Mart_Korz

Karma: 259

Mart_Korz 29 Sep 2025 22:25 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Slimepriestess’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming

Deeply relatable, I can’t wait to be genemodded to be able to photosynthesize.

I sometimes wonder whether I should want to be a digital mind at some point as this would definitely simplify the problem of suffering created by how I eat. I prefer your solution :)

Mart_Korz 16 Jul 2025 22:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: E.T. Jaynes Probability Theory: The logic of Science I
I was also confused by this, and think that it does work out with the usual ‘given that’ (I’ll write $P (A)$ instead of $A$ as I get confused with the other notation):

The statement becomes

If $A$ is evidence of $B$ , then $P (A | B) > P (A)$

where I would have intuitively phrased this as $B$ being evidence of $A$ . But this turns out to be the same thing: If knowing $A$ makes $B$ more likely, finding out that $B$ is true also makes $A$ more likely.

If we already know Bayes theorem, this becomes clear: $P (A | B) = \frac{P (B | A)}{P (B)} P (A) > P (A) \Leftrightarrow \frac{P (A | B)}{P (A)} P (B) = P (B | A) > P (B)$

where the fractions being $> 1$ is equivalent to the two things being evidence for each other.

Mart_Korz 9 Jul 2025 21:15 UTC
2 points
0
on: An Opinionated Guide to Using Anki Correctly
I call these little ‘>’ referring to other cards ‘handles’ and I use them all the time to keep cards short.

Do you use any technological method for making it easy to look up these handles? I am a long-time user of Obsidian for note-taking, and there is a great Obsidian_to_Anki plugin which allows for creating and managing Anki cards as part of one’s Obsidian notes and it inserts functional links on both Desktop and Android.
It might also integrate well with the AutoHotkey script that you use.

I have not kept up my Anki usage after setting it up once and will now try again. I really did find it extremely demotivating to find the “400 cards due” every time I did get myself to open Anki.

Thanks for the great tips!

Mart_Korz 20 May 2025 17:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Thinking Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Deal In The World Is Surprisingly Intuitive
A reasonable prior does not put zero mass on the hypothesis that the literally infinite characters in our stories are moral patients. A reasonable protocol does not therefore let this hypothesis dominate its decisions regardless of evidence.

I do agree that we need some distinction in our decision-making for uncertain ethical problems where a simple expected value is the right solution and uncertain ethical problems where the type of the uncertainty requires handling it differently.

And I do agree that insect suffering is deep enough in the territory of fundamental uncertainty that this question needs to be asked.

When you use the example of “the hypothesis that the literally infinite characters in our stories are moral patients”, I could imagine you having several possible aims:
- “literally infinite characters” as an example demonstrates that even very wild hypotheses can feel intuitive from some perspective.
- “literally infinite characters” is meant an extreme case to clearly point out the kind of uncertainty that needs to be discussed when talking about insect suffering.
- “literally infinite characters” is meant as a comparable example to insect suffering
My understanding is that you mean the first two, but not the third?

Mart_Korz 20 Feb 2025 16:50 UTC
4 points
−5
on: Go Grok Yourself
Grok 3 told me 9.11 > 9.9. (common with other LLMs too), but again, turning on Thinking solves it.

This is unrelated to Grok 3, but I am not convinced that the above part of Andrej Karpathy’s tweet is a “gotcha”. Software version numbers use dots with a different meaning than decimal numbers and there 9.11 > 9.9 would be correct.
I don’t think there is a clear correct choice of which of these contexts to assume for an LLM if it only gets these few tokens.

E.g. if I ask Claude, the pure “is 9.11>9.9″ question gives me a no, whereas
”I am trying to install a python package. Could you tell me whether `9.11>9.9`?” gives me a yes.

