johnswentworth

• johnswentworth 10 Dec 2025 22:20 UTC

  16 points

  4

  on: Rock Paper Scis­sors is Not Solved, In Practice

  Back in college, when one of my CS courses had an RPS tournament, the strategies to beat were:

  • Kill the process running the opponent’s code. This looks like the opponent crashed, resulting in a win.

  • Use gdb to get access to the opponent’s random number generator. Then, run opponent’s code with the RNG set to match, in order to perfectly predict what they’ll do.

  Obviously this is not in the spirit of the game, but seems worth noting.

Novem­ber Retrospective

The Moon­rise Problem

Not A Love Let­ter, But A Thank You Letter

You Are Much More Salient To Your­self Than To Every­one Else

• johnswentworth 27 Nov 2025 2:32 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  The post is focused on (banter → sex) mainly because that’s the place where I most strongly feel I’m missing something, i.e. I am unable to picture how it would plausibly work. Banter as a general social skill, e.g. for making friends or just having fun conversations or breaking the ice with new people, is something I’m already quite comfortable with.

  Indeed, much of the reason I was originally confused about the (banter → sex) pipeline was because I have had so much of that kind of conversation for so many years, and over all that time it did not particularly seem to lead to sex.

• johnswentworth 26 Nov 2025 23:23 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  I guess I should have directly asked: is the appeal of conversation before sex, for you, that it is a sexual turn on in its own right? Like, does good conversation with someone make you sexually aroused? Or is it something less direct than that, like e.g. you find it hard to be aroused by someone without first respecting them, or feeling curious about them, or something like that?

• johnswentworth 26 Nov 2025 22:12 UTC

  8 points

  3

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

  Not sure how much this applies to you specifically, but my go-to hypothesis when someone says “I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with” is “yeah sure you’re not, I wonder what you’d say if you were already turned on by the person in question?”. Like, using Aella’s toy model of “ladybrain” and “hornybrain”, “I am not very interested in sex with someone who I can’t have a good conversation with” is a very central example of something ladybrain says. And like most of the things ladybrain says, one could jump through the hoop… or one could just get hornybrain amped up enough that ladybrain gives up and calls it a night.

  On my models, when someone is actually turned on, a lot of their supposed barriers have a tendency to suddenly become quite flexible.

Courtship Con­fu­sions Post-Slutcon

Snip­pets on Liv­ing In Reality

• johnswentworth 25 Nov 2025 19:12 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: Why Not Just Train For In­ter­pretabil­ity?

  this feels like a subtweet of our recent paper on circuit sparsity

  It isn’t. This post has been in my drafts for ages and I just got around to slapping a passable coat of paint on it and shipping it.

Maybe Insen­si­tive Func­tions are a Nat­u­ral On­tol­ogy Gen­er­a­tor?

• johnswentworth 24 Nov 2025 3:52 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Show Re­view: Masquerade

  One bit review: yes.

  Low-bit-count info which I think would be most high-value for those who’ve already seen Sleep No More:

  It’s railroaded.

Show Re­view: Masquerade

Easy vs Hard Emo­tional Vulnerability

• johnswentworth 22 Nov 2025 15:26 UTC

  19 points

  16

  on: Be Naughty

  And there is no one less suited than a corpse for time-sensitive emergency situations.

  This is very false.

  I have personally experienced people who outright panic in emergency situations, and a corpse would be far more helpful than a panicking person.

Why Not Just Train For In­ter­pretabil­ity?

• johnswentworth 20 Nov 2025 22:50 UTC

  43 points

  9

  on: Dom­i­nance: The Stan­dard Every­day Solu­tion To Akrasia

  Some supplementary armchair psychologizing + navel gazing...

  A core part of the recipe for a prototypical LWer seems to be: take a kid with a fairly high IQ (like, at least +2 sd, probably more). At some point, the kid notices that the authority figures in their life—teachers, bosses, parents, what have you—are just not that smart or competent. Indeed, relative to the capabilities of our prototypical LWer, it is basically true that the authority figures in their life are largely morons. (This was certainly my experience!)

  … and a natural response to this is to reject the core dominance-hierarchies of society.

  That, in turn, lifts the wool from the prototypical LWer’s eyes in many ways. They become able to apply an appropriate level of skepticism to authoritative sources of information, like e.g. academic papers. On the flip side, part of the cost is often losing the standard anti-akrasia mechanism.

Dom­i­nance: The Stan­dard Every­day Solu­tion To Akrasia

• johnswentworth 20 Nov 2025 14:35 UTC

  16 points

  4

  on: In Defense of Goodness

  Brief responses:

  • I think the points about subagents within one human mind are largely factually correct.

  • “I think [John is] pointing at the yum/​yuck we feel now when thinking of something, not the projected yum we expect we’d feel later” is very importantly wrong as a description of what I’m pointing at (see Values Are Real Like Harry Potter), but again not cruxy to the point at hand. (Heroin is a go-to motivating example in that linked post.)

  • Actual cruxy claim: the process which actually produces claims about Goodness, memetically, in our world, is mostly not a bargaining process which “just” aggregates values. It biases heavily towards memeticity, even when memetic fitness is anticorrelated with the values of all the agents involved. (Think e.g. Toxoplasma of Rage.)

  • It would indeed be useful to have some term for the values which would pop out of some unbiased process of bargaining and value aggregation at a societal scale. That process does not currently exist, and consequently there is no standard mainstream word which is actually-in-practice used to refer to such values. Conflating that concept with “good” brings in unearned baggage/​connotations/​associations.