Jiro

Karma: 5,191

Jiro 29 Nov 2025 5:13 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Should you work with evil people?

At some scale, if the infrastructure is an effective monopoly and is necessary for life, then the simpler exclusion mechanisms become infeasible

How exactly do they become infeasible? The fact that someone can’t live when excluded doesn’t prevent you from excluding them. And since the goal takes priority over justice or fairness, you wouldn’t care that they can’t live.

Jiro 23 Nov 2025 7:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Sorry, I still think kidney donation makes no sense for an EA
Lemme try (tell me if I summarized it wrong)

Scott: Kidney donation actually isn’t that financially costly
- Scott’s recovery period of ten days seems unusually short
- Given a reasonable income, even ten days is costly enough to not be worth it
- The fact that people don’t like surgery itself is a cost, which Scott didn’t consider.
Scott: Federal Government dialysis costs
- The government spends a lot on wasteful or counterproductive things. Saving the Federal government a million dollars of dialysis costs doesn’t produce a million dollars of utility.
Scott: Is it fair to convert foregone money to foregone lives?
- Scott can’t make this argument while keeping to EA principles.
Scott wouldn’t have given the money to charity anyway
- Giving money is a choice. Scott could give money instead of making a donation; he just won’t.
Scott: On building libraries
- nicholashalden doesn’t agree with EA and thinks you have more duties to your community than to others (I don’t think this is an argument against Scott, it’s explaining a disagrement)
Scott: On rule utilitarianism
- Scott seems to be doing deontology here even though he denies it.
- And EA’s attempts to avoid deontology produce bizarre results.

Jiro 19 Nov 2025 16:37 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: TristanTrim’s comment on: Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket
These can shade into each other or be indistinguishable. Suppose you’re trying to signal that you’re smart. Is this #1 or #2, depending on how smart you are? If you think you’re smart and you really aren’t, and you’re intending #2, does that still count as #2 or is it #1 instead?

Jiro 19 Nov 2025 16:14 UTC
3 points
1
on: Sign language as a generally-useful means of communication (even if you have good hearing)
You need to compare opportunity costs. It’s easy to name some thing you want to do, whether learn sign language or anything else, and list the ways you could benefit if you did it. But those benefits could be rare and weak to the point where just about any other use of your time would serve you better. How often have you had problems communicating a bill in a noisy restaurant, and how much time did you lose by having to settle it without using sign language?

(Also, if those things are really problems, have you considered text messaging? If they’re not big enough problems for you to fix by using text messaging now, why do you consider them big enough problems that you should learn sign language to fix them?)

Jiro 17 Nov 2025 16:56 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Process Crimes and Pedantic Rules
If so, it’s a very noncentral example. The explanation for process crimes is that they are much easier to prove than the regular crimes they lead to. But the whole reason that people use trumped-up process is that proving that someone trumped up the process is difficult.

Jiro 14 Nov 2025 19:47 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
(Responding to old post here.)

I think this is typical-minding. For a child who isn’t a weird geek of the type who will grow up to post on LW, the adult knows more than the child and is a lot closer to correct than the child is about most of your points (maybe not the third one, although I don’t think that quite describes what’s going on). When a non-geek child disagrees with the teacher about whether the math skills are useful later in life or whether they are for the child’s own good, my bet would be on the teacher. The child probably doesn’t care much about either of those things and certainly didn’t conclude that math is useless based on good reasoning, and the teacher is probably a lot more knowledgeable than the child on pretty much any subject. And a non-geek child who’s disruptive or inattentive probably is at fault; he’s supposed to be learning the math whether it’s interesting or not and non-geeks really do need to be learning at this point.

If the child is an A+ student who understands the math after a week and finds it useless to go through of months of lessons teaching the same thing repeatedly, sure, the teacher is wrong. Maybe you were one of those. Most kids are not.

Jiro 14 Nov 2025 17:58 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: The Charge of the Hobby Horse

Is your point here that you didn’t literally switch to arguing in favor of the proposition Y, but rather switched to asking what led to Y being the case? This is a nitpick—a distinction without a difference

Here you seem to be saying that someone might not be literally arguing for something, but he might in effect be doing so anyway.

Yet your original post seems to reject that concept. Here you claim that Zack is wrong because he did not take someone’s words literally, and instead did interpret those words to be in effect saying something:

“But if I take your specific word choice and imagine a whole epistemological stance that produced that word choice, I disagree with that epistemological stance because of such-and-such.”

Jiro 12 Nov 2025 16:29 UTC
2 points
1
on: Do not hand off what you cannot pick up
Go and call the plumber (or ideally, ask the person on our staff who already knows). Then ask the plumber to explain to you what they are going to do to fix the problem. Then fix the problem yourself.
1. If you don’t have a person on your staff who already knows, and if the plumber isn’t on call, I hope you are paying the plumber for calling him and asking him to explain, while knowing in advance that your plans won’t include hiring him.
2. Who’s going to do the event invoices when you’re fixing the plumbing yourself? You have comparative advantage over the plumber; it doesn’t matter that fixing the plumbing yourself instead of having the plumber do it benefits you, because doing the event invoices benefits you more.
3. It seems like this would fall under “Knowing how to perform a task yourself at all is not the same as knowing how to perform it as well as the person you are delegating the task to.” Doing the plumbing yourself requires more skill (and probably equipment) than is necessary to understand the plumbing.

