Jiro

Karma: 5,324

Jiro 19 Apr 2026 4:21 UTC
2 points
0
on: Political Violence Is Never Acceptable

Speak The Truth Even If Your Voice Trembles

I don’t think this is consistent. If you think it is true that someone is evil, or that someone brought it on themselves, then by definition you are speaking the truth when you say that. I don’t see any meaningful difference between “you brought it on yourselves” and “you’re gambling with humanity’s future”, except that the latter is something you like to say and the former isn’t. On the level of “which one could be read by an extremist as a call to violence”, I’d say that both of them can.

Jiro 18 Apr 2026 4:02 UTC
−2 points
0
on: “Best humans still outperform”: One turning point in the history of cope around artificial intelligence
“Best humans still outperform” means that we know that machines have certain types of advantages over humans such as never getting drunk or tired. To meaningfully outdo a human, the machine has to outdo a non-malfunctioning human. Outdoing the human because it never gets tired may be useful in a practical sense, but it doesn’t show that the machine is smarter than the human. Furthermore, you shouldn’t be comparing the AI against an average human anyway unless the comparison is done using an average AI (if you can even figure out a definition of ‘average AI’ that can’t be gerrymandered.)

(And no, you don’t ignore AI hallucinations, because the hallucination is inextricably a part of the AI’s reasoning process. There’s no such thing as ‘the AI is in a non-hallucinatory state right now’, like a human won’t always be tired.)

Jiro 18 Apr 2026 3:49 UTC
2 points
0
on: Arguments Should Be Decisive Criticisms
Epistemic learned helplessness should control here, even if it’s inconvenient for rationalists trying to argue people into unusual beliefs.

Jiro 16 Apr 2026 22:17 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Dentosal’s comment on: Purchase Optics and Results Separately

In an ideal world that would mean that the inefficiency also acts as a tax on irrationality.

Why is the insurance inefficient? The whole point of insurance is to spread risk; some people get out more than they pay in (or could possibly pay in), because nobody knows in advance who’s going to need the expensive procedure. If insurance couldn’t do this, it wouldn’t be “efficient”; it would be useless.

Jiro 15 Apr 2026 18:20 UTC
2 points
−2
on: Purchase Optics and Results Separately

For instance, it makes no sense to have a “no man left behind” policy in war, except that it’s really useful for motivational purposes. It leads to more dead people than it saves in the long term.

Do you also object on similar grounds to insurance for expensive medical conditions? “Man is left behind” is a dangerous medical condition with fewer microbes than usual, and the cost of the insurance premium is implicitly part of the servicemen’s pay even though there isn’t a line item for it.

Your reasoning could be used to argue that servicemen shouldn’t get paid at all. Aside from motivational purposes, paying the soldiers costs money and accomplishes nothing, and there’s an exchange rate between money and lives, so giving them pay has a real cost in lives.

Jiro 14 Apr 2026 19:51 UTC
3 points
0
on: Effective Altruism, Seen From Slytherin

I don’t answer adversarial questions.

You linked to “I don’t answer questions”, which is very different.

Jiro 13 Apr 2026 14:57 UTC
4 points
0
on: 5 Hypotheses for Why Models Fail on Long Tasks
Long tasks require being able to decompose your problem into subgoals and meet them, rather than just copy something from the training set.

This may or may not be covered by the examples you already gave, depending on how broadly you interpret them.

Jiro 13 Apr 2026 14:51 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Rasmus Faber-Espensen’s comment on: [Hot take] Problems with AI prose

How would you rate this story? It has some continuity errors, but it got my eyes moist.

Some subject matter is almost guaranteed to make a lot of people’s eyes moist unless it’s written exceptionally badly. Treating a story based on those as good writing because of people’s reactions to them is cheating.

Jiro 13 Apr 2026 14:47 UTC
0 points
−2
in reply to: James Camacho’s comment on: [Hot take] Problems with AI prose
I’ve never heard of a D&Desque universe where that happens. There are worlds which can be described in a vaguely similar way, but there’s always an explicit recipient, whether intended or otherwise, of the thing you’re getting rid of. You can cure a fever by transferring it to someone, or maybe by tossing it out the window for the next person who walks by to get it, but you don’t cure a fever and have some random guy with no connection get it.

I’m sure there are worlds that do this, but it’s not very common at all. And even a world that had it would tell the reader about it, not just use it in an analogy about something else.

Jiro 13 Apr 2026 10:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Ethics of AI-Assisted Creative Work

Shortly after this essay went up, I read Audrey Henson’s two-part reporting on Shy Girl at The Drey Dossier:

Which has this comment which should be required reading. And I noticed some of it before reading the comment: asking for a DRM-free copy does not mean piracy, and even if it was pirated it would contain the same text as the original and would therefore still be useful for AI detection.

