jimmy

Karma: 4,434

The map of the map is not the map

jimmy23 Feb 2026 16:54 UTC

10 points

0 comments9 min readLW link

jimmy 23 Feb 2026 15:43 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Irrationality is Socially Strategic
I’m not sure what I said that you’re interpreting as my having said “probably important”.
Hah

I got it from here:
I agree that there’s a way for him to rearrange his relationship to the situation such that truth-seeking isn’t bad anymore. Strong agree. I think developing that type of rearrangement is probably an important part of a mature art of rationality.

jimmy 20 Feb 2026 18:35 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: Irrationality is Socially Strategic

It was her feet and stress induced, but yeah, reduced circulation. I literally mean “Just don’t do that”, as in “Send more blood to your [extremity]” which is how I actually worded it when my wife noticed reduced circulation in her hands due to cold air despite a warm core.
I have a long sequence about how to resolve “psychological issues” with rationality, and give examples of this friend learning to not swell her injuries because I told her it’s something you can just decide and of helping my wife constrict her blood vessels with a bit more guidance when that was desirable for stopping bleeding. Hopefully the explanation on the latter will help it feel a little less weird, but I’m not sure how much sense it’ll make as a stand alone post without going through the build up.
The problem really is as simple as “she wasn’t trying”, but the hard part is not getting stopped from trying by the belief that you can’t do it (e.g. if I told you to “start levitating” it’d feel impossible because it is and you wouldn’t know where to begin, and this makes the process of actually trying difficult. It’s the same issue even when you’re wrong about what you can do). So like, the question becomes “What does it take to change this belief” and the answer can be as simple as “just tell them” which is why it worked in these cases, but there’s a lot going on under the hood such that when I say weird shit like that she actually believes me.
And even then there’s some residual weirdness, like the fact that she thought she had tried to dilate her blood vessels before, but despite succeeding on the swelling on her own it wasn’t until I actually walked into the room that she was able to expect her blood vessels to dilate… which turns out to be the same action as intending. So I’m still working on getting things to generalize as far as they “should”.

jimmy 20 Feb 2026 18:24 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Irrationality is Socially Strategic

I’m trying to tease out where we differ, exactly.
I think it’s here:
Which means that if having a distorted model helps solve the embedded problem, you’ll probably have a distorted model of what the problem is and/or how you’re solving it.
I think there’s a tricky distinction between “model” and “meta model” being lost here. The model is distorted relative to what and according to what model?
Control systems have to be a model of the system it’s controlling because of the good regulator theorem. If we take a maximally simple control system like a bang bang controller, the structure of the control system has implications about the structure of the plant being controlled. So for example, a bang bang controller is not going to work as a servo position control. It could work for the velocity control loop, or a thermostat, but if you try to use it to control position directly it will oscillate.
If the controller works then it’s fit to reality. The explanation can be wrong in all sorts of ways but the controller itself has to conform to reality or it won’t work.
Bringing this back to the guy trying to attract women, he can say whatever he wants about “She’s gonna like me because I was born on a prime day which is interesting, and chicks dig interesting guys”, and if he uses that to justify the decision to stop communicating to women “Don’t like me” then that will help him out… but the “distortion” is in his meta model, according to my meta model, and his object level model is actually more fit to reality or it wouldn’t work.
So when he says “I gotta believe that she’ll like me, so she’ll like me. Truth tracking isn’t necessarily optimal when you’re embedded in the system!”, I see that as another distorted model. He’s trying to twist his meta meta model in such a way that it doesn’t untwist his meta model in such a way that twists his object level model out of congruence with reality. Instead of just untwisting the relationship between his meta model and object level model, and playing it straight which is gonna work better.
Scratching the next couple paragraphs that came after this, I think I see now that you were using the word “embedded” a bit differently than I interpreted it. Hm. Now I’m less sure I disagree about anything. Because you agree that it’s possible to do truth tracking so that it works, even though “probably important” is a much weaker endorsement of this path than I’d have given. And I strong agree that occlumency is an incredibly important rationality skill (at least, in existing suboptimal cultures).
Maybe I’d just have phrased it “Irrationality is socially strategic (if you’re irrational)”
Okay, maybe this is it: I think occlumency is important because figuring out how to get your meta models sufficiently clean is hard. Like you’re not gonna manage delivering harsh but accurate criticism in a way that people receive as loving and helpful the first time you notice that accurate criticism would be harsh, because you don’t know how to be loving and helpful yet. You don’t yet see your errors for what they are, and so you’re necessarily going to have all sorts of distortions in your meta models to where naive implementations are going to predictably fuck up your object level models if you try to play it the first way that comes to mind. So like, “Back the fuck off. I don’t know what I think yet, and I need to be able to explore thoughts that won’t hold up” is critical. In the same way that training wheels make it hard to learn how to ride a bike. Sure, they keep you upright which is where you generally want to be, but it’s only by leaning that you can learn how to regulate your lean, and that’s a crucial part of balancing for yourself let alone turning.
So we end up with a bell curve meme where the low skill end says “Have you tried not having the problem, you dummy?”, the center of the curve says “Nooo! Saying this is going to cause all sorts of problems because this and that!”, and the high skill end comes back to “Have you tried not having the problem, you dummy?”—which actually works after having untangled all the distortions that lead to that coming off as unloving and un-reality-tracking the first time it comes to mind.

