Nition

Karma: 54

Nition 7 Nov 2025 3:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction
A similar post from earlier this year: Someone should fund an AGI Blockbuster.

Nition 28 Oct 2025 19:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: henryaj’s comment on: Don’t Mock Yourself
I recall a comment here on LessWrong where this worked successfully.
I used to have really strong emotions that could be triggered by trivial things, which caused both me and the people I was around a lot of suffering.
I managed to permanently stop this, reducing my emotional suffering by about 90%! I did this by resolving to completely own and deal with my emotions myself, and told relevant people about this commitment. Then I was just pretty miserable and lonely feeling for about 3 months, and then these emotional reactions just stopped completely without any additional effort. I think I permanently lowered my level of neuroticism by doing this.
- Comment by user Adele Lopez, May 2020
The reason I really remember that comment is mainly the follow-up comment by user Alex_Shleizer, which suggests why it might work, and wonders whether this could be even a groundbreaking treatment.
There is research that claims that suffering might serve as an honest signal to get help from your group and that humans suffer more than other animals due to this reason.
You might have taught your system 1 that emotional suffering is useless for signaling purposes and it stopped using it.
If it’s true it could be an extremely impactful and even groundbreaking intervention.

Nition 28 Oct 2025 19:27 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Random Developer’s comment on: Don’t Mock Yourself
Reminds me of how ‘pick-up artists’ have that idea of ‘negging’. Normal friendly people really do often flirt by saying negative things to each other, but they’re never things that they think will actually hurt; most of the time they’re not even really true, it’s more likely sarcastic. It also needs to go both ways. Just straight-up insulting someone in the hope they’ll try to prove themselves to you is a very different thing.

Nition 22 Oct 2025 8:29 UTC
1 point
0
on: Nition’s Shortform
The proliferation of AI bots and content on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, everywhere, is becoming more and more visible and detrimental to the platforms. But it also occurs to me that no AI is choosing to create a Twitter account and start posting, or upload Suno tracks to Spotify, or put AI videos on YouTube. All these choices are still made by humans, mostly with the same old perverse incentive.

Nition 2 Oct 2025 3:02 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mr Beastly’s comment on: The Company Man
It’s actually thought to be something in the region of 4000-20,000 years for the ramp up (seriously). The 200k years includes the whole slow drift back down.

Nition 1 Oct 2025 3:46 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Mr Beastly’s comment on: The Company Man
Well obviously the cleanup nanobots eventually scrubbed all the evidence, then decomposed. :) /s

Nition 30 Sep 2025 21:15 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mr Beastly’s comment on: The Company Man
Yeah. Seems plausible to me to at least some extent, given the way the Internet is already trending (bots, fake content in general). We already get little runaway things, like Wikipedia bots getting stuck reverting each other’s edits. Not hard to imagine some areas of the Internet just becoming not worth interacting with, even if they’re not overloaded in a network traffic sense. But as you say, I’d certainly prefer that to potential much worse outcomes. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Re ancient AGI, I’m no conspiracy theorist, but just for fun check out the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.
p.s. Nice Great Dictator reference.

Nition 30 Sep 2025 2:23 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Mr Beastly’s comment on: The Company Man
I suppose my thinking is more that it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as many of the other potential outcomes. Because yes I certainly agree that we have come to rely on the Internet rather a lot, and there are some very nice things about it too.

p.s. Nice Matrix reference.

Nition 30 Sep 2025 0:43 UTC
1 point
0
on: “Other people are wrong” vs “I am right”
As an example of the first: Once upon a time I told someone I respected that they shouldn’t eat animal products, because of the vast suffering caused by animal farming. He looked over scornfully and told me that it was pretty rich for me to say that, given that I use Apple products—hadn’t I heard about the abusive Apple factory conditions and how they have nets to prevent people killing themselves by jumping off the tops of the factories? I felt terrified that I’d been committing some grave moral sin, and then went off to my room to research the topic for an hour or two. I eventually became convinced that the net effect of buying Apple products on human welfare is probably very slightly positive but small enough to not worry about, and also it didn’t seem to me that there’s a strong deontological argument against doing it.
(I went back and told the guy about the result of me looking into it. He said he didn’t feel interested in the topic anymore and didn’t want to talk about it. I said “wow, man, I feel pretty annoyed by that; you gave me a moral criticism and I took it real seriously; I think it’s bad form to not spend at least a couple minutes hearing about what I found.” Someone else who was in the room, who was very enthusiastic about social justice, came over and berated me for trying to violate someone else’s preferences about not talking about something. I learned something that day about how useful it is to take moral criticism seriously when it’s from people who don’t seem to be very directed by their morals.)
My guess here would be that he felt criticised and simply wanted to criticise back to make himself feel better, so he repeated a talking point he’d heard. Since he likely didn’t actually hold any strong belief one way or the other, you re-entering the argument later only opened him up to potential further criticism, after he already felt he’d got even.

It would be easy to end the thought there and rest happily in the knowledge that $h i m = b a d + d u m b$ and $y o u = g o o d + s m a r t$ , but maybe it’s worth examining your own thoughts also. Were your motivations for going away to research and bring the topic back up later actually as pure as written (i.e. “terrified [of] committing some grave moral sin”)? Or were you partly motivated also by your own chagrin, hoping for a chance to even the score in the other direction by proving that you were right all along? If so, could that even have influenced your final decision that owning Apple products is morally positive?