Mart_Korz 7 Feb 2025 16:48 UTC
1 point
0
on: C’mon guys, Deliberate Practice is Real
For me, a strong reason why I do not see myself^[1] doing deliberate practice as you (very understandably) suggest is that, on some level, the part of my mind which decides on how much motivational oomph and thus effort is put into activities just in fact does not care much about all of these abstract and long-term goals.
Deliberate practice is a lot of hard work and the part of my mind which makes decisions about such levels of mental effort just does not see the benefits. There is a way in which a system that circumvents this motivational barrier is working against my short-term goals and and it is the latter who significantly controls motivation: Thus, such a system will “just sort of sputter and fail” in such a way that, consciously, I don’t even want to think about what went wrong.
If Feedbackloop Rationality wants to move me to be more rational, it has to work with my current state of irrationality. And this includes my short-sighted motivations.
And I think you do describe a bunch of the correct solutions: Building trust between one’s short-term motivations and long-term goals. Starting with lower-effort small-scale goals where both perspectives can get a feel for what cooperation actually looks like and can learn that it can be worth the compromises. In some sense, it seems to me that once one is capable of the kind of deliberate practice that you suggest, much of this boot strapping of agentic consistency between short-term motivation and deliberate goals has already happened.
On the other hand, it might be perfectly fine if Feedbackloop Rationality requires some not-yet-teachable minimal proficiency at this which only a fraction of people already have. If Feedbackloop Rationality allows these people to improve their thinking and contribute to hard x-risk problems, that is great by itself.
1. ^
  To some degree, I am describing an imaginary person here. But the pattern I describe definitely exists in my thinking even if less clearly than I put it above.

Mart_Korz 29 Jan 2025 19:17 UTC
4 points
0
on: Fake thinking and real thinking
Thank you for another beautiful essay at real thinking! This time about the mental stance itself.
But I’ll describe a few tags I’m currently using, when I remind myself to “really think.” Suggestions/tips from readers would also be welcome.
I think there is a strong conceptual overlap with what John Vervaeke describes as Relevance Realisation and wisdom.
I’ll attempt a summary of my understanding of John Vervaeke’s Relevance Realisation.
A key capability of any agentic/living beings is to prune the exponentially exploding space of possibilities when making any decision or thought. We are computationally bounded, and how we deal with that is crucial. Vervaeke terms the process that does this Relevance Realisation.
There is a lot of detail to his model, but let’s jump to how some of this plays out in human thinking: A core aspect in how we are agentic is our use of memeplexes that form an “agent-arena-relationship”—we combine a worldview with an agent that is suited to that world and then tie our identity to that agent. We build toy versions all the time (many games are like this), but—according to Vervaeke’s theses in the “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” lectures—modern western culture has somewhat lost track of the cultural structures which allow individuals to coordinate on and (healthily) grow their mind’s agent-arena-relationship. We have institutions of truth (how to reach good factual statements rather than falsehoods), but not of wisdom (how to live with a healthy stance towards reality rather than bullshit. Historically religious institutions played that role but they now successfully do that for fewer and fewer people)
Inhabiting a functional such relationship feels alive and vibrant (“inhabit” = tying one’s identity into these memes), whereas the lack of a functional agent-arena-relationship feels dream-like (zombies are a good representation; maybe “NPC” is a more recent meme that points at this).
A related thing is people having a spiritual experience: this involves glimpsing a new agent-arena-relationship which then sometimes gets nourished into a re-structuring of one’s self-concept and priorities.
tying this back to “real thinking”
Although the process I described is not the same thing as real thinking, I do think that there are important similarities.
Regarding how to do this well, one important point of Vervaeke’s is that humans necessarily enter the world with very limited concepts of “self”, “agent” or “arena”. This perspective makes it clear that a core part of what we do while growing up is refining these concepts. A whole lot of our nature is about doing this process of transcending our previous self-concept. Verveake loves the quote “the sage is to the adult as the adult is to the child” to point at what the word wisdom means.
The process according to his recommendations, involves
- a Community of Practice (a community of people who share the goal of re-orienting themselves. One such is forming with and around him at awakentomeaning.com),
- an Ecology of Practices (meditation, reflecting on philosophy, embodiment practices, etc. are all contributing factors to reducing self-delusion; the term practice emphasizes that it is about a regular activity rather than about fixed beliefs). A good way to get a feel for his perspective might be the first episode(s) of his After Socrates youtube series
and from my impression, a lot of this is practicing the ability of inhabiting/changing the currently active agent-arena-perspective, exploring its boundaries, not flinching away from noticing its limitations, engaging with the perspectives which others have built and so on. Generally, a kind of fluidity in the mental motions which are involved in this.
I hope my descriptions are sufficiently right to give an impression of his perspective and whether there are some ideas that are valuable to you :)

