I think it depends on the relationship. My girlfriend sometimes asks me things that are obvious to me and easily searchable, but I enjoy the opportunity to flex my knowledge with her. My good friend who is an excellent conversationalist asks, I’m happy to answer, because he usually has interesting follow-up thoughts. My past coworker who I don’t think is very intelligent and I wonder if we should have even hired and hasn’t improved much—I am not terribly interested in answering such a question.
Maxwell Peterson
Karma: 1,283
I like this better!
It’s odd—a friend messaged me after reading to say he did the same thing, yet Dickinson analysts are either mystified or in denial that the caps mean anything at all; and the only articles I could find on Trump’s casing found it very odd indeed and were similarly mystified (though they were low-effort output articles at major news organizations, not analysis). So I am hearing only that it’s super weird or that it’s quite typical, nothing in-between!
I took a year of French in college yet had no idea—this is great, I like this.
Scott Alexander uses this style sometimes, and I like it. However, he tends to do it once per essay. I think that can work very well. Here, though, after I hit the “that’s wrong” multiple times, it started to feel like nothing in the essay was worth trying to understand, since I expected what I was reading to later be proclaimed wrong. (Just my own feeling.)
Yeah… so one of my problems with the post is that it presents itself as an exhortation to apply ironclad rationalist thought:
>when the tribal flags come out, you suit up. Operational definitions. Base rates. 48-hour restraint on attribution. Public updates when you’re wrong. The whole apparatus of rationalist epistemics applied to the domain where motivated reasoning runs hottest.
but when I present the data I did in my original comment, you show yourself to be overfocused on what’s possible, at the expense of what is likely.
I think the essence of rationalist practice is to be good at reasoning under uncertainty, and part of that is integrating multiple pieces of evidence. One can attack any single datum: certainly there is a possibility “Bella Ciao” was written in with a niche meme in mind, rather than an Anti-Facist idea. But “Catch, Facist!” was also written.
Certainly anyone can date a trans person; but it’s more likely for a left-aligned person to than a right-aligned one, due to the right’s clear distaste for the trans movement, and the left’s clear support.
These items, in conjunction with what Robinson’s mother said about his shift to the left, together, are really quite suggestive.
Against these data, there is the hypothesis that actually Robinson is on the far Right. This hypothesis requires the FBI to have fabricated or edited the messages, and further, for them to make it so the roommate does not ever say “hey, that’s not what he sent me”. It also requires Robinson’s mother to be badly wrong, lying, or for the quote from her to be misattributed or made up. I don’t think these things are likely.
This overfocus of yours on what is possible, instead of what’s likely, is partisan-driven, not “the whole apparatus of rationalist epistemics” you frame the post as.
You write:
>Utah officials arrest Tyler James Robinson, 22, after a manhunt. Motive still being investigated, but the instant certainty about “the left” doesn’t get walked back—it just fades to silence.
But the certainty about the left being culpable has not faded to silence; see, for example, Stephen Miller’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s funeral yesterday. In my part of X, the certainty about the ideology of the assassin has been consistent.
Given the evidence so far revealed—the text messages sent to the roommate:
>”I had enough of his hatred,” Tyler Robinson wrote back. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
the Anti-Facist inscription on the unfired bullet casing -
>Another casing was inscribed with lyrics from the song Bella Ciao, which honours World War Two-era partisans of the Italian resistance who fought Nazi Germany.
and the impression his mother had of his motive -
>According to an indictment, Robinson’s mother told police that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and left-wing, “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented”. And in family conversations before the shooting, Robinson allegedly accused Kirk of spreading hate.
the weight of evidence leans strongly toward Robinson having strongly-felt Left politics.
And yet you write:
>The Kirk case was a perfect demonstration… when the facts arrive and don’t fit the narrative—just silence. No retractions, no apologies, no “we updated our beliefs based on new information.” Just on to the next outrage.
I find this line… hard to wrap my head around. What facts arrived that did not fit the “Left assassin” hypothesis, and why do you think they outweigh the data points listed above?
[Quotes are from The BBC, “The motive behind Charlie Kirk’s killing: What we know and don’t know”, published September 19, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v1rle0598o]
That’s… a pretty good theory! Whenever I do achieve an early wake-up time, I have trouble holding on to it, quickly waking later until I run up against the “unacceptably late time to wake up” barrier. This is maybe consistent with an ever-advancing internal sleep-wake rhythm. It isn’t periodic in the way you describe your experience though.
This is not my experience, and I don’t know why. I am not more intelligent than the average LessWrong user, but when I play Go, I’m one of the strongest at the Go club; when I go running outside, I pass many more people than I am passed by; I started poker in February but rank in the top of the free bar league I’ve been going to. I am not trying to brag but there is no other way to describe how strange this post reads to me.
Maybe it’s because these things I do are niche? Go might be like this, but chess wouldn’t be? free bar tournament poker might be like this, but the casino isn’t? running around a neighborhood lake might be like this, but a marathon isn’t? Hm.
I say thanks. In person, or with someone I know well, maybe I’ll kind of say “well you should ask such things too!”. But this so far as I can tell has never been convincing. One close coworker said “it is good, and I am glad that there are people like you in the world, but there shouldn’t be too many of you”, which I found oddly convincing.
That’s an interesting interpretation of politics-is-the-mind-killer, that sounds reasonable.
I agree it doesn’t invite engagement—it is just a drive-by shot, ugly to any reader who doesn’t agree with the bracketed text.