I don’t mean to criticise you specifically (and I certainly don’t know what you or he were really thinking), but more point out a way people often think in general. It’s worth being careful about how much an argument might come across as an attack, and leaving the other person a way to gracefully admit defeat or bow out of the discussion (I recall expecting that’s what Leave a Line of Retreat from the Sequences was going to be about, but it ended up being about something different). If every argument could be respectful, in good faith, and not based on emotion, things would be a lot better. But alas, we’re only human.

Nition 29 Sep 2025 21:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mr Beastly’s comment on: The Company Man
Considering the high percentage of modern-day concerns that are centered around Internet content, if it manages to only destroy the Internet and materially nothing else, maybe that won’t actually be so bad. Let me download an offline copy of Wikipedia first please though.

Nition 9 Aug 2025 4:23 UTC
6 points
0
on: Nition’s Shortform
Is there any existing name for the kind of logical fallacy where one who actually considers whether they can achieve a thing is criticised above one who simply claims they’ll do the thing and doesn’t?

Examples abound in politics but here’s one concrete example:

In 2007 the UN passed the “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”. New Zealand, which was already putting some significant effort into supporting the rights of its indigenous people, genuinely considered whether they would be able to hold up the requirements of the declaration, and decided not to sign due to it being incredibly broad[1]. Many other countries, not doing much for their own indigenous people and recognising the declaration as non-binding, simply signed it essentially for the good vibes. As a result, New Zealand was criticised for not being willing to sign while others were, and was eventually pressured into signing (for the good vibes).

[1] See e.g. https://www.converge.org.nz/pma/decleov07.pdf For example the entire country could feasibly fall under the requirements for returning land to indigenous people.

Nition 31 Jul 2025 22:34 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Someone should fund an AGI Blockbuster
Sorry yeah, I was just joking, of course that very much shouldn’t be the actual plot of the film. Just seemed funny because Yudkowsky was thinking about these things long before most people were. Good lesson that I shouldn’t treat LessWrong discussion like a Reddit discussion.

Nition 31 Jul 2025 22:23 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Someone should fund an AGI Blockbuster
It’s Yudkowsky that’s sent back. He starts a movement called LessWrong to get people thinking about AI risk. He takes a huge time-paradox gamble in writing a book directly called “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. But somehow it’s still happening.

Edit: To clarify, this isn’t an actual plot suggestion. Just seemed funny to me because Yudkowsky was thinking about these things long before most people were. I put some real thoughts on plot in my other comment here.

Nition 31 Jul 2025 9:47 UTC
2 points
0
on: Someone should fund an AGI Blockbuster
Thank you for writing this up, as I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while.

Totally agree re “slowburn realism”. Start with things exactly as they are today. Then move to things that will likely happen soon, so that when those things do happen, people will be thinking directly back to the film they saw recently. Keep escalating until you get to whatever ending works—maybe something like AI2027, maybe something like in A Disneyland Without Children.
It doesn’t even have to be a scenario where the AI is intentionally evil. We’ve had a thousand of those films already. An AI that’s just trying to do what it’s been told but is misaligned might be even scarier. No-one’s done a paperclip maximiser film.

Whatever ends up destroying us in the script, if you must have a not-totally-bleak ending, maybe the main characters manage to escape into space. Maybe they look back to watch a grey mass visibly spreading across the green Earth.
What links here?
- Nition's comment on Someone should fund an AGI Blockbuster by pinto (31 Jul 2025 22:23 UTC; 2 points)

Nition 27 Jul 2025 1:57 UTC
7 points
0
on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
From what I remember it was the jump to Azkaban that seemed like a jarring escalation when I read the story, more than the Quirrell thing. Felt like it should be more overwhelming to Harry, going from relatively normal magic school life to terrifying evil prison.

Nition 16 Jul 2025 23:55 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: NicholasKees’s comment on: Why haven’t we auto-translated all AI alignment content?
Or a forum where people can discuss AI in whatever language they prefer, and things are automatically translated between users?
Cool idea. I’ve never seen this done, yet it sounds very achievable with today’s tech. I presume you’d set your desired language to whatever you prefer, and every post would now appear in that language, either natively or auto-translated. Put a little “translated from x, click here to view original” on each auto-translated post. Write your own posts in whatever language you like and everyone would see them in their preferred language.

Nition 13 Jul 2025 23:09 UTC
25 points
4
on: the jackpot age
Another simple way to understand why the coin flip scenario makes you lose money: If you have $100, double it with heads to $200, then lose 60% on tails, you have $80 - less than you started with.

Nition 6 Jul 2025 21:49 UTC
1 point
0
on: New Improved Lottery
Reading this post today feels like a prophecy for the rise of reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets

Nition 5 Jul 2025 22:30 UTC
1 point
−3
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Foom & Doom 1: “Brain in a box in a basement”
I suspect this is why many people’s P(Doom) is still under 50% - not so much that ASI probably won’t destroy us, but simply that we won’t get to ASI at all any time soon. Although I’ve seen P(Doom) given a standard time range of the next 100 years, which is a rather long time! But I still suspect some are thinking directly about the recent future and LLMs without extrapolating too much beyond that.

Nition 1 Jul 2025 1:47 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Nition’s Shortform
Thanks! I hadn’t read that one before; it’s a good point that more intelligence is required to be able to predict what any specific person might say than the intelligence of that person themselves. Having said that, I’m not convinced that a model trained on human text being super-intelligent at predicting human text necessarily means it can break out above human-level thinking.

If we discovered an intelligent alien species tomorrow, would we expect LLMs to be able to predict their next word? I’m fairly confident that the answer is “only if they thought very much like we do, just in a different language.” Similarly, my suspicion is that a what-would-a-human-say predictor can never be a what-would-a-superintelligence-say predictor—or at least, only a predictor of what a human thinks a superintelligence would say.