Julius

• Julius 29 Jan 2026 4:29 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: No, Amer­i­cans Don’t Think For­eign Aid Is 26% of the Budget

  Yeah, I think in that case the best thing to do would be to use log-odds aggregation. That would be symmetric.

• Julius 28 Jan 2026 19:41 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: Con­tra Sam Har­ris on Free Will

  Yeah, there’s not much disagreement about the physical world here. But I do think a framework that leads to distinctions between choosing orange juice and having a muscle spasm, and being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff, is a better framework (e.g. has more explanatory power) than one that doesn’t. So I was thinking these were also conceptual differences, in addition to semantic ones. Like I said in the other comment, I don’t see how his framework makes sense of the pathologies I mentioned.

  Sometimes it seems like there’s an empirical difference regarding the conscious mind, but I also agree with you that he wouldn’t really make the claim that it does NOTHING, although at times he seems to.

  Either way, I still think this matters for more than free will debates. It definitely has implications in law. The Radiolab episode Blame talks about some of these.

• Julius 28 Jan 2026 18:14 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Con­tra Sam Har­ris on Free Will

  I guess I was thinking it included semantics, but I was thinking (hoping?) that these were more conceptual than purely semantic. (I admit there’s very little empirical difference here.) I tried to call them out in the cruxes section, where I have things like whether consciousness is causally efficacious or merely a witness and whether deliberated actions and reflexes differ in kind or only in degree.

  I think the question of does something (consciousness) do causal work is an empirical claim. We could (in theory) find a bunch of p-zombies and test it.

  I was trying to show that some definitions really do lead to more natural distinctions that intuitively feel like different things, like the difference between being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff.

  Do even these ultimately collapse into semantics? (Is this ultimate about what we define as “you”?) Of course we could define free will any which way, so it’s always partially semantic. I was thinking they didn’t, but could be wrong.

  Re: the framing, I understand the sympathies towards his framing. If your goal is “help people stop hating criminals as self-created monsters,” then “you have no free will” is a much better reply than “read my long essay please”.

  Sometimes I was wondering how much I was rebutting and how much we were agreeing. I think it ended up being less rebutting almost because Sam ends up in essentially compatibilist positions. For example, I would regard someone who believes they’re just watching their body move without their control (i.e. alien hand syndrome) as a pathology. My guess is Sam would call that a pathology as well, although I don’t know how that conclusion would follow from his framework. But doesn’t this implicitly concede that consciousness normally does something functional?

  Thanks for reading it and commenting.

Con­tra Sam Har­ris on Free Will

• Julius 20 Jan 2026 18:02 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: No, Amer­i­cans Don’t Think For­eign Aid Is 26% of the Budget

  Yeah, I mentioned this in a footnote. Not sure what the best way to handle it is either, but I suggested subbing in some small non-zero value.
  
  > Note that the use of geometric mean requires non-zero values, so if anyone responded with 0%, this would have to be replaced with a small, non-zero value.

No, Amer­i­cans Don’t Think For­eign Aid Is 26% of the Budget

Think­ing in Predictions

• Julius 28 Sep 2025 7:20 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: lillybaeum’s comment on: Book Re­view: The System

  Yes, I did. Thanks for letting me know it comes off that way.

Book Re­view: The System

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San Diego – ACX Mee­tups Every­where Fall 2025

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• Julius 22 Oct 2024 0:00 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Gregory ’s comment on: In­ter­est in Leet­code, but for Ra­tion­al­ity?

  I originally had an LLM generate them for me, and then I checked those with other LLMs to make sure the answers were right and that weren’t ambiguous. All of the questions are here: https://​​github.com/​​jss367/​​calibration_trivia/​​tree/​​main/​​public/​​questions

• Julius 17 Oct 2024 5:25 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: In­ter­est in Leet­code, but for Ra­tion­al­ity?

  Another place that’s doing something similar is clearerthinking.org

• Julius 16 Oct 2024 23:07 UTC

  2 points

  2

  on: In­ter­est in Leet­code, but for Ra­tion­al­ity?

  I like this idea and have wanted to do something similar, especially something that we could do at a meetup. For what it’s worth, I made a calibration trivia site to help with calibration. The San Diego group has played it a couple times during meetups. Feel free to copy anything from it. https://​​calibrationtrivia.com/​​

AI Safety Newslet­ter #42: New­som Ve­toes SB 1047 Plus, OpenAI’s o1, and AI Gover­nance Summary

AI Safety Newslet­ter #41: The Next Gen­er­a­tion of Com­pute Scale Plus, Rank­ing Models by Sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to Jailbreak­ing, and Ma­chine Ethics

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