Nicolas Rasmont

Karma: 51

Nicolas Rasmont 26 May 2026 19:23 UTC
3 points
0
on: Will we really put data centers in space?
The calculation in Appendix E is wrong. The Earth emits longwave radiation, which are at roughly the same wavelength as the emissions of the radiator itself. Per Kirchhoff’s law, the spectral emissivity equals the spectral absorptivity. Therefore, the correct heat flux due to Earth itself radiating is epsilon x F x sigma x T_earth^4, not alpha x F x sigma x T_earth^4. The contribution from reflected solar radiation due to Earth’s albedo is correct, however. The heat flux from infrared radiation from Earth is then 53W/m2 instead of the ~5W/m2 your model spits out. It reduces the net rejected power by about 8% in the 20C case, from 633 W/m2 to 585 W/m2. Not enough to change the overall argument, but having the correct physics is always good.

Nicolas Rasmont 21 May 2026 22:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: distbit’s comment on: Futarchy is Parasitic on What It Tries to Govern
Thank you for your interest in my article! I appreciate it.

Your proposal, if I understand it correctly, is this: instead of market participants having to put real money in the system, and then being reimbursed if the bets are off (the naive randomization I and Hanson assumed), you propose that everyone can place unfunded orders at any time. If the bets are off, nothing happen, if they are on, everyone receives a bill for the full amount they ordered, all at once. Alternatively, everyone uses borrowed money to bet on margin, which is essentially the same thing.

You are correct that this does equalize the carry cost between the market manipulator insider and the arbitrageur outsider, which make it possible to profit off arbitrage that are small relative to 1/epsilon (but larger than the carry cost).

The main problem is that removing the requirement to secure the bets basically destroys the epistemic argument underpinning futarchy, which is that real money at play creates skin in the game forcing market participants to trade honestly. Under universal margin, no one has to trade real money to move this price. If the participants can default on their obligations to the platforms after the bets are executed, then skin in the game is largely fictional. If the platform requires some form of collateral, then capital requirements are back on the table.

Nicolas Rasmont 11 Feb 2026 21:52 UTC
6 points
2
on: Is a constitution a “noble lie”?
It can be dangerous at the symbolic level, in that political legitimacy needs to pretend to rest on something even if it is in practice circular. This is an is-ought gap problem: the government is legitimate because you obey the government without resistance (descriptive), and you obey the government without resistance because it is legitimate (normative). This second part is, yes, dependent on what one thinks about what makes the government legitimate. Embracing the circularity is unstable. A totalitarian state and a democracy would both be legitimate as long as people don’t protest. But what if people do protest? You need an idea that will pull citizens to obey the government by default, even if it goes against their immediate self-interest, even if many others disagree.
In the US, the constitution is part of this stabilizing idea. It’s not the only part, but it got a sacred character that goes far beyond what constitutions in other places get. This sacralization is in many way unrelated to the practical content of the document as a set of basic rules for a government. Sure, the 1st, 4th, 5th amendments are good ideas, the 3rd is downright obsolete, and the 2nd is contentious. But because the rules are all we got, they become a focal point for coordination, and pointing out that the words on the page might be confused, or obsolete, or unrelated to how we employ them today, is considered gauche.
Is it dangerous to point out? Not more nor less than other forms of critical theory. Is widespread knowledge of Foucault dangerous for the legitimacy of psychiatry, of Judith Butler for gendered norms? Kinda, but those institutions are functionally robust in other ways. The Psmiths are riding the coattails of the entirety of sociology and political science here. I would flip the causal arrow: in most cases, dissatisfaction with existing institutions leverages critical theory to attack them. But the failure of existing institutions causes the unrest, not critical theory itself.

Nicolas Rasmont 3 Feb 2026 5:07 UTC
1 point
0
on: Thoughts the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Maths
Richard Hamming provided a (formalist) response to Wigner’s argument about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in this 1980 paper, which was helpfully expanded upon by Derek Abbott in 2013. The core point is that despite the appearances, mathematized science answers comparatively little about the world, and that both the mathematics we use and the phenomena we apply those mathematics to are probably parochial to our cognitive processes. Mathematics is, in this view, a powerful tool rather than the underlying truth of the universe, and we shouldn’t be surprised it managed to drive a few nails really well.

Nicolas Rasmont 28 Jan 2026 19:40 UTC
3 points
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on: Is the Gell-Mann effect overrated?
I wonder if Gell-Mann amnesia might be more historically contingent than people assume.
When Crichton coined the term in 2002, (scientific) information was a lot less accessible, because the internet was more niche, and social media did not exist. Traditional media (including print) was also a much larger field than today, in part because you couldn’t just check twitter to learn about current events. People had no independent means of fact-checking a claim made in their dailies. Journalists, in turn, had access to much sparser resources on any given topic and much less oversight for accuracy.
I suspect that the press was generally less accurate in Crichton’s time than today. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal survived because they were top-tier newspapers, more accurate than the rest of the press. They could rely on this reputation to survive the broader press crisis. But the many mid-size newspapers were less accurate and simply didn’t survive.

Nicolas Rasmont 28 Jan 2026 7:16 UTC
10 points
1
on: The Window for Political Revolution is Closing Soon
I do not think you are necessarily wrong in general, but this is part of a much larger class of concerns about “lock-in” and path dependency after ASI is achieved. I mean, it’s supposed to be “the last invention” : a lot of arrangements will be hard or impossible to change after ASI is achieved, including political arrangements. I think that’s why the field of alignment as a whole is concerned about making sure things are right before ASI is achieved. Murderbots being on the table against political opposition counts as a form of misalignment.

