lesswronguser123

Karma: 99

lesswronguser123 18 Jun 2025 2:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: sunwillrise’s Shortform
I haven’t looked much into AI doom, I still find some posters here useful. Just to note a lot of AI doomer criticism posts do get a lot of upvotes if they appeal to the attitudes of lesswrong users.

lesswronguser123 17 Jun 2025 16:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: silentbob’s comment on: Against asking if AIs are conscious
The idea of mind independent prescriptive facts seems incoherent, it doesn’t even pay rent, even if a stone tablet has the moral commandments written on them it still doesn’t give me a reason to pursue them. Moreover it has no pragmatic implications, let’s say even if I presuppose there is some essence of morality, evolution has no reason to converge on it. This essence of morality is also not needed in our physical models to draw predictions, so might as well remove them—because occam’s razor. Moral anti-realist theories are able to explain the moral intuitions just as well whilst still being epistemically coherent,positing less laws and tenable.
Now you can argue there are certain things which humans in general can value more or less than others given the machinery of the brain—that would be an epistemic claim, but that does not require queer mind independent objective moral facts.

lesswronguser123 17 Jun 2025 15:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: [Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
I find that feature extremely helpful a lot of old sequence posts are outdated or have detailed expansions which often ping the original post, that alongside with precise tagging makes lesswrong easier. I don’t know how feasible this is, and how much usage it will garner but a pingback, tagging or bookmark feature for shortforms— since people are resorting to expanding various ideas in this format— would be useful, whereas in early era of lesswrong there were extremely short posts, which makes searching for them much easier.
(Or alternatively make shortforms more like twitter and add a low character limit)
Advanced search operators would also be welcome! Thanks.

lesswronguser123 17 Jun 2025 2:52 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: sunwillrise’s Shortform
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P32AuYu9MqM2ejKKY/so-geez-there-s-a-lot-of-ai-content-these-days
Can’t we just move it to Alignment Forum?
When I’ve brought this up, a few people asked why we don’t just put all the AI content on the Alignment Forum. This is a fairly obvious question, but:
a) It’d be a pretty big departure from what the Alignment Forum is currently used for.
b) I don’t think it really changes the fundamental issue of “AI is what lots of people are currently thinking about on LessWrong.”
The Alignment Forum’s current job is not to be a comprehensive list of all AI content, it’s meant to especially good content with a high signal/noise ratio. All Alignment Forum posts are also LessWrong posts, and LessWrong is meant to be the place where most discussion happens on them. The AF versions of posts are primarily meant to be a thing you can link to professionally without having to explain the context of a lot of weird, not-obviously-related topics that show up on LessWrong.
We created the Alignment Forum ~5 years ago, and it’s plausible the world needs a new tool now. BUT, it still feels like a weird solution to try and move the AI discussion off of LessWrong. AI is one of the central topics that motivate a lot of other LessWrong interests. LessWrong is about the art of rationality, but one of the important lenses here is “how would you build a mind that was optimally rational, from scratch?”.

lesswronguser123 16 Jun 2025 15:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: [Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
It does seem to qualify as spam, though.
That was from before, I convinced him to condense his entire wall of text into 4 premises^[1]—I used the analogy of it being a test for finding interested people so that he can expand later with his wall of texts— but that took around 3 hours of back and forth in lw-cord because otherwise it goes in circle. Besides I find him funny too. He still managed to get banned from multiple servers afterwards, so I think it’s just his personality and social skills. It’s possible to nudge him in certain directions, but it takes a lot of effort, his bottom line is kind of set on his cause.
I would summarise it as “evolutionary s-risk due to exponentially increasing contamination by panspermia caused by space exploration” . (He thinks the current organisations monitoring this are dysfunctional)
Other trivia includes, I told him to go attend an EA meetup in munich. He was convinced he will make an impact, but was disappointed that only few people attended, although his impression was mostly positive. (If you know about more meetups or events in munich regarding this particular cause let me know I will forward it to him)
On the lw-cord thing, Kabir kumar, posted an advert for an event he was hosting, with some slogan calling in who’s qualified. Aran basically went on to paraphrase “but I am the most important person and he banned me from his server, so he’s a liar”, the lw-cord mod got mildly annoyed at his rude behavior and muted him.
But he didn’t actually leave because he got muted—he has been muted several times from hundreds of servers—he cited the reason that some other user in discord was obnoxious to him from time to time, this same user was called “clown” by aran when they had an ethical disagreement and renamed his server alias to “The Clown King” to mock aran. He also had a change in heart with that approach, given not many people took his cause as seriously as him on discord. Nowadays he’s in his moral ambition phase, he even enrolled in a mars innovation competition for children and got graded ³³⁄₄₅, because his project didn’t innovate anything, he just posted about his ethical cause.
He has been oneshotted by inside view enough times, that he thinks he has access to infohazards which have potential to stop elon musk from launching things into space. For example, his latest public one is that under UN weapons of mass destruction treaty all interplanetary space travel are prohibited and people should be prosecuted for that. ^[2]
He has a masters in maths,his now deleted reddit account is u/eterniseddragon, he has sent emails regarding his cause to 100k people and organisations(easily searchable on lw-cord)^[3], he even has a text file with all the mail ids etc.
I think those are the main highlights anyways.
1. ^
  Premise 1: Evolution of life on exoplanets or solar system ice moons, if it happened or were to be caused as consequence of being risked to be caused, intentionally so or by accident, would entail an—by orders of magnitudes unprecedentedly—enormous amount of eventual far-future wild animal suffering.
  Premise 2: Evolution can unfold in millions of different ways.
  Premise 3: The window of possible outcomes from such evolution processes (between best and worst versions of evolution) in terms of well-being or suffering is extremely large, i.e. the interval size of the total summed up suffering is gargantuan.
  Premise 4: Absolutely any form of near-future introduction of microbes to planets or moons likely leads to an intolerably/unacceptably sub-optimal or negative outcome for an enormous number of animals eventually emerging from these microbes, leading to incompensatable scales of suffering.
  Conclusion: Humanity at almost any costs (outside of humanity’s extinction), in about the worst case including even MAD, must prevent/avoid so-called interplanetary/interstellar microbial forward contamination for centuries, based on utilitarianism, the fundamental ethical principle, together with the rational, unbiased-compassion-requiring but non-negotiable trolley problem solution logic. Morality is scientific, not made up. We must not let this happen!
2. ^
  Subject: Irrefutable Proof that Interplanetary Space Probes constitute Weapons of Mass Destruction & Immediate Legal Consequences are Necessary RETURN, CEASE & DESIST ALL CURRENT AND FUTURE INTERPLANETARY MISSIONS IMMEDIATELY! THIS IS A MORAL & LEGAL ULTIMATUM AS PER ARTICLES IV & IX OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652500181X We demand an immediate moratorium on activities and technologies that risk microbial interplanetary forward contamination! Proof of the applicability of Article IV of the OST, based on the definition of WMDs in 1977 by the General Assembly of the UN through its resolution referred to as “A/RES/32/84-B”: https://www.unrcpd.org/wmd/ “Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) constitute a class of weaponry with the potential to: [...]
  Disseminate disease-causing organisms or toxins to harm or kill humans, animals or plants;”
  Interplanetary space probes carrying microbes are a means by which those microbes can be disseminated, and microbes are a form of organisms capable of causing disease, and therefore they are disease-causing organisms, as specified in the above official declaration in the defining context of WMDs. Microbes can kick-start evolution causing animal suffering for eons.
3. ^
  I have touched grass with long term commitment a month ago and left discord,twitter,reddit in general except for dms and real life work, so I cannot link this here, but you may recognise me, if you have been on there on few of those discords—namely bayesianconspiracy,lesswrong discord—by my multiple usernames and accounts: dogmaticrationalist, militantrationalist, curiousinquirer, averagepcuser, averagediscorduser, RatAnon.
  I even trolled a bunch of discord servers by creating a huge list of link in a discord thread on lw-cord, such that aran finds it easier to find servers(although I wasn’t that explicit with my non altruistic motives) but it was funny to watch him go and get banned. Optimised dating server banned him very quickly from what I have heard. In hindsight I apologize for any inconvenience.

