Lorenzo(Lorenzo)

Karma: 133

Lorenzo 26 Apr 2024 17:46 UTC
1 point
0
on: This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Only vaguely related, but I think you might also enjoy Leonard Stecyk from David Foster Wallace.
(text copied from here)
It is this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier and shepherds the really small ones through the crosswalk outside school.
This is after finishing the meals-on-wheels breakfast tour of the hospice downtown, whose administrator lunges to bolt her office door when she hears his cart’s wheels in the hall. He has paid out-of-pocket for the steel whistle and the white gloves held palm-out at cars while children who did not dress themselves cross behind him, some trying to run despite WALK DON’T RUN, the happy faced sandwich board he also made himself.
The autos whose drivers he knows he waves at and gives an extra-big smile and tosses some words of good cheer as the crosswalk clears and the cars peel out and move through, some joshing around a little by swerving to miss him only by inches as he laughs and dances aside and makes faces of pretended terror at the flank and rear bumper. The one time that station wagon didn’t miss him really was an accident and he sent the lady several notes to make absolutely sure she knew he understood that and asked a whole lot of people he hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to make friends with to sign his cast and decorated the crutches very carefully with bits of colored ribbon and tinsel and adhesive sparkles and even before the six weeks the doctor sternly prescribed, he’d given them away to the children’s wing to brighten up some other less lucky and happy kid’s convalescence and by the end of the whole thing he’d been inspired to write a very long theme to enter into the annual Social Studies theme competition about how a positive attitude can make even an accidental injury into an occasion for new friends and bright new opportunities for reaching out to others.
And while the theme didn’t even get honorable mention he honestly didn’t care because he felt like writing the theme had been its own reward and he’d gotten a lot out of the whole nine-draft process and was honestly happy for the kids whose themes did win awards and told them he was 100-plus percent sure they deserved it and that if they wanted to preserve their prize themes and maybe even make displayed items out of them for their parents, he’d be happy to type them up and laminate them and even fix any spelling errors he found if they’d like him to and at home his father puts his hand on Leonard’s shoulder and says he’s really proud that his son’s such a good sport and offers to take him to Dairy Queen as a kind of reward and Leonard tells his father he’s grateful and that the gesture means a lot to him but that in all honesty he’d like it even more if they took the money his father would have spent on the ice-cream and instead donated it either to Easter Seals or, better yet, to UNICEF to go toward the needs of famine-ravaged Biafran kids who he knew for a fact had probably never even heard of ice cream and says that he bets it’ll end up giving both of them a better feeling even then the DQ would and as the father slips the coins in the coin-slot at the special bright-orange UNICEF volunteer cardboard pumpkin bank, Leonard takes a moment to express concern about the father’s facial tick again and to gently rib him about his reluctance to go in and have the family’s MD look at it, noting again that according to the chart on the back of his bedroom door the father is four months overdue for his annual physical and that it’s almost eight months past the date of his recommended tetanus and T.B. boosters.
He serves as hall monitor for period’s one and two but gives far more official warnings than actual citations. He’s there to serve he feels, not run people down. Usually with the official warnings he dispenses a smile and tells them you’re young exactly once so enjoy it and to go get-out here and make this day count why don’t they. Heroes UNICEF and Easter Seals and starts a recycling program in three straight grades. He is healthy and scrubbed and always groomed just well enough to project basic courtesy and respect for the community of which he is a part and he politely raises his hand in class for every question, but only if he’s sure he knows not only the correct answer but the formulation of that answer that the teacher’s looking for that will help advance the discussion of the overall topic they’re covering that day, often staying after class to double-check with the teacher that his take on her general objectives is sound and to ask whether there was any way that his answers could have been better or more helpful.
