jimmy

Karma: 4,504

jimmy 11 Apr 2026 16:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Why Control Creates Conflict, and When to Open Instead
Variance is a statistical property of populations, and what I’m saying isn’t about statistical properties of populations.
Say for example we have a monoculture Uniformistan, where everyone is virtually identical. The culture has very strong norms against creating disruption, so everyone tries really hard to avoid saying anything that will disrupt another person. People find this community very pleasant to be in, since no one ever says anything offensive, no one ever tells them they smell bad, etc. Well, pleasant on this front, at least.
Then we import Susie from a different culture where telling the truth is valued and disruptions are seen as necessary parts of life and what matters is recovery. She tells you that you smell bad—as gently and tactfully as she can, but she tells you. She tells everyone this, since y’all stopped showering once your fears of negative social feedback were quelled by culture. This is why you all think “Man, everyone else stinks”, and the culture isn’t so pleasant on that front.
Now all the variance is contained in “Are you talking with Susie-The-Disruptor?” and none of it in “Are you taking responsibility for making sure you can handle the truth?”—because no one does that. The more people start to take responsibility for their own epistemics, the less the variance is explained by ~~Susie-The-Disruptor~~ Susie-The-Truth-Teller. In Susie’s home town everyone is a truth teller, and few people stink, but there is varying skill in handling the more difficult information that comes after you’ve handled personal hygiene, so the ratio of variance is very very different.
The variance depends on the population, yet the dynamics are the same everywhere. The point I’m making holds in Uniformistan, even as your whole culture assures you that Susie-The-Disruptor is the problem because conflict follows her, and that you’re perfect in every way because you’re just like them.
In the terms of the post, the culture in Uniformistan attempts to Control conflicts in Control, rather than Opening to the conflicts as necessary to actually resolve them. It’s a control spiral spiralling meta (for which the next move is “YOU CAN’T CENSOR FREE SPEECH!”!)

jimmy 11 Apr 2026 7:36 UTC
4 points
0
on: Why Control Creates Conflict, and When to Open Instead
You do need to have enough trust that the other agent won’t use the fact that you’ll hear them out and model them in more detail to disrupt you in ways you’re not willing to risk, but assuming good faith on the meta layer is often (though not always) safe.
I disagree with the framing that “disrupt” is something you do to someone else, rather than something you allow people to do to you. Proper humility and honest epistemics is protective against this kind of disruption (e.g. “You say that I’m fat, and I’m very insecure about this so it scares me to think of the implications, but I also know that I’m not able to figure out what they are with any reliability so I’m not going to jump to any conclusions that might be harmfully false. Maybe that means my crush won’t like me, but I don’t actually know so I’m still gonna ask), and people you don’t take seriously can’t disrupt you because you just don’t take them seriously (“You’re fat!”, “lol”). Getting disrupted is a consequence of your belief that the person is sharing information worth attending to and your mismanagement of this information. Any system that tries to pin responsibility on someone else for their own belief system is attempting a deliberately brittle strategy which is going to conflict hard with reality, in ways that lie outside the self imposed limitations to their FOV.
That’s not to say that with a sufficiently advanced model of a person, you can’t deliberately disrupt someone, but the considerations go the other way. The better model you have of someone, the easier it is to recognize when they’re trying to mislead you. The better model you have of them, the more you can punish them for stepping out of line. When you see them with sufficient clarity, and get them to sign off that you’ve passed their ITT, and can find the contradiction so clearly that you can ask with genuine curiosity “How do you square this? Doesn’t that look kinda bad?”, then you can disrupt the shit out of them (which is why feeling seen and feeling intimidated can go hand in hand). And if they don’t open to you, and don’t model you, they can’t touch you.
It’s not trust in the other that is required, but trust in one’s own epistemics. If you can trust yourself, and don’t trust the other guy to not try some shenanigans, that’s when it’s most important to drop the attempts to control and look them in the eye with intent to see. “I can’t trust that other guy [it’s his failure not mine]” doesn’t actually work as an excuse, so when opening is hard we know we have some work to do.
That said, I otherwise agree that this is all true and important (strong upvote).

