Jiro

Karma: 5,188

Jiro 14 Oct 2025 23:42 UTC
12 points
−1
in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: The Mom Test for AI Extinction Scenarios
“People will draw conclusions that harm me” and “people will draw conclusions that weaken my argument” are very different things. Yelling that you shit your pants is in the first category. Saying things that make people less likely to believe in AI danger is in the second.

Hiding information in the second category may help you win, but your goal is to find the truth, not to win regardless of truth. Prosecutors have to turn over exculpatory evidence, and there is a reason for this.

Jiro 5 Oct 2025 19:38 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Mike Evron’s comment on: Markets in Democracy: What happens when you can sell your vote?
I would disagree that people in the real world act based on what’s cheaper. None of the cancellations we already see over other things are done so as to be financially optimal for the cancellers. Even companies don’t act based on what’s financially optimal; if Google was willing to fire James Damore, Google certainly would be willing to fire people for not selling their vote to Google. If Disney is willing to lose millions, maybe billions, of dollars through woke Marvel and Star Wars, I’m pretty sure they’d be willing to fire people who won’t sell their votes to them, even if it “isn’t cheaper”.

It’s true that the market hurts companies that do this sort of stuff, but it takes a long time between when someone loses money because they are acting against the market, and when they actually go out of business. Disney isn’t about to die soon.

And punishing some people does often benefit them financially anyway because even though firing an employee costs money, it also intimidates other employees, reducing the sale price of their votes.

There’s also the issue that some people won’t sell their vote for the financially optimal price either, so the company or the mob will threaten to fire them to force them to. Many people wouldn’t, absent coercion, sell their vote for any price, just like many people won’t sell sex. Or they will, but only for a life-changing amount that is many times the market price.

Jiro 5 Oct 2025 19:30 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mike Evron’s comment on: Markets in Democracy: What happens when you can sell your vote?
If there are a hundred thousand people like you who are being asked to sell your vote and you stand to lose $1000 from the wrong person being elected, your vote can only be 1/100000 of the reason the person is elected, so you should sell it for $1000/100000 = 1 cent. Under the proper decision theory, you shouldn’t sell it for less than $1000, but the number of people in the real world who understand (let alone both understand and agree with) such decision theories is negligible on the scale of voting.

Jiro 5 Oct 2025 6:06 UTC
4 points
0
on: Markets in Democracy: What happens when you can sell your vote?
What about the situation where you get fired unless you sell your vote to the company? Or maybe to the union?

Or the situation where the mob demands that you sell your vote to them so that they can use it for some socially beneficial purpose, and otherwise they cancel you?

Jiro 4 Oct 2025 22:25 UTC
2 points
−2
on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
My own reading of Omelas: The scenario at the end has the child being sacrificed for the good of the rest of society. But the lesson to be learned from that depends on who you’re supposed to identify with. If you identify with the society, the reader is being lectured on not hurting people for his own gain. But if you identify with the child, the moral of the story is that it’s wrong for other people to ask you to sacrifice things for the good of society. The moral that was obviously intended was the first of these—this kind of story tends to lecture the reader, and “you need to be less selfish” is one of the most common morals in existence. Nobody writes a story whose moral is that you should be selfish and ignore the greater good, but the story unintentionally says exactly that.

Jiro 28 Sep 2025 19:26 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: Caleb Biddulph’s comment on: Safety researchers should take a public stance

I also wouldn’t want people to be peer-pressured into making statements that are more extreme than their actual views, but I think we’re pretty far from that world.

That’s because there isn’t a norm for safety researchters to take the public stance described here. Once such a thing became a norm, peer pressure into making extreme statements, and generally threats to force them to make extreme statements, would be common.

Look at what we have now with all sorts of social justice statements.

Jiro 26 Sep 2025 17:33 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
Old post but...

In a recent intelligence explosion discussion, someone mentioned that Vinge didn’t seem to think that brain-computer interfaces would increase intelligence much, and cited Marooned in Realtime and Tunç Blumenthal, who was the most advanced traveller but didn’t seem all that powerful. I replied indignantly, “But Tunç lost most of his hardware! He was crippled!” And then I did a mental double-take and thought to myself: What the hell am I saying.

If the question is about what Vinge seems to think then this reasoning is perfectly appropriate. Tunc doesn’t really exist, but if you want to know what Vinge thinks, the details of the scenario that Vinge wrote are relevant—if Vinge wrote Tunc as not having much increased intelligence because he was crippled, this doesn’t show what Vinge thinks about increased intelligence in general.

Jiro 21 Sep 2025 21:55 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: What Caplan’s “Missing Mood” Heuristic Is Really For
Betting against your professed beliefs is valid as an example of diversification.

Jiro 18 Sep 2025 0:29 UTC
2 points
−1
on: How To Dress To Improve Your Epistemics
High status is something you can only control to a limited degree, especially when you are trying to do things that have an immediate effect rather than doing thigns that gain status in the long run. Acting confident certainly helps, but it won’t help by so much that you can get away with wearing a clown suit because you’re acting confident. What will happen is that instead of confidence making the clown suit work, the clown suit will make the confidence fail.