The boy’s mom has a terrible accident while cleaning the oven and is rushed to the hospital and even though he’s beside himself with concern and says constant prayers former safety, he volunteers to stay home and field calls and relay information to an alphabetized list of concerned family friends and relatives and to make sure the mail and newspaper are brought in and to keep the home’s lights turned on and off in a random sequence at night as officer Chuck of the Michigan State police’s Crime Stoppers public school outreach program sensibly advises when grown-ups are suddenly called away from home and also to call the gas company’s emergency number, which he has memorized, to come check on what may well be a defective valve or circuit in the oven before anyone else in the family is exposed to risk of accidental harm and also, in secret, to work on massive display of bunting and penance and Welcome Homeland World’s Greatest Mom signs which he plans to use the garage’s extendible aluminum ladder—with a responsible neighborhood adult holding it and supervising—to very carefully affix to the front of the home with water-soluble glue so they’ll be there to greet the mom when she’s released from the I.C.U. with a totally clean bill of health which Leonard calls his father repeatedly at the I.C.U. payphone to assure the father that he has absolutely no doubt of (the totally clean bill of health), calling hourly, right on the dot, until there is some kind of mechanical problem with the payphone and when he dials it he just gets a high tone which he duly reports to the telephone company’s new automated 1618 Trouble Line.
He can do several kinds of calligraphy and has been to origami camp twice and can do extraordinary free-hand sketches of local flora with either hand and can whistle all six of Telemann’s Nouveaux Equators and can imitate any birdcall Autobahn could even ever have thought of, don’t even mention spelling bees.
He can make over twenty different kinds of admiral, cowboy, clerical and multi-ethnic hats out of ordinary newspaper and he volunteers to visit the school’s K-through-2nd classrooms teaching the little kids how, a proposal the Carl P. Robinson Elementary principal says he appreciates and has considered very carefully before turning down.
The principal loathes the mere sight of the boy but does not quite know why. He sees the boy in his sleep, at nightmares’ ragged edges; the pressed checked shirt and hair’s hard little part, the freckles and ready, generous smile; anything he can do. The principle fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into Leonard Steel’s bright-eyed little face and dragging the boy face down behind his Volkswagen Beetle over the rough new streets of suburban Grand Rapids.
The fantasies come out of nowhere and horrify the principal, who is a devout Mennonite.
Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred that makes the hater feel guilty and awful and to hate themselves for feeling this way and so makes they involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred. The whole thing is totally confusing and upsetting. People take a lot of Aspirin when he’s around. The boy’s only real friends among kids are the damaged, the handicapped, the slow, the clinically fat, the last-picked, the non-grata. He seeks them out. All 316 invitations to his eleventh birthday Blow-Out Bash—322 invitations if you count the ones made on audiotape for the blind—are off, sent printed on quality velum with matching high-rag envelopes addressed in ornate Philippian calligraphy he spent three weekends on and each invitation details in Roman Numerated outline-form the itinerary’s half-day at Six Flags, private Ph.D.-guided tour of the Blanford Nature Center and reserved banquette-area-with-free-play at Shakey’s Pizza & Indoor Arcade on Remembrance Drive, the whole day gratis and paid-for out of the paper and aluminum drives the boy got up at 4 a.m. all summer to organize and spearhead, the balance of the drive’s receipts going to the Red Cross and the parents of a Kentwood, MI third-grader with terminal spina bifida who dreams above all-else of seeing Landry and Greer and ‘Night Train’ Lane live from his motorized wheelchair and the invitations explicitly call the party this: A Blow-Out Bash in balloon-shaped font as the caption to an illustrated explosion of good cheer and good will and no-holds-barred, let-out-all-the-stops fun with the bold-faced proviso: Please, no presents required in each of each card’s four corners and the 316 invitations—sent via first-class mail to every student, instructor, substitute, aid, administrator, custodian and physical plant employee at C. P. Robinson Elementary—yield a total attendance of nine celebrants, not counting parents and L.P.N.s of the incapacitated, and yet an undauntedly fine time was had by all was the consensus on the Honest Appraisal and Suggestion cards circulated at party’s end. The massive remainders of chocolate cake, Neapolitan ice cream, pizza, chips, caramel corn, Hershey’s kisses, United Way and Officer Chuck pamphlets on organ tissue donation and the correct procedures to follow if approached by a stranger respectively, kosher pizza for the Orthodox, biodegradable napkins and dietetic soda in souvenir Survived Leonard Steel’s Eleventh Birthday Blow-Out Bash, 1964 plastic glasses with built-in crazy-straws the guests were to keep as mementos all donated to the Kent County Children’s Home via procedures and transport that the birthday-boy had initiated even while the big Twister free-for-all was underway, out of concerns about melted ice cream and staleness and flatness and the waste of a chance to help the less blessed and his father, driving the wood-paneled station wagon and steadying his cheek with one hand, avowed again that the boy beside him had a large, good heart and that he was proud and that if the boy’s mother ever regained consciousness as they so very much hoped, he knew she’d be just awful proud as well.