jimmy 11 Apr 2026 5:08 UTC
12 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: No77e’s Shortform
Yeah, the frustrating part is almost always on a meta level. I think Zack’s point about “No natural units of pie” applies to the gaslighting issue as well though. Asserting one’s viewpoint means asserting it as truth which invalidates differing perspectives. “I disagree, you contradict, he gaslights”.
It’s difficult because sometimes the gas lights really don’t seem to be dimming, and sometimes that perception is downstream of some motivated thinking because I really don’t want to believe we’re running out of oil already, dammit. And so the result is simultaneously kinda an honest statement of perspective (at least, as honest as these tend to get) while also being a (not-necessarily-consciously) motivated action pushing people to disregard their own senses. And then we have to decide how to judge this mess of bias and honesty, and if we don’t judge such that the product after a round trip of perceiving C/D and responding accordingly we get more C than last time… shit’s fucked. And without objective units of pie that people can agree on when judging who was in the wrong.
So like… am I trying to gaslight people into questioning their own sanity so they accept what I want them to accept, or am I just flinching away from what scares me, like we all do? Both, and the question of whether I deserve the leniency and empathy is a difficult one, because what are the units of this pie and where’s the objective cutoff? And because our tolerance for further bullshit tends to diminish after accumulating bullshit, so it gets even more difficult to get back to the other side of criticality.

jimmy 8 Apr 2026 17:23 UTC
2 points
0
on: Is death and suffering axiomatically bad?
pleasure is good
nobody argues against this.
Oh, that’s not true at all. The statement “pleasure is good” has the exact same problem that “suffering is bad” has. It confuses the map for the territory. “The map says good” is only good if reality is good.
Heroin? Pleasurable, but problem.
Antisocial sadism, of the sort experienced by people like Ted Bundy? Problem. Not good.
suffering is bad
Someone did argue that this is potentially untrue, that there exists “voluntary suffering”. I think this is one case where language is a bit inadequate.
It’s way more than that. First, let’s get clear on our terms.
Pain is the signal that we’re getting damaged. Suffering is the internal tension that this can create.
When you stub your toe and flinch away exclaiming “FUCK!”, gritting your teeth, you’re trying to get away from the sensation. Or when a loved one dies and you’re still saying “No! It can’t be!”. You’re fighting against it, and it’s tearing you apart. That’s suffering.
When you stop pushing back and just feel the pain, it’s different. You stub your toe, and don’t tense up in response. It’s just like.. “Wow. This really hurts”. Or when grieving it’s just sadness. There’s a purity to the sadness, and it will look very different on your face. That’s what it feels like to face reality and allow yourself to update on the new and unfortunate evidence. I don’t understand the physiology well enough to say if it’s necessarily going to follow this pattern, but I have noticed that when eating hot peppers my heart rate will go down if I don’t fight against the pain, and up if I do.
The purpose of suffering is that it means we get to fight back. We get to jerk our hands off of the hot stove, instead of sitting there thinking “Ooh, interesting. This is bad”. It means giving CPR for longer even when things are “hopeless”, which may on occasion actually work.
It’s not always clear how to disentangle things such that we will choose to stop fighting the battles that are counterproductive, so you can’t just tell people “Suffering is a choice, stop suffering”, in general. But it is a choice, and if you can understand why they’re choosing to fight reality well enough that you can make visible to them that it’s not the right choice (and not just that they “should conclude” that it’s not the right choice), that actually does resolve suffering even in extreme cases where someone has been in debilitating pain for a year because their nerves are fried. Once you can’t be motivated to fight it, there’s no fight. Pain, and damage, but no suffering.
The question isn’t “Suffering is bad, how to not suffer”, or “Does my map say this suffering is good” which is a question floating untethered from ground level reality.
The question that matters is “Which suffering is worth it”. Or, on the flipside, is this heroin really giving me what I want in life?
To be honest, it probably comes down to something like “I value my own continued existence, and thus end up drawing ethics in a way where this is justified”. So I am probably just being biased here.
Well, yeah. You have to actively seek continued existence, or you will cease to exist shortly. You have to eat, drink, thermoregulate, and otherwise resist entropy. Friston extends this to literally every thing, including drops of oil. And if you predictably act to ensure your existence, that’s what “valuing your existence” is.
But that’s not “bias”, that’s the fundamental physics that grounds our values. Any conception of values that doesn’t pass this basic test won’t be taken seriously for long.

