasites this week. These aren’t things we need to refer to the EEA to understand, because they apply today. The only reason I could come up with these explanations, and trivially, is because I’m not throwing away most of what I know, declining to run cheap experiments, and then noticing how hard it is to reason 1M years in advance when I don’t have to.
The thread I followed to get there isn’t “What would people who knew less want, if they suddenly found themselves blasted with a firehose of new possibilities, and no ability to learn?”. The thread I followed is “What do I want, and why”. What have I learned, and what have we all learned. Or can we all learn—and what does this suggest going forward? This framing of people as agents fumbling through figuring out what’s good for them pays rent a lot more easily than the framing of “Our desires are set by the EEA”. No. Our priors are set by the EEA. But new evidence can overwhelm that pretty quickly—if you let it.
So for example, EEA thinking says “Well, I guess it makes sense that I eat too much sugar, because it’s energy which was probably scarce in the EEA”. Hard to do the experiment, not much you can do with that information if it proves true. On the other hand, if you let yourself engage with the question “Is a bunch of sugar actually good?”, you can run the experiment and learn “Ew, actually no. That’s gross”—and then watch your desires align with reality. This pays rent in fewer cavities and diabetes, and all sorts of good stuff.
Similarly, “NaCl was hard to get in the EEA, so therefore everyone is programmed to want lots of NaCl!”. I mean, maybe. But good luck testing that, and I actually don’t care. What I care about is knowing which salts I need in this environment, which will stop these damn cramps. And I can run that test by setting out a few glasses of water with different salts mixed in, and seeing what happens. The result of that experiment was that I already knew which I needed by taste, and it wasn’t NaCl that I found my self chugging the moment it touched my lips.
Or with opioids. I took opioids once at a dose that was prescribed to me, and by watching the effects learned from that one dose “Ooh, this feels amazing” and “I don’t have any desire to do that again”. It took a month or so for it to sink in, but one dose. I talked to a man the other day who had learned the same thing much deeper into that attractor—yet still in time to make all the difference.
Yes, “In EEA those are endogenous signaling chemicals” or whatever, but we can also learn what they are now. Warning against the dangers of superstimuli is important, but “Woooah man! Don’t EVER try drugs, because you’re hard coded by the EEA to destroy your life if you do that!” is untrue and counter productive. You can try opioids if you want, just pay real close attention, because the road may be slicker than you think and there are definitely cliffs ahead. Go on, try it. Are you sure you want to? A lot less tempting when framed like that, you know? How careful are you going to be if you do try it, compared to the guy responding “You’re not the boss of me Dad!” to the type of dad who evokes it?
So yes, lots of predictions and lots of rent paid. Just not those predictions.
Predictions about how I’ll feel if I eat a bowl full of bear fat the way one might with ice cream, despite never having eaten pure bear fat. Predictions about people’s abilities to align their desires to reality, and rent paid in actually aligning them. And in developing the skill of alignment so that I’m more capable of detecting and correcting alignment failures in the future, as they may arise.
I predict, too, that this will be crucial for aligning the behaviors of AI as well. Eliezer used to talk about how a mind that can hold religion fundamentally must be too broken to see reality clearly. So too, I predict, that a mind that can hold a desire for overconsumption of sugar must necessarily lack the understanding needed to align even more sophisticated minds.
Though that’s one I’d prefer to heed in advance of experimental confirmation.

jimmy 4 Nov 2025 18:27 UTC
74 points
19
on: I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point
First, props for doing the experiment. And yeah, that sounds delicious.

