NeroWolfe

Karma: 123

NeroWolfe 25 Sep 2026 14:41 UTC
3 points
2
on: We Underestimate the Weaknesses of Pangram
It feels as though you are arguing for two separate conclusions here. First you say you’re unhappy that your work is flagged as AI Generated when you don’t think that’s right.
I believe the AI-Assisted label describes this process well. But many people besides me think there is a large difference between this writing and having an LLM generate a piece on its own.
Then you argue that AI writing has become better than human writing, so it would be wrong not to accept the edits.
If AI editing typically made human writing worse, my previous point would be weak. However, in my experience, AI editing is very good now. I’ve experimented with almost every new Claude and ChatGPT update, and in 2026 their wording suggestions have gone from almost useless to usually better than the best I can produce.
It sounds like the only real issue here is that you disagree about where the line between “AI Generated” and “AI Assisted” should fall. That seems like a pretty subjective issue; some people could argue that automated spellcheck is AI Assisted, but that seems wrong to me. You are arguing that rewording a paragraph to be clearly different from the original is just assistance, but I disagree. While the two ends of the spectrum are clear (wrote it on a typewriter = 100% Human Written, gave Claude a prompt and published the result = 100% AI Generated), I think it’s reasonable for different people to have their own opinions about where the range for AI Assisted begins and ends.
So, other than asking for Pangram to provide a more transparent description of what the three ranges cover, I’m not sure what you think should change. Part of the problem may be that you like the collaboration between yourself and Claude but you don’t want to list it as a co-author or editor. I like books co-written by Larry Nivens and Jerry Pournelle, but I’d be unhappy if Jerry claimed to have written the whole novel without assistance.

NeroWolfe 21 Sep 2026 19:43 UTC
2 points
−4
on: We’re not ready for the e/Acc × Longevity preference cascade
First, I think this is a good article. However, I have a question about one of your premises:
“What is the problem?? How can you fail to recognize this! Do you not AGREE that DEATH IS BAD?”
Has anybody done a second-level analysis of what happens if we discover immortality tomorrow? While I’m not personally crazy about dying tomorrow, I think that, viewed from the perspective of an entire race, the answer is not so obvious. Despite the fact that Malthus was early with his prediction of widespread disaster, there is still some finite carrying capacity of the Earth. We’re already seeing clear effects from climate change with 8 billion people. If nobody dies, either we stop having children, or the population balloons very rapidly, putting more strain on our resources.
I’m old enough to have lived through the Green Revolution that provided fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides that dramatically increased what a farmer could produce. There are also plenty of other examples of big improvements in technology as well, so I don’t rule out the possibility that we could support an order of magnitude more people on the planet, but I also think it’s far from a given.
There is also the issue that you see in various research fields, politics, etc. Progress is said to happen one funeral at a time; if none of the senior people die, how do the younger ones ever move forward? Do we really want a thousand-year-old politician (of any stripe) still sitting in office? On the flip side, will the average worker who only does the job to make the pay want to continue working for centuries? If they don’t, who supports them? Do we end up like Logan’s Run and enforce maximum age limits?
I don’t know if any of these things are likely to be real problems, but failure to plan is planning to fail. So, I’m wondering if there are any good papers, articles, etc. that examine the societal and planetary consequences of immortality.