Jiro 28 Mar 2026 22:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: The Problem with Asking your Doctor

That’s not what they actually said, they did make the wrong claim that there’s no evidence

According to your own post:

My doctor just said, she doesn’t know of any evidence

which is not a claim that there is no evidence.

Jiro 21 Mar 2026 18:51 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Bowl of Cereal’s comment on: It’s a Good Thing to Respond to Internet Trolls

Instead of focusing on saying “this is wrong,” try to add new information that is related to the discussion and that could stimulate readers’ minds

That allows the trolls to control the direction of the discussion by picking a topic and having other people add new information to it. Some topics are inherently inflammatory or inherently are likely to attract people who behave badly, so even letting the troll pick the topic can be a disaster. You do not want to have a troll arguing that Jews descend from Cthulu, provide “new information”, and attract people sincerely arguing that Jews are not descendants of Cthulhu but are as evil as if they were, or even just Holocaust deniers.

Jiro 21 Mar 2026 15:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
You get to specify that the trolley doesn’t have brakes because you can say “I will only apply the conclusion I am getting from the trolley problem in real life situations that are similar to the trolley problem in that there are no (metaphorical) brakes.”

The equivalent for your slavery contract is “I will permit slavery only in situations where I will starve if a slavery contract is not allowed”. You can’t do this, because you can’t have a slavery law that applies only in a specific, unlikely, scenario. A law permitting slavery will apply in the vastly more common scenario where the slaver is still incentivised to get some money from you and sell you the food.

Jiro 21 Mar 2026 13:26 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
It’s “wrong” because you describe a scenario where if slavery is prohibited, you will starve, but in that scenario if slavery is prohibited you won’t starve—because if slavery is banned, the slaver is still incentivized to sell you the food at a price less than a slave contract.

You can’t just say “it’s my scenario so that doesn’t happen”, because to do that you have to have a scenario where incentives don’t work, and if you do the scenario has no relevance to the real world.

Jiro 21 Mar 2026 4:13 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
But one argument you gave is:

I would be mad if someone else stepped in and prevented the transaction on abolitionist grounds. It beats starving to death.

This argument is flat out wrong. If slavery is forbidden, the would be slaveowner is incentivized to sell you the food for a price that is large but less than a slave contract. Thus, you would not starve to death, and in fact you would be strictly better off than if the slave contract was allowed.

Jiro 19 Mar 2026 22:55 UTC
6 points
−2
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
Incentives matter. If it was illegal for someone to make a starving person pay for food with an indentured servant contract, he could just refuse to sell you the food, but his incentive is to sell it to you at the maximum legal price. The result in the real abolitionist world would be that the starving person is better off, and the person selling the food only gets a high fee but misses out on an indentured servant contract.

Libertarians usually can’t handle fixing situations with bad incentives or improving incentives because people respond to the bad incentives voluntarily, so there is no way for a libertarian to decide that prohibiting the bad incentive can improve things

I do not intend to fully generalize this argument, even if I understand it can be interpreted that way.

If you don’t intend to generalize it, on what grounds do you decide that it doesn’t need to be generalized? After all it looks as though the reasoning still applies. That seems like it would foreclose refusing to generalize it.

Jiro 17 Mar 2026 17:03 UTC
3 points
0
on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
If I think someone else’s text (either from here or from elsewhere on the Internet) is likely unlabelled LLM text, and I wish to quote it here, what should I do under this policy? Neither labelling nor not labelling it as LLM really seems appropriate.

Jiro 14 Mar 2026 3:46 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: The Refined Counterfactual Prisoner’s Dilemma: An Attempt to Explode Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism
Giving you a limited amount to decide, where that limited amount of time means that you can’t use some lines of reasoning, means that the question is now “what should an imperfect reasoner do when faced with Omega”. The answer to this question 1) depends on the details of the imperfect reasoning and 2) leads to rather less insight on the main question.

Jiro 14 Mar 2026 3:43 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Fake Updates
The basic problem is epistemic learned helplessness. You know that your own reasoning process isn’t perfect and that there are arguments that are wrong, but which you can’t detect as wrong. In other words, “once you fully understand a point” is a state that you, an imperfect reasoner, can’t know you are in. Advice on what to do in that state is therefore useless. You need advice on what to do when you seem to be in that state, which may be different than advice on what to do if you know for sure that you’re in that state.

Jiro 12 Mar 2026 8:36 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Refined Counterfactual Prisoner’s Dilemma: An Attempt to Explode Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism
Is Omega meant to be immune to the Halting Problem here? (Your own strategy could conceivably depend on trying to predict what Omega would do under some circumstances.) Or are you supposed to be an imperfect reasoner (which may be true in real life, but isn’t normally assumed to be true in these hypothetical scenarios)?