jmh

Karma: 1,561

jmh 11 Jan 2026 4:35 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I don’t quite like the framing “Don’t Exist”. I suspect a lot will depend on the specific context you need to use the term and the point one wants to make. Should I make a blanket statement “Murder Does Not Exists” simply because across cultures and national laws there is not 100% agreement on what defines a killing as murder or not murder? What about many of the technical standards that end up producing incompatible implementations that break interoperability? Are there really no standards?
I am probably more sympathetic to the last claim that to the one about murder or treaties.

jmh 8 Jan 2026 4:34 UTC
4 points
−3
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: On Owning Galaxies
I’m not sure there is the trap you claim. I do agree that enforcement, which does mean applying some level of force or power in some cases, is needed. Property rights, or any rights generally, don’t just get respect and adherence from all. It’s complicated but I do think one might suggest property rights emerging as preferred to just relying brute force and power as the determinant. Both Demsetz and Olson have some good work that suggests property rights and respect of property rights arises as much (more?) from desire and incentives to escape from the conflict and application of force/projection of power.
How well human history and social/cultural evolution might apply to any ASI futures is a big unknown, but for that very reason I tend to think projecting ASI behavior from human history and experience might itself be a bit problematic.

jmh 5 Jan 2026 2:10 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform
I had a bit of the same reaction (logic being many loose their jobs, income craters, good demand craters, corp earning crater stock price higher????). But I kind of see it from a I don’t have a good handle on AI and equity market levels in the future so maybe stick to a strategy that historically makes sense.
I would only add some slight shifts to the suggestion. While it is also an open question for the average investor as to buy-hold versus timing the market works well, I do think most here can think though well enough to consider timing for the option allocation. Simple mean-reversion type entry points might increase the odd tempered by where one things the overall market is in the cycle.

jmh 9 Dec 2025 14:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
I wonder if situations like the Cuban missile crisis are good examples for your position. But then I also wonder if that (I think apparently worried but calm about the world ending in a nuclear conflict) isn’t contrasted by the claims about the mass hysteria after the radio broadcast of Well’s War of the Worlds.

jmh 9 Dec 2025 2:04 UTC
2 points
0
on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
You really get asked that? Wow.
I also have always found the “the world might end tonight/tomorrow/next week” stories with people running around madly doing all the things they never would have otherwise a bit stretched. But then mob mentalities are not rational so I don’t really try to make too much sense of them
I suppose that would be my first approach to coping with the world ending—just keep my eye open to external madness and perhaps put some space between me and large population or something.
Since I generally don’t believe anyone has ever promised me tomorrow, the end of the world case does seem to fit into the “what has that got to do with me” view. I’d much rather live my life on my own terms than concede I have been living according to other people terms for some reason and feel the end of the world somehow free me from some constraints or something.

jmh’s Shortform

jmh7 Dec 2025 22:15 UTC

6 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

jmh 7 Dec 2025 22:15 UTC
0 points
0
on: jmh’s Shortform
I suspect some have seen this argument already but thought it was an interesting point of view on an aspect of AI that was new to me.
The Platonic Case Against AI Slop

jmh 3 Dec 2025 17:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
I wonder if it’s less about rate of change (but don’t really take any exception to that claim) and more about divergence of change from expectations. 1950′s or 60′s expectations (at least in pop culture) was flying cars and smart robot house servants—think Jetson’s here.
People of the early 20th Century had the direct experience of living though some very significant events which they probably had not really expected. The future became much more uncertain so receptivity to more possible outcomes probably increases. The situation is a bit different up to now, so I wonder if that doesn’t place greater weight on a view of the future as some trend path with variation but mean-reversion.

jmh 29 Nov 2025 2:14 UTC
3 points
0
on: Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort posts
The quick post is short, the effortpost is long
Years ago when I was in school one of my professors told me (well probably the whole class but...) you should be able to write the thesis of your entire paper on two or three index cards.
My initial thought was, then all the other writing is really a waste of effort I could put elsewhere. Not quite true. But that does seem to map over to the doodle—finished art point made. A lot of writing in the paper is the details and often can prove more distracting/noise to the main insight.
But I do have another thought on that. If you can put an interesting idea down in a very short set of statements or bullets the core to the thought is clear. The rest of what you write is about the author’s view. Just offing the index card view opens up the field for every reader to take that idea/thought where they want to explore. That is often much more interesting for a reader.

