noggin-scratcher

Karma: 924

noggin-scratcher 15 Oct 2025 13:27 UTC
5 points
0
on: Can LLMs Coordinate? A Simple Schelling Point Experiment
For “Springfield”, is this just based on the Simpsons or is there some other context that I’m missing (coming from Norway)?
If memory serves, they chose that name in the Simpsons because it’s an oddly common name, with a small town by that name in 30+ different states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(toponym)
As it mentions there, “Fairview” and “Midway” are even more common, but I guess there’s more of a meme about “Springfield” being very common (sometimes inaccurately said that there’s one in every state)

noggin-scratcher 10 Oct 2025 22:44 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Charlie Edwards’s comment on: Top Warning Signs Your Friends are Being Oneshotted By AI
We make efforts with the automod, but it’s a fairly rudimentary tool. Mostly a keyword/regex matcher.
So we can have it automatically look for some of the common repeated phrases (relatively few of our human users say “That’s a great question”). If it’s a weak signal maybe it only highlights them for mod review rather than fully automatically removing them.
But otherwise it relies on the human eye to spot them being weird. Especially when the comments are too short for AI detectors to get a good read on it (deciding what’s suspicious enough to run through a detector is itself done by eye).

noggin-scratcher 7 Oct 2025 16:17 UTC
3 points
0
on: Top Warning Signs Your Friends are Being Oneshotted By AI
NB: suspishously good grammer is now becuming an AI sign in itself
I moderate for a subreddit where, despite our best efforts to purge them with holy fire, AI spambots are rife (trying to act inconspicuous and get some karma). In addition to the “suspiciously good grammar and bullet points and em dashes” type, there’s conversely also a strain of them that use a gimmicky level of slang.
Where most of the tone of the subreddit is explanatory/informative, and most people are using standard spelling/grammar, they drop in with “ngl bro honestly the vibes are wild fr”

noggin-scratcher 21 Sep 2025 8:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: Day #8 Hunger Strike, Protest Against Superintelligent AI
At acknowledged risk of sounding like an evil robot, what’s the theory of change that links this action to the desired outcome?
Traditionally the logic of a hunger strike is that it applies pressure to the target because they have sufficient conscience that they don’t want to watch you die, or at least don’t want to be viewed as responsible for your death, or don’t want to create a “martyr”. If you openly say from the outset that you don’t intend to fast to death or detriment, what motivates the relevant decision makers to change their actions?

noggin-scratcher 2 Sep 2025 19:52 UTC
9 points
5
on: Structural engineering in software engineering
My first thought was that the “ground beneath your feet”, that might move around more than you initially expected, would be the libraries and dependencies you call on; other people’s code that your code relies on. You might see old methods become deprecated in ways that break your use of them—or new methods introduced that you want to switch to, for efficiency gains or other reasons.
Which can be mitigated by some forethought to put in a layer of abstraction that wraps around the library, so that you only have to change how you call the library in the wrapper, without changing the rest of the code. But can also be taken too far (if you put a wrapper around all kinds of really basic functions, just creating extra cruft for no good reason).
Can also suffer from “leaky” abstractions, if your wrapper makes assumptions about the library that don’t hold up, or if the code calling the wrapper needs to still know about the underlying library to work right. Not sure quite what the analogy to a building foundation would be there—I guess if you thought your big concrete slab was trustworthy as an immovable foundation, but then it turned out that big concrete slabs on top of dirt behave importantly differently to big concrete slabs on sand.

noggin-scratcher 17 Aug 2025 17:06 UTC
1 point
0
on: Plan E for AI Doom
and we adhere to these principles
Do we though? As a species? I suppose we can claim to, as part of a transmission to try to persuade aliens of our niceness. But if they’re able to receive and decode a transmission it seems like there’s reasonable odds they’ll also have other observations of us that demonstrate our less worthy aspects.

noggin-scratcher 11 Jun 2025 12:43 UTC
3 points
0
on: Using AI Video Generation to Re-create Memories
I would be concerned about the risk that details fabricated by the AI come to be confused with the actual organic memory. Memory can be malleable and an invented image could well somewhat overwrite what you remember.

noggin-scratcher 26 May 2025 9:15 UTC
3 points
2
on: Beyond Democracy: A System Where Citizens Vote with Their Taxes
Wealthier people have different concerns and interests than poor people. So any system making voting power proportional to wealth is liable to result in the upper class voting through changes that defund various forms of assistance/subsidy for low incomes. Including things that are broadly socially desirable, but the wealthy aren’t using.
Like what already happens by way of representatives paying more attention to wealthy constituents, business owners, and donors—but even moreso by formalising their ability to simply directly vote with their money.

noggin-scratcher 12 May 2025 20:14 UTC
31 points
20
on: PSA: The LessWrong Feedback Service
Cool service/feature, but would it be worth defusing the “jumpscare” with an interstitial that explains the function of the button? At least the first time any given user clicks it.