lesswronguser123 16 Jun 2025 14:08 UTC
11 points
1
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: [Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
I am not familiar with any example of the latter
Have you met a user called “aranjaegers” in lesswrong adjacent discord servers? (lesswrong name; @Bernd Clemens Huber ) Infamously banned from 50+ rationalist adjacent servers—either for being rude, spamming wall of text of his arguments(which he improved on eventually), being too pompous in his areas of interests etc . I think his content and focus area are mostly fine, he can be rude here and there, and the walls of texts — which he restricts to other channels if asked for. He’s barely a crackpot who’s plausible deniably not a crackpot but operating from inside view and a bit straightforward in calling what he thinks are stupid or clownish things(Although I personally think he’s rationalising). After other servers banned him the main unofficial lw-cord maintained with extremely light moderation by a single volunteer—who thought aran jaeger was good at scaring away certain types of people—got captured by aran jaegers, the discord got infamous for being a containment chamber for this person, eventually the moderator muted him for a day after an year, because he was being rude to @Kabir Kumar , so he left. (I tracked this situation for multiple months)

lesswronguser123 14 Jun 2025 6:43 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: xpym’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
Research consistently shows that religious communities outperform secular ones on all sorts of desirable metrics—they are happier, live longer, have less poverty, antisocial dysfunction
Then religious people are simply more instrumentally rational than the “Rationalists” , the “rationality as winning” is a definition which doesn’t restrict itself to superiority of a group which calls itself “Rationalists”.

lesswronguser123 13 Jun 2025 17:57 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
It depends how you define hinduism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_philosophy
In broadest sense people just try to claim everything on here, it just becomes a second word for “culture but Indian” .
There are narrow sense of the term.

lesswronguser123 12 Jun 2025 4:18 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
I think that sort of truth is something everyone in practice buys into, due to usefulness but I think someone could have different notions of truth, like in maths or morality.

lesswronguser123 12 Jun 2025 3:39 UTC
−1 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
“well there’s different things which are ‘true’ in different ways, and what even is ‘truth’, anyway”
Well I am not sure what conception of truth do you buy into, but the lesswrongian theory of truth is fairly deflationist. Tarskii’s semantic theory of truth requires two different language one meta language which is open-ended, and other one being object language. So you could have different things which are true between two pair of languages, so things can be “true” in different ways in that sense.

lesswronguser123 12 Jun 2025 3:05 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Religion for Rationalists
Saying one practices Hinduism is more like saying EA is part of western enlightenment tradition. It’s an entirely different cultural frame, which has many different philosophical worldviws from atheistic to theistic within it. Hindus even claim buddha as one of their own. The word hindu itself comes from river located in North West of India, so they clustered bunch of philosophical positions together which were reminiscent of that place.
Besides labelling one thing as religion and doing away with it is a lazy thing to do, there are various practices within it which may or may not be good or accurate which can be tested for.
I personally don’t buy into a lot of hindu rituals, astrology etc. Personally I treat their claims as either metaphorical or testable. I think a lot of ancient “hindu” philosophers would be in the same camp as me, I just think a lot of their disciples didn’t take their epistemology to their logical conclusion but got misguided by other cultural memes like absolutism,mysticism etc.

lesswronguser123 11 Jun 2025 17:42 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
I am vibing this, but I feel like the only guy keeping it alive at this point is unironically jordan peterson— the final postmodernist boss— who’s declining as other parts of political right ascend to power, yet he manages to go viral from time to time thanks to his idiosyncratic use of language . The other new atheist tubers have mostly receded into doing general political commentary or philosophy, maybe few of them are still doing full time anti-theism, but what do I know, I am not part of the generation which got to experience new atheism first hand.

lesswronguser123 11 Jun 2025 13:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: James Stephen Brown’s comment on: Emergence Spirals—what Yudkowsky gets wrong
But I still feel like you’re being a bit too charitable. I re-read the ‘it’s okay to use ‘emerge”’ parts several times, and as I understand it, he’s not meaning to refer to a higher-level abstraction, he’s using it in the general sense “whatever byproduct comes from this” in which case it would be just as meaningful to say “heat emerges from the body” which does not reflect any definition of emergence as a higher-level abstraction.
[,,,]
But it is not correct to say that acknowledging intelligence as emergent doesn’t help us predict anything. If emergence can be described as a pattern that happens across different realms then it can help to predict things, through the use of analogy.
I don’t think Eliezer uses emergence that way. He is using it the way, if a person is asked “why do hands have X muscular movement?” , one may reply “it’s an emergent phenomena” , that is the explanation which doesn’t predict anything he’s criticizing, unless a person clarifies what they mean by emergent phenomena.
A proper explanation could be: (Depending on what is meant by the word “Why”) ^[1]
1. Evolutionary: The reason why X muscular movement got selected for.
2. Biological/Shape/Adaptation; How it works or got implemented.
The common use of the word emergent is such that when a person is perplexed by the idea of free will, and finds a lack of contra-causal free will troubling to their preliminary intuitions , their encounter with the idea “free will is emergent” resolves the cognitive dissonance mistaking it for an explanation^[2] when it holds no predictive power, and doesn’t actually work to resolve the initial confusion alongside physics.
What examples do I have in back of my mind that I think he’s criticizing this particular usage?
Eg-1: He uses the example of “Intelligence is emergent”.
- In online spaces when asked, “Where is the ‘you’ in the brain if it’s all just soft flesh?” , people often say , “I am emergent” . Which doesn’t quite predict anything, like I learn nothing about when do I cease to be “I” , or why do I feel like “I” etc.
Eg-2: He uses the example of “Free will is emergent” , where he mentions the phrasing “one level emerges from the other”.
To dissolve the puzzle of free will, you have to simultaneously imagine two levels of organization while keeping them conceptually distinct. To get it on a gut level, you have to see the level transition—the way in which free will is how the human decision algorithm feels from inside. (Being told flatly “one level emerges from the other” just relates them by a magical transition rule, “emergence”.)
Eg-3; He uses “behavior of ant colony is emergent” in original post.
Eg-4; He also emphasizes that he’s fine with the term that chemistry “arises from” interaction between atoms as per QED. Since chemistry—or parts of it, can be predicted in terms of QED. ^[2]
Chemistry arises from interactions between atoms, according to the specific model of quantum electrodynamics.
- Which he clarifies is fairly equivalent to “Chemistry emerges from interaction between atoms as per QED”.
None of these examples seem to argue against “emergence as a pattern that happens across different realms” . That seems like a different thing altogether and can be assigned a different word.
This particular usage he is criticizing, and this is the trap majority of people including my past self & a lot of people I know in real life fall into. Which is why, I think the disagreement here is mostly semantic, as highlighted by TAG. This can also be categorized as the trap of strong emergentism, or intuitions behind it such that it satisfies the human interrogation without adding anything to understanding. Moreover, the sequence in question is named “Mysterious answers” where he goes over certain concepts which are in common zeitgeist used as an explanations even when they’re not.^[2]
From what I understand the way you’re using it, in emergent cycle to import over to other places Eliezer would agree with your use case. He uses this as an argument as to why maths is useful :-
The apples are behaving like numbers? What do you mean? I thought numbers were this ethereal mathematical model that got pinpointed by axioms, not by looking at the real world.
“Whenever a part of reality behaves in a way that conforms to the number-axioms—for example, if putting apples into a bowl obeys rules, like no apple spontaneously appearing or vanishing, which yields the high-level behavior of numbers—then all the mathematical theorems we proved valid in the universe of numbers can be imported back into reality. The conclusion isn’t absolutely certain, because it’s not absolutely certain that nobody will sneak in and steal an apple and change the physical bowl’s behavior so that it doesn’t match the axioms any more. But so long as the premises are true, the conclusions are true; the conclusion can’t fail unless a premise also failed. You get four apples in reality, because those apples behaving numerically isn’t something you assume, it’s something that’s physically true. When two clouds collide and form a bigger cloud, on the other hand, they aren’t behaving like integers, whether you assume they are or not.”
But if the awesome hidden power of mathematical reasoning is to be imported into parts of reality that behave like math, why not reason about apples in the first place instead of these ethereal ‘numbers’?
It seems like your emergent cycle is closer to this. He similarly to your emergent cycle for systems also asserts probability theory as laws underlying rational belief and similarly decision theory for rational actions of all agents:-
Probability theory is the set of laws underlying rational belief. The mathematics of probability applies equally to “figuring out where your bookcase is” and “estimating how many hairs were on Julius Caesars head,” even though our evidence for the claim “Julius Caesar was bald” is likely to be more complicated and indirect than our evidence for the claim “theres a bookcase in my room.” It’s all the same problem of how to process the evidence and observations to update one’s beliefs. Similarly, decision theory is the set of laws underlying rational action, and is equally applicable regardless of what one’s goals and available options are .