Lorenzo 1 Apr 2024 23:23 UTC
4 points
0
on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
There’s a typo that breaks “Half An Hour Before Dawn In San Francisco” (one of my favorites): https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/9045

(You can listen to it here if you miss it: https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/video/upload/v1712004590/San_Francisco_gujlc3.mp3 )

Lorenzo 27 Feb 2024 19:53 UTC
1 point
3
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Retirement Accounts and Short Timelines
Not saving so you can donate more—I think it’s confused, but I can’t really judge what’s important to you.

Why do you think it’s confused? If some others can benefit >100x more from the money compared to 60-year-old Lorenzo, and their interests are just as important, wouldn’t it be rational to reallocate money from him to them?

Lorenzo 6 Oct 2023 20:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Linking Alt Accounts
I think it’s reasonably common that people who post under an alt think that they’re keeping these identities pretty separate, and do not think someone could connect them with a few hours of playing with open source tools. And so it’s important to make it public knowledge that this approach is not very private, so people can take more thorough steps if better privacy is something they want.

I agree with this. I think sometimes people are pretty clueless. E.g. people post under their first name and use the same IP. (There is at least one very similar recent example, but I can’t link to it.)
I think that a PSA about accounts on LW/EAF/the internet often not being as anonymous as people think could be good, and should mention stylometry, internet archives, timezones, IP addresses, user agents, browser storage; and suggest using TOR, making a new account for every post/comment, scheduling messages at random times, running comments through LLMs, not using your name or leaking information in other ways, and considering using deliberate disinformation (e.g. pretending to be of the opposite gender, scheduling messages to appear to be in a different timezone, …)
Specifically on the “feel less safe”, if people feel safer than they actually are then they’re not in a position to make well-considered decisions around their safety.
I think this is a very good point.
I could have posted “here’s a thing I saw in this other community”, but my guess is people would take it less seriously, partly because they think it’s harder than it actually is.
I’m not sure about this. I think you could have written that there are very easy ways to deanonymize users, so people who really care about their anonymity should do the things I mentioned above?
I think maybe we’re thinking about the risks differently?
Possibly, I think I might be less optimistic that people can/will, in practice, start changing their posting habits. And probably I think it’s more likely that this post lowers the barrier for an adversarial actor to actively deanonymize people. It reminds me a bit of the tradeoffs you mentioned in your previous post on security culture.
I think it was a good call not to post reproducible code for this, for example, although it might have made it clearer how easy it is and strengthened the value of the demonstration.

I’m not planning to do more with this. I made my scraping code open source, since scraping is something LW and the EA Forum seem fine with, but my stylometry code is not even pushed to a private repo.
Thank you for this, and I do trust you. On some level, anonymous users already had to trust you before this project, since it’s clearly something anyone with some basic coding experience would be able to do if they wanted, but I think now they need to trust you a tiny bit more, since you now just need to press a button instead of spending a few minutes/hours actively working on it.
In any case, I don’t feel strongly about this, and I don’t think it’s important, but I still think that, compared to an informative post without a demonstration, this post increases the probability that an adversarial actor deanonymizes people slightly more than the probability that anonymous users are protected from similar attacks. (Which often are even less sophisticated)

Lorenzo 6 Oct 2023 18:27 UTC
6 points
−4
on: Linking Alt Accounts
Personally, I’m a bit unsure about the ethics of this. I understand that you’re not planning to publicly deanonymize the accounts, and I assume you don’t plan to do so privately either.
But I can imagine having more barriers for people to post things “anonymously” (or having them feel less safe when trying to do so) to heavily discourage some of the potentially most useful cases of anonymous accounts.^[1] I also expect, as you mention, that some who posted anonymously in the past would not appreciate being privately de-anonymized by someone.
It seems meant to be a demonstration, but I don’t see why people wouldn’t expect this to work on LW/EAF, given that it worked on HN? I also think that people might be worried about you in particular deanonymizing them, given how central you are in the EA community and how some people seem to be really worried about their reputation/potential repercussions for what they post.
1. ^
  Interestingly, I was just reading this comment from a user updating on the value of anonymous accounts.

Lorenzo 23 Sep 2023 19:52 UTC
3 points
0
on: Hand-writing MathML
Though I could see including a LaTeX-to-MathML or a MathML-verbosifier step at build time.
This should be something GPT excels at: https://chat.openai.com/share/7e19d5e1-1a17-484c-a2ea-e0d7d2cfd56b If your editor supports gpt plugins

Lorenzo 19 Sep 2023 7:29 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: duck_master’s comment on: Show LW: Get a phone call if prediction markets predict nuclear war
No I’m Lorenzo!

