Murtaza Amin

Karma: 109

Murtaza Amin 11 Dec 2025 18:37 UTC
37 points
24
on: North Sentinelese Post-Singularity
I completely agree that everyone has a right to normalcy.
However, “The Sentinelese” and “Sentinelese Culture” are not moral patients, in my opinion. The individuals are. Each person has the right to choose for themselves how they would live, given adequate information.
I believe that holds true under current capabilities also, but there’s no way to give each Sentinelese person a choice like that without immediate disruption that is likely to make their lives worse.
If future technological capabilities allow wider society to give each Sentinelese person an informed choice of how they should live without likely bad effects, that is what I consider the best path.

Murtaza Amin 14 Oct 2025 15:44 UTC
12 points
7
on: What is Lesswrong good for?
Lesswrong is very good at taking known facts to their predictable conclusion, even when there isn’t a society-wide consensus on them. Especially when the conclusion is outside the norm. Examples include:
- Predicting the extent of COVID by following the exponential
- ‘Feeling the AGI’ a few years before the mainstream based on rapidly doubling compute and earlier developments that weren’t mainstream (like GPT-2)
Currently unresolved examples might include:
- Global population will not hit the predicted peaks because birthrates continue to fall, which the most prominent predictions don’t account for (they assume birthrates will hold at their current low levels).
- IABIED

Murtaza Amin 13 Aug 2025 9:46 UTC
4 points
2
on: Enlightenment AMA
I’ve heard enlightenment described as separating oneself from a mindset you are fused with.
An analogy I’ve seen is when you’re so immersed in a video game or story that you’re invested and emotionally involved as if it were real. But then you take a step back, realize that it’s not your entire existence, and its salience / importance goes back to a reasonable baseline for fiction. The deep emotional investment is gone though you may still appreciate the story.
Is that analogy accurate in your opinion? Am I mischaracterizing it?

Murtaza Amin 12 Aug 2025 18:18 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Eliza Test
I agree that modern AIs would pass the Eliza test as you define it, particularly if given the right prompt. What is the value of the test though? It seems like it would be saturated as a benchmark, and also take a long time to administer.

Murtaza Amin 7 Aug 2025 15:43 UTC
14 points
5
on: No One is Really Working
I don’t necessarily know the answer, but I don’t find any of the explanations compelling. In my experience as a manager of ~10 employees, some of whom are young knowledge workers:
1. The knowledge workers reporting to me and also on my broader team are putting in long hours, doing grunt work in the lab, developing scientific processes, and writing them up. This is in R&D, where the value comes from expected value of future products.
2. Some people are less than fully utilized, but between 25% and 75% utilization at worst, and varying from week to week. Having the capacity available is probably enough reason to keep them aboard. For example, Alice is trained on a set of tasks. Her utilization might be low some weeks, but it would strain Bob to learn her tasks and be available to fulfill them even though Bob isn’t fully utilized every week either. Bob would have to keep track of too much, and would also have to work overtime some weeks. These are not necessarily knowledge workers though.
3. For the underutilized people, the impact that each person has in maintaining the company’s ability to continue production / expected value of new products being developed is far higher than their cost to keep around.
Overall, I expect that the answer is that under-utilization is not as extreme as indicated in the article, and that the value of the knowledge and skill sets of the under-utilized people is valuable enough to keep around.

Murtaza Amin 5 Aug 2025 17:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: Emotions Make Sense
Thanks for writing this! It was a good read, and it helped me see some concepts more clearly, particularly anxiety.
That said, I have a couple of notes:
- The definitions of jealousy and envy you use are different from the ones I’ve encountered in most places.
  - Envy: You want what someone else has. If you can’t have, it you resent them. Most often applies to material things or status.
  - Jealousy: You’re worried someone will take something that you have or think you deserve. You take actions to guard that thing (often applies to relationships).
- I think the concept of laziness is multiple things (like you said), but more like “lacking the motivation to do [X]”. If others (or yourself) think you should be doing [X], then they call you lazy with respect to it. The lack of motivation can be for multiple reasons, but not typically for energy conservation: depression, lack of confidence in success, lack of belonging (e.g. in a workplace), too prideful to do it (status), other competing activity, lack of familiarity, etc. The story of the person with food insecurity trying conserve energy is backwards: In humans and other mammals (mice, monkeys), moderate calorie restriction actually leads to greater foraging type behavior and energy expenditure.

Murtaza Amin 30 Jul 2025 19:40 UTC
3 points
0
on: Sex Determination as a Bottleneck to Species Development
Haplodiploidy in hymenopterans (ants and wasps) has a huge impact on eusociality: All daughters of the queen get half their genes from their father’s entire genome (the father’s sperm are all identical), which means they share 75% of their genes with their sisters rather than the 50% in others like termites. For this reason, Eusociality has evolved independently multiple times in hymenopterans.
I would speculate that the colony is more cohesive for this reason, and this may have an impact on why ants are so successful in so many niches.
Termites, on the other hand, have one key thing going for them: the ability to digest wood. This allows them to fill their specific niche well.

Murtaza Amin 30 Jul 2025 18:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
By ‘best they can’ I didn’t necessarily mean ‘self-actualize’ or ‘contribute as a net positive’ but more like ‘navigate the difficult demands of life.’
By that understanding, I think most people I encounter fit this description.
Apologies for the imprecision.

Murtaza Amin 30 Jul 2025 15:58 UTC
5 points
1
on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
The disgust/disappointment you describe sounds to me like contempt. In this context the opposite of contempt is compassion, which I would consider the point of empathizing with someone.
In the past, I’d feel the same kind of contempt when observing people demonstrating lack of skill in an area I had ability in, particularly when their lack would impact me in a (slightly) negative manner. That changed when I learned to have more compassion for myself despite my own weaknesses. Once I did that, the feelings of contempt for others seemed to diminish significantly.
The pathway, as best I understand it, was “This person, like me, is trying to do the best they can with the knowledge, ability, and responsibilities they have, just like I am. I have (different) failings of my own that I deserve compassion for. Having contempt for them is hypocritical of me.”
Having compassion for oneself is something that makes you stronger and more mentally resilient. Compassion for others seems to come along with it.

Murtaza Amin 28 Jun 2025 14:44 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: CapResearcher’s comment on: CapResearcher’s Shortform
In my experience, that’s pretty much what 5-HT2A agonists (hallucinogens) do but to a stronger extent: You see peripherally a curled leaf on the ground, and perceive it as a snake before you take a closer look, or you see patterns on a marbled tile, and the exact positions of the shapes slowly wobble.
My understanding is that this is because you assign a lower confidence to your visual inputs than usual, and a higher confidence to your priors / the part of your brain that in-paints visual details for you.

Murtaza Amin 6 Nov 2024 17:08 UTC
3 points
0
on: Scissors Statements for President?
How might someone figure out what their blind spot (A or B) is and overcome it?

Murtaza Amin 25 Jan 2024 3:46 UTC
2 points
−1
on: Monthly Roundup #14: January 2024
Federal highway officials hate us, tell local and state officials they must stop using humor and pop culture references on their road safety signs because they might ‘distract.’ That’s the point. You get people to pay attention. Also you brighten up their day. I sincerely despise people who issue rules like this. How do we fight back?
I strongly agree with the highway officials here. These are highway signs meant to warn of traffic problems, altered commute times, or potential hazards. Most of the time they are blank or (at least my area) they give commute times to major landmarks. In either case, they are not ‘surprising’ and unlikely to distract drivers, but still provide value.
On the other hand, when they show a novel message (whether a specific hazard warning, road closure, or corny joke) people pay special attention to them. Anecdotally, I’ve found that novel messages that require interpretation slow down traffic.
Using the signs to display stupid safety messages dilutes their intended purpose, causes delays, and reduces safety by distracting drivers (directly opposing their message). Those messages were awful and I’m glad they’re gone.

Murtaza Amin 29 Jun 2023 0:12 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: What is your financial portfolio?
With reinvested dividends and rising price, it simply grew to become one of my bigger positions. I invested in a variety of industries and this is how it ended up. I did consciously increase my positions in NVDA, MSFT, TQQQ, and GOOG (Google) in light of recent AI advances though.

Murtaza Amin 28 Jun 2023 20:55 UTC
6 points
0
on: What is your financial portfolio?
Biggest positions (in order):
NVDA (NVidia)
SPLX(3x S&P)
TQQQ(3x tech)
VT (total world shares)
XOM (Exxon Mobil)
MSFT (Microsoft)
AAPL (Apple)
I wasn’t initially so heavy in NVDA, but graphics cards go brrr.