Decision theory works because it is sufficiently similar to the goal oriented systems in the universe. He also thinks intelligence is lawful, as in it’s orderly such as following decision theory. Which seems similar to your defense in the sense of multiple leveled maps.
To further flesh the point, he would agree with you on the eyes part :-
The notion of a “configuration space” is a way of translating object descriptions into object positions. It may seem like blue is “closer” to blue-green than to red, but how much closer? It’s hard to answer that question by just staring at the colors. But it helps to know that the (proportional) color coordinates in RGB are 0:0:5, 0:3:2 and 5:0:0. It would be even clearer if plotted on a 3D graph.
In the same way, you can see a robin as a robin—brown tail, red breast, standard robin shape, maximum flying speed when unladen, its species-typical DNA and individual alleles. Or you could see a robin as a single point in a configuration space whose dimensions described everything we knew, or could know, about the robin.
A robin is bigger than a virus, and smaller than an aircraft carrier—that might be the “volume” dimension. Likewise a robin weighs more than a hydrogen atom, and less than a galaxy; that might be the “mass” dimension. Different robins will have strong correlations between “volume” and “mass”, so the robin-points will be lined up in a fairly linear string, in those two dimensions—but the correlation won’t be exact, so we do need two separate dimensions.
[,,,]
We can even imagine a configuration space with one or more dimensions for every distinct characteristic of an object, so that the position of an object’s point in this space corresponds to all the information in the real object itself. Rather redundantly represented, too—dimensions would include the mass, the volume, and the density.
[,,,]
Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans: A robin is more similar to another robin, than either is similar to a pigeon, but robins and pigeons are all more similar to each other than either is to a penguin, etcetera.
Then the center of all birdness would be densely populated by many neighboring tight clusters, robins and sparrows and canaries and pigeons and many other species. Eagles and falcons and other large predatory birds would occupy a nearby cluster. Penguins would be in a more distant cluster, and likewise chickens and ostriches.
He probably would assign the intensional/word “eye” to an extensional similarity cluster but I think you and him might still disagree on nuances:
The atoms of a screwdriver don’t have tiny little XML tags inside describing their “objective” purpose. The designer had something in mind, yes, but that’s not the same as what happens in the real world. If you forgot that the designer is a separate entity from the designed thing, you might think, “The purpose of the screwdriver is to drive screws”—as though this were an explicit property of the screwdriver itself, rather than a property of the designer’s state of mind. You might be surprised that the screwdriver didn’t reconfigure itself to the flat-head screw, since, after all, the screwdriver’s purpose is to turn screws.
[,,,]
So the screwdriver’s cause, and its shape, and its consequence, and its various meanings, are all different things; and only one of these things is found within the screwdriver itself.
Where do taste buds come from? Not from an intelligent designer visualizing their consequences, but from a frozen history of ancestry: Adam liked sugar and ate an apple and reproduced, Barbara liked sugar and ate an apple and reproduced, Charlie liked sugar and ate an apple and reproduced, and 2763 generations later, the allele became fixed in the population. For convenience of thought, we sometimes compress this giant history and say: “Evolution did it.” But it’s not a quick, local event like a human designer visualizing a screwdriver. This is the objective cause of a taste bud.
What is the objective shape of a taste bud? Technically, it’s a molecular sensor connected to reinforcement circuitry. This adds another level of indirection, because the taste bud isn’t directly acquiring food. It’s influencing the organism’s mind, making the organism want to eat foods that are similar to the food just eaten.
What is the objective consequence of a taste bud? In a modern First World human, it plays out in multiple chains of causality: from the desire to eat more chocolate, to the plan to eat more chocolate, to eating chocolate, to getting fat, to getting fewer dates, to reproducing less successfully. This consequence is directly opposite the key regularity in the long chain of ancestral successes which caused the taste bud’s shape. But, since overeating has only recently become a problem, no significant evolution (compressed regularity of ancestry) has further influenced the taste bud’s shape.
What is the meaning of eating chocolate? That’s between you and your moral philosophy. Personally, I think chocolate tastes good, but I wish it were less harmful; acceptable solutions would include redesigning the chocolate or redesigning my biochemistry.
Which is to say he would disagree with the blanket categorization of “purpose”, which can be a problematic term and leaves space for misunderstanding regarding normativity and would likely advocate for more clearer thinking and wordings along the lines highlighted above.
Although I think he would be fine with concepts like ‘agency’ in decision theories to degree to which axioms happen to coincide with that of reality—just like apples behaving like numbers listed above— since it can be bounded to physical systems amongst other considerations such as well biological agent sustaining itself etc.
Which brings us to his second potential source of disagreement, regarding analogies :^[3]
A medieval alchemist puts lemon glazing onto a lump of lead. The lemon glazing is yellow, and gold is yellow. It seems like it ought to work… but the lead obstinately refuses to turn into gold. Reality just comes back and says, “So what? Things can be similar in some aspects without being similar in other aspects.”
[,,,]
The general form of failing-by-analogy runs something like this:
- You want property P.
- X has property P.
- You build Y, which has one or two surface similarities S to X.
- You argue that Y resembles X and should also P.
- Yet there is no reasoning which you can do on Y as a thing-in-itself to show that it will have property P, regardless of whether or not X had ever existed.
[,,,]