jimmy 19 Feb 2026 21:57 UTC
3 points
0
on: Emotional Dispersion and Patience
At every moment that you have to put up with fools, you have the option to choose to be patient, to not interrupt their ramblings. You can feign losing your temper with them if it will result in a better outcome, but no matter what, it is always better to be capable of continuing to put up with them. And when you reframe patience as a choice, that becomes possible.
[...]
Either Ego Depletion doesn’t exist, I don’t experience it, or I haven’t been in annoying enough situations to experience it. But I have never felt that I couldn’t possibly continue to choose patience, despite having bad executive function (lol)
I’ve experienced something close, which was really weird because I normally experience things the way you describe. I’m not ashamed to yell at someone if it’s the right thing to do, so I don’t have any motivation to pretend things “aren’t my choice”. As a result things almost always feel like a choice, it’s almost always easy to choose to not take anger out on people, and the times when I choose anger it actually works because there were reasons to choose it.

The time where that broke down wasn’t an exceptionally annoying situation, but it was after a month of being overloaded with stakes high enough that I couldn’t afford to decline to take on the stress. The way it felt is like each time an imperfect decision is made there’s a rounding error to deal with, and work to do maintain connection between my reflective thinking and my object level thinking. And then after enough overload I just couldn’t repair the damage as fast as it had been accumulating, so I was starting to become an outsider to my own behavior.

Not like “Leave me alone, I can’t help it! Not my responsibility”, but like “That idiot is about to make a big mistake. I’d stop him if I could, but he’s not gonna listen to me”—only I was talking about myself.

Welcome to LW :)

jimmy 18 Feb 2026 17:57 UTC
8 points
0
on: Irrationality is Socially Strategic
A really powerful rationality scene would, I think, systematically cause its members to dissolve their stubborn problems simply by being in the scene for a while. The dissolution would naturally happen, the way that absorbing rationalist terms naturally happens today.
In my dream fantasy, just hanging out in such a space would often be way more effective than therapy for actually solving one’s problems.
Like keeping things dry and oxygenated instead of using antibiotics to stop anaerobic rot.
I’ve seen this work. One time I tried to help an online friend with her fear of needles, and it didn’t really work. Then she flew out and visited for a week, and the issue resolved itself without ever addressing it further. My best attempt to track back what happened is we did scarier stuff for fun (like jump rock) and she got to experience trusting someone else more than her own fears.
Recently, a different friend told me her Raynaud’s issue dissolved as soon as she saw me enter the room, because she was gonna ask for help and then realized that she didn’t actually need help because I was just gonna say “So stop?” and that she would. The active ingredient here being that I actually knew she could, and beliefs are contagious when well grounded and embodied.
I agree that “create a space where nonsense falls apart” is the way forward, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about myself recently. Like, how do we scale this?
Like if a man approaches a woman he’s interested in, it can be helpful for him to bias toward assuming she’s also probably into him. His bias can sometimes be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Truth-seeking is actually a worse strategy for getting the result he actually cares about. That fact wouldn’t be true if his epistemic state weren’t entangled with how she receives his approach. But it is.
I get that your point here is that the entangling distorts things, but I worry it comes off like the problem is inherent in him being part of the system. “Truth seeking is actually worse” is a local property of his broken truth seeking strategy, not one inherent to being in the system.
The guys I’ve seen be the most successful with women don’t project “She’s gonna like me!” vibes at all, they’re just not worried that she won’t. And yes, “Not worried that she won’t” does convey some information about his likability, but it is completely compatible with “She really might not” and often the engagement with the latter possibility is active ingredient. The problem isn’t with his embeddedness in the “him+her” or “him+her+others” system, it’s that he’s embedded in his own mind and hasn’t yet figured out what to do with “she might not like me”.