NeroWolfe 11 Sep 2026 19:39 UTC
3 points
−5
on: Post-AGI, we are all jobless aristocrats
I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the notion that once we have powerful AI coupled with robots that everything is going to be available at prices too cheap to meter. While it may be possible to assemble goods without workers, at some point you have to generate the energy to make all of this possible. There are a number of problems with that:
- Burning far more fossil fuels leads to even faster climate breakdown than already predicted
- Fusion is still 30 years away, and may well be forever
- Solar might work given the amount of available space on the planet, but see the next paragraph
Using more energy will, by itself, cause the planet to heat up. Collecting “free” solar power to strip-mine the rare earth deposits needed to create more solar panels is an inefficient process, generating waste heat at every step along the way. We already know that densely populated areas are heat islands that are measurably warmer than their general climate would suggest.
There is also no known way to implement the heavy industry that underpins all of this in a way that doesn’t lead to large amounts of pollution. Mining sends all sorts of unpleasant materials into the surrounding air, soil, and water. Running a blast furnace not only produces toxic slag but also generates a fair amount of carbon monoxide due to the chemistry required. Rinse and repeat for most other large-scale manipulation of atoms.
Then there are the things that cannot be made that much better. Unless the AI develops some miracle way to grow fields of wheat in a week without huge increases in the water and fertilizer required, there are still going to be limits on food. The higher up the food chain you go the worse this gets. We are already raping the seas for all commercially viable sea creatures; coming up with faster ways to harvest the remaining tuna doesn’t make any more of them. (And farming fish produces a lower-quality product with lots of associated pollution.)
Finally, while it may be that AI is truly transformative and overcomes all of the above objections, it’s always a good idea to look at history for a clue as to how humans might manage this societal upheaval. Looking at the largest-scale changes in human history doesn’t provide happy reading:
- Moving from hunter-gatherer communities to agriculture gave us more food, but also doomed a large proportion of people to miserable work conditions. The 1%ers of the day were the feudal overlords, who had a decent existence without much of the improvement being spread widely.
- The industrial revolution gave us vastly more power than came from animals and waterwheels, but again there was a fair amount of economic disruption involved—coal mining was a new form of hell on earth, pollution increased dramatically, etc. Again, industrial magnates made out like bandits, but the people working on Ford’s assembly lines didn’t see much of that new wealth
- Immediately after WWII, we were going to have electricity that was too cheap to meter because everybody and their brother would have a nuclear power plant providing them with virtually unlimited power. Except it turned out that we forgot to figure out how to dispose of all the byproducts, that the engineering of truly safe plants was harder than we expected (Fukushima wasn’t that long ago), and that power consumption rose to suck up any cheap surplus (terawatt data centers, anybody?) As with the other changes, the companies that produce the energy are living large while the rest of us pay whatever rates are demanded.
It is true that all but the very poorest people today live better than the very richest hunter-gatherers (medical care alone makes a huge difference in life expectancy and enjoyment), so humanity as a whole has gained from all these advancements. However, through all of this surplus we have always had a small number of ruthless people who rose to the top and grabbed everything they could. I find it nearly impossible to believe that Elon Musk and company are going to suddenly distribute their power and access to benefits to the rest of the world just because AI worked out really well.

NeroWolfe 9 Sep 2026 17:53 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Sausage Vector Machine’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
It’s also on the front page of The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic-researchers-ai-human-extinction

NeroWolfe 10 Jun 2024 14:06 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Why I don’t believe in the placebo effect
Probably even negatively correlated. If you think you’re protected, you’re going to engage in sex more often without real protection than you would if you knew you were just 15 minutes away from being a parent.

NeroWolfe 9 Jun 2024 22:48 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: O O’s comment on: What if a tech company forced you to move to NYC?
I think the point by the OP is that while YOU might think NYC is a great place, not everybody does. One of the nice things about the current model is that you can move to NYC if you want to, but you don’t have to. In the hypothetical All-AGI All Around The World future, you get moved there whether or not you like it. Some people will, but it’s worth thinking about the people who won’t like it and consider what you might do to make that future better for them as well.

NeroWolfe 23 May 2024 20:54 UTC
1 point
0
on: Power Law Policy
Your black table of income levels and taxes paid has something wrong with it. I looked at the Tax Foundation link you provide, and it says something rather different from what you report.
Here is how I read their numbers compared to yours
Top 5%: 23.3% rate vs. your 18.9%
Top 10%: 21.5% rate vs. your 14.3%
Top 25%: 18.4% rate vs. your 10.3%
Top 50%: 16.2% rate vs. your 7.2%
I also note that your row for School Teachers has the same bracket as truck drivers and police officers, but the rate for teachers is from the next bracket up.

NeroWolfe 6 May 2024 19:08 UTC
1 point
0
on: Effective Altruism Miami—Crispr’ing Green Yeast
I hope you market it under the name Soylent.

NeroWolfe 7 Apr 2024 0:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: Vanessa Kosoy’s Shortform
Why do you think that the space colonists would be able to create a utopian society just because they are not on earth? You will still have all the same types of people up there as down here, and they will continue to exhibit the Seven Deadly Sins. They will just be in a much smaller and more fragile environment, most likely making the consequences of bad behavior worse than here on earth.