If two processes have forms that are nearly identical, including internal structure that is similar to as many decimal places as you care to reason about, then you may be able to almost-prove results from one to the other. But if there is even one difference in the internal structure, then any number of other similarities may be rendered void. Two deterministic computations with identical data and identical rules will yield identical outputs. But if a single input bit is flipped from zero to one, the outputs are no longer required to have anything in common. The strength of analogical reasoning can be destroyed by a single perturbation.
Yes, sometimes analogy works. But the more complex and dissimilar the objects are, the less likely it is to work. The narrower the conditions required for success, the less likely it is to work. The more complex the machinery doing the job, the less likely it is to work. The more shallow your understanding of the object of the analogy, the more you are looking at its surface characteristics rather than its deep mechanisms, the less likely analogy is to work.
[,,,]
Admittedly, analogy often works in mathematics—much better than it does in science, in fact. In mathematics you can go back and prove the idea which analogy originally suggested. In mathematics, you get quick feedback about which analogies worked and which analogies didn’t, and soon you pick up the pattern. And in mathematics you can always see the entire insides of things; you are not stuck examining the surface of an opaque mystery. Mathematical proposition A may be analogous to mathematical proposition B, which suggests the method; but afterward you can go back and prove A in its own right, regardless of whether or not B is true. In some cases you may need proposition B as a lemma, but certainly not all cases.
Which is to say: despite the misleading surface similarity, the “analogies” which mathematicians use are not analogous to the “analogies” of alchemists, and you cannot reason from the success of one to the success of the other.
Which basically goes over the necessity for having a reasoning as to why, someone suspects this analogy to work aside from being merely similar in certain aspects, because most of them don’t. Take the example of more sophisticated analogy of biological evolution extended to corporations:
Do corporations evolve? They certainly compete. They occasionally spin off children. Their resources are limited. They sometimes die.
But how much does the child of a corporation resemble its parents? Much of the personality of a corporation derives from key officers, and CEOs cannot divide themselves by fission. Price’s Equation only operates to the extent that characteristics are heritable across generations. If great-great-grandchildren don’t much resemble their great-great-grandparents, you won’t get more than four generations’ worth of cumulative selection pressure—anything that happened more than four generations ago will blur itself out. Yes, the personality of a corporation can influence its spinoff—but that’s nothing like the heritability of DNA, which is digital rather than analog, and can transmit itself with 10^-8 errors per base per generation.
With DNA you have heritability lasting for millions of generations. That’s how complex adaptations can arise by pure evolution—the digital DNA lasts long enough for a gene conveying 3% advantage to spread itself over 768 generations, and then another gene dependent on it can arise. Even if corporations replicated with digital fidelity, they would currently be at most ten generations into the RNA World.
Now, corporations are certainly selected, in the sense that incompetent corporations go bust. This should logically make you more likely to observe corporations with features contributing to competence. And in the same sense, any star that goes nova shortly after it forms, is less likely to be visible when you look up at the night sky. But if an accident of stellar dynamics makes one star burn longer than another star, that doesn’t make it more likely that future stars will also burn longer—the feature will not be copied onto other stars. We should not expect future astrophysicists to discover complex internal features of stars which seem designed to help them burn longer. That kind of mechanical adaptation requires much larger cumulative selection pressures than a once-off winnowing.
Think of the principle introduced in Einstein’s Arrogance—that the vast majority of the evidence required to think of General Relativity had to go into raising that one particular equation to the level of Einstein’s personal attention; the amount of evidence required to raise it from a deliberately considered possibility to 99.9% certainty was trivial by comparison. In the same sense, complex features of corporations which require hundreds of bits to specify, are produced primarily by human intelligence, not a handful of generations of low-fidelity evolution. In biology, the mutations are purely random and evolution supplies thousands of bits of cumulative selection pressure. In corporations, humans offer up thousand-bit intelligently designed complex “mutations”, and then the further selection pressure of “Did it go bankrupt or not?” accounts for a handful of additional bits in explaining what you see.
Since this analogy can mislead one to think corporations can evolve on their own and someone may conclude that hence anyone can become CEO of a corporation, but it’s the case that majority of changes are due to human intelligence so that would be an example of failure by analogy.^[4]
As per my amateur analysis you seem to have taken caution in your emergent cycle analogy, as to only apply it when entropy has inverse relationship, which is still quite a broad application and but on surface seems to isolate the generalization to certain systems which have sufficiently enough internal structure for the analogy to carry over under those constraints.
1. ^
  A thing to note here is Eliezer is a predictivist, both of these type of explanation would narrow down experience to hand’s muscle moving a certain way.
2. ^
  For Eliezer— a predictivist—an explanation narrows down anticipated experience.
3. ^
  In this post he criticized neural networks, and as we know that particular prediction of his aged poorly, but those are for different reasons, but the general point regarding analogy still stands.
4. ^
  Although I can see someone making the case of memetic evolution.

