Julian_R

• Julian_R 4 Mar 2026 20:43 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: [Be­neath Psy­chol­ogy] In­tro­duc­tion Part 1: The Challenge

  I’d try something like

  :::spoiler “Is there a situation you are likely to run into today where you’d want to have makeup on, before you have a chance to reapply it?” The idea would be to get her to actually think about, and reply with “Huh, no actually, guess I’ll go swim” or “Uhh idk, I won’t swim tho” (in the case she actually has some other reason for not swimming) :::

• Julian_R 4 Mar 2026 20:18 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: [Be­neath Psy­chol­ogy] Chronic pain challenge part 2: the solution

  This was very interesting to read. Thank you for writing up such a detailed example!

  > Jimmy: Sounds like you’re not too happy with your new identity as “fat kid,” and are kinda pissed at life for pushing you to accept it. Jimmy: I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that the reason you’re pissed and haven’t fully accepted it is that “accepting it” kinda feels like “accepting your fate.” Jimmy: You don’t want the rest of your life to be this way. The time you already spent messed up is fine. Spending a few more years recovering is fine. Shitty, yes, but fine. Jimmy: It’s the idea that it’s over, and all you got to look forward to is being a cripple in pain forever that pisses you off, and which you don’t want to accept. Jimmy: Am I wrong? Jimmy: Because if that’s the case, then yeah, fuck that. I wouldn’t accept that shit either, and being pissed off sounds like approximately the right reaction. Jimmy: It’s not time to accept that which hasn’t been determined.

  > Okay, I think this is the important piece. This is the piece of truth that he could sense but hadn’t integrated which would have been lost “just accepting” the pain and feeling okay without doing something with the message. This is why he pushed back, rather than “just” treating pain like any other information. To him, the pain seemed to be saying “Your life is over. You’re a cripple now”, so if he says “okay”, then it’s “Okay, I’m a cripple”, an expectation of being a cripple, and therefore no ability to work towards not being a cripple. At least, not with his heart in it.

  As someone who has struggled with accepting pain for exactly this reason, I feel really seen by this passage

• Julian_R 10 Feb 2026 8:26 UTC

  5 points

  3

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Near-In­stantly Abort­ing the Worst Pain Imag­in­able with Psychedelics

  On a similar note, I wonder if a more promising angle of attack is chemical research to find another compound that might be even more effective.

  Given that sumatriptan and DMT are pretty similar, and the psychedelic effects of DMT are apparently not relevant, it’s plausible that there might be an even better molecule out there.

  If that molecule did not have psychedelic effects, that would be ideal in terms of quick widespread adoption.

• Julian_R 12 Aug 2025 16:51 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Eliz­a­beth’s Shortform

  I recently learned that the Starship Troopers movie started out like this.
  
  To quote Wikipedia

  Development of Starship Troopers began in 1991 as Bug Hunt at Outpost 7, written by Neumeier. After recognizing similarities between Neumeier’s script and Heinlein’s book, producer Jon Davison suggested aligning the script more closely with the novel to garner greater interest from studio executives.

• Julian_R 12 Aug 2025 11:54 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Re­ward is not the op­ti­miza­tion target

  I suspect the clearest way to think about this is to carefully distinguish between the RL “agent” as defined by a learned policy (a mapping from states to actions) and the RL algorithm used to train that policy.

  The RL algorithm is designed to create an agent which maximises reward.

  The “goal” of an RL policy may not always be clear, but using Dennett’s intentional stance we can define it as “the thing it makes sense/​compresses observations to say the policy appears to be maximising”.
  
  Then I understand this post to be saying “The goal of an RL policy is not necessarily the same as the goal of the RL algorithm used to train it.”

  
  Is that right?

• Julian_R 18 Aug 2024 21:53 UTC

  10 points

  1

  on: Ex­tended In­ter­view with Zhu­keepa on Religion

  Thank you for recording and posting these, I feel like I learned a lot, both about how to have conversations and lots of little details like the restaurant thing as proto preference synthesizer and the trauma cancer analogy and the Muhammad story and the disendorsing all judgements/​resentments thing.

• Julian_R 29 May 2024 2:25 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: riceissa’s comment on: How to get nerds fas­ci­nated about mys­te­ri­ous chronic ill­ness re­search?

  I wonder if, just like young people not thinking clearly about mortality, it’s just something healthy people don’t tend to think about, partly because it’s depressing.

  (I’m also someone who got a lot more interested in this kind of thing after my own health issues)

• Julian_R 20 Nov 2023 5:03 UTC

  13 points

  6

  on: Am I go­ing in­sane or is the qual­ity of ed­u­ca­tion at top uni­ver­si­ties shock­ingly low?

  re institutional incentives, I’ve heard that part of US News rankings are based on asking survey respondents to evaluate other universities by reputation. Professors elsewhere (can only, and do) evaluate other professors based on the quality of their research, not teaching.

  I’m curious, did you check what the quality of teaching would be like at your university before you went? If not, why? If so, why did you pick it anyway?

Re­in­force­ment Learn­ing Goal Mis­gen­er­al­iza­tion: Can we guess what kind of goals are se­lected by de­fault?

• Julian_R 11 Feb 2022 13:48 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Julian_R’s comment on: Clar­ify­ing the palata­bil­ity the­ory of obesity

  to clarify, I don’t understand why positive CICO can increase your weight set point but negative CICO can’t decrease it.

• Julian_R 11 Feb 2022 13:46 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Clar­ify­ing the palata­bil­ity the­ory of obesity

  Guyenet suspects that our brain’s weight set point might never go down dramatically after living long enough in the modern world, even if we eventually stop eating palatable food altogether. If true, this would make his theory harder to test, and again, his theory would earn a penalty for being more unfalsifiable, but at the same time, we should be clear about what observations his theory strongly predicts, and rapid weight loss on unpalatable diets is just not one of them.

  I don’t understand how CICO can coexist with the idea of a weight set point. If the mechanism of gaining weight is CICO via overeating because food is so palatable, then it seems natural than on unpalatable food you would eat less, and thus I would expect rapid weight loss on unpalatable diets as a prediction of the theory.

• Julian_R 14 Oct 2021 23:35 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Red­wood Re­search’s cur­rent project

  I was confused by Buck’s response here because I thought we were going for worst-case quality until I realised:

  1. The model will have low quality on those prompts almost by definition—that’s the goal.

  2. Given that, we also want to have a generally useful model—for which the relevant distribution is ‘all fanfiction’, not “prompts that are especially likely to have a violent continuation”.

  In between those two cases is ‘snippets that were completed injuriously in the original fanfic … but could plausibly have non-violent completions’, which seems like the interesting case to me.

  I suppose one possibility is to construct a human-labelled dataset of specifically these cases to evaluate on.

Ju­lian_R’s Shortform