I think you are just wrong about swarming. Revolutions do not work by zerg rushing since… the invention of grapeshot, at least. Information cascades can and have led to regime change from a very small group of committed activists, if the legitimacy of the regime is shaky enough.

That being said, the deeper point stands, and I agree that ASI would obliterate most modes of political actions viable today via labor power and the implicit threat of regime change, including, if misaligned enough (totalitarian surveillance+murderbots), information cascades. More broadly, I haven’t seen enough discussion of what the political economics of the post-ASI world should look like and how to actually get there. Again, once arrangements have congealed in place, it will be probably very difficult to change.

Nicolas Rasmont 27 Jan 2026 18:11 UTC
6 points
1
on: My favourite version of an international AGI project
I really like the comparison to Intelsat. The best examples of institutions working well are usually those we do not know about because… working well is boring! But what do you think we should learn from the failure of the Baruch Plan, which also aimed at international control of a strategic technology (nuclear energy), and failed because the race dynamics it was supposed to prevent had already started? Seems like the race to AGI is already on between the US and China.

Nicolas Rasmont 26 Jan 2026 19:42 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Optimization Process’s comment on: How accurate a model of the refrigeration cycle is this doodle?
No problem at all!
Small point of terminology: “partial pressure” only makes sense in multi-species mixtures, but most refrigerants are single-species. The correct terms are 1) pressure as a descriptive term for the state of the refrigerant and 2) vapor pressure specifically for the equilibrium condition at a given temperature.
regarding your questions:
1. I have been a bit imprecise here. at the exit of the valve/entrance of the evaporator, the droplets are in thermodynamic equilibrium with the vapor, in the sense that there is no macroscopic vaporization (i.e. there is as much mass going from the liquid to the vapor as there is going from the vapor to the liquid). Vaporization happened inside the valve, during the Joule-Thomson process, which I am sure you have heard of at this point. The refrigerant went from all-liquid before the valve, to a partial mixture of liquid and vapor after the valve. both states are in equilibrium, or at least should be in a properly designed system.
2. The vaporization does happen mostly through direct conduction between the surface of the evaporator and the droplets in practice, but that’s not exactly what I meant. I wanted to say that the causal arrow is heat transfer from the outside causes the complete evaporation, not complete evaporation then heat transfer from the outside as your diagram shows. Even if no liquid droplets touch the walls of the evaporator, the heat transfer to the gaseous refrigerant would warm the gas, which would warm the droplets, which would evaporates, which would cool the gas, which would take heat from the walls, etc.
Thermodynamically, the process is the same as if you have direct wall-liquid contact: you have an amount of heat being used to transform the fluid from a partial vapor-liquid mixture to a complete vapor state.

So your update is mostly correct, except that the droplets usually vaporize “inside the valve”, not “immediately after the valve”. But that is not really relevant to the high-level physics. It depends on whether you have an orifice valve or a porous plug valve, where “the valve” begins and ends in your system, how quickly your refrigerant reaches equilibrium, which itself depends on your valve design, on turbulent mixing properties, on heat transfer properties, etc.

Nicolas Rasmont 26 Jan 2026 7:19 UTC
13 points
2
on: How accurate a model of the refrigeration cycle is this doodle?
Trying to understand refrigeration through statistical mechanics (i.e. what happens to each molecule), as you are trying here is going to be a bit tricky. Refrigeration is really best explained by classical thermodynamics, using properties of the fluid like enthalpy, pressure, entropy, etc. which themselves can be understood using statistical mechanics. As a matter of fact, the vapor-compression cycle was invented before Boltzmann’s theory.
Two significant mistakes in your diagram:
- after the expansion valve, the droplets are not floating in “free space”. They are in an environment where the pressure is low enough that they can vaporize, but this is still in the continuum regime. There are plenty of refrigerant molecules around, the system is a vapor+liquid saturated equilibrium. (It is also best to understand that the valve enforces the low pressure by restricting the flow of refrigerant, rather than the compressor creating it, in a causal sense, but that’s mostly nitpicking)
- the refrigerant droplets vaporize completely because of heat transfer from the outside in the evaporator, not vaporizing THEN absorbing heat from the outside. That’s the crux that makes the vapor-compression cycle so efficient: the heat is transferred from the outside to the refrigerant and from the refrigerant to the outside during phase changes (evaporation and condensation) at constant temperature.
My advice for understanding the vapor-compression cycle:
1. vaporizing a liquid requires a lot of energy (the enthalpy of vaporization). At constant pressure, this energy can be provided as heat, like boiling a pot of water (the stove provides energy).
2. Symmetrically, condensing a gas releases the same amount of energy, which at constant pressure is provided as heat, like water condensing on a cold mirror.
3. The boiling point of a substance varies as a function of pressure: at low pressure, the boiling point is low, at high pressure, the boiling point is high.
4. Refrigeration consists in vaporizing a liquid at low pressure, hereby sucking a lot of energy from the environment at cold temperature, and then condensing this same vapor back into a liquid at high pressure, therefore releasing the same amount of energy (plus compressor waste heat and other inefficiencies) into the environment at a higher temperature.
The compressor and the valve are there to enforce this pressure differential between the hot side and the cold side.