jimmy 5 Apr 2026 19:43 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: How social ideas get corrupt
But you could also just say—for example—that it’s language that “disconnects people from an awareness of their needs”, or something similar. And that would have a more compassionate vibe than saying that people are behaving violently, and (I expect) would be less likely to get them to police other people’s language.
You could, and it might have that effect. But I think that’d be missing a lot of what is descriptively accurate about the “violent” descriptor.
The reason it’s accurate is that “All laws are enforced at gunpoint, and social shame too”. Use “Violent” language enough, and someone is gonna stop getting invited to parties. If that person keeps showing up anyway, eventually so do men with guns.
The reason is matters is that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and social power too”. The person who can successfully wield Violent language gains power. If we don’t understand these dynamics, then we’re not going to understand the problem we’re trying to solve and will struggle to solve it.
I don’t think we can avoid tackling the question of why we should care, unless we accept that people are going to fill in their own incomplete and distorted answers there.
Call it “violent” and leave it at that, and people will notice the relevance. They’ll also be prone to relate to it the way they already relate to violence, which is often violent.
Try to strip away any reference to violence with language like “Disconnects people from an awareness of their needs”, then you take away that failure mode, but you also disconnect it from a recognition of what it is and reason for people to care. “I don’t need to be ‘connected’ to my needs in some sort of gay soccer mom buddhist sort of way, I need people to actually treat me right dammit!”.
This is getting slightly separate from the point in the post, but I don’t really think that NVC is correct with regard to everything that it classes under violence. [...]E.g. the way that it claims that interpersonal feelings like “I feel betrayed” aren’t really feelings and that you should rephrase them as something like “I feel disappointed”. And as a conflict-resolution technique that can be a useful move since it avoids the implicit accusation of “you betrayed me” and makes your conversational partner less likely to get defensive.
Yeah, I’m with you here. I don’t think I don’t think policing what is a “real” feeling/”totally objective observation” and what is a “totally subjective judgement” is the right way to do it.
The way I see it, they’re trying to strip down to observables that cannot be disagreed on so that nothing that is said can be the focus of a (potentially hostile) disagreement. But this doesn’t entirely work because no matter what you do there will be implications. “How dare you call me a disappointment!”.
And we also don’t need to avoid things, because often people can accept “Kaj feels betrayed” or even “I betrayed Kaj”. Like, “Okay, you’re upset because in your perspective I betrayed you like an evil jackass. I hear you. And yeah, that sucks to have your best friends betray you like an evil jack ass. What exactly did I do that you interpret in this way?”
I’d rather track “What ideas will threaten this person” directly rather than conflating NVCs rubric with reality itself, and track what is actually meant/likely-to-be-taken as (threat of) violence. I could totally snarl through NVC patter if I wanted to :p
Ah yeah, if NVC said that it’s sometimes fine to choose violence (or “violent” language), then that’d make it a lot better.
I’m pretty sure you’ve read a lot more NVC than me, so correct me if I’m wrong, but the impression that I get is that it doesn’t really say a whole lot either way? Like, it just says “this is violent” and “look how much better things can go when not violent” and leaves the is to ought conversion implicit?
I pulled on that thread and wrote about it here. The analogy I like is that an inclination towards “doing NVC” is like neutron dampers between fissile sources throwing off violent neutrons. There are some cases where a little bit of damping is absolutely critical, and also cases outside that band where it’s either insufficient or unnecessary (and potentially counterproductive).
But I think I wasn’t trying to understand their rationale very deeply. Like, I encountered a claim A that rested on premises B, C, and D, and then thought “well B and C make sense but D is wrong”. And then I just decided that therefore A must be wrong, without investing any energy into checking whether I might be mistaken about D being wrong, or whether it might be meant in a different sense than what my first impression was.
I think that is also potentially completely reasonable though.
For example: A) You should walk to the car wash because B) it’s only a quarter mile away and C) exercise is good for you and D) it’s not like there are any other reasons to drive.
It’s not arrogant to notice that this is stupid because you need your car there to wash it.
Before tarring you as “arrogant” I’d want to see that you chose not to invest more energy because you were flinching from the truth rather than just because you knew what’s there.
Maybe you were flinching a bit, I dunno. Arrogance happens. But I’m generally more suspicious of arrogance on the part of the person who cries “arrogance!” without first distinguishing it from truth. Often accusations are more descriptive of the accuser than the accused (“You’re trying to gaslight me!”).
One thing I notice across these: the right-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks that were originally critical of power — Mill questioning social conformity, Young warning about meritocratic elites, evo psych insisting on the naturalistic fallacy — into frameworks that defend existing arrangements. The left-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks for self-examination into tools for controlling others.
Hm, I think I see a few patterns.
One is “Everything exists on one dimension. The opposite extreme has bad stuff in there, so don’t do that extreme [do this extreme instead]”. Left and right just pick opposite extremes to notice/not-notice the horror of.
Another is “Here’s a thing You should do” → “Ah, great ideas for what You should do! I shall begin informing all the Yous of what they should do!”
But then some of them look like “I’m just gonna use this to justify what I already believe”.
The NVC example arguably hits all of these. Still thinking about what the best way is to minimize these failure modes. Some of it seems motivated, but a lot of it also seems downstream of simply not understanding. Like, I think people genuinely don’t understand “how a framework that dictates how I ought to behave can apply to me and not other people”. That might be an interesting post to write.