Fedoras aren’t quite clown suits, but still, you can see how they worked, which is “not well”.

None of the ideas you’re saying are completely wrong, but you’re wrong about how they balance against each other.

Jiro 15 Sep 2025 8:06 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Contra Shrimp Welfare.
1 in 10000 allows me to be Pascal mugged, so it must be much smaller. Also, scenarios where shrimp suffering exists and matters are generally scenarios where my ability to reason about the world is compromised, so any number I could produce would be useless for calculations.

Jiro 8 Sep 2025 3:07 UTC
5 points
0
on: D&D.Sci: Serial Healers
The question is ambiguous. Is an “accusation” “this mage has illegally healed” or “this mage has done this specific illegal healing”?

Jiro 3 Sep 2025 15:34 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: nem’s comment on: Not stepping on bugs

practicing empathy

Nobody says “I’m going to spare some video game characters, because I like to think that someone would spare me”. There has to be some relevant similarity between the worm and me which would distinguish it from cases like that. It needn’t be causal, but it has to be something. What is it?

(And if you reply “video game characters don’t have feelings”, I would of course say that worms don’t either.)

making the world the type of place you’d like it to be.

“Type of place” is a vague term. Do you mean “the type of place where nobody steps on worms” or “the type of place where nobody steps on worms or people”? In the former case, I don’t care about making the world such a place. In the latter, I’d again ask what’s so similar about worms and people that putting them together forms a natural category.

It seems like the whole thing is based around the unsaid premise “worms are like people, so empathy for one has some connection to empathy for the other”. It’s unsaid because if you said it, you’d have to defend it, and I don’t think there is a good defense for it.

Jiro 30 Aug 2025 21:31 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: nem’s comment on: Not stepping on bugs
That doesn’t make sense unless you rescuing the worm has some connection to someone rescuing you. What connection are you claiming?

Jiro 24 Aug 2025 2:28 UTC
37 points
7
on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)

Crimes that are harder to catch should be more harshly punished

Please, don’t do this.

Your reasoning amounts to “we need to increase the punishment to compensate for all the false negatives”.

If the only kind of error that existed was false negatives, you might have a point. But it isn’t. False positives exist too. And crimes that are harder to catch are probably going to have more false positives. Harsher punishments also create bigger incentives for either false positives, or for standards that make everyone guilty of serious crimes all the time, thus letting anyone be punished at the whim of the moderators while pretending that they are not.

Jiro 23 Aug 2025 22:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: When Money Becomes Power
Why does “Amish society” not then count as a greater power?

Jiro 23 Aug 2025 22:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: When Money Becomes Power
You can gerrymander a result from that by changing whether you’re a lumper or a splitter. Is Wal-Mart a single entity or is it a coalition of groups that have some similar goals but who also sometimes work against each other? Is a political party? Is “capitalists” a coalition and can we say that Elon Musk is in a coalition with other rich people?

Jiro 21 Aug 2025 17:24 UTC
2 points
0
on: Critiques of FDT Often Stem From Confusion About Newcomblike Problems

Likewise, if we assume the agent’s behavior in Newcomb’s problem is also determined by a function—its *decision procedure—*then, if the predictor can model this function, it can accurately predict what the agent will do.

How does this not fail to the Halting Problem?

Jiro 18 Aug 2025 22:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Crazy philosopher’s comment on: Why Every Politician Thinks They’re So Right (and Why That’s a Disaster)

I agree that any discussion of god-related topics might take several times longer, since you’d have to go into cognitive biases.

Okay then, let’s use homeopathy as an example. I can fairly and honestly say that my position—which is that homeopathy is crap—is basically 100% correct. Or Holocaust deniers. I can fairly and honestly say that my position—which is that the Holocaust was real—is basically 100% correct.

Saying “everyone’s human, every side has smart people on it, so the sides are 50% correct” doesn’t work. Holocaust deniers are certainly human, and they’re not stupid. But they and I are not equally correct.

(I’d also ask, if you’re going to exclude god-related topics because of cognitive biases, how is that not special pleading? In other contexts, you reject the idea of saying “my political opponents have cognitive biases”. After all we’re all human, all sides have smart people, etc.)

Jiro 18 Aug 2025 19:06 UTC
8 points
5
in reply to: Crazy philosopher’s comment on: Why Every Politician Thinks They’re So Right (and Why That’s a Disaster)
No, I couldn’t. Because the object level is important. Both evolutionists and creationists can say that the other side is biased, refuses to look at evidence, etc. But when it comes to creation versus evolution, only one side actually is. The symmetry collapses into asymmetry. Creation versus evolution is a prime example of your thesis being wrong. There are two sides, they can’t convince each other, they say the other side is reasoning poorly… and yet someone who understands evolution can fairly and honestly say that their position is about 100% correct.

Jiro 18 Aug 2025 18:46 UTC
8 points
8
on: Why Every Politician Thinks They’re So Right (and Why That’s a Disaster)

If the truth is on your side, you will be able to convince others without using dirty tricks, won’t you?

I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t convince a creationist that evolution is correct. And not because creation and evolution each have a 50% chance of being correct.