Murtaza Amin 16 Jun 2023 14:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jam_brand’s comment on: I still think it’s very unlikely we’re observing alien aircraft
I’m the OP of that bigfoot discussion on r/ssc. My views haven’t substantially changed on that subject.
I agree with the great-grandparent that aliens being real is an enormously bigger change from the standard worldview than bigfoot being real.
I give < 10% likelihood to these UAPs being genuine aliens as stereotypically imagined, and < 50% likelihood of being some significant scientific update (e.g. weather phenomenon, spoofing technology).
However, assuming actual aliens in spaceships were here and trying halfheartedly to hide from us, I would expect the photo and video evidence to be about as crap as it is. So I agree with the conclusion of this OP, but disagree with the rationale.
Edit 19-JUN-2023: Upon reflection, I think assigning <10% likelihood is overconfident of me. I realized this when I read the recent post asking for UAP bets https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF5gKyTofQB/ufo-betting-put-up-or-shut-up and thought about the real reasons why I wouldn’t take the bet.

Murtaza Amin 4 Feb 2023 15:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: memeticimagery’s comment on: What fact that you know is true but most people aren’t ready to accept it?
It’s discussed in the Reddit comments, if you want more details, but briefly: A rare species with a long life might leave on the order of ~100 dead a year. If each corpse has, say 1e-5 chance (low but still plausible number) of being found by a person, then it could take a while.
I don’t know of any claim that they would take care of their dead, but I don’t see that as implausible.

Murtaza Amin 4 Feb 2023 15:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Morpheus’s comment on: What fact that you know is true but most people aren’t ready to accept it?
If they exist, then they would have crossed the Bering land bridge at the same time as humans. They would never have lived anywhere without a human presence. And yes, similar sightings are known from across Asia also.

Murtaza Amin 3 Feb 2023 19:19 UTC
10 points
−15
on: What fact that you know is true but most people aren’t ready to accept it?
I wouldn’t say I know it to be true, but read and reviewed books by experts (anthropologists, special effects experts, pro and con) and ended up concluding that bigfoot probably exists (~75%).
I wrote up my rationale in r/slatestarcodex a year or so ago:
link

Murtaza Amin 22 Apr 2018 4:29 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Weird question: could we see distant aliens?
Some more thoughts pertaining to limits of detection:
The Milky Way weighs 5.8e11 times M*, which itself is 2e30kg. Total mass of the galaxy = 1.2e42kg.
If all that mass were converted to energy with perfect efficiency, say via black hole evaporation, or annihilation with antimatter, then that’s a total of 1.0e59 joules.
That many joules over 5 billion years (1.5e17 s) is a power of 7e41 watts. At a radius of 7 billion light years (6.6e25m), that’s an energy flux of 1.3e-11 W/(m*m).
The sun puts out about 1400 W/(m*m)at our distance. So the sun would be about 1e14 times brighter than this distant galaxy trying to get our attention. Move the sun 1e7 x farther away to about 158 light years to match this brightness, and you get a ~8.5 magnitude star, never visible without aid. (Note: If using 1000x as much energy it becomes a clearly visible star and among our top 20 or so.)
So, if a type III civilization were using the entire mass-energy of 1 galaxy with 100% efficiency and used this resource to signal continuously for 5 billion years, they would not be bright enough to see unaided. We would still probably notice the light as a third-rate star if it wasn’t blocked by dust.
How could they make it unusual enough to be noticed as a signal? Perhaps the signal has a complete blackbody spectrum, but they surround the galaxy with an unusual spectral absorption signature. Example: Surrounding the galaxy they could have concentric clouds of He, Li, B, N, Na, Al, etc. The elements with a prime atomic number.
That’s unusual enough to draw attention. Maybe they could even encode a message in the degree of absorption.

Murtaza Amin 22 Apr 2018 4:26 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Weird question: could we see distant aliens?
I may be misunderstanding: Are you suggesting a targeted beam to the habitable zone of every star they can see?
If so, I don’t see how that could work, considering that most stars visible at time of transmission would be dead by the time the transmission reaches them. Also the fact that they have orthogonal velocity that would be difficult or impossible to measure and account for.
My apologies if I have misunderstood.