NeroWolfe 25 Mar 2024 14:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice
So, does this mean that you have descended past “We need to eliminate the suffering of fruit flies” and gone straight for “We need to eliminate the suffering of atomic nuclei that are forced to fuse together?” This seems like a pretty wildly wrong view, and not because rectifying the problem is beyond our technological abilities. It seems like there is plenty of human suffering to attend to without having to invent new kinds of suffering based on atoms in the sun.

NeroWolfe 3 Mar 2024 15:38 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Increasing IQ is trivial
I saw that too and I don’t think it’s a nitpick. All of that was raised in support of the idea that human limits are much greater than we think, so having a couple of examples that are off by a factor of two is not a small difference. In addition to the wild claims about a human with 350 kg of muscle mass, I know the world record for unequipped deadlift is just shy of 1,100 pounds/500kg. “Lifting a car” can’t mean picking it off the ground entirely no matter how small it is; my Miata weighs about 2,400 pounds and other than something like a Lotus Elise it’s right at the lowest weight available. I’m willing to buy “picking up the back of a tiny car while leaving the front wheels on the ground, but again that’s not what you implied.

I have no idea about whether you raised your IQ with your method, but the exaggeration of facts I do know makes me suspicious.

NeroWolfe 23 Feb 2024 15:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Retirement Accounts and Short Timelines
I may have used too much shorthand here. I agree that flying cars are impractical for the reasons you suggest. I also agree that anybody who can justify it uses a helicopter, which is akin to a flying car.
According to Wikipedia, this is not a concept that first took off (hah!) in the 1970s—there have been working prototypes since at least the mid-1930s. The point of mentioning the idea is that it represents a cautionary tale about how hard it is to make predictions, especially about the future. When cars became widely used (certainly post-WWII), futurists started predicting what transportation tech would look like, and flying cars were one of the big topics. The fact that they’re impractical didn’t occur to many of the people making predictions.
I have a strong suspicion that there are flaws in current reasoning about the future, especially as it relates to the threat of AGI. Recall that there was a round of AI hype back in the 1980s that fizzled out when it became clear nothing much worked beyond the toy systems. I think there are good reasons to believe we’re in a very dangerous time, but I think there are also reasons to believe that we’ll figure it out before we all kill ourselves. Frankly, I’m more concerned about global warming, as that requires absolutely no new technology nor policy changes to be able to kill us or at least put a real dent in global human happiness.
My point is simply that deciding that we’re 95% likely to die in the next five years is probably wrong, and if you base your entire set of life choices on that prediction, you are going to be surprised when it turns out differently.
Also, I’m not strongly invested in convincing others of this fact, partly because I don’t think I have any special lock on predicting the future. I’m just suggesting you look back farther than 1980 for examples of how people expected things to turn out vs. how they actually did and factor that into your calculations.
[Small edit in the first paragraph for clearer wording]

NeroWolfe 22 Feb 2024 16:29 UTC
16 points
2
on: Retirement Accounts and Short Timelines
I gather from the recent census article that most of the readers of this site are significantly younger than I am, so I’ll relay some first-hand experiences you probably didn’t live through.
I was born in 1964. The Cuban Missle Crisis was only a few years in the past, and Kennedy had just been shot, possibly by Russians, or The Mob, or whomever. Continuing through at least the end of the Cold War in 1989, there was significant public opinion that we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust (or Nuclear Winter), so really, what was the point in making long-term plans?
Spoiler: things worked out better than expected, although not without significant bumps along the way. Spending all your money on hookers and blow because you might as well enjoy yourself now would not have been a solid investment strategy.
Now, much like the AGI/ASI threat, the nuclear threat could have actually played out. There were other close calls where we (or they) thought the attack had started already (Vasily Arkhipov comes to mind), and of course, Death From AI could well happen. However, you should probably hedge your bets to a certain extent just in case you manage to live to retirement age. Remember, we still don’t have flying cars.