The fact still stands that ice cream is what we mass produce and send to grocery stores. Even if our hypothetical aliens could reasonably predict that we’d enjoy any extra fatty, salty, and sweet food should we happen to come across it, that’s not sufficient information to determine what foods we mass produce in practice.
Is it really that hard to predict ice cream over bear fat with honey and salt? I’m skeptical.
To start with, it’s a good bet that we’re going to mass produce foods that are easily mass produced. Bears? Lol, no. Domesticated herbivores, obviously. Cream, not tallow. Plant sugar, not honey. Cavemen figured out how to solve the “mass produce food without much technology” problem, which is how we stopped being cavemen. If the aliens are willing to spend five minutes actually trying, you’d think they’d figure out that bear fat is out for this reason alone.
More centrally, I roll to doubt the implicit “But I should want to eat lots of pure fat, because I’m evolved to like calories!”. Stop being a baby about “Ew it’s gross”, and try eating 1000 calories of pure rendered fat by itself. I dare you to actually run the experiment, and see what happens. Find out where that “Ew it’s gross comes from” and whether it’s legit or not. It’s not hard to figure out.
Tallow is delicious when potatoes are fried in it, but try to have a meal of pure tallow and you’ll feel sick to your stomach because your stomach is going to have a hard time digesting that. Butter is emulsified with water, and is easier to digest in large globs. Cream is emulsified fat-in-water so it actually disperses when consumed with more water, and is therefore way easier to digest in large amounts when not mixed in with other foods. Maybe part of the reason that we fry potatoes in tallow, put globs of butter on bread, and eat bowls of solidified cream—and not the other way around—is that the other way around doesn’t work?
On top of that though,
I don’t know any bear hunters and don’t want to get parasites,
Emphasis mine.
This is important too, and affects people’s taste in a very visceral way—and pathogen risk is exactly why I was disgusted by bear meat the one chance I had to eat it. Imagine taking a bite of raw chicken, or pork. Or even beef. Disgusting, right?
Except raw meats are delicious when we trust them. Sushi is the obvious example, despite the fact that you’d be disgusted by the idea of taking a bite out of a raw fish you caught in the river. But it’s true with other meats too, which are a lot like sushi. In Germany they sell raw pork sandwiches, and call it “mett”. It’s delicious.
If you want to understand why people aren’t always immediately super on board with “Try this weird food that no one else you know eats and survives eating”, maybe this is partly why. When I was visiting Sweden, people there were having cheese for dessert. How easy do you think it’d be to sell people on the idea of stinky cheese, if not for cultural learning that it’s actually safe?

Is this really that surprising?
That we’d viscerally want to avoid food that brings risk of parasites and disease?
That we’d mass produce food that is easily mass producible?
And want to eat large quantities of food only when we can digest it in large quantities?
There are more details that aren’t so immediately obvious. Like why iced cream? Sure, maybe to make it solid, but why does that matter? Or, why do we not salt ice cream? Okay, I guess it’d melt. So maybe it is immediately obvious, since I literally figured that out as I was typing this.
Regardless, there’s work to be done in predicting which “superstimuli” people are going to tend towards, and it’s not always trivial. “Plant sugar and cream” may be trivial, but predicting “ice cream” in particular is a bit harder.
Back on the first hand though, we don’t just eat ice cream. We also drink milk shakes, for one. So the answer to “Why solid?” is “Not just solid!”. And ice cream sounds gross to me right now, but a fatty bear steak drizzled with a touch of honey and sprinkled with salt actually sounds delicious. Or cow steak, whatever. Ice cream is but one food we consume, and not some fixed pinnacle of yumminess.
Our tastes and desires actually change, as we learn about things like “How safe is it to eat raw pork in Germany?”, and “How much sugar is good for my body right now?”. That’s why you can’t tempt me with ice cream right now.
Run the experiment of eating all the sugar you want—way more than you should. Experience what it feels like to eat too much sugar, and allow yourself to update on that feeling of sickness. The result is learning that sugar isn’t all that great. I still enjoy little bits at the appropriate times, sure, but that actually aligns with my current best estimates of what’s best for me—and gone are the days of gorging on sweets. Try to restrain yourself, and treat your tastes as “unpredictable unchangeable unconscious stuff”, and you may never give yourself the chance to learn otherwise.

I agree that most people don’t put in more thought than “Uh, bear fat and honey and salt flakes?”, and therefore make terrible predictions. Maybe this is how the book presented it.
But I don’t think the right conclusion is “Unpredictable!” so much as “So put in the work if you care to predict it?”.
This is directly applicable to the alignment of AI because it turns out we’re cultivating AI more than hard coding them, so if we don’t learn to cultivate alignment of our own desires.. and learn to make sense of our preferences for ice cream over bear meat—and to allow them to shift back to bear meat over ice cream when appropriate.. then what chance do we have at aligning an AI?
You don’t want the AI craving something analogous to sweets and trying to restrain itself—look how well that works out for humans.
Nor do you want to plead with AI—or people working on AI—to resist the temptation of the forbidden fruit. Look at how well that one has worked out for humans.

jimmy 4 Nov 2025 2:49 UTC
35 points
13
on: Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill
Beautifully written. And visibly practicing what you preach.

I was not, however, socially adroit, so what I said was “why do you care about something boring like horses?”