Lorenzo 18 Sep 2023 18:52 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: duck_master’s comment on: Show LW: Get a phone call if prediction markets predict nuclear war
I’ve placed some limit orders on both. It’s cheaper than subsidies and should work the same way (if there is no nuclear war)

Lorenzo 16 Apr 2023 10:15 UTC
4 points
0
on: SmartyHeaderCode: anomalous tokens for GPT3.5 and GPT-4
Does LLaMA have any weird/unspeakable tokens? I’ve played around with it a bit and I haven’t found any (I played with it for a very short time though).
Here are the LLaMA tokens, if anyone’s curious. Sadly I couldn’t find anything as interesting as ” SolidGoldMagikarp”

Lorenzo 16 Mar 2023 0:28 UTC
2 points
0
on: Write a Book?
A lot of this depends on how I approach it: is this something I should work on after the kids go to bed, when I typically write blog posts? Or should I consider trying to go part-time at work, take leave, or quit? I haven’t yet talked to people at work about this, but I would lean towards taking leave or going part time: if this is worth doing it’s probably worth focusing on. That I think what I’m currently doing is valuable, though, means that there’s a higher bar than just “does this seem like a good book to exist.”
I wonder if it would make sense to write it as a series of blog posts (like the sequences, HPMOR, and “Wait But Why Year One: We finally figured out how to put a blog onto an e-reader”), at least for the first few chapters.
It seems it could provide the usual advantages of agile development, and get you some quick (self-)feedback in a lower-stakes environment (even though as you mention this has many downsides).
As someone who’s trying a bit of community building, I would love more books, and the topics you are suggesting are super interesting in terms of helping many people do more good.

Lorenzo 15 Mar 2023 13:48 UTC
7 points
1
on: Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices
Thank you for sharing this, I was wondering about your perspective on these topics.
I am really curious about the intended counterfactual of this move. My understanding is that the organizations that were using the office raised funds for a new office in a few weeks (from the same funding pool that funds Lightcone), so their work will continue in a similar way.
Is the main goal to have Lightcone focus more on the Rose Garden Inn? What are your plans there, do you have projects in mind for “slowing down AI progress, pivotal acts, intelligence enhancement, etc.”? Anything people can help with?

Lorenzo 21 Feb 2023 9:26 UTC
7 points
2
on: Bankless Podcast: 159 - We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky
https://youtu.be/gA1sNLL6yg4?t=5006 Interesting that it seems like he’s leaving MIRI

Lorenzo 12 Feb 2023 13:22 UTC
6 points
0
on: Top YouTube channel Veritasium releases video on Sleeping Beauty Problem
See https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/sleeping-beauty-paradox for LessWrong posts on this problem from the past 14 years

Lorenzo 21 Jan 2023 15:31 UTC
5 points
0
on: Small Go Boards
5x5 is way too tiny, do you play with a komi of 24 or do you use it mostly for teaching new players?

Edit: https://www.jefftk.com/p/simple-5x5-go it seems both, nevermind

Lorenzo 11 Jan 2023 10:22 UTC
15 points
5
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: We don’t trade with ants
Someone on Twitter mentioned slave owners similarly “not just trading” with slaves who could talk. I think it’s a better analogy than factory farmed animals.

Lorenzo 11 Jan 2023 8:32 UTC
13 points
4
in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: We don’t trade with ants
Does what we do to factory farmed animals count as “trading” feed and shelter in exchange of meat, eggs and diary?

Lorenzo 24 Dec 2022 8:41 UTC
18 points
10
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Let’s think about slowing down AI
I loved the link to the “Resisted Technological Temptations Project”, for a bunch of examples of resisted/slowed technologies that are not “eating sand”, and have an enormous upside: https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=responses_to_ai:technological_inevitability:incentivized_technologies_not_pursued:start
- GMOs, in some countries
- Nuclear power, in some countries
- Genetic engineering of humans
- Geoengineering, many actors
- Chlorofluorocarbons, many actors, 1985-present
- Human challenge trials
- Dietary restrictions, in most (all?) human cultures [restrict much more than sand, often quite good stuff!]
I would tentatively add:
- organ donor markets (at least for kidneys)
- drug development in general (see all of Scott’s posts on the FDA slowing things down, I would love to see an AIA slowing things down)

Lorenzo 18 Dec 2022 10:41 UTC
7 points
8
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Consider working more hours and taking more stimulants
But weightlifting and working longer hours would still help in both explore and exploit, right?

Why do you get the impression that Adderall and similar don’t help with exploring for 50 hours a week? e.g. Erdos explored quite a lot

Lorenzo 2 Nov 2022 8:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Mildly Against Donor Lotteries
which I thought was a total waste and if that was what they were going to do they should have donated to LTFF in the first place
I don’t understand what was wasted. Do you estimate the costs of running the lottery to be significant?
I don’t think there are any extra financial transactions, if you would donate from the same platform in both the lottery and non-lottery cases. (In both cases you donate to EA funds / GWWC, and they then donate it to the org, so 2 transactions)

Lorenzo 2 Nov 2022 0:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Mildly Against Donor Lotteries
In theory, yes, but I don’t think it has ever happened in practice.
It has happened that you never find out P because the winner doesn’t reveal their recommendations, though