localdeity

Karma: 2,911

localdeity 5 Aug 2026 10:37 UTC
5 points
0
on: What if people value their work mattering?
Try flipping the status quo. If AIs were already solving all the problems in your particular field, would you advocate for banning them from the field so that people would need you to solve those problems for them (presumably more expensively, presumably making some problems’ solutions too expensive to be solved at all) and so that you would feel like your work mattered? How does the idea of such advocacy strike you?

localdeity 4 Jul 2026 5:14 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: cubefox’s Shortform
The first and second man both believe P —> Q. I think the idea is that the first man started out believing P, and the second started out believing not-Q, and therefore the new piece of information “P —> Q” is accepted by both but used to make different (and opposing) deductions. The third man is a heretic who believes P does not imply Q, and has been cast out.
ETA: A common sort of example: First man believes that Bob is a good mathematician. Second man believes that statement X, in the realm of math, is false. Now Bob proclaims that X is true. Both men believe that if Bob were a good mathematician, then he would not make a mistake about whether X is true. Therefore, the first man takes “Bob says X is true” and deduces that X must be true, while the second man takes “Bob says X is true” and deduces that Bob is not a good mathematician.

localdeity 3 Jul 2026 15:00 UTC
9 points
2
on: Lydia Laurenson: “The Inside Story of Leverage Research”
I also note that “debugging” was mentioned only once, briefly. It seemed fairly important from Zoe’s piece: that at least some people felt significant pressure to engage repeatedly in a practice whose uncharitable description might be “High-ranking member tells low-ranking member, ‘Why do you not agree with me? Let’s spend hours digging into what is wrong with you that you would think that, until you decide you agree with me after all.’”

localdeity 29 May 2026 15:05 UTC
55 points
41
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Some Dating Stories
Wrong argument. If people started posting videos of cats on LessWrong, they would not be “false”, but I’d downvote them just the same. Being false is not the only reason to keep them off LessWrong.
(I did find this post interesting and upvoted it.)

localdeity 12 May 2026 20:06 UTC
18 points
0
on: The Owned Ones
My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack’s muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Essays on Mind and Matter”

localdeity 9 May 2026 1:34 UTC
4 points
2
on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
But why are they so incredibly over-the-top evil about it?
Not knowing any details, one possibility that comes to mind:
“How can she get away with it?” Lavender said to Matilda. “Surely the children go home and tell their mothers and fathers. I know my father would raise a terrific stink if I told him the Headmistress had grabbed me by the hair and slung me over the playground fence.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Matilda said, “and I’ll tell you why. He simply wouldn’t believe you.”
“Of course he would.”
“He wouldn’t,” Matilda said. “And the reason is obvious. Your story would sound too ridiculous to be believed. And that is the Trunchbull’s great secret.”
“What is?” Lavender asked.
Matilda said, “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable. No parent is going to believe this pigtail story, not in a million years. Mine wouldn’t. They’d call me a liar.”
My memory suggests that Scientologists have done this… I haven’t found any specific claim that they did outlandishly evil things because they would be less believable, but here are some outlandishly evil things done and planned for the purpose of silencing a critic.

localdeity 6 May 2026 19:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Open Thread Winter 2025/26
Inspiration? “YouTube Comment Reconstruction #1 - ‘One Direction: What Makes You Beautiful’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxrWuE5qC5c

localdeity 21 Mar 2026 20:53 UTC
84 points
33
on: China Derangement Syndrome
The epistemics at work here...
China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history
The “non-bordering” part is doing an enormous amount of work here. Choosing only to attack bordering countries is perfectly compatible with conquering much of the world. Arguably, if conquering the world were a country’s sole goal, then going after immediate neighbors one at a time is usually the best strategy.
nor have they ever tried to overthrow a foreign government by covert or manipulative means
Hong Kong? Taiwan? (In both cases, the “foreign” part is kind of in dispute, Hong Kong more so.) The fact that the post doesn’t mention Taiwan at all raises my eyebrow.
China is a very inward-looking country compared to other major powers. Only 0.1% of Chinese residents were born abroad, much fewer than the 15% in America and 14% in France
The fact that China lets in very few immigrants does not provide evidence against the hypothesis that they think they’re better than everyone else and that the world should belong to them. If they also had near-zero emigration and trade with the outside world, then the term “inward-looking” would fit. But this is about as far from “inward-looking” as you can get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion.
This is understating the case. The post does not mention disappearing dissidents, Uyghurs, or reeducation camps. I’ll also point at CCP attempts to police speech across the globe, such as by pressuring companies to not mention Taiwan as a nation separate from China.

localdeity 6 Mar 2026 5:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Sting’s comment on: Maybe there’s a pattern here?
There is one way for the producers to suck out almost all the surplus while maximizing profit: Price discrimination. Which is, of course, difficult to do. In a market for easily transferable physical goods, the best they tend to be able to do is to make multiple, somewhat different versions of a product and sell one at a premium; but this is fairly crude. (Apple products are an example.)

localdeity 26 Feb 2026 10:40 UTC
5 points
0
on: localdeity’s Shortform
“Psychotherapy cults: An iatrogenic perversion.” (1982)

Abstract: “Conducted clinical observations of 5 teachers of psychotherapy and 26 of their patients, who themselves were practicing psychotherapists, which showed that psychotherapy may be misused to produce cults. It is suggested that these psychotherapists produced cults by failing to maintain professional boundaries with their patients. They treated their friends, students, lovers, relatives, employees, and colleagues and brought them together to form cohesive, psychologically incestuous groups of which they were the leader. They did not consider their patients’ idealization of them to be a transference, to be understood as part of the treatment, but used it to encourage submission, obedience, and adoration, as in religious cults. Patients became “true believers,” as described by E. Hoffer (1951), with totalistic patterns of thought, increased dependence, and paranoia. Both therapist and patients became trapped in a closed system that encouraged mutual exploitation and corruption.”

It’s probably good for people to have some antibodies based on this.

localdeity 26 Nov 2025 1:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: utilistrutil’s comment on: Why Talk to Journalists
And then I would describe the motivation more as “career success” than “political benefit”. As in getting a big scoop or writing a successful story, more than pushing a particular agenda.
This gets subtle. I can think of several cases where journalists sat on what would have been delicious scandals that should be good for a career, for what look like political reasons. That said, if one looks closer, it’s plausible that, in each case, they reasoned (plausibly correctly) that it would not have actually been good for their career to publish it, because they would have faced backlash (for political/tribal reasons), and possibly their editors (if applicable) would have refused to allow it. I imagine there is partial but incomplete equivalence between this kind of “externally imposed political motivation” versus “internalized political motivation”, and it may be worth tracking the difference.
That’s for omitting stories. For lying… On priors, that difference of external vs internal political motivation would be important: the latter would encourage a journalist to come up with new lies and use them, while the former would mostly just make them go along with lies that the rest of their tribe is already telling. I do see plenty of “going along with lies” and not much innovative mendacity; I’ll note that the “lies” I refer to are usually “not technically false, but cherry-picked and/or misleadingly phrased, which a normal person will hear and predictably come away believing a statement that is false; and which a journalist who felt a strong duty to tell the truth as best they could would not say absent stronger external pressure”. (See Zvi on bounded distrust.)

localdeity 25 Nov 2025 7:33 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: utilistrutil’s comment on: Why Talk to Journalists
Even if it were ¹⁄₁₀, it might be the most important ¹⁄₁₀. Something like that is in fact plausible: if someone were optimally trying to mostly look factual while pushing a political agenda, they would probably sort statements by ratio of [political benefit of lying] / [expected cost of being caught lying], pick a threshold, and lie whenever that ratio exceeds the threshold; and political benefit, as evaluated by this hypothetical journalist-hack, likely correlates with importance to the reader.

localdeity 24 Nov 2025 4:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Easy vs Hard Emotional Vulnerability
I would put it this way: being vulnerable is a probably-unfortunate side-effect of a means to an end, not an end in itself, and it’s usually worth tracking just what end you have in mind. (And, yes, if you had a cost-free alternative means that achieved the same result but didn’t make you vulnerable, then that would be an improvement.) For example: “telling someone a secret that would enable them to shame you for it”, or “letting yourself rely on someone else to take care of a thing for you [such that if they fell through, it would hurt you]”, or “letting yourself care about someone else’s judgment of you”. There are situations where each of these is an unavoidable part of a plan with positive expected value, and situations where they create needless risks with no benefit.
Let’s see if I can capture the good parts of potential counter-stances:
1. It is imaginable that someone is so afraid of the negative consequences that they can’t really think rationally about them, in which case it’s plausibly good to deliberately create those situations in relatively safe circumstances and teach your brain that it’s actually not that bad (“exposure therapy”).
  1. Here, you want situations in which your brain thinks you’re much more vulnerable than your rational mind believes. Having picked a situation to expose yourself to, you’d like the actual chance of getting hurt to be as close to zero as possible.
2. You could deliberately make yourself vulnerable to person X’s actions for the purpose of evaluating person X: can you actually trust them to treat you well?
  1. In this case, the important thing is that person X believes you’re vulnerable and has the opportunity to do something about it. If you are secretly emotionally ironclad, or fully able to intercept/punish X’s misbehavior, or whatever, then so much the better. It could be good to find ways to make yourself look more vulnerable than you are, to enable this kind of testing. On the other hand, fooling them in this way could either be impossible or carry its own risks.
3. On “shame-able secrets”, it can be ideal to take a stance of, “Some people will shame me and others don’t care. I’m fine with cutting the first group out of my life and dealing solely with the second group. This is most efficiently accomplished by being completely open about this secret (and possibly deliberately broadcasting it).”
  1. In this case, after the initial phase of dealing with the haters you already know, you have made yourself invulnerable to any future social shaming for this secret. And since you’re erring on the side of filtering out any new haters before they become socially important to you, you’re essentially doing your best to keep yourself invulnerable.
  2. There are also lesser versions of this, where you “out” yourself to a particular group (such as writing about your fetishes to a niche online forum), or even a single person, to “get it over with” at a time and place of your choosing.
  3. There are also greater versions of this, where you do it with lots of “shame-able secrets”. There tend to be “economies of scale” here: there tends to be overlap from one secret to the next among the people you cut out, the steps you take to prepare yourself for the fallout, etc.
I think the conclusion stands: in all circumstances, actual vulnerability is something you’d like to minimize; sometimes it’s correct to do things that look like seeking out vulnerability, but on closer examination you’re always seeking out something else that happens to be correlated (or to look like it’s correlated) with actual vulnerability, which is something you tolerate if, and only if, there aren’t better choices.

localdeity 24 Nov 2025 2:28 UTC
4 points
0
on: 5 Physics Problems
Suggestion for how to pose the first problem: “Imagine that someone places a large number of mirrors around the Earth so that the same sunlight hits the earth as before, but now it lands evenly spread around the earth’s surface instead of hitting the daytime half of the earth.” And, probably: “The mirrors don’t reflect any of Earth’s radiation back onto the earth.”

localdeity 24 Nov 2025 1:46 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
Protip: replace the “x” in the URL with “xcancel”. Currently works well.

localdeity 5 Nov 2025 18:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Tomás B.’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform
It seems like the move for height would be to make men taller and women shorter? Or to increase the sexually dimorphic difference, and separately pick the optimal average.

localdeity 11 Oct 2025 20:16 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts
An argument in favor of it is, “free association” is inherently a fuzzy human thing, where the process is just thinking for a bit and seeing what you come up with and at some point declaring victory; there is nothing in it that could possibly guarantee correctness. Arguably, anyone who encounters the term should be conscious of this, and therefore notice that it’s an inappropriate step in a logical argument that purports to establish high certainty. Perhaps even notice that the term itself is paradoxical: in a logical context, “exhaustion” must be a rigorous process, but “free association” is inherently unrigorous.
I’m not sure if I buy the argument. The author of “The Design of Everyday Things” warns against being too clever with names and assuming that normal people will get the reference you intend. But… I dunno.

localdeity 10 Oct 2025 18:39 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Martin Sustrik’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
Asking Claude for examples
There are languages out there in which the epistemic status is a mandatory part of a sentence (“I’ve seen”, “so I have been told”, “I think”, etc.)
Is this true? Examples?
Yes, this is absolutely true! These grammatical features are called evidentials or evidentiality markers, and they’re mandatory in many languages around the world.
Examples:
Turkish is a classic example. It has two past tenses that encode evidentiality:
-di (direct/witnessed past): “I saw it happen”
-miş (indirect/inferred past): “I heard/inferred it happened”
So “geldi” means “he came” (and I witnessed it), while “gelmiş” means “he came” (but I didn’t see it—I heard about it or saw evidence of it).
Quechua (Andean languages) has several evidential markers:
-mi: direct knowledge
-si: reported/hearsay
-chá: conjecture
Tibetan has a rich evidential system distinguishing personal knowledge, inference, and hearsay.
Japanese has evidential markers too, though they’re sometimes considered less grammaticalized:
rashii: hearsay (“I heard that...”)
yōda: inference based on evidence
sōda: reported information
Bulgarian and other Balkan languages have “renarrative” mood marking information learned from others rather than directly experienced.
The key point is that in these languages, you often cannot make a statement about a past event without indicating your epistemic basis for the claim. Leaving it out would be grammatically incomplete, like forgetting to conjugate a verb in English. This forces speakers to constantly track and communicate their source of knowledge.
Interesting.

localdeity 9 Oct 2025 21:22 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
Hmmph. If he wants to push people to do more research so that they can make statements without any such qualifiers—or to shut up when they haven’t done enough research to have anything useful to say—then I may sympathize. If he wants them to make themselves sound more certain than they are, then I oppose.

localdeity 2 Oct 2025 20:53 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Richard_Kennaway’s Shortform
Rescue the girl and plan to explain to the wealthy people what happened. Possibly try to bring her with him, for purposes including lending credence to his story.

localdeity

Examples: