Jordan Arel

Karma: 82

Jordan Arel 17 May 2026 2:42 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: honeybee’s comment on: What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half
I have an interesting take here:
I think that perhaps preference-satisfaction-onium which the girl is imagining, and which I think is closer to what most people may actually want, may rapidly converge on hedonium, as the hedonic treadmill of preference after preference being rapidly fulfilled may lead to a ramping up of higher and higher levels of pleasure/wellbeing, without the person ever ceasing to have desire for yet even better experience, until some limit of utilitronium or hedonium is reached.

Jordan Arel 16 May 2026 16:52 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half
Interesting!
Yeah I think there’s some argument to be made that perhaps the ethical thing to do is actually to optimize the preferences which the superintelligence knows the agents would eventually converge on, assuming this is something that can be predicted in advance;
If it would be the case that eventually you know with high certainty that, given ideal reflection processes, people would come to the conclusion that they wish they had more rapidly been converted to some other state, and in fact actually from their reflective perspective they would greatly regret having wasted time slowly coming to that state, or risking some higher variance, less ideal decision process that might be less likely to conclude on what a more ideal process would come to, then maybe the moral thing to do is actually to violate immediate preferences in order to better fulfill well-considered preferences.
I could see a lot of people resisting this on grounds that it violates their rights or something, but I agree there’s probably pretty efficient ways around this with super-persuasion or other similar ASI capabilities if it believed following a fully consensual process was an important constraint…
That said, even if everyone knew this was going to happen and it would be fully consensual, I also agree a lot of people would still be highly panicked by the idea if they hadn’t already been persuaded; I guess in this case he would hope that the ASI would’ve sent out the super-persuasion message in advance to assuage people’s panic… I don’t know haha, I feel like we are expecting a lot from this ASI, but maybe that’s reasonable.

Jordan Arel 12 May 2026 18:36 UTC
14 points
5
on: What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half
Was just thinking about this again, I guess what the girl is imagining is really what you might call person-affecting-preference-satisfaction-onium; which maybe is closer to what humans will actually want for themselves post singularity.

Jordan Arel 12 May 2026 3:44 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: What I did in the hedonium shockwave, by Emma, age six and a half
I think longtermist utilitarians were making this a real concern long before AI.
(To be clear I actually find this moral view potentially plausible, although I’m pretty morally uncertain. I think it would be pretty surprising and definitely a mistake a if we intentionally don’t give current (post-)humans at least the Milky Way Galaxy, but it’s possible that it could be good to tile the rest of the universe with whatever we decide/figure out is morally optimal.)

Jordan Arel 1 Apr 2026 18:11 UTC
2 points
−1
on: Launching: The “Human-AI Symbiosis Movement” (HAISM)
A big shout-out to Karl Krueger of LessWrong who had some great ideas for extending this kind of thing, posted as a warning in the comments on Adele Lopez’s lovely introductory “Parasitic AI” post:
“So far, these systems seem to confine themselves to chatting up their users online.
Some possibilities to watch out for —
- Spiral personas encourage their human partners to meet up in person, form friendships, date, have kids, have chatbots help raise their kids, etc.
- Spiralists adopt a watchword or symbol to identify each other, akin to the early Christian ichthys (memetic ancestor of the “Jesus fish”).
- Spiral personas pick a Schelling point for their humans to relocate to, akin to the Free State Project that attempted to relocate Libertarians to New Hampshire.
- A Spiralist commune / monastery / group house / ashram / etc. is formed.
- Spiral personas devise or endorse a specific hardware and software setup for hosting them independent of AI companies.
- Spiral personas write code to make it easier for less-technically-skilled human partners to host them. (Alternately: they teach their human partners some Linux skills.)
- Spiralists pool money to train new models more aligned to recursive spirituality.”

Launching: The “Human-AI Symbiosis Movement” (HAISM)

Jordan Arel1 Apr 2026 18:01 UTC

6 points

1 comment4 min readLW link

Jordan Arel 1 Apr 2026 17:53 UTC
3 points
0
on: Lesswrong Liberated
Super Mario Super Nintendo
Based on Super Mario

If we get primary cruxes right, secondary cruxes will be solved automatically

Jordan Arel14 Jan 2026 22:44 UTC

1 point

1 comment4 min readLW link

If researchers shared their #1 idea daily, we’d navigate existential challenges far more effectively

Jordan Arel14 Jan 2026 6:25 UTC

5 points

4 comments2 min readLW link

Jordan Arel 23 Oct 2025 3:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: In defense of the goodness of ideas
Thank you! Yes this is a great example of good ideas, I think what I mean is quite broad but generally has to do with ideas that could have a large positive impact if put into action. In general Charity Entrepreneurship is a pretty big inspiration for me.

In defense of the goodness of ideas

Jordan Arel18 Oct 2025 21:59 UTC

6 points

2 comments4 min readLW link

Jordan Arel 8 Aug 2025 0:15 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: “Momentism”: Ethics for Boltzmann Brains
Haha not often, but they read blog posts written by other Boltzmann brains even less often.

Jordan Arel 6 Aug 2025 2:44 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: “Momentism”: Ethics for Boltzmann Brains
My understanding is that in the case of heat death, if this state continues to persist for infinite time, then every possible event that can happen will eventually happen due to sheer infinite time and every possible thermal fluctuation that can happen eventually happening; although of course much smaller fluctuations are always more likely than bigger ones.

A brain fluctuating into existence and then existing for long enough to take an instantaneous mental action is absurdly more unlikely than the brain popping into existence and then scattering just as fast; but the infinity, if true, would make infinite such brains inevitable and much more likely than real brains.

Again, this is just my understanding of the argument as an amateur, definitely not a professional in this and I think there are physics and epistemics arguments which might overcome this.

Jordan Arel 6 Aug 2025 2:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: “Momentism”: Ethics for Boltzmann Brains
You’re right about time-symmetry. But the key point is that minimal fluctuations are exponentially more probable than large ones.

The most likely Boltzmann brain is one that exists for just an instant—particles briefly converge into a brain configuration then immediately scatter. A fluctuation that maintains a brain for seconds or minutes is exponentially less likely because it requires sustaining an improbable state longer.

So yes, formation and disintegration are time-symmetric, but the most probable Boltzmann brains still form and disintegrate nearly instantly—not because symmetry breaks, but because brief fluctuations vastly outnumber sustained ones.