jmh 23 Nov 2025 20:28 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I do think that is good advise, and true regardless of trollish or good/bad faith. I read your comment and immediately thought of the shooting messengers rather than messages. In other words, don’t let the messenger distract you from the actual message.
Reading the comments, though, it almost seems like many still focus on the “messenger” rather than the message carried—and here I’m not specifically pointing at Elizabeth’s post but the whole annoying/sneering/troll/just plain difficult person aspect, in other words the characteristics of the delivery rather than the value of the message/information/things the other person might contribute.

jmh 12 Nov 2025 20:39 UTC
4 points
0
on: Human Values ≠ Goodness
I think there may be a fairly critical confusion here, but perhaps have missed the key bit (or perhaps by seeing this particular tree have missed the forest the post is aiming at) that would address that. It seems that in “human values” here are defined very much in terms of a specific human. However, “goodness” seems to be more about something larger—society, the culture, humanity as a class or even living things.
I suspect a lot of the potential error in treating the terms as near to one another disappears if you think of goodness for a specific person or thinking of human values in terms of human as a group that holds common values. (Granted, in this latter case get to specific values will be problematic but in terms of pure logic or abstract reasoning I don’t think the issues are nearly as bad as implied in the OP.)

jmh 10 Nov 2025 0:39 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: RationalElf’s comment on: Unexpected Things that are People
Yes, it’s weird semantics but I think it’s become a way to get more than just a small fraction of the legal rights real persons enjoy and are entitled to under law. I would challenge the claim “This is universally agreed to be a good thing”. True, there are some very clear benefits to granting corporation the status of a de jure person—a central party to allow contract. But we get a lot of costs that go with that (ability to avoid personal accountability, undue influence in public policy) when taking the legal fiction beyond what was necessary.
Granting ships and rivers “personhood” (and I would actually include corporation as a person in this too) seems sloppy/lazy at best (probably could have gotten to where you needed to get without such confusion) and intentional corruption of an idea at worst to some alternative gain that would have been rejected outside draping a veil of “personhood” for legal purposes.

jmh 28 Oct 2025 0:53 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Petropolitan’s comment on: EU explained in 10 minutes
Other than policing the EU buildings and facilities, does that force do other things? Does it function as some supra police force that investigates throughout the EU?

jmh 26 Oct 2025 3:40 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Doomers Were Right
A lot of this reminds me about an old econ article I read in school. Ron Heiner’s The Origins of Predictable Behavior. As I recall, the basic argument is baysean in reasoning and largely gets to how social rules evolve to deal with very infrequent but highly costly, socially I want to say but also individually, actions by members of society.
The infrequency and lack of firsthand knowledge creates a lot of tensions in terms of views about the existing rules. Broadly that can fit into the view of resistance to change and “sky is falling” type fears and rhetoric that does generally slow the rate of change.

jmh 25 Oct 2025 5:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
I’d be much happier with a post with the target I think you’re aiming at if there was some comparisons to as many other pandemic events as possible.
To be honest I don’t find the bit about global GDP loss or the lack of follow through with some planned program funding that convincing or even relevant. Most of the programs announced in 2022 were likely all suggested in 2020 or 2021 so likely more knee-jerk “we have to show the people we’re doing something” rather than well thought out. Then in 2022 and 2023 you have politics starting to dominate and since they are competing with other spending needs may well have been poor options for spending (compared to preventing future pandemics or other programs that also have some greater discounted value to social welfare and overall health). So not clear that we should take each or even any of them as good ideas we should have implemented.
Similarly, looking at global GDP from the World Bank data it’s not clear that the hit to GDB was as bad as claimed. Sure, 82T is a big number. So is 17T but over 5 years in the context of global GDP not so shocking. I think that was a case of seeing something big in isolation and so thinking it’s a bigger issue and it real is. Also, MR had a post about the impact to income in the USA and the government response. The estimate was the the lock-down reduces incomes by $15B a month. But the government support in response was something like $30B a month. A bit hard to see that situation supporting a big hit to GDP/incomes. I would agree that the USA situation is not representative of the world, but not too different from other developed countries (which I would include China in) and those are the countries that drive global GDP. The chart on the World Bank site supports the supply shock to GDP for 2020 but then basically a return to the prior growth path, or even a steeper one. So I don’t actually see that it’s an easy case to make that we had some significant, persistent negative impact to global GDP. As such, I’m not seeing how this might support any claims about human’s not having learned anything from the pandemic.
Feel like I should add one quick point as well. I think it’s a mistake to make the type of aggregate claim “humanity learned almost nothing”. That is either a claim that no one learned much or just wrong. as such I think framing the question that way is likely to lead one into a sub optimal analytic framework and so reduce whatever value such an inquire might produce.

