Linch

Karma: 4,150

Linch 18 Dec 2025 11:02 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tricular’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
Have you heard the argument before that single votes can’t ever matter because there’d be a recount anyway?

Linch 18 Dec 2025 7:23 UTC
2 points
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on: Introducing Open Asteroid Impact
I basically agree with Thomas’ assessment. I think the post is likely the funniest thing I’ve ever done’ the jokes are cerebral, sharp, and meaningfully facilitated the local conversation. Many people told me that the humor helped clarify or exposed certain arguments in a useful way.
Other than Eliezer posts, I think this might well be the best April Fools’ project in terms of being on the forefront of humor + AI Safety pedagogical value.
Downsides include that it didn’t get significant media or public attention, and the humor was the central point rather than a vehicle for making novel arguments. But my not-very-confident self-assessment is that the post + website is probably still worthy of being among the ~50 best LessWrong posts of 2024.

Linch 18 Dec 2025 5:44 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Drake Morrison’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
I’ll think about it! I don’t personally like writing blogposts of well-known concepts unless I have a novel angle or a clear model for why the existing material is inadequate, but maybe!
Other people reading this who have a novel angle are of course free to take these projects on, of course.

Linch 18 Dec 2025 3:30 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
Extension: Which obvious-in-retrospect-and-to-other-people ideas am I currently missing? Are there conceptual technologies that you’ve noticed that I (Linch) in my conversations or internet comments appear to have missed?

Linch 18 Dec 2025 3:27 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
Yep! Or donations below a certain amount won’t do anything since planning a shipment of antimalarial nets, or hiring a new AI Safety researcher, is lumpy.

Linch 18 Dec 2025 2:00 UTC
18 points
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in reply to: Guive’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
Sometimes people say that a single vote can’t ever affect the outcome of an election, because “there will be recounts.” I think stuff like that (and near variants) aren’t really things people can say if they fully understand IVT on an intuitive level.

Linch 17 Dec 2025 21:11 UTC
28 points
1
on: Linch’s Shortform
There are a number of implicit concepts I have in my head that seem so obvious that I don’t even bother verbalizing them. At least, until it’s brought to my attention other people don’t share these concepts.
It didn’t feel like a big revelation at the time I learned the concept, just a formalization of something that’s extremely obvious. And yet other people don’t have those intuitions, so perhaps this is pretty non-obvious in reality.
Here’s a short, non-exhaustive list:
- Intermediate Value Theorem
- Net Present Value
- Differentiable functions are locally linear
- Theory of mind
- Grice’s maxims
If you have not heard any of these ideas before, I highly recommend you look them up! Most *likely*, they will seem obvious to you. You might already know those concepts by a different name, or they’re already integrated enough into your worldview without a definitive name.
However, many people appear to lack some of these concepts, and it’s possible you’re one of them.
As a test: for every idea in the above list, can you think of a nontrivial real example of a dispute where one or both parties in an intellectual disagreement likely failed to model this concept? If not, you might be missing something about each idea!

Linch 12 Dec 2025 3:14 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice
oops! For some reason I brain-farted and thought it was a different constant I wasn’t familiar with.

Linch 11 Dec 2025 20:54 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice
I wonder if he’d just memorised the first couple dozen digits of something like Chaitin’s constant or e or pi like you or whatever and just started somewhere in the middle of his memorised substri
Yeah that’s what I suggested people try if they want a near-perfect external source of randomness.

Linch 11 Dec 2025 20:45 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice
Yeah I suspect a distilled/pruned neural-net could do really well against the existing strategies, I dunno what the latest state of the field is. I also don’t have a very good sense of recent progress in computer/ML optimizations so maybe there are other tricks I’m discounting.

Linch 11 Dec 2025 20:44 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Dalcy’s comment on: Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice
When I remember to, I try to keep my fist in a “neutral” state (thumb not touching fist so it’s easy to either close or open) until after my hand starts moving, but I do wonder how common hand-shape prediction is, and if so, how often high-level players try to “bait.”
I don’t take the game very seriously outside of the bot exercises and I’ve never played in irl tournaments.