jimmy 3 Apr 2026 17:22 UTC
4 points
0
on: How social ideas get corrupt
Interesting post, I think I have a lot of different thoughts on it.
Take Non-Violent Communication. It’s literally called “Non-Violent Communication”, implying that anyone who doesn’t communicate in that way is behaving violently.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, because it can be descriptively true (and I’d argue that it basically is, though it’s more precisely described as threats of violence). It’s possible to hold this non-violently. Or to whole heartedly choose violence.
But, tying in with the point of your post, if you just label it as “violent” and leave it at that people are going to activate their “violence” circuits and do what they do in response to violence instead of noticing the potential application of NVC on the meta layer and the contradictions that might bring up.
I think you have to leave room to say “Yeah man, I’m choosing violence” and preferably have a framework to make sense of when to do this or else you’re going to inevitably run into pressure to distort your perception when you’re drawn to violence for valid reasons that your frameworks can’t account for.
It reminds me of something I once wrote, that a reader said had an arrogant tone. I was surprised by that, because I thought I had gone to the effort of looking up the rationale behind views that disagreed with me and explaining what about those views was reasonable. And I did do that. But then I would also follow up the explanation of their rationale with something that amounted to “and here’s why that is wrong and misguided”, which the reader correctly responded to.
But were you honestly trying to understand their rationale? If you found something that seemed more correct than anticipated, would you have updated?
If no, then I can buy the arrogance claim. If yes though, and (so far as you could tell) you really did just see through all the problems with the alternatives, then I think we have to face the possibility that you really are intellectually superior. If that’s the case, then the way you’re “doing it now” is falling back to conflict aversion 🙂.
Kinda like the violence thing. Sometimes it’s both true and important to mention. Even if there’s a bit of emotional “It’s important to understand that this is WRONG” energy, that can be true too and that’s not the same thing as arrogance.
NVC’s simultaneous message of “don’t judge” and “people who don’t do this are violent” may be part of what makes it spread. The explicit philosophy appeals to people who value non-judgment, while the words about violent language may appeal to people who have difficulty dealing with that kind of language. Readers may then interpret it through the lens that they prefer, with the model getting a wider audience than if it only contained one message.
~~Damn. Hmm… I think I’m gonna have to chew on this one.~~
Hah! I did the thing.
It sounds like you’re saying “you get acceptance among two separate groups”? On first read, I read it as applying to two different drives in the same person. “I like the idea of people being non-judgy, and also I judge”.
I still have to chew on this alternative interpretation.
I feel like I often run into various other examples too, but these two are the ones for which is it’s the easiest to point to a “correct” form of the thing
Could you share some, to help isolate the thing they have in common?
The NVC example is interesting, but I wonder if there’s something additional going on where “Here’s a framework to look at” is just much easier to pick up than “Here’s a framework to inhabit”, which seems to explain the “You’re not doing NVC!” phenomenon and I’ve seen it come up in other places too. Getting people to even notice that distinction seems tricky, and I don’t get the sense that “Because then I’d have to actually be NonViolent!” explains it all.

