mruwnik

Karma: 753

mruwnik 6 Aug 2026 22:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: programjames’s comment on: “Bad faith” means intentionally misrepresenting your beliefs
I suppose so, but that might make things even more confusing

mruwnik 6 Aug 2026 22:32 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Chris Santos-Lang’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
I assume you can come up with a coherent and correct way to create a society without injustice. I assume that any such plan would be hard and complicated to implement. That being said, if your goal is “no more social injustice” then there are many ways to change the world to end up in such a world. It’s just that most of them are bad. The simplest way to satisfy that is to just make sure there are no more people (i.e. kill them all). If there are no people, then there is no injustice.
If you have something that is very good at Getting Things Done (this is very handwavy) and you give it a goal, you’re likely to end up with that goal. The problem being that unless you specify really, really precisely what you want, you’re most likely going to end up with a bunch of side effects that you don’t want. Just because you’ll get the simplest (in the sense of not being complicated) solution that satisfies your goal. Basically this.

mruwnik 4 Jun 2026 10:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Michael Roe’s comment on: Tell people as early as possible it’s not going to work out
I’d guess you have a different understanding of what danger is. “has a history of attacking children” and “will have a corrosive effect on morale” are both dangers, just of different things. Companies kick out people that seem to be introducing a danger of being net negative for financial reasons (very widely understood). A church will kick out someone who is a danger of leading others into sin. A well managed forum will ban someone who is a danger of making the experience worse for everyone else.
Nowhere does the OP say anything about kicking people out for not going along with the group dogma. There are multiple groups where that is treated as a real danger, but I don’t think that’s a fair criticism here? Unless you mean by dogma something about open discussion, truth seeking etc., in which case acting against them really is a danger which needs to be removed. A garden without a gardener won’t last long.

mruwnik 16 May 2026 11:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
They both are injuries? The same as punching someone in the face is injurious whether in self defense or as an attack. The correct thing to do when someone starts getting violent is to stop them from continuing. This sometimes requires violence, hence often injuries. Sometimes the violent person hasn’t yet actually punched anyone, but is doing things that strongly imply that they are planning on hurting someone. Such situations also call for stopping the violent person from continuing, even though no actual injury has happened yet.

mruwnik 10 May 2026 17:54 UTC
4 points
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on: Is ProgramBench Impossible?
I’ve done some baselining on MirrorCode, which is similar. I reckon I am (or at least was) a decent software engineer. Turns out it’s really hard to re-implement a byte-for-byte copy of a program which isn’t trivial or really well specified. And even those have quirks. My approach was usually to set up hypothesis as a test fuzzer in order to find as many edge cases as possible. This helps a lot. Still, I don’t think I ever got a full 100% correct on the final score, and a large portion of time spent on creating MirrorCode was a vetting process to filter out any programs that are “unfair”.
Most programs are buggy. A faithful copy of such a program requires both understanding the intent behind the program, and also working out what exactly is causing a given bug, and then reproducing it. A couple of the less polished programs I baselined caused me a lot of frustration when it turned out I had to break my beautiful abstractions and flows to make a monstrosity that spits out the same values as the program being tested. Another fun source of differences are system differences. Floating point differences are one source. But also e.g. i18n of the underlying system. All in all, loads of opportunity for fun.

mruwnik 8 May 2026 16:47 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Pauliina ’s comment on: Stop Applying And Get To Work
Also worth mentioning is that there aren’t that many people around (the community is small) and the same people keep popping up everywhere. @Myles H is a fun case, who started volunteering for https://aisafety.info/, which in turn led to other opportunities and he’s now at Redwood. Volunteering is a good way to get yourself on people’s radar. Being in general useful is a very good skill to have, and underrated.

mruwnik 4 May 2026 17:49 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: “Bad faith” means intentionally misrepresenting your beliefs
Wait, I’m confused. What is the difference between not admitting to themselves and not knowing? Do you mean something like subconsciously knowing? Or maybe cognitive dissonance?

mruwnik 4 May 2026 13:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Chris Santos-Lang’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
Check Yudkovsky’s other writings (especially fiction) for multiple detailed discussions of these topics.
The simplest way to get rid of social injustice is to get rid of society. Most people would think that not an acceptable cost?

mruwnik 4 May 2026 13:00 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: jrincayc’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
Nit pick of your nit pick is that he doesn’t propose that it would include using nuclear weapons, he proposes that it would include the will to use nuclear weapons. The point is not “lets start throwing nukes around” it’s “this threat is larger than nuclear war—so nukes should also be an option if nothing else will work”.