jmh 25 Oct 2025 5:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mike Evron’s comment on: Markets in Democracy: What happens when you can sell your vote?
While not quite buying votes elections in the Philippines, at least local elections, have near ubiquitous payments to potential voters by candidate—including forms with the name of the recipient (eligible voter) for each in a household (seems to help ensure that someone doesn’t front-run the payment and keep all payments when they can only cast one vote).
But when talking with people about the whole arrangement no one seems to think it actually changes results or makes anything better in terms or official or policy or effective governance. Just a small bit of extra cash candidates have to payout—and so will then want to recoup in terms of bribes or other forms of political corruption.
Not something I’ve made a study about so all anecdotal but seems to be a real world case that is similar to your thoughts. But also different in that each candidate is making a payment and no real enforcement mechanism to ensure the vote is given to the highest bidder (or whatever the buy structure might be).

jmh 5 Oct 2025 16:46 UTC
2 points
0
on: Markets in Democracy: What happens when you can sell your vote?
I don’t think selling or buying votes is a good solution. There is a reason why we have multiple forms of social institutions: they solve different types of problems using different types of tools. If you think the problems of governance and policy are solved via a market mechanism I think your first task is to show why the market solution never emerged in the first place. But I think if you want to go down that path why stop at votes, why not take David Friedman’s approach of a market anarchy where government largely doesn’t exist but private solutions provided in a competitive market setting do.

jmh 2 Sep 2025 9:52 UTC
2 points
0
AF
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Four ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI
First, I’ll admit, after rereading, a poor/uncharitable first read of your position. Sorry for that.
But I would still suggest your complaint is about some economist rather than economics as a study or analysis tool For example, “If anything, the value of labor goes UP, not down, with population! E.g. dense cities are engines of growth!” fits very well into economics of network effects.
To the extent that the economists can only consider AI as capital that’s a flawed view, I would agree. I would suggest it is, for economic application, probably best equated with “human capital”—which is also something different than labor or capital in classic capital-labor dichotomy.
So, in the end I still see the main complaint you have is not really about economics but perhaps your experience is that economists (that you talk with) might be more prone to this blind spot/bias than others (not sure who that population might be). I don’t see that you’ve really made the case that it was the study of economics that produced this situation. Which them suggests that we don’t really have a good pointer to how to get less wrong on this front.

jmh 22 Aug 2025 1:18 UTC
LW: 11 AF: -1
−1
AF
on: Four ways learning Econ makes people dumber re: future AI
I thought the first two claims were a bit off so didn’t read much farther.
The first seems a really poor understanding and hardly steelmanning the economic arguments/views. I’d suggest looking in to the concept of human capital. While economics uses the two broad classes you seem to be locking the terms into a mostly Marxist view (but even Marx didn’t view labor a just motive force). Might also be worth noting that the concepts of land, labor and capital are from classical political economy relating to how surplus (the additional “more” the system produces from the inputs) is divided up.
I think for second bit, the Experience Curves claims are a bit poorly thought out I would suggest looking into Say’s Law about production and exchange situations. Your shift in demand has to come from somewhere and not just be something that materialized out of thin air. You might look at prior savings but I think that makes a special case type argument rather than a general one. If one sees value in Say’s Law, then the increased demand for some product/service comes from the increased production of other goods and services. In that case then resources have already been bid over to those markets (and presumably we might assume are in some semi-stable equilibrium state) so just where are the resources for the shift in supply you suggest?
I would agree that partial/limited understanding of economics (all the econ 101 stuff) will provide pretty poor analysis. I would actually go farther in saying even solid and well informed economics models will only go so far: economics can explain the economic aspects of AI and AI risks but not everything AI or AI risk. I kind of feel perhaps this is where your post is coming from—thinking simple econ 101 is used to explain AI and finding that lacking.

jmh 18 Aug 2025 4:41 UTC
12 points
4
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Underdog bias rules everything around me
I’m not sure I agree with cousin_it’s premise but lack any good knowledge to justify a strong disagreement. However, I would note that the 300 Spartans story might be read both ways, and perhaps at the same time. If 300 Spartans can fight off the entire Persian army seems to also suggest they are incredibly strong fighters with strong strategy and tactics.
I think one can make both cases and neither necessarily refutes the other.