lesswronguser123 10 Jun 2025 18:13 UTC
1 point
−6
in reply to: Kabir Kumar’s comment on: Ghiblification for Privacy
I don’t like the practice of using people’s work without giving them any credit. Especially when used to make money.
Do you dislike open source software? For most of them the credit is of the license or name. Quite similar to ghibli, where a person drops the name of the artstyle.
And even moreso when it makes the people who made the original work much less likely to be able to make money.
In open source stuff, backend libraries are less likely to get paid compared to frontend products, creating a product can make the situation worse for the OG person. It can be seen predatory, but that’s the intent of open source collaboration fwiw.

lesswronguser123 10 Jun 2025 16:08 UTC
1 point
0
on: Emergence Spirals—what Yudkowsky gets wrong
I think eliezer would agree with what you’re saying here, in the same post mentioned;
The phrase “emerges from” is acceptable, just like “arises from” or “is caused by” are acceptable, if the phrase precedes some specific model to be judged on its own merits.
However, this is not the way “emergence” is commonly used. “Emergence” is commonly used as an explanation in its own right.
So he would agree that as long as you’re not using the word “emergence” as an explanation—since the sequence is on words which are used in common language which don’t predict anything by themselves— and are actually acknowledging the various mechanisms beneath, which you’re understanding using higher level non fundamental abstractions.
To reiterate In a reductionism post he mentions
(I.e: There’s no way you can model a 747 quark-by-quark, so you’ve got to use a multi-level map with explicit cognitive representations of wings, airflow, and so on. This doesn’t mean there’s a multi-level territory. The true laws of physics, to the best of our knowledge, are only over elementary particle fields.)
I think that when physicists say “There are no fundamental rainbows,” the anti-reductionists hear, “There are no rainbows.”
If you don’t distinguish between the multi-level map and the mono-level territory, then when someone tries to explain to you that the rainbow is not a fundamental thing in physics, acceptance of this will feel like erasing rainbows from your multi-level map, which feels like erasing rainbows from the world.
So it’s quite clear that he’s actually fine with higher level abstractions like you’re using here, as long as they predict things. The phrase “intelligence is emergent” as what intelligence is doesn’t predict anything and is a blank phrase, this is what he was opposed to.
I wished he was a lot more clear with these things back then, it took me quite a bit of time to understand his position (it’s fairly neat imo)