Mart_Korz 20 Oct 2024 14:19 UTC
4 points
1
on: Arithmetic is an underrated world-modeling technology
It happens to be the case that 1 kWh = 3,600,000 kg/s². You could substitute this and cancel units to get the same answer.
This should be kg m²/s².^[1] On the other hand, this is a nice demonstration of how useful computers are: it really is too easy to accidentally drop a term when converting units
1. ^
  I double checked

Mart_Korz 27 May 2024 20:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: reconstellate’s comment on: Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow
I read

to have a dude clearly describe a phenomenon he is clearly experiencing as “mostly female”

as “he makes a claim about a thought pattern he considers mostly female”, not as “he himself is described by the pattern” (QC does demonstrate high epistemic confidence in that post). Thus, I don’t think that Elizabeth would disagree with you.

Mart_Korz 26 May 2024 18:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: How We Picture Bayesian Agents
Thanks for the guidance! Together with Gwern’s reply my understanding now is that caching can indeed be very fluidly integrated into the architecture (and that there is a whole fascinating field that I could try to learn about).

After letting the ideas settle for a bit, I think that one aspect that might have lead me to think

In my mind, there is an amount of internal confusion which feels much stronger than what I would expect for an agent as in the OP

is that a Bayesian agent as described still is (or at least could be) very “monolithic” in its world model. I struggle with putting this into words, but my thinking feels a lot more disjointed/local/modular. It would make sense if there is a spectrum from “basically global/serial computation” to “fully distributed/parallel computation” where going more to the right adds sources of internal confusion.

Mart_Korz 26 May 2024 17:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: How We Picture Bayesian Agents
What a reply, thank you!

Mart_Korz 13 Apr 2024 13:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: Ulm, Germany—ACX Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
We are sitting close to the playground on top of red and blue blankets

Mart_Korz 13 Apr 2024 12:29 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
Hmm.. . In my mind, the Pilot wave theory position does introduce a substrate dependence for the particle-position vs. wavefunction distinction, but need not distinguish any further than that. This still leaves simulation, AI-consciousness and mind-uploads completely open. It seems to me that the Pilot wave vs. Many worlds question is independent of/orthogonal to these questions.

I fully agree that saying “only corpuscle folk is real” (nice term by the way!) is a move that needs explaining. One advantage of Pilot wave theory is that one need not wonder about where the Born probabilities are coming from—they are directly implied of one wishes to make predictions about the future. One not-so-satisfying property is that the particle positions are fully guided by the wavefunction without any influence going the other way. I do agree that this makes it a lot easier to regard the positions as a superfluous addition that Occam’s razor should cut away.

For me, an important aspect of these discussions is that we know that our understanding is incomplete for every of these perspectives. Gravity has not been satisfyingly incorporated into any of these. Further, the Church-Turing thesis is an open question.

Mart_Korz 12 Apr 2024 22:04 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: evhub’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
I am not too familiar with how advocates of Pilot wave theory usually state this, but I want to disagree slightly. I fully agree with the description of what happens mathematically in Pilot wave theory, but I think that there is a way in which the worlds that one finds oneself outside of do not exist.