Linch 11 Dec 2025 20:39 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: DusanDNesic’s comment on: How Stealth Works
Thanks for being nice about the whole thing! Would totally understand if you’re really angry given the context etc.

Linch 11 Dec 2025 1:57 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
Interesting, are there examples of people feeling positive-tribal-emotions to “go insane” in the abstract?
I suspect in practice it looks more like social pressure to be sleep-deprived, social pressure to repeat what the Glorious Leader says without question, pressure to ignore widely held taboos, pressure to sacrifice the self, etc.

Linch 10 Dec 2025 22:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice
Yeah I thought about including randomness exploits for bots too (instead of just noting it for humans) but decided it’d be distracting.
Hopefully if I ever run that contest I’ll be able to catch problems like randomness exploits and forced crashes!

Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice

Linch10 Dec 2025 21:37 UTC

55 points

11 comments9 min readLW link

(inchpin.substack.com)

Linch 10 Dec 2025 21:32 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: DusanDNesic’s comment on: How Stealth Works
Thanks for the feedback!
Hmm my general take on this is that war is bad! It is frequently irrational, and always destructive I’d like there to be less war. Conditional upon there being war however, I think the sadness of weapons causing people to die is sort of “priced in”^[1], whereas the death of the bats was idiosyncratic and particular to stealth technology specifically.
I do get what you’re saying, and I apologize if my post was insensitive. For what it’s worth, my impression is that other things I’ve seen covering weapons are substantially more cold-minded, and my full review of Skunk Works will investigate the ethical issues of working in the US military-industrial complex more thoroughly.
1. ^
  Though I suppose you could make the argument that stealth is more offense dominant than defense dominant, unlike say trench-lines.

Linch 10 Dec 2025 21:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts
Sure but at some point your probability of murder goes below that of suicide, no? It seems like your argument would imply that you can never think suicide is more likely than murder based on investigating all the plausible ways it could be murder, unless you have an actually exhaustive search or an airtight logical argument.
Similarly, re: the Fatima sun case, I think what Ethan did was that he investigated all the ways he thought it could be natural, until his probability of natural explanation was lower than his probability that it was a miracle. At face value, this seems like a perfectly reasonable method of investigation to me! To the extent there was a reasoning mistake, I think of it as very different from how you’re conceiving it. I think he had a) too high a prior for supernatural explanations, b) did not sufficiently adjust for the selection bias in choosing the most plausible miracle (Where the correct update is that if the most plausible miracle is <X persuasive, you should update downwards on God), and c) was overly credulous in one direction than the other.
In the Rethink and superforecaster cases, I don’t think what you said is a particularly plausible account of what they did to begin with.

Linch 10 Dec 2025 21:10 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Middlemen Are Eating the World (And That’s Good, Actually)
David Graeber is not saying that all middlemen are bad. His thesis is that middleman jobs where the person who has the job believes the job is useless are bad.
I think alienation is real but exaggerated, and we also shouldn’t take people’s alienation as substantial evidence their work is actually meaningless.

Linch 9 Dec 2025 7:13 UTC
5 points
−1
on: The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts
The argument here feels somewhat slippery, and I think I’m overall not convinced by this.
If you’re trying to investigate a crime, it seems like the best process is to go through all the most likely leads until your marginal opportunity cost of further investigation exceeds the marginal benefit. Do you a) disagree that this is an appropriate way to investigate a crime? or do you b) disagree that this process is analagous to what you call “Exhaustive Free Association?”
Now of course a genuinely exhaustive search would be better. But you can’t usually realistically search every person as a potential suspect, nor rule people out in broad categories (Here’s the case for a male criminal, here’s the case for a female criminal). So in practice I don’t think you can do better than a non-exhaustive search.
Additionally, the specific examples you choose both seem not very strong, and tilted by your object-level commitments.

Linch 9 Dec 2025 7:04 UTC
2 points
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on: The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts
But honestly? The best defence is to make your argument better. If you’re relying on something which looks like an exhaustive free association, your first worry should be that it actually is! Invert the argument to a set of assumptions. Go up a level to a general principle. Go down a level to specific cases.
This paragraph in particular sounds very AI-assisted to me.

Linch

Rock Paper Scis­sors is Not Solved, In Practice

Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice