Orioth

Karma: 48

Orioth 16 Apr 2026 14:20 UTC
9 points
0
on: Do not conquer what you cannot defend
King George III of Great Britain called him “the greatest man in the world” upon hearing the news
History trivia: There seem to be two versions of this story out there; a quick internet search suggests that they both come from the same person recounting a conversation with King George III but telling the story differently on different occasions.
In the one I originally heard, and have heard more often, the remark “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world” was not about Washington declining to run for a third term, but rather about the news that Washington—having won the Revolutionary War, but not yet president—intended to resign from public life rather than seeking to lead the newly-formed USA.
(And he did retire from public life for some time, before being persuaded to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and then becoming president.)

Orioth 13 Apr 2026 19:59 UTC
11 points
−2
on: Morale
Not sure to what extent I endorse the following, but a thought I’ve had on this topic:

Conservation of expected evidence means that unless you’re reasoning in a predictably incorrect manner or outright deceiving yourself, you can’t deliberately change a belief in a particular direction—any test that could disprove it must also be able to reinforce it, depending on the result.

Insofar as morale is “the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve”, there’s no principled way to, on expectation increase it. You can try working hard and see if your conditions improve, and if they do, you’ll gain morale, but if they don’t, you’ll presumably lose morale.

And this is fine, actually! We tend to presuppose that high morale is good, but sometimes, your conditions are not responsive to being improved by hard work, and when that is the case, isn’t it worth noticing?

So perhaps the lesson is not to try to raise morale, but to keep at least a little bit of an open mind on the question of whether hard work will prove worthwhile, and to be willing to update on that as your situation changes.

Orioth 2 Apr 2026 4:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: Announcing my retirement to a life of entirely failing to desperately seek renewed meaning
There is so much fun I was not having while I was frantically trying to fix everything. Sure, I made enough personal time to get in some good collaborative storytelling, but boy howdy I was not doing nearly enough of it. I cannot wait to see the look on my players’ faces when I tell them about the absurdly ambitious new campaign I’ve cooked up, and it’s only getting better from there now that people will actually have time for things.
People ask me, but Joe, won’t you get bored of writing books and running RPGs? And the exciting thing is, I don’t know! Maybe I will! And then there will be so many new cool things to fascinate me. Having kids! Teaching people stuff! Learning seven different martial arts styles and fusing them into an elegant rainbow of practiced violence! Visiting beautiful places with people I love! Debugging my own thought-patterns to fix problems that have annoyed me for years! Maybe as a personal project I’ll climb every mountain on Earth that begins with the letter G. Then I’ll have more stuff to write about! It’ll be great!
I expected to have more or less this reaction, but in the event, I actually have found it rather demotivating; many (though not all) kinds of fun genuinely were more fun when we had to fit them in between dealing with the big problems.
I think, when you get down to it, part of my motivation to have fun and make art and so on was based on the feeling that it was in some sense important to do so—not as important as averting global crises, sure, and maybe only important to me, but still, in some sense, important. But, well, now everything is going to be okay forever, whether I do any of that or not! If a story really needed to be told, if a song needed to be written, if a game needed to be played, it surely would have already happened, seeing as we’ve solved all possible problems.
So it turns out that a surprising amount of what I’d hoped to get around to after all the problems were solved just seems unnecessary at this point; I think that instead of an approach to life oriented around trying to make or change things, it’s time to turn towards appreciating what’s already there.
So all in all, I’m enjoying the future very much—just not in the way I’d expected!

Orioth 11 Feb 2026 19:49 UTC
1 point
0
on: Announcing Inkhaven 2: April 2026
If you didn’t expect to complete the program, or didn’t expect to like the program, you probably wouldn’t go. My takeaway here is less that Inkhaven is very good and more that the people who might go to Inkhaven are very good at predicting whether it’ll go well for them.

Orioth 15 Aug 2025 16:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)

If you interact with the kind of entity that offers you a better deal if you reject their first offer, and they make an offer before you explain what you’ll do, you just always reject their first offer, explain your strategy to them, and say that it’s in their interest to make a fair offer, and if you probabilistically reject that one, they won’t be able to make more offers.

I’m not convinced that this remains optimal when you’re bargaining with an entity that might offer you a better deal if you reject their first offer for legitimate reasons, rather than in an attempt to exploit your bargaining strategy.

Suppose a deal falls through, your counterparty tries their BATNA, it goes worse than they thought, so they come back and make a better offer than they did the first time. Or maybe they, or you, learn something new regarding the value of the goods being negotiated for. Shouldn’t it be possible to take this into account and reopen negotiations? If not, a lot of mutually beneficial trades become impossible.

But I don’t see a specific strategy that allows for this without being exploitable, since you can’t necessarily tell whether a new offer is prompted by new information or whether it’s just a bargaining tactic.

Orioth 14 Aug 2025 23:14 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
This caused me to get around to writing a comment on the linked How to Give in to Threats post, which I had meant to for a while.

Orioth 14 Aug 2025 23:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
I’d say it’s more like D&D 3.5 than any two of [AD&D, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, D&D 5E] are like each other.