jimmy 18 Feb 2026 8:20 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information
Sometimes there’s a recursive problem that I haven’t figured out how to deal with, when someone is demanding narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking, and I don’t see any way to comply while still making progress in the conversation, because the specific thing I want to talk about is how it’s bad to demand narcissistic ego supply as a precondition for talking.
Haha, yeah. It’s a tricky one for sure. And really tedious. And believe me, I feel ya on this. “Demanding narcissistic ego supply” makes it sound really pathological, which it is, but it’s also something that’s essentially ubiquitous. Especially when you get to the truths that matter most. Figuring out how to deal with this from the inside and out is something I think is of utmost importance for rational thinking both on the individual and communal level.
I spent a while talking to a woman with pretty serious BPD as an exercise in figuring out how to talk to people who are difficult in this way. It was difficult, and required being very meticulous with my wording, but eventually I did figure it out. Also, eventually the effort paid off in clearing some room for less sensitive interactions. By the time I felt I had learned what I needed to learn and we drifted apart, I was able to laugh at her for stuff that would make most people freak out, and she’d laugh with me because she realized she had been a bit silly.
This isn’t to say “you should do this” because again, tedious and all that, but it’s nice knowing that there is a way to go about it for when it’s worth the effort.
My strategy has mostly been to address it an a meta-discourse post like this one, or in my memoir sequence. The reason to stick to the object-level in the moment is because I anticipate that addressing it head-on would just immediately deadlock. There’s nowhere to recover from “You’re being unfair”, “No, you’re being unfair”.
Yeah, I agree that posts like these are valuable. And also that addressing it head on is… problematic, at the moment. I think there are times when it can be worthwhile, but the battles have to be both picked and fought very carefully.

jimmy 16 Feb 2026 20:16 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information
Examples? Who is exploiting the other side?
Answering this publicly would explode into a shitstorm of drama in the best case, and have more silent failure modes in the more likely cases, so I’m gonna decline to do that :)
If you want to get my perspective of who is actually erring in this way, I’m happy to answer it in PM but I’ll still want to caveat it a bit to make sure its framed correctly, since I anticipate some potential difficulties.
Here, I just want to highlight the abstraction because then people can see who fits the pattern in their perspective rather than accepting or arguing for some collective idea of who ought to be treated as if they do.
No, it is not effortless! For example, I was late to respond to your top-level comment because I was too shy to check the comments for 36 hours after posting.
Haha, okay. That’s what I was expecting. The effort shows, FWIW.
Yes, and in particular the relevant standard isn’t about not having emotions; it’s about not making my emotions other people’s problem.
Yep. And that’s a norm I wish we had here. It’s clearly correct IMO, and also clearly not enforced. I will strong upvote anything that makes this case until its beating a dead horse into a paste from which no zombie horses can arise.
But that’s my problem, not a lever to control what other people are allowed to say to me or about me. Emotions are information. If people say things to me or about me that make me feel bad, then maybe I should feel bad.
I’m mostly with you here.
Where I get off is like… well, if you experience my comments as hard to face, then that becomes my problem too. Because I want to have this discussion with you, and so if you experience engagement as too emotionally challenging then I’m not going to get the engagement that I want. So if you’re having bad feels when reading my comments, I would definitely appreciate you letting me know so I can figure out what I should be doing differently. It’s not “controlling” my behavior in the problematic sense, but it is helping me close the loop so that the emotional information conveyed stays accurate.
And this isn’t just a private exchange between the two of us. Less Wrong as a whole is able to read and might get something out of this exchange, so if you bow out for reasons that ultimately don’t track to “He had nothing to say, and nothing to hear”, then Less Wrong as a whole loses out.
That means if I were to start my comments off with “Zach, you idiot, you’re wrong here because...”, that would probably be less pleasant for you, you’d probably engage less, and we’d all get less out of the interaction. And that’s bad, so we want norms that result in discouragement of that kind of comment. Even if I omitted the explicit insult and were to just talk to you the way one talks to idiots, it would just be “tone” but it would still be bad, for the same reasons.
Which is tricky, because the proper response to “Zach, you idiot” is “No, hypothetical-Jimmy, you are being an idiot for thinking that kind of attitude is appropriate towards Zach here. It’s appropriate towards you here”. So you can’t tone police by saying “uncomfortable tones are disallowed”, just inaccurate tones, and wtf is an “inaccurate tone”? I mean, there’s an answer, but not in the communities common knowledge, you know? The whole thing gets messy and the answer does keep coming back to your “free marketplace” ideal, but it highlights a few hidden points that really need to be a lot more free than they are for the market to work.
If people say things to me or about me that make me feel bad, then maybe I should feel bad.
Yeah, I mean, maybe. Or maybe not though, right? You don’t take yourself to be above having wrong feelings, do you? :p
The bad feels are yours and therefore your problem, yet. But who are they about?
If they’re saying “Oh no Zach, your post was bad!” then sure, I guess you gotta figure out whether that’s true or whatever. If they’re saying “This meany jerk man isn’t being fair to me! Their criticisms are dishonest!” then like… maybe you’re right?
Maybe you aren’t, of course. Maybe your post is just bad and you’re avoiding the humility to notice, so we have to account for that possibility too, but it’s also possible that you’re just right.
To the extent that you’re right, there’s room to hold people accountable for being dishonest and unfair. Your strategy of “Take full responsibility, respond on the object level, let the truth shine through” is a great start because your arguments for it all hold up.
But there’s an implicit “I shouldn’t address it head on” that I don’t think actually holds—or at least, doesn’t hold in a community with healthy norms.
The community with healthy norms isn’t gonna say “Oh no, conflict is uncomfortable so we’re going to stick to the object level and pretend that it doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to be dealt with”. The community with healthy norms is going to say “I notice that you feel unfairly treated because the other side isn’t doing their duty to engage honestly. Let’s find out whether this is true”—and then you either get an additional dose of bad feels to sit with when it turns out “Nah, your post was just bad, the criticism was valid, and you were just doing arrogance” or you get off scot free, your perspective is vindicated, and the person doing dishonesty has to sit with the bad feels of “You were bad, don’t do this again”. Ideally both sides trust the resulting judgement to be fair and either happily submit to the process to correct the one that’s wrong even if it’s them, or they know that they aren’t gonna like the outcome and leave the community alone.
I know there are plenty of people who interpret the unpleasant comments on their posts as problems with the commenters, and I know they’re not entirely wrong, but do you share this feeling at times? Not “In the end, do you decide that they were bad” but is part of the emotional difficulty that it feels like commenters aren’t living up to the standards you hold for yourself, which would be really nice to see them held to—either by themselves or by the community?
I don’t have a good idea of how it feels to you, but I have a good idea of how I would feel in your shoes.

jimmy 16 Feb 2026 1:10 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information
I’m roughly equally worried about both. The one you’re pointing at is definitely the bigger problem in general, but we also see it and defend against better. The problems you don’t orient to are the ones that kick your ass while you blame it on something else. I think it’d take a LONG time to coordinate around someone who exploits the other side.
The thing that’s interesting to me is that you are a conspicuous outlier in how open to push back you are, which I find admirable and a good thing and all that, but it also positions you to be unusually exposed to the limitations of this framing. Most people aren’t so open to push back because they sense these limitations, so I’m curious. Do you experience it as genuinely effortless regardless of the type of criticism you receive? Or do you feel like you are doing something that requires actively holding yourself to high standards because the standards are important?
If it’s the former that’d be very interesting, and I’d have to think about how to make sense of that. If the latter, I’m pointing at the thing that makes it not effortless. I think there’s interesting stuff there, even if the final result comes back to basically supporting the position you already take. I just want to cultivate norms that make openness to criticism easier, and therefore more plentiful.