jimmy 29 Mar 2026 19:30 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?
if i had no inhibitions, i am sure that i would engage in all sorts of maladaptive and antisocial behavior, but i don’t think that i would ever feel good when someone else feels bad? even if they “deserve it”?
I’m less sure.
It’s one thing if you’re simply uninterested. Like, “People like that part? Weird. Seems boring to me”. But if you’re “freaking out” and feeling “very bad” then you’re attributing great importance. And when you skip over the section you’re seeking to avoid the stimulus.
This makes it really tough to tell what else might be there, or might grow there if you let it. Partly for the same reason that it’s tough to detect let alone enjoy the flavor of a Carolina Reaper when you’re distracted by the fire. Partly for the same reason that someone exclaiming “I can’t imagine how anyone could enjoy the pork that Allah forbids!” would have a hard time noticing that bacon is kinda delicious sometimes.
That’s not to imply that “You’re a secret sadist too” or anything. Maybe reapers taste bad under the heat, maybe it’s more like cilantro than bacon where some people just have different genes. Or maybe it’s like coffee where it tastes like shit to everyone at first… but it’s not hard to develop the taste for it if you indulge.
The point is just that until you do the experiment and peel back the inhibition it’s hard to see what’s underneath. And as you found with your friend, sometimes the answer is surprising and hard to square with your existing frameworks/models of things.
i don’t know what to make of this and i’m starting to get the feeling that a lesswrong comment thread is probably not the right place, i’m also a bit worried about de-anonymizing my friend on accident.
Then I probably shouldn’t say more about how to convince someone that sadism isn’t fun. I’ll just leave it as a note that there’s a path there, should you want to follow it.
I don’t think there’s a short answer to “what to make of this”, because it takes a lot of peeking under inhibitions and restructuring of both psychological and moral frameworks. But I think you’re right to sense the importance, and the lack of satisfactory answers.

jimmy 29 Mar 2026 16:32 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?
ugh. it makes me wonder if we have any kind of data about the incidence rate of sadism in society?
The tricky part of questions like this is that sufficient inhibition hides what drives are being inhibited. If sadism doesn’t do anything for you, then you don’t need the shock and horror. You can just notice that you don’t share the same temptation, and wonder what is different about them that makes it enjoyable for them. What would have to be different about you, in order for you to enjoy it?
If sadism does do things for you, then the horror is load bearing, and you get very different behavior in situations where the inhibition is lifted. And if it might be, then it’s a tricky question to ask.

So are we asking what fraction of people have “enough” inhibition? How are we measuring “enough”?

Or are we asking what fraction of people can safely be disinhibited without engaging in sadistic behaviors?
I bet you the latter number is much lower than the former. And that the inhibitions aren’t as good as people want to think.
what i really wanted to do was convince them that sadism was not fun, and it really messed with my head that this wasn’t a coherent thing to want

I’m not sure why you think it’s an incoherent thing to want, but it’s absolutely possible to do. You just have to track the meaning of the fun, and then engage on the level that is relevant.
Your friend said that if he were to realize that LLM were sentient he’d regret it. If he were to find out that the LLM he’s been abusing is sentient and genuinely suffering, how do you think he’d feel? He said he’d regret it, so probably not good. What do you think happens to the motivation to torment LLMs after sitting with these feelings?