If we assume that it is in fact just the particle positions which are “reality”, the only way in which the wave function (including all many worlds contributions) affects “reality” is by influencing its future dynamics. Sure, this means that the many worlds computationally do exist even in pilot wave theory. But I find the idea that “the way that the world state evolves is influenced by huge amounts of world states that ‘could have been’” meaningfully different to “there literally are other worlds that include versions of myself which are just as real as I am”. The first is a lot closer to everyday intuitions.

Well, this works to the degree to which we can (arbitrarily?) decide the particle positions to define “reality” (the thing in the theory that we want to look at in order to locate ourselves in the theory) in a way that is separate from being computationally a part of the model. One can easily have different opinions on how plausible this step is.

Mart_Korz 9 Apr 2024 18:59 UTC
LW: 4 AF: 3
0
AF
on: How We Picture Bayesian Agents

Finally, if we want to make the model capture certain non-Bayesian human behaviors while still keeping most of the picture, we can assume that instrumental values and/or epistemic updates are cached. This creates the possibility of cache inconsistency/incoherence.

In my mind, there is an amount of internal confusion which feels much stronger than what I would expect for an agent as in the OP. Or is the idea possibly that everything in the architecture uses caching and instrumental values? From reading, I imagined a memory+cache structure instead of being closer to “cache all the way down”.

Apart from this, I would bet that something interesting will happen for a somewhat human-comparable agent with regards to self-modelling and identity. Would anything similar to human identity emerge or would this require additional structure? Some representation of the agent itself, and its capabilities should be present at least

Mart_Korz 7 Jul 2023 19:43 UTC
4 points
0
on: Introducing bayescalc.io
After playing around für a few minutes, I like your app with >95% Probability ;) compare this bayescalc.io calculation

Mart_Korz 28 Jun 2023 16:18 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Jon Garcia’s comment on: Another medical miracle
Unfortunately, I do not have useful links for this—my understanding comes from non-English podcasts of a nutritionist. Please do not rely on my memory, but maybe this can be helpful for localizing good hypotheses.

According to how I remember this, one complication of veg*n diets and amino acids is that the question of which of the amino acids can be produced by your body and which are essential can effectively depend on your personal genes. In the podcast they mentioned that especially for males there is a fraction of the population who totally would need to supplement some “non-essential” amino acids if they want to stay healthy and follow veg*n diets. As these nutrients are usually not considered as worthy of consideration (because most people really do not need to think about them separately and also do not restrict their diet to avoid animal sources), they are not included in usual supplements and nutrition advice
(I think the term is “meat-based bioactive compounds”).

I think Elizabeth also emphasized this aspect in this post

Mart_Korz 28 Jun 2023 15:49 UTC
1 point
2
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Self-Blinded Caffeine RCT

log score of my pill predictions (-0.6)

If did not make a mistake, this score could be achieved by e.g. giving ~55% probabilities and being correct every time or by always giving 70% probabilities and being right ~69 % of the time.

Mart_Korz 28 Jun 2023 15:28 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Self-Blinded Caffeine RCT

you’d expect the difference in placebo-caffeine scores to drop

I am not sure about this. I could also imagine that the difference remains similar, but instead the baseline for concentration etc. shifts downwards such that caffeine-days are only as good as the old baseline and placebo-days are worse than the old baseline.

Mart_Korz 25 Jun 2023 19:41 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Mart_Korz’s comment on: Steering GPT-2-XL by adding an activation vector
Update: I found a proof of the “exponential number of near-orthogonal vectors” in these lecture notes https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall16/cos521/Lectures/lec9.pdf From my understanding, the proof uses a quantification of just how likely near-orthogonality becomes in high-dimensional spaces and derives a probability for pairwise near-orthogonality of many states.

This does not quite help my intuitions, but I’ll just assume that the “it it possible to tile the surface efficiently with circles even if their size gets close to the 45° threshold” resolves to “yes, if the dimensionality is high enough”.

One interesting aspect of these considerations should be that with growing dimensionality the definition of near-orthogonality can be made tighter without loosing the exponential number of vectors. This should define a natural signal-to-noise ratio for information encoded in this fashion.