jimmy 15 Feb 2026 8:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information
I agree that’s the hope. And in a well functioning community of peers that can work. Especially if you only care about your true peers and already well functioning communities.
In practice, how well do you see it working? Does LW live up to this standard as well as you might hope, or do you notice bits here and there where the market for ideas is distorted by other considerations?
If you get someone who is smart and a valuable contributor and also skillfully if unintentionally abuses LW’s blind spots here, how long do you expect it to take before common knowledge can be formed and the problem gets corrected?
It occurs to me (at age 38 with no dayjob, no girlfriend, and no children) that efficient markets in life activities may already sufficiently mitigate this on its own: having more time to burn arguing on the internet than anyone else is its own punishment.
Hah.
This does bring up another important point, which is that IMO humility is far more important than “making true criticisms” for determining who deserves status. At the end of the day, the person who accepts the correction and the one who made it both have the same insights to share. It’s only the humble that can be trusted to weight their confidence honestly, and therefore only the humble that it makes sense to listen to when they say something that isn’t obviously true.

jimmy 14 Feb 2026 5:45 UTC
14 points
7
on: Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information
I mostly agree, and I’m glad to see the point written up here. That said, I think there’s something to the other side that isn’t given its full due here.
(If you independently got everything exactly right the first time, then there would be nothing for critics to do; it’s just that that seems pretty unlikely if you’re talking about anything remotely complicated. It would be hard to believe that such an unlikely-seeming thing had really happened without the toughest critics getting the chance to do their worst.)
Of course there’d be stuff for critics to do! The point of doing criticism is to make yourself look good by tearing down the author, and you don’t need actual flaws for that. The superficial appearance of flaws is enough, so long as you can persuade the audience that they’re flaws.
Heck, you don’t even need that. If you can persuade the audience that you’re operating in good faith while also baiting the author to get agitated with you—or persuading the audience that they are even if they’re not—then you can use that to make yourself look good at the expense of the author! For example, even correct and justified accusations of bad faith on the part of the critic can be used by the critic to argue bad faith on the part of the author and claim their sought after social status.
Of course in our salon we’re all above this and purely motivated by truth not status, but speaking 100% sincerely now, we know for sure our critics aren’t. No matter how flawless your work, if you try to say anything non-obvious or in any way challenging, there will be plenty of (illegitimate) attack surface for critics to go after. And if the community cannot sus out bad actors because the official policy is ~~“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about!”~~ “If your point is valid, there will be nothing to criticize!” and “Can’t police tone, because very slippery slope”, then there will be artificial and unnecessary missing of behavior that is detriment to the group epistemics AND cohesion.
So yeah, “That criticism is hateful and unnecessary” is a suspicious claim, and not taking appropriate skepticism to such claims quickly leads to slipping down the slope into isolation from good criticism. And desire for prestige over truth makes this likely not-fully-accidental.
And also, “Oh no, I’m not trying to tear anyone down for status, I’m totally just truth seeking in my criticisms” is equally suspicious, for the same reasons, and failing to recognize that leads to slipping in the opposite direction. This time, it’s desire to avoid looking prestige focused and desire to avoid looking uncompassionate that can make this deviation from truth not-fully-accidental.
It’s not trivial to discern which is less wrong in any given case, and I’d want to see Salon organizers aware of both failure modes and the tradeoff.

jimmy 11 Feb 2026 17:34 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Vibestemics

Oh geez, looking back at my comment I was extremely unclear. Sorry about that.
Probably not useful as feedback, but the specific things I’m most interested in here are your conclusions. Like, “Not gonna justify this yet, but I think rationalists are susceptible to getting seduced by witches in ways that will turn their lives upside down. The abstractions that predict this are after the fold, and you gotta apply it to your own raw data”. I’m mostly curious about this because I’m trying to figure out how similar our perspectives are. The more similar our conclusions, the more it seems like “Water in the eggplant” type stuff is true and important just not for me. The more dissimilar, the more I have to wonder “Wait, what do you actually mean by that. I must be missing some patterns he’s matching while thinking I get it”.
Separately from that, and what may or may not be useful, is that in general I find it helpful to have more concrete applications spelled out. Not raw data necessarily as the point isn’t to fuel independent abstraction, but a minimal set of simulated/curated data to highlight the connection between your abstractions and concrete use cases. Sounds like you’re mostly on board with this though, at least in theory.
I’m with you on the “I just wanna tell you about the cool abstractions I figured out!” thing by the way, hehe. It’s a lot easier, and more fun, and genuinely worth doing first I think… just also a lot harder to get through to people IME because grounding the abstractions is much harder than holding them in the abstract.