Orioth 14 Aug 2025 22:56 UTC
3 points
0
on: How to Give in to Threats (without incentivizing them)
When somebody offers you a 7:5 split, instead of the 6:6 split that would be fair, you should accept their offer with slightly less than ⁶⁄₇ probability. Their expected value from offering you 7:5, in this case, is 7 * slightly less than ⁶⁄₇, or slightly less than 6. This ensures they can’t do any better by offering you an unfair split; but neither do you try to destroy all their expected value in retaliation. It could be an honest mistake, especially if the real situation is any more complicated than the original Ultimatum Game.
If they offer you 8:4, accept with probability slightly-more-less than ⁶⁄₈, so they do even worse in their own expectation by offering you 8:4 than 7:5.
Having thought about this strategy a bit, one thing I remain uncertain about is how to generalize it to a situation where the other party can try offering you a better deal if you reject the initial offer (or one where you get to make counteroffers, for that matter, which might or might not have the same problem).
If you evaluate subsequent offers independently, then it would seem to be in their interest to open with an offer of 1:11. With slightly less than ⁶⁄₁₁ probability, you accept and they profit; with slightly greater than ⁶⁄₁₁ probability, you say “no deal” and they say “fine, how about 2:10″, and so on until a deal is reached, which will never be better for you than fair, and may be worse.
So obviously you won’t do that.
In this scenario, it’s a pretty transparent exploit, and you can just consider yourself committed to not even consider subsequent worse-than-fair offers after you’ve rejected the first one. But in real life, there may be situations where there’s a perfectly legitimate reason for your counterparty to make you a better offer once you’ve rejected their initial one, and committing to reject those seems like it’ll result in missed opportunities.

Orioth 13 Aug 2025 22:56 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Orioth’s comment on: Orioth’s Shortform
Made some updates to this:
- added songs I remembered folks singing during Less Online and Manifest this year
- tinkered with the categorization
- added links to chords (whatever was the first search result, mostly; I don’t know if there are better or worse chord websites out there) and links to lyrics when lyrics weren’t given on the webpage with the chords

Orioth 3 Jun 2025 18:36 UTC
3 points
0
on: Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout
The terms ‘living money’ and ‘dead money’ seem to include an unwarranted implication that living is better. As I understand it, that framework would count money spent on buying something just because one wants it as ‘dead money’ - there’s no hope of a financial return, it gets used up via paying people to do things and then it’s gone. But being able to spend it to get what one wants is arguably the entire point of money! It’s not clear to me if this generalizes to willpower in this analogy, though.

Orioth 30 May 2025 14:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: David Gross’s comment on: Virtues related to honesty
I think parts of your Notes on Honesty are as close to the post I was trying to write as what I actually wrote was. I wonder if I had some cryptomnesia going on, even. In any case, thanks for writing that and for pointing it out here!

Orioth 30 May 2025 14:02 UTC
3 points
0
on: Orioth’s Shortform
What do the Rats Sing?

(A list of songs compiled from impromptu group singing sessions at several rationalist-adjacent events. Anything where the program was decided in advance is excluded from this list. This is all done from memory of events I happened to be at, and I’m more likely to remember songs I’m familiar with.)

Group singing standards
- Country Roads (x3)
- Hallelujah (x2)
- Wellerman (x2)
- Wagon Wheel
- Battle Hymn of the Republic
- Leave Her, Johnny
Songs which were written for Secular Solstice
- Bitter Wind Blown
- When I Die
- A Little Echo
- For the Longest Term
- Our Favorite Things (lyrics, sheet music)
(and see the ‘Filk and filk-adjacent’ and ‘Uncategorized’ sections, which include some that weren’t written for Solstice but are oft sung at it)

Filk and filk-adjacent
- Hymn to the Breaking Strain
- Time Wrote the Rocks (x2)
- Lucifer
- Landsailor
- Somebody Will
- HaMephorash (lyrics, chords)
- What’s it Like to Be a Bat (lyrics nowhere I can find on the internet, chords based on I Am My Own Grandpa)
- Bold Orion
Bob Dylan
- Blowin’ in the Wind
- Make You Feel My Love
- Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
- We went through the whole album Blood on the Tracks that one time:
The Beatles
- Hey Jude (x2)
- Here Comes the Sun (x2)
- Revolution
- With a Little Help From My Friends
- Let It Be
- A Hard Day’s Night
- All You Need is Love
- Imagine (Yes, this is John Lennon solo, but I’m putting it in the Beatles section since he was a Beatle, if not at the time he wrote it.)
Some Manifest Attendees Prefer Modern Pop Music
Uncategorized

Orioth 29 May 2025 0:56 UTC
1 point
−7
on: Orioth’s Shortform
So, in general not having your values changed is an Omohundro goal, right? But would I suggest that if you you change your utility function^[1] from U(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w) or whatever it is, to U(w) = weightedSumSapientSatisfaction(w) + personalHappiness(w) + someIdiosyncraticPreferences(w) + 5000, all your choices that involve explicit expected utility comparisons will come out the same as before, but you’ll be happier.
1. ^
  There are a lot of issues with utility functions as a framing for describing actual human motivations, but bear with me.

Orioth 29 Mar 2025 19:40 UTC
7 points
6
on: Orioth’s Shortform
Ozy Brennan, as quoted by Scott Alexander, as (scripted? transcribed? I’m not quite sure) by Ozy Brennan, says that
[...] Ricardo’s Law Of Comparative Advantage was one of the most inspirational things he’d ever read. This is an economic theorem which says that under ideal frictionless capitalism, even if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can do the thing you’re relatively least worst at, trade with other people, and be guaranteed to make nonzero money. Maybe not very much money, but nonzero. It will mean that your actions have made other people nonzero better off, and they are nonzero grateful to you.
I do not find this inspiring! Under ideal frictionless capitalism, if you’re the worst person in the world at everything, you can make nonzero money, but most likely less then the cost of living, so the most likely outcome is that you die in abject poverty, having in the meantime done some things that made other people nonzero better off, and which might—or might not—outweigh any costly screw ups you may have made or suffering you may have undergone in the process.
And that’s under ideal frictionless capitalism! In the real world this can and does sometimes happen even to people who are pretty good at some things!

Orioth

What do the Rats Sing?

Group singing standards

Songs which were written for Secular Solstice

Filk and filk-adjacent

Bob Dylan

The Beatles

Some Manifest Attendees Prefer Modern Pop Music

Uncategorized