johnswentworth

Karma: 61,537

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

johnswentworth 20 Nov 2025 5:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: What Is The Basin Of Convergence For Kelly Betting?
Indeed, good catch. Fixed.

johnswentworth 18 Nov 2025 18:19 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket
Separate from the cringe, I do also see little object-level reason to go, at least for me. The signal to noise ratio at noob-dominated events is pretty bad, EA branding specifically tends to make it worse, and if I’m just going to restrict to people I already know anyway then I can just talk to them outside of such events.

johnswentworth 18 Nov 2025 18:12 UTC
2 points
3
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket
I don’t generally wear a full suit (no button down shirt or tie), but more to the point I have a whole look going on which is pretty clearly not “MBA” or “middle manager” or whatever a suit normally signals.

johnswentworth 18 Nov 2025 0:45 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: george_adams’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
These numbers are from around 2016/2017.

johnswentworth 17 Nov 2025 21:10 UTC
15 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
That matches my expectation. There was a notable tendency for real estate to be a larger and larger fraction as I moved down the list, so I strongly expect real estate to dominate for smaller companies, and it certainly dominates for individuals. Though that’s “real estate” including both land and buildings; I would still guess that buildings are usually a larger component than land even for private individuals.

johnswentworth 17 Nov 2025 17:37 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
Alice’ shares have a $200 market price, but the accountants aren’t using that price on the books yet (unless they make a separate move to “mark to market”). Accounting values are not market values. This is one of the major reasons why I have those cautionary notes about accounting conventions throughout the post.

johnswentworth 17 Nov 2025 16:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
Their corresponding entry would be “equity” IIUC. So if Alice has $100 of stock in company X, that means Alice paid $100 for that stock (which now may have higher or lower market value, but the book still shows $100 worth for now).
If Alice bought the stock from Bob, who himself paid $80 for it, then Bob would have one entry for the buy and one entry for the sell, at $80 and $100 respectively. Those $80 and $100 entries both have corresponding opposite-sign entries in somebody else’ books.
If the stock was originally issued to Bob for $80 by company X… I don’t know the details of how that’s recorded, but at a high level company X has an entry for equity and IIUC they sold some of that equity (or perhaps diluted the equity of existing shareholders to free some up, and then sold the freed-up equity). So, again at a high level where I don’t know the low-level details, company X traded some equity (which is an entry in their books) for $80.

johnswentworth 17 Nov 2025 15:04 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
Good question! Habryka also objected (offline) to the same block but making a different point: sometimes money just kind of “goes in circles” in the derivatives market, trading claims for claims for claims, and maybe doesn’t actually end up in any nonfinancial assets.
IIUC the answer to both of these is double entry accounting. I am significantly less than 100% confident in my understanding here, but here’s how I understand it.
Double entry accounting was designed largely for the specific purpose of making sure no money went “missing”. To that end, a central constraint on all its conventions is that, for every debit, there must be an equal and opposite credit on the books. It’s not showing “current market value of holdings” so much as “how much was spent to get the stuff”. The “add up to zero” property is a constraint of accounting conventions specifically designed to achieve that property. Again, that’s if I understand correctly; I’m significantly less than 100% confident.

johnswentworth 17 Nov 2025 2:37 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Gretta Duleba’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
Oh yeah, I was surprised by that too. I broke out land separate from buildings in most of my notes specifically for that reason.
Turns out the buildings (and, implicitly, building permits in high-density areas) are generally worth a lot more than just land itself. At least based on whatever black magic these accountants are using.

johnswentworth 17 Nov 2025 0:16 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Where is the Capital? An Overview
That sure does depend on some very dubious choices. Human capital is rarely valued at all in standard accounting, it’s the sort of thing I’ve mostly only heard priced in academic papers.

johnswentworth 15 Nov 2025 19:31 UTC
13 points
2
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: “But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? … Right?”
Some combination of:
- Path of least resistance
- Compelling outside-view argument that I’d probably get more value from the relationship over time because that’s how bonding usually works (think e.g. the mental picture here)
- Explicit decision to put off the effort of fixing some things which I assumed were fixable, and finding out relatively late that those things were very intractable
A relatively legible example: we were poly right from the start (I was her secondary for a while, which was great), but in practice neither of us bothered with anyone else for a long time. It wasn’t a particularly sexually satisfying relationship, but for years I was focused on other things in life and didn’t worry about that; if and when I decided to invest effort in upgrading my sex life, I could look outside the relationship for that, because we were poly. About 8 years in I decided to actually do that, so it wasn’t until 8 years in that I found out she was EXTREMELY not ok with me sleeping around, to the point of having full-on anxiety attacks from thinking about it. And she did not have the will or emotional slack to treat that as a problem to fix. That wasn’t the end, we did try for quite a while to make it work, but that was definitely the thing which finally pushed me all the way onto the off-ramp.