Jiro 10 Nov 2025 9:10 UTC
4 points
0
on: We’re Not The Center of the Moral Universe

People will pay the same amount to save 200,000 birds as 2,000.

People don’t want to save X number of birds as a terminal goal. They want to save a significant number of birds at a reasonable cost. And the fact that the question asks you about saving X number of birds would, in most contexts outside a poll specifically designed to not do so, provide information about what number is significant and what number can be saved at a reasonable cost. Since people being asked the question with 2000 and people who are asked the question with 200000 are provided what would normally be different information, different answers are expected.

Also, the phrase “anthropic principle” appears nowhere in this post. Having nothing important until humans came around is completely expected; being able to make a graph and being important are strongly correlated, and by the anthropic principle, the time when the graph is made is always centered around now.

Jiro 7 Nov 2025 9:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs
“You said it’s mutually exclusive here and you said the opposite there” is adversarial in the sense that pointing out any sort of error or inconsistency is adversarial. In other words, it is literally adversarial, but it’s a good kind of adversarial. You can’t point out an inconsistency without being adversarial!

Jiro 4 Nov 2025 20:15 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect

Why can’t there be a rock-paper-scissors–like structure, where in some position, 12. …Ne4 is good against positional players and bad against tactical players?

I would say that in that situation, the move is bad, but being a positional player after your opponent makes that move is also bad.

Jiro 2 Nov 2025 22:47 UTC
−6 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy [Linkpost]
So what do you think about the car-stealing example? Shouldn’t the fact that people don’t want you stealing their cars affect whether you should do so, even if they can’t come up with good logical arguments for it?

(And that isn’t actually very far from Marxism anyway, it’s just that “redistribution” is a much more positive term than ‘stealing’.)

Jiro 30 Oct 2025 21:46 UTC
2 points
0
on: Resolving Newcomb’s Problem Perfect Predictor Case

A human computer programmer would read your code after you submit it and decide whether your program chooses 1-boxing or 2-boxing.

The human computer programmer is not immune to the halting problem, so he can’t always do this.

Jiro 25 Oct 2025 2:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: [Thought Experiment] If Human Extinction “Improves the World,” Should We Oppose It? Species Bias and the Utilitarian Challenge

EA strives for maximization of MEASURABLE and SPECIFIED value(s), but the value dimensions need not be (I’d argue CAN not be) objectively chosen.

That implies that if I want to make things better for Americans specifically, that would be EA.

Jiro 25 Oct 2025 2:02 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Jesper L.’s comment on: Reminder: Morality is unsolved
Your answer highly depends on what the rule says you could be swapped with (and what it even means to be swapped with something of different intelligence, personality, or circumstances—are you still you?) Saying “every human on Earth” isn’t getting rid of a nitpick; it’s forcing an answer.

Jiro 24 Oct 2025 20:26 UTC
4 points
2
on: The main way I’ve seen people turn ideologically crazy [Linkpost]
Some ideas inherently affect a lot of people. Anything involving government or income redistribution, including Marxism, falls into that category. Anything that’s about what all people should do, such as veganism, also does.

You are inherently going to be arguing with a lot of stupid people, or a lot of “super fired up” people, when you argue ideas that affect such people. And you should have to. Most people wouldn’t be able to correctly and logically articulate why you shouldn’t steal their car, let alone anything related to Marxism or veganism, but I would say that their objections should have some bearing on whether you do so.

Jiro 24 Oct 2025 20:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Jesper L.’s comment on: Reminder: Morality is unsolved

Minimum acceptable outcome.

That’s a key point that a lot of people are missing when it comes to AI alignment.

Scenarios that people are most worried about such as the AI killing or enslaving everyone, or making paperclips in disregard of anyone who is made of resources and may be impacted by that, are immoral by pretty much any widely used human standard. If the AI disagrees with some humans about morality, but this disagreement is within the moral parameters about which modern, Western, humans disagree, the AI is for all practical purposes aligned.

Jiro 17 Oct 2025 15:11 UTC
−4 points
0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
Nobody means literally nobody by “nobody says X”.

Jiro 16 Oct 2025 18:30 UTC
−4 points
0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
I didn’t mean that there’s literally no such thing whatsoever. But “be selfish and ignore the greater good” is constantly derided and is rarely even accepted, let alone presented as a good moral. The whole reason the rationalism community is tied to EA is rejection of selfishness.

Obviously self-help books are an exception, in the same way that pro-murder books are an exception to “murder isn’t widely accepted”.

Jiro 16 Oct 2025 18:18 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: The Mom Test for AI Extinction Scenarios

It would have given my mom the wrong impression about AI extinction risk (that it sounds crazy)

“It sounds crazy” is a correct impression, by definition. I assume you mean “the wrong impression (that it is crazy)”.

But there’s a fine line between “I won’t mention this because people will get the wrong impression (that it’s crazy)” and “I won’t mention this because people will get the wrong impression (that it’s false)”. The former is a subset of the latter; are you going to do the latter and conceal all information that might call your ideas into doubt?

(One answer might be “well, I won’t conceal information that would lead to a legitimate disagreement based on unflawed facts and reasoning. Thinking I’m crazy is not such a disagreement”. But I see problems with this. If you believe in X, you by definition think that all disagreement with X is flawed, so this doesn’t restrict you at all.)