What reasons do you have for being horrified even conditional on LLM not suffering? What do you think would happen in his mind if he were to sit with them?

jimmy 18 Mar 2026 15:26 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn
The part that’s not clear to me is that giving Grog a database of 1000 textbooks is just as good as walking him through and explaining the contents of 1000 textbooks within a long context window, for a Grog with an impractically large brain. Or rather, I know that it’s not the same, but I don’t know what the limits are or how they work. When Claude switched from reading book length pastes serially to “having them available”, the difference was very obvious. It switched from learning the material as well as a human to the sort of incompetence you’d expect from someone who has the book but hasn’t actually done the reading.
I’m with you on “Grog would need to spend years developing a deep understanding of optics and lasers and so on”, but it’s not obvious to me that the years of going through 1000 textbooks in one impractically large context window can’t simulate the learning process itself, and through that simulate a deep understanding of optics and lasers even in theory.
I don’t see you make an argument for why simulation of the learning process itself isn’t possible. I see you concede that “(so-called) “in-context learning” can imitate a small number of steps of actual weight updates”, but I don’t see an explanation of how tight this bound is, exactly, or how it works. Maybe I’m just being a dummy and missing it, or maybe it seems obvious to you because you’ve been thinking about this kind of thing more than I have and so some of the arguments are implicit in ways that aren’t coming across. Either way, pointing to a reason that the learning process itself isn’t something that could be simulated in an astronomically large context window would be a thing you could add which would help me understand.

jimmy 17 Mar 2026 18:17 UTC
2 points
0
on: You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn
I’m nodding along on the basic claims (I think), but still trying to digest the implications. I think one of the things I’m taking away from this is that even though human architecture is different, this failure mode applies and is really common. Not sure what to make of that yet.
(If we’re talking about what a sealed “country of human geniuses” could do over the course of, like, one minute, rather than over the course of 100 years, then, yeah sure, maybe that could be reproduced with future LLMs! See von Oswald et al. 2022 on how (so-called) “in-context learning” can imitate a small number of steps of actual weight updates.^[1])
Am I correct in understanding you to be pointing at a practical rather than a theoretical limitation here?

Is the reason that you think it could work for a minute but not 100yr a practical matter of efficiency or one that has a more fundamental limitation that you couldn’t get around with infinite context window/training data/etc?
Will the trained imitation-learner likewise keep improving over the next 10M moves, until it’s doing things wildly better and different than anything that it saw its “teacher” deep Q network ever do? My answer is: no.
Even with a context window that contains all 10M moves, or do you mean within reasonably limited context windows?

It seems like the answer with unlimited context would depend on whether the transformer was able to model the teachers learning process itself. I don’t see any reason this shouldn’t be possible in theory, do you?

jimmy 13 Mar 2026 23:15 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: Don’t Let LLMs Write For You
English class always seemed to me to be about saying absolutely nothing in flowery language. Almost like a politician speech, where the point is to talk in such a way that the point is to make the words sound so nice that you don’t notice that the content is missing. Only I don’t think it’s intentional, just a byproduct on focusing on the language without having anything interesting to say.

jimmy 12 Mar 2026 15:59 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Not Loving Liking What You See
Because she’s not a counterexample at all. She’s a demonstration that you can get what superficially appears to be passable results while giving less fucks about things. The rule are the rules, and knowing the rules helps to highlight what’s really going on because you know where to look to find the “missing” downsides.
If I were as unmotivated as she was by the loss of her husband, there’s someone who might be dead right now. If she were as motivated as I was, her husband might be alive. The only reason “Her husband killed himself” doesn’t come off as completely damning to her way of going through life is because the narratives we tell about such things are designed to numb us of these things already. “She did what she could! It’s not her fault!”. Did she really? Do everything she could? Would he likely have killed himself if she grew up suffering more? Sure. Would it be bad to blame people too readily for their spouses’ suicides? Sure.
But what probability of saving your spouses life does it take to justify enduring suffering for a couple years as it tears you apart and allows you to rebuild into something that might have made the difference? Can you actually justify that the chance of making the difference is lower than this number? For her too? Confidently?
These are hard questions to answer affirmatively, and you don’t get the answer right except by luck if you’re running on defaults. And coming up with convincing answers to this does chip away at the suffering, to the extent that we actually find them convincing. The woman I know who lost her husband to suicide would probably say something similar to Jo, but I know it hurt. I know she cared. The reason she was able to get back on her feet relatively quickly and successfully is that she actively threaded that needle between the courage to change what she could and the serenity to accept what she can’t.
Jo’s story is of finding motivation to stop touching hot stoves somehow, leaving the “somehow” unspecified. And of failing big where it matters most. In a way that we give her a pass for because the rest of us are prone to fail there too. Potentially even more often, given how common and debilitating saturation can be around serious issues like that. Her story demonstrates that it’s possible to get by alright if we turn down our sensitivities a good bit, and blame luck for the bad things like her husband’s suicide more than we credit it with the good things like “not dying on the stove”.
It doesn’t demonstrate that it’s better, either in expectation or in her exact case. Or that the rules somehow don’t apply to her. Just that we generally have so little clue of what we’re doing that it’s easy to spin that way.