NeroWolfe 21 Feb 2024 15:23 UTC
2 points
1
on: Abs-E (or, speak only in the positive)
I see a problem with this approach when the speaker does not know the answer to the question:
Under Abs-E, binary questions (“yes”-or-”no”) are less obvious to answer. If your answer would ordinarily be “no”, you must instead reply as if the question was open-ended. For example, your reply to “will you be here tomorrow?” may be “yes”, or “I will be in the office tomorrow”, or “I will stay home tomorrow”. This forces you to speak with more information.
How do you respond when you don’t know what you will be doing tomorrow? This could be a case where you haven’t made up your mind yet (in which case “I will decide on that later” is a valid answer), or it could be because you genuinely don’t have the information and have no way to find it. “What will the closing price of Apple be at the end of the year?” is difficult to answer as far as I can tell, especially if the person asking the question thinks you should know the answer. “You will have to wait for the end of the year before you can know that” doesn’t convey the same information as “Short of stock manipulation, nobody can know the answer to that until the time comes.” The first one could mean that I know the answer but choose not to tell you, while the second one conveys the more reasonable claim that the question cannot be answered in advance.
So, I think this is an interesting thought experiment, but I suspect that the amount of time spent mentally rewording everything before you speak will outweigh any positive value.

NeroWolfe 12 Feb 2024 20:58 UTC
13 points
8
in reply to: datawitch’s comment on: I played the AI box game as the Gatekeeper — and lost
But the big caveat is the exception “with the consent of both parties.” I realize that Eliezer doesn’t want to play against all comers, but presumably, nobody is expecting Ra and Datawitch to defend themselves against random members of the public.
I’m willing to believe that the “AI” can win this game since we have multiple claims to have done that, so knowing the method seems like it would benefit everybody.
[edited to fix a misspelling of Eliezer’s name]

NeroWolfe 2 Dec 2023 23:09 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: jimv’s comment on: Sherlockian Abduction Master List
In what way is rugby wildly different from combat :-)

NeroWolfe 2 Nov 2023 20:10 UTC
1 point
0
on: My thoughts on the social response to AI risk
I’m skeptical that the government regulation will amount to much that addresses the main problems. Highly profitable industries have routinely engaged in regulatory capture, often for decades, before things are bad enough that the population as a whole demands change. Oil and gas companies, pharmaceutical companies, etc., all come to mind as current examples of “regulated” industries that do pretty much what they like. Before that we had examples like tobacco, asbestos, narcotics-laced health tonics, etc., that took decades before they were really impeded by regulations. Politicians, at least in the U.S., are coin-operated and will put a finger on the scale in whatever direction results in their maximum profit.
Also, note that the examples above are pretty well-understood issues with little technical nuance. The examples of government regulation of technology are even worse; technology advances so much more quickly than legislation that the regulators are generally fighting the last war. I mean, I’m glad that the US Congress decided that it was OK for consumers to use Betamax recorders to tape TV shows and skip the commercials, but I’m not sure they’re going to get any agreement on technical aspects of AI while those particular issues are still relevant.

NeroWolfe 12 Oct 2023 17:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Soulmate Fermi Estimate + My A(ltr)u[t]istic Mating Strategy
Don’t underestimate the value of a red-headed woman...

NeroWolfe 11 Oct 2023 18:02 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: David Hornbein’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
And we knew it is the plural form of “medium,” which is isomorphic to the message.

NeroWolfe 3 Oct 2023 18:38 UTC
7 points
5
on: Why We Use Money? - A Walrasian View
This is a good presentation of the idea. However, I think there are a few important things missing from the discussion:
- Divisibility of goods for barter. You mention it briefly, but this seems like a big reason to pick an arbitrary accounting unit that can be subdivided at will.
- Portability. Theoretically, we could agree on grains of wheat as the accounting unit since they are sufficiently fine-grained(hah!) to avoid the divisibility problem. However, having to haul 100 tons of grain down to the auto dealer is pretty inconvenient.
- Time-shifting. Again, you touch on this near the end, but one of the reasons that gold and/or silver have been used is that they don’t decay (and it’s not possible to print more of it). If I want to ensure I have access to a slice of cherry pie every day next year, I can’t exactly buy 45 pies today and put them in the cupboard. Being able to exchange my oranges today for silver and then the silver for a slice of pie next year is a win.