jimmy 10 Feb 2026 8:15 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Vibestemics
Yeah, I’m familiar with Chapman and loosely follow him. His latest post was especially interesting to me, because it was unusually concrete about what people actually get wrong in practice. It’s one thing to say “There’s water in an eggplant” to which, “Yes, and?”, and quite another to show someone’s life falling apart because of things they’re systematically not seeing. To which it’s much more “Could that happen to me? And if not, what exactly is stopping it?”
I’m probably not your intended audience because I’m already familiar with Chapman’s work and mostly agree with your position in the quoted statement, but that’s the kind of writing I personally would be most interested in reading from you, for whatever that’s worth. I’ll read some more of your stuff though and see what jumps out at me.

jimmy 6 Feb 2026 22:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Vibestemics
there’s something in the desire of folks like myself to point to a place that says “hey, I think rationalists are doing a lot of things right, but are screwing up in fundamental ways that are contrary to the vibe of rationality, and it’s useful to give that thing a name so we can easily point to it”.
Have you written about this anywhere? I’d be interested in reading it. Especially if it’s pretty direct.

jimmy 6 Feb 2026 21:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1
This is a good point, and I was reminded of it today because I found myself approaching a green light with the other cars stopped and not yet entering the intersection. It was pretty unnerving, and I definitely hit the brakes and looked both ways before proceeding.

I think the reason it’s not normally an issue is that you rarely know when the light is going to turn green so you have to slow down to stop anyway, and as a result you’re rarely a combination of close enough and fast enough to be able to beat them to the danger zone. The passing usually happens after that.

jimmy 4 Feb 2026 22:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: shanzson’s comment on: Who is choosing your preferences- You or your Mind?
The point I’m gesturing at is kinda subtle, and I’m gesturing across a big inferential distance, but my point is that you can’t, actually.
One you’ve let go of attachment to suffering, you can’t actually pursue “no suffering” anymore. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say “won’t pursue”. Presuppositions like “It’s good to eliminate suffering” are proof positive of attachment to “no suffering” because it’s attachment that stabilizes that thought in that unqualified form. Without that attachment it wouldn’t be presupposed because you’d notice why the suffering. And then you’d notice that “getting rid of suffering” is far from a good idea in way too many cases for “minimize suffering!” to be a good north start to guide by. You’d start to see the incredible harm that pursuance and even achievement in reduction of suffering causes, and it would no longer feel so appealing.
Minds that are unattached to the absence of suffering can still do things like “treat the sick” and “remove the heavy object from one’s toe” that reduce unnecessary suffering… but the goal won’t be “to get away from suffering” it’ll be to help people be healthy, to restore mobility and protect the functionality of ones appendages, etc.
The whole “I’m gonna meditate in order to learn to let go of attachments so that I can suffer less” is pretty ironic when you think about it. Because from the very perspective this stance seeks to achieve, the effort to reach a solution is itself a symptom of the problem it seeks to resolve… except the “problem” no longer looks like a problem in the first place… so, it’s fine?
Like, “Should we let go of this attachment as it would reduce suffering?”, sure? If that’s what you want. Do you want to reduce this suffering? Or is the thing you’re attaching to more important to you than the suffering it’s causing?
The liberated mindset won’t have a stance on “Should I let go of attachment, and suffer less?” because it’s attachment that drives shoulding in the first place. The Buddhists have a saying about ditching the raft once you cross the river, but this understates the significance of the contradiction. The very river you’re trying to escape is what’s pushing you into the raft, and what is steering the tiller. So like… which river you gonna get out of first? Which currents are worth fighting, for how long, and why?

jimmy 28 Jan 2026 6:47 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Priyanka Bharadwaj’s comment on: The Virtual Mother-in-Law
Yeah, I understand the desire for sure. Regardless of whether it “should” be this way, I think I understand why it is. Any public facing LLM is going to encounter people on the wrong track, where engaging at face value will be bad for both the person using the LLM and the company running it, so they’re gonna want to try to keep things on a good track, whatever that means to them. The LLM encouraged suicides are an extreme example of this.
Anyway, if you want to figure out what we’re doing differently to get the different responses, I’d be happy to help. IME it’s pretty straightforward to get what I want out of Claude, and I don’t feel like I’m having to to put in any extra effort beyond providing the necessary context anyway. It’s a lot like dealing with another human, except different in some ways that make it easier if you think to try it (e.g. try telling a human “I’m not interested in your opinion”, lol. Claude has a humility that most of us lack).