[...]
This is a pure tactical mistake.
I didn’t get more information this way. I wasn’t more honest by being more graceful. This is not a linear scale.
I don’t think you could have conveyed this without taking away from the clarity with which you demonstrate your thesis, but I also think you undersell the point here.
It’s easy to read this and think “Oh, so social skills and grace are kinda orthogonal to epistemic virtue, at least in cases like this”, and that alone is sufficient to justify “Maybe notice the possibility of practicing more grace so that you can do it when it is socially helpful and not epistemically harmful”.
It’s much deeper than that, because what she was pissed off about is epistemics. Back in your less skilled days, you were being a jackass by making your epistemic vices a social rationality problem. She was forced to either accept falsehoods into the social epistemics, or push back and engage in social conflict.
I’ll explain.

So, “horses are boring” asserts that horses are boring. It implies that if someone thinks horses are interesting, they’re wrong—like her. She’s wrong. This assertion presupposes that her interest in horses is not meaningful evidence about their interestingness that could change your mind—but is this presupposition justified? If it was, why the heck would he be asking her in the first place? If he really knew something she didn’t, why not just explain it to her so she can realize that horses aren’t as interesting as she thought?
Her fascination with horses is evidence that horses are or at least can be fascinating. Your desire to ask her about her interest, presuming that you’re being genuine, is evidence that her perspective is meaningful evidence to you. Noticing this, we can take a step towards improved epistemics by noticing what this does to our confidence in the idea that horses really are boring, after all. Because now it’s no longer “Horses are boring”. It’s “Huh, I always thought horses are boring, but she obviously finds something about them to be really interesting. What might she see that I do not?”.
And what comes out once you have that realization?
How about “What do you find so interesting about horses?”
Or, if you’re going to reference your initial perspective at all, it’s going to come out like “Huh, I always thought they weren’t interesting” or “I never was able to find anything interesting about horses”—not a presupposition that they are boring, as if anything she could possibly say would be wrong.
The “grace” here, is specifically in not pushing forth one’s ignorance as fact in direct contradiction to the evidence you’re responding to. It’s epistemic humility—an epistemic virtue, not merely a virtue of social harmony.
It’s a great example because it’s both relatable and not abusing an edge case to make a point. I think it’s central. It’s an easy case that we can all look at and say “okay, failing socially isn’t epistemically virtuous”, and there are harder cases where it’s harder to square social grace with epistemic virtue. But those are just that—harder.
Still a skill issue.
At least, more often than not.

jimmy 28 Oct 2025 2:47 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: P. João’s comment on: Do you completely trust that you are completely in the shit? - despair and information -
The urgency comes from noticing that the beliefs you’re navigating by are likely insufficient, in light of new evidence. E.g. “There are no tigers around, so I can walk outside without getting eaten” is called into question when you hear a rustling in the bushes, and figuring out whether you can actually walk around outside without getting eaten can be pretty urgent. If you already know there are tigers are around, you just won’t go outside, so the urgency isn’t going to be there unless your beliefs are challenged in a time sensitive manner.
As applied to your situation, I don’t know what chance you have of getting the same or similar salary or prestige. “No chance” seems pretty hard to justify given the immense possibility space and inherent uncertainty of the future, but I don’t know your situation. It doesn’t sound like the end of the world either way to me. I’m not saying it’s not important, and if you’ve been navigating by beliefs that said you’d definitely keep that or more, then it totally makes sense that you’d be shaken when evidence comes in saying this might not be true.
At the same time, not everyone has to have the highest paying most prestigious jobs. Take my parent’s old mail man, for example. He’s got to be the happiest and most genuinely friendly person I’ve ever met. Not because he got the most prestigious job or hasn’t had struggles outside his work life, but because of the way he chooses to relate to the world with openness to what it might bring. I admire that, and want to be more like that. Making lots of money is definitely nice, and prestige is a good sign you’re doing things right and feels good for a reason. But I think a lot of what fuels these drives for salary and prestige is really an underlying drive for respect, and knowing that we’re making the most of what we can. And I think he has that, more than a lot of people in much more prestigious and higher paying careers. He definitely has more of my respect than most others in those categories, and I suspect this is also true of people closer to him—who tend to matter more than the broader society anyway.
If something happened and I found myself needing to deliver mail for a living it would be devastating to me. I’ve put in a lot of work and a lot of thoughts and expectations into being able to do other things that are higher paying and all that, so it wouldn’t just be a giant loss I would also be largely lost. I wouldn’t know what to do, where to go, and I certainly wouldn’t want to give up on what I once had. If that’s something like the potential reality you’re navigating right now, I can’t say “I get it” in that I haven’t actually been there, let alone in your shoes. But I get why it’d be tough, and overwhelming. I hope to never get there. If I do, I know who I’m looking to role model. Proof by example that there’s still something difficult to strive towards, which is very worth striving towards.
None of this makes any of it easy, of course. Life is a lot to figure out, regardless. Hopefully this makes it a little clearer what fuzzy light to aim towards, should your fear turn out to be a likely reality. And hopefully having a sketch of a line of retreat makes it easier to explore and figure out if it actually is.
Best of luck to you Joao. I’m looking forward to seeing where you go next, and how things turn out for you.