noggin-scratcher 28 Apr 2025 21:34 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: mishka’s comment on: “A victory for the natural order”
Found it: https://preservinghope.substack.com/p/a-victory-for-the-natural-order

noggin-scratcher 11 Mar 2025 10:42 UTC
3 points
2
on: Stress exists only where the Mind makes it
How should we speak about “stressful events”? Maybe instead of, “buying a plane ticket is stressful”, something like, “buying a plane ticket made me stressed.” But the word “made” implies inevitability and still cedes too much power to the event
“I am feeling stressed about buying a plane ticket” would acknowledge that the stress is coming from within you as an individual, and doesn’t foreclose the possibility of instead not feeling stressed.

noggin-scratcher 6 Mar 2025 2:55 UTC
1 point
0
on: Sparks of Original Thought?
Pretty sure I’ve seen this particular case discussed here previously, and the conclusion was that actually they had published something related already, and fed it to the “co-scientist” AI. So it was synthesising/interpolating from information it had been given, rather than generating fully novel ideas.
Per NewScientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2469072-can-googles-new-research-assistant-ai-give-scientists-superpowers/
However, the team did publish a paper in 2023 – which was fed to the system – about how this family of mobile genetic elements “steals bacteriophage tails to spread in nature”. At the time, the researchers thought the elements were limited to acquiring tails from phages infecting the same cell. Only later did they discover the elements can pick up tails floating around outside cells, too.
So one explanation for how the AI co-scientist came up with the right answer is that it missed the apparent limitation that stopped the humans getting it.
What is clear is that it was fed everything it needed to find the answer, rather than coming up with an entirely new idea. “Everything was already published, but in different bits,” says Penadés. “The system was able to put everything together.”
That was concerning the main hypothesis that agreed with their work. Unknown whether the same is also true for its additional hypotheses. But I’m sceptical by default of the claim that it couldn’t possibly have come from the training data, or that they definitely didn’t inadvertently hint at things with data they provided.

noggin-scratcher 2 Mar 2025 14:47 UTC
1 point
0
on: Not-yet-falsifiable beliefs?
Technically it’s still never falsifiable. It can be verifiable, if true, upon finding yourself in an afterlife after death. But if it’s false then you don’t observe it being false when you cease existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatological_verification
If we define a category of beliefs that are currently neither verifiable or falsifiable, but might eventually become verifiable if they happen to be true, but won’t be falsifiable even if they’re false—that category potentially includes an awful lot of invisible pink dragons and orbiting teapots (who knows, perhaps one day we’ll invent better teapot detectors and find it). So I don’t see it as a strong argument for putting credence in such ideas.

noggin-scratcher 2 Feb 2025 21:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: National Security Is Not International Security: A Critique of AGI Realism
Looks like #6 in the TL;DRs section is accidentally duplicated (with the repeat numbered as #7)

noggin-scratcher 23 Jan 2025 1:23 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Mechanisms too simple for humans to design
Solid point. I realise I was unclear that for face shape I had in mind external influences in utero (while the bones of the face are growing into place in the fetus). Which would at least be a somewhat shared environment between twins. But nonetheless, changing my mind in real-time, because I would have expected more difference from one side of a womb to the other than we actually see between twins.
Even if I’m mistaken about faces though, I don’t think I’m wrong about brains, or humans in general.

noggin-scratcher 22 Jan 2025 21:58 UTC
3 points
−2
on: Mechanisms too simple for humans to design
In other words, all the information that controls the shape of your face, your bones, your organs and every single enzyme inside them – all of that takes less storage space than Microsoft Word™.
The shape of your face, and much else besides, will be affected by random chance and environmental influences during the process of development and growth.
The eventual details of the brain, likewise, will be in large part a response to the environment—developing and learning from experience.
So the final complexity of a human being is not actually bounded by the data contained in the genome, in the way described.

noggin-scratcher 6 Jan 2025 18:17 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Meal Replacements in 2025?
I wasn’t the one eating it, but having prepared a couple of Huel’s “hot meal pot/pouch” options for my partner (I forget which ones exactly, but something in the way of mac & cheese or pasta bolognese), I can report that I found the smell coming off it to be profoundly unappetising.
Not sure how they went down with her, but there’s a small stash of these pots in the cupboard that she hasn’t touched beyond the first few—so I suspect not very well.

noggin-scratcher 3 Jan 2025 1:36 UTC
1 point
0
on: 4. Uphold Voluntarism: Physical Defense
Slight glitches:

The “chapter shortcuts” section of https://www.lesswrong.com/s/9SJM9cdgapDybPksi lists “editPost” links to the chapter drafts (inaccessible to others)

The numbering in the post titles skip over #4

noggin-scratcher 31 Dec 2024 2:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: Linkpost: Look at the Water
Oh I was very on board with the sarcasm. Although as a graduate of one of them, I obviously can’t believe you’re rating the other one so highly.

noggin-scratcher 30 Dec 2024 23:04 UTC
3 points
0
on: Linkpost: Look at the Water

This is a general principal

Principle* — unless they’re the head-teacher of a school, the type to be involved in a principal/agent problem, or otherwise the “first”

graduates of the great English universities (both of them)

Shots fired