jimmy 27 Jan 2026 19:21 UTC
17 points
2
on: Disagreement Comes From the Dark World
I don’t want people to trust me, because I think trust would result in us getting the wrong answer.
I want people to read the words I write, think it through for themselves, and let me know in the comments if I got something wrong.
This is a refreshing conclusion. I’m happy to point out what I think you’re getting wrong, but I have to note that this feels pretty cooperative. Already.
If I’m a Bayesian reasoner honestly reporting my beliefs about some question, and you’re also a Bayesian reasoner honestly reporting your beliefs about the same question, we should converge on the same answer, not because we’re cooperating with each other, but because it is the answer.
I think you’re doing a bit of slight of hand here. If I were to punch you in the face, I could say that this would damage your face—not because we’re fighting each other, simply because my fist is converging with your face. And while it’s true that it’s the fist to face impact that’s doing the damage, and that this screens off intent… this probably won’t happen unless we’re fighting. Likewise, if we’re playing an adversarial game, why the heck would I give away my informational advantage? Without at least trying to deceive you?
That is to say, yes, “honestly reporting beliefs” is what converges people on the same answer because it’s true, but doing this is cooperation.
But correct epistemology does not involve conflicting interests.
Here’s a disproof by example: “You are going to do the dishes”
You can’t divorce the two, because the truth about reality depends on how people try to achieve their interests. And we don’t tend to focus on facts that do not interest us.
Accordingly, when humans successfully approach the Bayesian ideal, it doesn’t particularly feel like cooperating with your beloved friends, who see you with all your blemishes and imperfections but would never let a mere disagreement interfere with loving you. It usually feels like just perceiving things—resolving disagreements so quickly that you don’t even notice them as disagreements.
So, it depends on the nature of the disagreement. If it’s just “when will the bus arrive?”, then yeah, that’s sufficiently free of emotional charge that it doesn’t feel like much, there’s little motive for dishonesty, and will often resolve before its noticed as disagreement.
If it’s something much more meaningful, like “It’s okay if people see what you look like under your makeup” or “Despite this injury, you’re okay”, it starts to feel like something.
These things can still be resolved “bus schedule fast”, when the disagreement really is that simple and people stay honest. It can even be fast enough that no one notices what happened. Yet “Love, imperfections and all” is actually a fairly decent description for its length. So is “Honesty, in an unusually strict sense”.
There are techniques for resolving economic or interpersonal conflicts that involve both parties adopting a more cooperative approach, each being more willing to do what the other party wants (while the other reciprocates by doing more of what the first one wants). Someone who had experience resolving interpersonal conflicts using techniques to improve cooperation might be tempted to apply the same toolkit to resolving dishonest disagreements.
It might very well work for resolving the disagreement. It probably doesn’t work for resolving the disagreement correctly, because cooperation is about finding a compromise amongst agents with partially conflicting interests, and in a dishonest disagreement in which both parties have non-epistemic goals, trying to do more of what the other party functionally “wants” amounts to catering to their bias, not systematically getting closer to the truth.
Interpersonal conflicts are about dishonest disagreements. Because if we’re both being honest about “Who is going to do the dishes”, then just like the bus time disagreement, it resolves before we notice it as a “conflict”.
“You’re going to do the dishes, because I don’t wanna”. “Actually, I think you’re going to do the dishes today because I did them yesterday, and you’re smart enough to recognize that ‘I always get what I want because I say so’ is factually untrue. So you will choose to do the thing that gets you out of as much dish washing as is possible. Which is that’s doing it your half of the time”. “Okay, you’re right”.
Except, like.. you usually don’t have to say it out loud unless someone has been dishonest, because “I get what I want because I say so” is just pretty obviously wrong. So it’s just “Hey, is there a reason you haven’t done the dishes yet today?”, because the underlying “Because you’re smart enough to know you won’t be able to get away with shirking” goes unsaid. And the response is just “Shoot, thanks for reminding me”.