lesswronguser123 9 Jun 2025 15:14 UTC
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in reply to: azergante’s comment on: The Magnitude of His Own Folly
I still find it funny you can see this post here, which gives examples regarding that urge to dunk on people.
The oldest dunk I can think of right now comes from the Spartans, who were famous for their witty one-liners. Indeed, the “Laconic phrase,” defined by Wikipedia as “a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder,^[2]” was literally named after Laconia, the region of Greece that included the city of Sparta. Wikipedia’s account of the classic laconic phrase goes as follows:
> A prominent example of a laconism involving Philip II of Macedon was reported by the historian Plutarch. After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, Philip turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe. The reply was “Neither.”
> Losing patience, he sent the message:
> “If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.”
> The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:
> “If.”
> Philip proceeded to invade Laconia, devastate much of it, and eject the Spartans from various parts.
See what I mean? This anecdote has everything we associate with “dunking”, even the part where the “dunker” gets their teeth kicked in despite trying to sound cool.

lesswronguser123 9 Jun 2025 3:12 UTC
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in reply to: Orpheus16’s comment on: Akash’s Shortform
The comment sections makes me think that half of the people don’t understand the ai 2027 scenario or the video glosses over quite a lot of background knowledge, Eg; In replies section of the pinned comment we have people who didn’t understand that openbrain was a placeholder.
There are a lot of people who were just not the target audience of the video and were vibing off of social reality, but I guess that’s normal for — still fringe AI safety movement.

lesswronguser123 7 Jun 2025 7:45 UTC
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in reply to: Nina Panickssery’s comment on: Nina Panickssery’s Shortform
Sure, you can claim that embryos have moral value for some magical God-given reason. But my intuition is that in their hearts, the embryo-valuers are using some notion of potential full human life to ground their assessment. In which case again we run into the arbitrariness of the fertilization cutoff point.
Some people believe embryos have souls which may impact their moral judgement. Soul can be considered as “full human life” in moral terms. I think attributing this to purely potential human life may not be accurate, since the intuitions for essentialist notions of continuity of selfhood can be often fairly strong among certain people.

lesswronguser123 3 Jun 2025 7:55 UTC
3 points
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on: In defense of memes (and thought-terminating clichés)
I would like to draw a distinction between meme as dunking on person vs idea, I love diogenes’s criticism of plato’s definition of human, it’s to the point, similarly for alexander.
I am on the other hand not that big fan of the dunk on bentham because I don’t find those kind of dunks funny much rather the insider joke is about a stereotype, which may not even be accurate. Like it’s just laughing upon a picture of a random dude but now I do understand the role as you have highlighted since the person doing the dunk just didn’t want to engage, so it acts a semantic stopsign even though bad intentioned one.
I meanwhile find Politicalcompassmemes enjoyable since they’re archetypical representation of a ideology and quite funny when the convergence happens in real life, because the strawman versions often exist in politics. They broadly cover the various political clusters, and ideologies which are in zietgeist, albeit a bit oversimplified yet informative.

lesswronguser123 31 May 2025 13:29 UTC
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in reply to: azergante’s comment on: Do you even have a system prompt? (PSA / repo)
It probably does, given iirc how praising it gives better responses.