>for example, I think Donald Trump is extremely bad, and am disappointed in my fellow countrymen for voting for him
LessWrong is a special site in that there is a norm here against blunt political statements (since politics is the mind-killer). I am disappointed in you for burning the commons with a statement like this. You could make it on any other site, as they are all already cesspools of political-warring, but perhaps you desire to bring the same ugly battles here too. You should not desire this.
It’s too bad you feel that way. I wasn’t planning on attending, and probably still won’t, but love Cremieux’s work, and knowing he’ll be there makes me want to go more.
I recommend those unfamiliar with his work to view some of his posts on X: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil
Woah—nice value-assignment finds.
I trained a booster (LightGBM) and used it to look for nonlinearity in the items—basically I made one ICE plot per item. From this I discovered the following nonlinearities:
Unicorns were the big thing—if you submit enough Unicorn Horns, you seem to get a discount or credit on your taxes. Perhaps they are medicinal, and there is a shortage. This happens at 5 horns, and submitting more than 5 doesn’t get any further discount.There was also some discounting going on with Cockatrice Eyes, but more confusing, where in one view of mine, it looked like the tax was bigger at 0 of them, smaller at 1, bigger at 2, smaller at 3, etc., oscillating.
Dragon, Lich, and Zombie parts looked mostly linear though.
There are a number of tax submissions for which the assessed tax was zero. Even property as large as [1 cockatrice eye, 1 lich skull, 6 zombie hands] had a zero-tax entry. So I took the strategy of starting by copying the zero-tax historical records, where I could, for three of the adventurers. For the fourth, Dragon Heads always incur a big chunk of tax, so I gave the final adventurer all the Dragon Heads, as well as 5 Unicorn Horns and an odd number of Cockatrice Eyes, to offset them.Then from there I poked around and tried to ride the gradient downward manually. I arrived at:
1: {2 Lich Skull, 8 Zombie Hand} [for 3 gp 6 sp = 3.6 tax]
2: {1 Cockatrice Eye, 1 Dragon Head, 1 Unicorn Horn} [0.0]
3: {1 Dragon Head, 1 Unicorn Horn} [4.2]
4: {3 Cockatrice Eye, 2 Dragon Head, 3 Lich Skull, 5 Unicorn Horn} [19.2]For a total tax of 27 gp 0 sp.
From this poking around, I’ve started to feel like maybe one Unicorn Horn can cancel a Dragon Head, or something? I couldn’t get a proper black-box optimization program working, so it was just my manual optimization at the end that got me from 32.0 down to 27.0. There is probably a bit of room for progress.
(Haven’t yet read what others wrote).
Cool setup! Haven’t done one of these for a few years, and I enjoyed it a lot.
I did have a terrible time trying to get a black-box optimizer running—the hard constraints on the sums seemed to be mostly not a thing in optimizer packages? I’m interested in the thoughts of someone who knows more about black-box optimization like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or whatever, and if they think they’d be suitable for a problem like this.
Posting my findings in the comment below.
I suspect that, to many readers, what gives urgency to the Krome claims is that two people have allegedly died at the facility. For example, the fourth link OP provides is an instagram video with the caption “people are dying under ICE detainment in Miami”.
The two deceased are Genry Ruiz Guillen and Maksym Chernyak. ICE has published deaths reports for both:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddr-GenryRuizGuillen.pdf
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddrMaksymChernyak.pdfNotably, Mr. Ruiz-Guillen was transferred to medical and psychiatric facilities multiple times, and my read of the timeline is that he was in the custody of various hospitals from December 11 up through his January 23 death, i.e. over a month separates his death and his time at Krome. (It’s possible I’m reading this wrong so let me know if others have a different read). Ruiz-Guillen was transferred to hospital a month before inauguration day.
Chernyak’s report is much shorter and I don’t know what to make of it. Hemmorhagic stroke is hypothesized. He died February 20.
These are fairly detailed timelines. Guillen-Ruiz’s in particular involves many parties (normal hospital, psychiatric hospital, different doctors), so would be a pretty bold fabrication.
You said:>the fact that we haven’t seen definitive evidence against the allegations is significant evidence in favour of their veracity.
But “detainees are dying because of overcrowding and lack of water” is an allegation made by one of OP’s links, and these timelines and symptoms, especially Guillen-Ruiz’s, are evidence against.
When something is true, I desire to believe it’s true. When something is false, I desire to believe it’s false. This is the proper epistemics. If your epistemic goals are different, then they’re different. But “If the accused is in power, increase the probability estimate” is not how good epistemics are achieved.
Tangent here, just occurred to me while writing. The correct adjustment might be in the other direction: there are way more accusations against people in power, so part of the problem when considering them is: how do you keep your False Discovery Rate low? Like, if your neighbor is accused of a crime, he probably did it. But top politicians are accused of crimes every week, and many of those aren’t real, or aren’t criminal. And most or all False Discovery Rate adjustments lower the estimated probability of each instance. (Tangent over).
I think you may have a case about how one’s decision theory should adjust based on power and risk. Something like “I think there’s a 15% chance this is true, but if it were, it would be really bad, so 15% is high enough that I think we should investigate”. But taking that decision theory thought process, and using it to speak as if the 15% thing has a greater-than-50% probability, for example, isn’t correct.
Wildbow’s Claw is about a husband and wife with two kids doing and dealing with the consequences of clandestine activities. I think he set out to specifically write a book about a family, where the children weren’t written off the screen but rather were the whole point, and he very much succeeded! The story itself is also gripping, I enjoyed it a lot.