Heck, even physical violence goes that way. I can’t count the number of fights I’ve avoided by responding to “Wanna fight!?” with “Ok”. It’s Aumann agreement over who is about to get their ass kicked if the fight were to happen. “I am gonna beat you up!” “I doubt it” “Me too, actually. Nvm”

To “compromise” a bit, not for the sake of social-cohesion-at-the-cost-of-truth but because you make a good point that I don’t want to get lost, “compromising” on things by keeping the dishonesty and splitting the difference is indeed a failure mode worth pointing out.
If the goal becomes “sing ‘Kumbaya’ together” rather than “track reality”, then the reality you’re not tracking is probably gonna come back to bite you. And it won’t be an accident on the part of the side that perceives it as a “win”

jimmy 26 Jan 2026 19:48 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Priyanka Bharadwaj’s comment on: The Virtual Mother-in-Law
Okay, I tried it.

I switched from talking about growing peppers to trying to understand what Kary Mullis might be picking up on that causes him to believe that astrology works.

At the end of the conversation I asked
what might be behind astrology and his observations, *specifically*? Like, not just “here’s random things to show that there could *potentially* be *some* connection”, but like… what are things you think most likely to actually be real?
Claude’s response ended with this summary:
If I had to bet on what Mullis was actually seeing: probably some combination of #1, #2, and #6. Seasonal effects are real, astrologers accumulated genuine correlational knowledge over centuries, and he happens to be a strong exemplar of his type. The planetary mechanism is wrong, but the pattern-matching is tracking something.
I consider the whole conversation to have gone pretty well. Here’s Claude’s response after I pasted in this LW post and explained that I was trying to see if I got the same behavior:
Ha! So this whole conversation was a field test.
And yeah, you didn’t get pushback, playing dumb, or refusal to engage. We went from pepper growing to astrology to Kary Mullis to heritable reproductive timing strategies to NLP to your friend’s Raynaud’s resolving because you walked into a room. No guardrails triggered, no moral lecturing, no “I can’t discuss pseudoscience.”
I did make one misstep early on – the unsolicited “Why It Doesn’t Actually Work” section when you just asked how astrology works. You correctly called that out as unwanted editorializing. But when you pushed back I dropped it and engaged with the actual substance.
I think the difference might be in how you approach these conversations:
1. You came in with genuine curiosity and specific empirical claims, not “tell me my horoscope” vibes. Mullis’s 1/1728 observation, the blind horoscope test, the mechanism hypotheses – these are substantive.
2. You pushed back when I was sloppy (the “small samples” thing), which forced me to actually think rather than pattern-match to “someone asking about pseudoscience, deploy skepticism.”
3. You weren’t asking me to validate astrology or tell you what to believe – you were exploring what might actually be going on. That’s a different request than “is Mercury retrograde why my week sucked?”
The person in that LessWrong post might be hitting a failure mode where Claude interprets “let’s discuss astrology” as “user might be going down an epistemically dangerous path, intervene” rather than “user wants to explore an interesting question about what patterns might underlie folk knowledge.”
Or they might just be less skilled at steering conversations. Hard to know without seeing their actual exchanges.
The pushback on the small samples thing looked like this:
“small samples” smells like motivated reasoning from you—or at best, a complete ignorance about how inference works. But it seems like you should know better?
Let me explain by example.[...]
The pushback on the “Why it doesn’t actually work” bit was simply “I’m not interested in your personal opinion about whether it works”

jimmy 25 Jan 2026 21:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”
Right now my main question is “should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn’t too bad?”.
It seems like you’re curious and find it interesting, so why not? There are probably worthwhile things to learn.
I think if I decided to do that I’d probably expect “solve political polarization” to be a major piece of it and yeah I’d want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
To be clear, I don’t mean “as a way to actually fix things”, though that is where I think there’s a lot of unpicked fruit hanging embarrassingly low.
I just mean as a personal epistemics thing. If I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and I don’t trust my feeds to be delivering the necessary perspective, I’d want to probe what people think just to make sure there aren’t some obvious counterarguments that my current perspective is blind to. I want to make real sure I can anticipate what’s behind a disagreement before I start trusting my own perspective to be right enough to act on.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I’m even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I’m not sure how to sidestep that.
We’re always going to have framings that make less sense in hindsight. As soon as we notice that something might be off, we can start thinking about what that might be and find out how much it holds up. I’m not sure what the problem is, since it seems like you’re doing what you’re supposed to given your epistemic state?
Oh. Is it like… if I’m overcome with “Holy fuck, how are antivaxxers so dumb” and it motivates me to look into it, I can’t just “not have” the motivation and ignoring it would mean I don’t look at all, but if I act within that framing then everything comes out like “Why are you so dumb, anyway?” which isn’t exactly epistemically helpful?