mruwnik 4 May 2026 12:37 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: joseph_c’s comment on: “Bad faith” means intentionally misrepresenting your beliefs
The thing is that in her world model, she did see the Holy Spirit. That’s how she understands “seeing the Holy Spirit”. It very much is a valid representation of her beliefs. Whether her model is correct (or even good) is a different matter. Christianity has a bunch of jargon, as any such group with a history of thought does (I yesterday had a bit of a confusing discussion before I realised that the meaning of “world model” is not obvious). It seems fair to say that it’s worth first establishing that all phrases being used are understood in the same way by everyone, but that also requires noticing when a given phrase is non obvious or even counter-intuitive.
The entity with the intention to deceive doesn’t have to be the same as the entity misrepresenting its (which?) beliefs, true. But in that case it’s better to say that “Christianity is acting in bad faith”, rather than “this Christian over here is acting in bad faith”. Saying that someone is acting in bad faith is a statement about their intentions, not their actions.

mruwnik 4 May 2026 12:24 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: “Bad faith” means intentionally misrepresenting your beliefs
You seem to have a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of “lying’ (or I do—might be a cultural thing). My understanding of lying is “saying something you know to be untrue”. Which sort of is intentionally misrepresenting what they believe? Whether they do it instrumentally or terminally is besides the point?
“Accidentally bad faithing” doesn’t make sense (hence the “I like people who obey the law (here meaning never committing a social faux pas)” example). If you misrepresent the truth—or even outright lie—but but didn’t intend to, then that’s not bad faith. Bad faith is when you intentionally set out to deceive someone. The intentions here are important. It’s like the difference between manslaughter and cold blooded planned murder. Both result in a corpse, but the later set out to intentionally kill someone.
The Christian talking about the witness of the Holy Spirit is not setting out to deceive you. They truly believe in their position. It might not be true, it might leave you with a totally different understanding than they’re thinking of, they might even be aware that they’re using “witness” in a somewhat unusual manner (“open your heart to Jesus”...) etc., but it’s not explicitly intended to deceive you, and so is not in bad faith.
“Cynical” seems to often be used as an incorrect synonym for what bad faith is pointing at, e.g. “cynically mention the witness of the Holy Spirit as evidence”.

mruwnik 30 Apr 2026 0:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: joec’s comment on: Slightly-Super Persuasion Will Do
Why assume this is only words? AI systems can already generate images, video and sound, which gives you a lot more subconscious bandwidth (scents and tactile feedback are admittedly harder). There’s also the shortcut of finding a charismatic/convincing person and convincing them to help, which may or may not make things a lot easier.

mruwnik 29 Apr 2026 12:05 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: joec’s comment on: Slightly-Super Persuasion Will Do
It seems like being persuasive is mainly working out what the entity being persuaded wants to get and wants to avoid. Once you can work that out (basically—something like cognitive empathy, including how psychopaths work), you then just have to select arguments that suggest that they are more likely to get what they want (and less likely to get what they don’t want) if they agree with you.
If you can simulate another entity with high fidelity, then you can just run a bunch of different arguments by them and see which ones tend to work better. This transforms it into an optimisation problem. Or you can even do it the other way round and map which arguments work on which bins of people.

mruwnik 26 Apr 2026 1:36 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Chasing Oliver’s comment on: Do not conquer what you cannot defend
You might need to add sources for this. I roll to disbelieve, and Claude seems to also think that while you can construct a narrative that might be technically true, it would be at best misleading.

mruwnik 22 Apr 2026 11:40 UTC
16 points
6
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
“Here are 5 bad interactions with this person” can be interpreted as “we don’t get along well”. “Here are 5 different people who had bad interactions with this person” is “that person doesn’t get along well with others”. This post is showing that certain people have patterns of harming others, as opposed to just having harmed the author.

mruwnik 21 Apr 2026 14:40 UTC
2 points
4
on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
where almost everyone seemed like a sexual abuser
There is something to the whole “my boyfriend will punch you in the face if you try anything funny” threat. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about violence nowadays, but it’s much harder to introduce credible deterrence mechanisms which aren’t backed by imminent physical pain.

mruwnik 21 Apr 2026 14:28 UTC
11 points
11
on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
I would like the world to be saved and think being good and not being evil
There’s also the whole thing about having something worthwhile saving. Winning all battles but losing the war is a very sad way to end.

mruwnik 19 Apr 2026 12:06 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how I escaped)
Which is simply not true, according to my experience. You can. And even do it immediately
This is quite dependent on the person. I know people who can do so easily, and I know people who can’t at all. It might be something you can learn with practice, but until you can do it, you can’t.
Beware the typical mind fallacy.
What links here?
- ChristianKl's comment on Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how I escaped) by Declan Molony (19 Apr 2026 18:45 UTC; 4 points)

mruwnik 19 Apr 2026 11:55 UTC
1 point
2
in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
I guess it’s mainly too long, and therefore unclear? There are at least 4 main points that you are addressing in one large comment, along with a bunch of smaller issues. Splitting it into multiple, targeted ones would make it easier to react to them—it would also make it easier for you to work out what people don’t like about it.

mruwnik 19 Apr 2026 11:49 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
I think you’re making a good point, but it could be boiled down to 2-3 sentences