Mart_Korz

Karma: 294

Mart_Korz 31 Jul 2026 10:25 UTC
13 points
0
in reply to: positiveFuture’s comment on: Big-World Intuitions
Interesting, your small/big-world point reminds me of the mean-field footnote in OP that I felt confused by:

There are zones where the best move is non-consequentialist, in the sense that you do best by following heuristics (or principles, or virtues) that are good regardless of the exact specifics of the situation you’re in. You can neglect your (immediate) action’s (immediate and specific) effect on the environment.[1] [1]: This intro to mean field theory seems to be pointing to a similar concept of a “foreground” particle and a “background”, where the background is made of the interaction of lots of little “foreground” particles, but each particle has negligible impact on the background; you can just model the particle’s behavior as some function of the (assumed approximately fixed) background. But I don’t really know mean field theory in physics so I can’t be sure the analogy is apt.

Here, assuming that I have no effect on the environment is not quite what mean field theory does (at least not in the places where I encountered it in physics): mean field theory assumes “everyone behaves like me. If I follow a principle, the world does too.” From that assumption, a natural next step is Kant’s ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’. This does seem related to “the best move is non-consequentialist”.

If I had zero effect on the big world (also in the sense that the big world does not treat me any differently if I misbehave) there would be no force that pushes me to cooperate. But with the mean-field worldview, I will assume that there is an effect even if I am not tracking the causality – whether there are repeated interactions or not.

Mart_Korz 2 May 2026 12:19 UTC
7 points
2
on: How Go Players Disempower Themselves to AI
People consistently underestimate just how lost they will be when the solution is no longer right in front of them.
Important and true. In many cases where I felt confused about how people (myself absolutely included) behave highly irrationally, my conclusion was that many of us are desperately grasping for certainty much of the time and on most topics.
Noticing confusion only feels like an option where one’s thinking feels mostly stable. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, we live in a world full of agents that are just as smart as ourselves and which is full of evolved structures that slot right into our innermost workings and empower/exploit them. We can use Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization, but any single person can only do so much and it is permanently tempting to cut corners on the whole solidified-world-model thing and just optimize for what we want directly: “I see the solution and it makes lots of sense. If someone asked me about it, I could even explain why it works. Success!”. Why waste lots of time and effort on digging deeper when successful – much better to move forward and win the next game.

Structurally, we do the same thing all the time and often it is a good idea. But we definitely systematically underestimate just how pervasive this tension is, and often we shy away from noticing. Security Mindset has impressive examples.
Our world is moving more and more out-of-distribution for our evolved heuristics and we should expect our own natural tendencies to fail us increasingly often.
Over time, I have progressed to feeling deep sadness for a group that surrenders much of what it claims to value. The thing I want to impress with this article is the consistency with which we as a species underestimate our own willingness to give up our culture, economy and autonomy to AI, even without monetary incentives.
Thanks for sharing these experiences from the Go community – if you are aware of a sub-group which attempts to (and maybe succeeds) at Protecting Cognitive Integrity under AI use, I would be happy to learn about them, too.

Mart_Korz 14 Apr 2026 20:36 UTC
3 points
1
on: Meaningful Questions Have Return Types
Thanks for a great post!

Once I was discussing with a friend about the question “what is the meaning of life?”—and I think I made progress on how I approached the question in a similar manner: At some point of turning this question over in my mind, I realized that “suppose someone gives me a text which has The Answer, would I actually feel satisfied? → No, I would not”. My conclusion was that “what is the meaning of life?” is not a question that can be answered in this manner at all. Today, my perspective on this is close to what Vervaeke describes: meaning-making is an activity that is central to agency. The goal is not for that process to end, the goal is to do it and do it well.

Mart_Korz 30 Dec 2025 11:31 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: lemonhope’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
I think this is a little tricky as the theory uses the actual continuum for wave functions such that the amount of information is and remains infinite whether we remove far-away branches or not. On the other hand, we can only ever calculate finite approximations of the true thing and here we definitely can be more or less efficient.

When we “collapse the wave function” during a measurement process, we decide to remove the other branches from our description such that in some sense a pragmatic version of hardly computing any of the pilot wave is the standard approach. The description of Open Quantum Systems has really helped formalize this perspective and one can find that even just cosmic radiation or gravitational interaction is strong enough to create quick branching of the wave function for anything macroscopic. Unfortunately a mathematically equivalent simplification is not feasible as technically the distant contributions are not ruled out to become important at some point in the future (e.g. the wave function tends to spread out in configuration space such that in a non-expanding universe we would expect branches to touch at some point), but at least for many situations one can get good effective descriptions which put us closer to a quantum-native description of how classical behaviour comes about. From that perspective, the probabilistic predictions tell us about which part of a simplified pilot wave (/many worlds branch) we expect to update towards.

Mart_Korz 25 Nov 2025 19:49 UTC
1 point
0
on: Sufficiently Decentralized Intelligence is Indistinguishable from Synchronicity
I love the mood that you are describing. I do think that it would still be valuable to have some amount of pressure towards shared concepts and symbols, but it really could be a lot less.

One already common example is that in the past decades many small languages and cultures have been on the decline due to shared concepts just being too useful such that most young people just don’t learn the local language in the first place. I am also reminded of the quote (not sure of the origin), “nowadays, walking around in any big city across the world kind of feels the same”, and now I start to imagine how much more vibrant culture could be and feel if interfaces were fluid.

Mart_Korz 21 Nov 2025 15:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Jemist’s Shortform
I could also get used to saying “cGive” pronounced similar to “sea Give” which has nice connotations spoken aloud and has c as coefficient right in the written version. But I agree that “Coefficient” has a good sound compared to which “cGive” seems more generic

Mart_Korz 18 Nov 2025 22:13 UTC
1 point
0
on: How Colds Spread
Maybe the secretions on the contaminated coffee mug handles and plastic tiles took longer to dry than those on the playing cards & poker chips.
Wild guess: air temperature and humidity should make a big difference in how quickly things dry. As hands are constantly sweating, I could imagine that there is a kind of threshold humidity/temperature beyond which hands have enough moisture to sustain viruses?

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
5 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
5 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
−2
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.