jimmy 12 Mar 2026 3:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JustisMills’s comment on: Don’t Let LLMs Write For You
What’s your explanation for how LLMs can create non messy writing without conveying a clear point, and in your view do humans ever do it? I’m finding myself simultaneously agreeing with your first claim and also thinking “but English class”, and I’m not sure how to square these conflicting ideas.

jimmy 11 Mar 2026 17:11 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Not Loving Liking What You See
If you step over enough disfigured corpses and look only at seemingly normal people, eventually you’ll find one who through some combination of luck and incomplete impairment seems to have made it work.

Some of this applies to me. The only time I’ve ever asked a doctor for “pain drugs” was to see if they could give me something to make injuries more painful so I was less likely to ignore the signs. The other day I noticed that I had cut myself because I saw bleeding, and I have no idea how or when it happened. If I play up this side of things, I could make a case for suffering being unnecessary and make some valid points.

At the same time, when I’ve faced similar loss/threat of loss, it hurt. And that hurt motivated quite significant changes to who I am as a person that definitely would not have happened if I were numb to it. On a brief overview like that, the difference isn’t gonna show up. Sure, my wife hasn’t killed herself, but that’s normal and I don’t have any reason to believe she would have otherwise. But if there were a missing corpse walking around living somewhere… who’d know?

There has to be some ability to detect harm, and motivation to correct it, or it won’t happen. At the same time, sensitive systems saturate easily, and saturated controllers don’t control well. Turning down the gain can be useful if you have reason to believe saturation is worse than insensitivity in the context in question, but avoiding one failure mode invites the other. It’s a discrimination problem, and not a trivial one. Ideally you train capacity and have both.

jimmy 10 Mar 2026 21:34 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Not Loving Liking What You See
We might not procreate many times per day, but much of what we do is in service of this goal. It might be many times per day that you meet a potential spouse. Or a person who might introduce you to their similarly-attractive friends, who could end up being your spouse. Or a person you might be seen with, and therefore judged by, when a potential spouse sees you and has to infer what hidden attractiveness you may posses. And so many times per day you have to decide whether to take step towards or away from these potential futures and whatever procreation they may or may not entail.

That’s not to say “it’s good that ugly people get bullied”, because there’s quite a lot of room between that and “it’s so bad, that it’s better to fully numb ourselves to appreciation of beauty”. Pain killers have their uses in specific cases, but congenital insensitivity to pain is no bueno. You don’t want to throw the non-ugly babies out with the bathwater.

jimmy 6 Mar 2026 19:01 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: Andrew_Critch’s Shortform
The more interesting argument for that norm is that it makes people accountable for their downvotes and therefore less likely to give dishonestly motivated downvotes.

There’s still no obligation to upvote anything, so if it’s plainly visible that a post is bad and no one cares to explain why it’ll just sit at 0. Downvotes become important when some people (incorrectly) think a post is good, because then it will accrue a positive score if uncorrected. But in that case the downvoter thinks they understand something the upvoters don’t, so maybe they should be explain.

The problem with downvotes without accountability is that if I post something about how people named Taylor are statistically likely to be <bad thing>, it might be true and well supported and important and empathetic… and still you could still just downvote it to censor what you don’t like while most people don’t care enough either way to vote. So we get good posts systematically suppressed in ways that wouldn’t happen if you had to comment “Downvoted because my name is Taylor”, whenever a minority is hostile to a particular truth.

Downvote explanations could be hidden by default so it wouldn’t spill over, but I find myself frequently expanding “comment scored below threshold” to see what it is the community in question really doesn’t want people to think. These comments are rarely boringly bad.

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
8 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
6 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.