jimmy 27 Oct 2025 18:24 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: P. João’s comment on: Do you completely trust that you are completely in the shit? - despair and information -
Belief is about how we think the world is. Fear is about what we think the world might be, or might become, if we don’t act to preempt the outcome.
Both can change, because the world itself can change and we can get new information that changes what is most likely. The difference is that changing beliefs usually requires additional information. For example, if you believe that you don’t own a bike, learning that your friend bought you one for your birthday will change that belief.
In contrast, when you hear a rustling in the bushes and run screaming “There’s a tiger in that bush! It’s gonna eat me!”, does that mean that once you safely get out of that situation you will recollect and determine “Yes, there was actually a tiger in that bush”? Will you experience surprise when you don’t get eaten? Or will you just think “I don’t know if it was actually a tiger or not, but I wasn’t gonna stay and find out!”. Because if it’s the latter, then you never actually believed that you would get eaten or just that there was a tiger in the bush, just that the possibility of “Tiger!” was too high to ignore and that you might have to run to keep from getting eaten.
That alarm shouting “Tiger!” raises some hypotheses which urgently call for attention, but you don’t wait around until you believe “there is a tiger in that bush, and it is going to eat me”. You’re trying to get out of there before there is enough evidence to justify these as facts about reality.
If you find yourself “not in deep shit” and recollecting, will you look back and think “Wait, how’d that happen? There was no way out and now I’m out??? This doesn’t make sense”? Or will it feel more like “Whew! That was a close one!” or “I’m glad that didn’t turn out to be true!”?
As you look forward, do you find yourself still looking for ways out? Writing LessWrong posts in hopes of finding ways out? Because that behavior wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense if you don’t think there’s anything there to be found. It makes a lot of sense if you’re not sure what’s there, and you sense a danger of losing your way out if you don’t act.

jimmy 26 Oct 2025 19:14 UTC
3 points
1
on: Do you completely trust that you are completely in the shit? - despair and information -
“I’m in deep shit! There’s no way out.”
In other words, I believe I’m in the worst there is and that there’s no way out; that’s information.
Beliefs describe the world as you think it is. Fears describe the world as it might be, or might become, if you don’t act so as to rectify things. This looks more like a fear than a belief to me, both due to the way its phrased and the way you’re responding to it.
This is important because it changes the way we relate to the information.
If it’s a belief, then it’s just true, so far as we can tell. We can try to take in more information in hopes that we’ve misestimated, or we can try to figure out what to do about it, but it’s kinda just the world [we believe] we’re living in. And if part of the belief is “There’s no way out”, then that’s pretty limiting.
If it’s a fear, then that’s not true. It’s something that might be true, or somewhat more true on the margin than we’ve been giving credit for in our world models, but there’s also a gap between what we do believe and this thing which we fear. This gap is likely to generate significant curiosity, once you notice that it exists. Questions like “Am I in deep shit?”, “Is there no way out?”, “How do/would I know?”, “What would be the appropriate action to take if it were true, and how do I know that?”, “What can I do to distinguish?, “Is there something I need to devote more attention to, if I’m going to make sure not to be/stay in deep shit?”. These questions can all be investigated relative to what we already believe, from information we already have. And if “There’s no way out!” is just being raised as a hypothesis, then it might be getting raised early and preemptively—and we’re not bound to taking it seriously, at face value.
The important difference between beliefs and fears is that fears are not bound by requiring solid evidence before making strong claims and sweeping generalizations. “One person was a jerk to me” isn’t sufficient to justify “Everyone hates me!” as the way reality is, but it might be enough to raise the hypothesis—if you don’t already have a secure foundation for rejecting such hypotheses.
Such fears are worth examining, because they are sometimes true, or partly true. But also, just because you thought it doesn’t mean it’s true. Or that you even believe it.
Noticing that makes it significantly easier to explore, in part because because it’s only a “might” and “if we don’t react in time”, and that gives us room to move and to think. And also because we get to redirect our focus to finding out what’s true about the world and let our beliefs update to match, instead of struggling trying to micromanage what we believe to be our own mistaken beliefs, ending up trapped in distinctions we don’t see.