philh

• philh 25 Aug 2025 11:30 UTC

  16 points

  12

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  But you’re not doing that. You’re trying to make the case that you are objectively right to feel that way, that you have succeeded at a Sense Motive check to detect a pattern of emotions and intentions that are really there. I don’t agree with you, about that.

  I think the claim I’d make is not necessarily that Oli’s Sense Motive check has succeeded, but that Oli’s Sense Motive check correlates much better with other people’s Sense Motive checks than yours does, and that ultimately that’s what ends up mattering for the effects on discourse.

  Like, in the sense that someone’s motives approximately only affect LessWrong by affecting the words that they write. So when we know the words they write, knowing their motives doesn’t give us any more information about how they’re going to affect LessWrong. For some people, there’s something like… “okay, if this person actually felt disdain then the words they write in future are likely to be _, and if not they’re likely to be _ instead; and we can probably even shift the distribution if we ask them hey we detect disdain from your comment, is that intended?”. But we don’t really have that uncertainty with Said. We know how he’s going to write, whether he feels disdain or not.

  I am somewhat interested in his True Motives, but I don’t think they should be relevant to LW moderation.

  (This is not intended to say “Said’s comments are just fine except that people detect disdain”.)

• philh 25 Aug 2025 10:59 UTC

  8 points

  6

  in reply to: Alex Vermillion’s comment on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  people who haven’t interacted with Said

  Well, this is someone who hasn’t interacted with Said in the sense of exchanging words. They have interacted with him in the sense that Said’s comments have marginally changed the trajectory of thir life. (So maybe we say they haven’t interacted with Said but Said has interacted with them? But that seems like the more important direction here.)

  Like, some rando who never heard of LW or Said Achmiz chiming in to say “I would have found Said unpleasant if I’d been here” would feel a bit weird to me. Not off topic but also not very meaningful, and I’d be worried about selection effects. (Which I take to be the bad dynamics you’re thinking of. “We don’t get an unbiased sample of randos, so it’s hard to tell what randos-in-aggregate think.”)

  But here… sure, there’s still some chance of selection effects, and it’s good to keep them in mind, which Duncan did.^[1]

  But there’s also selection effects that come from “people somewhat driven away by Said are less likely to be here than people nonewhat driven away by him”, and encouraging DrShiny to comment is a way of counteracting those.

  So like, I think it’s good to notice the thing that you noticed, we should indeed be paying attention to such things, but ultimately I don’t think it was bad.

  1. ^

     Granted, his attempt to fight against them presumably wasn’t 100% successful in expectation. Duncan’s discord members are probably somewhat selected in the direction of disliking Said, though I think less than a lot of people would guess.

     Another thing that seems relevant: I claim the members are also somewhat selected for “people who would be a good fit for LW if they feel like being here”, and I haven’t spoken to DrShiny much but from what I have I believe they are such a person.

• philh 24 Aug 2025 23:50 UTC

  21 points

  4

  on: Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion)

  Like seemingly many others, I found Said a mix of “frequently incredibly annoying, seemingly blind to things that are clear to others, poorly calibrated with the confidence level he expresses things, occasionally saying obviously false things^[1]” and “occasionally pointing out the-Emperor-has-no-clothes in ways that are valuable and few other people seem to do”.

  (I had banned him from my personal posts, but not from my frontpaged posts.)

  And I wish we could get the good without the bad. It sure seems like that should be possible. But in practice it doesn’t seem to exist much?

  I have occasionally noticed in myself that I want to give some criticism; I could choose to put little effort in but then it would be adversarial in a way I dislike, or I could choose to put a bunch of effort in to make a better-by-my-lights comment, or I could just say nothing; and I say nothing.

  I think this is less of a loss than I think Said thinks it is. (At least as a pattern. I don’t know if Said has much opinion about my comments in specific.) But I do think it’s a bit of a loss. I think it’s plausible that a version of me who was more willing to be disagreeable and adversarial would have left some valuable comments that in fact never got written.

  (But also, it’s plausible that that version of me wrote fewer of my actually-good comments; and that some of the additional comments he wrote turned out to be crap; and that his refusal to put in effort in some cases lead to him learning less.)

  So is this just, like, a personality dial? Where you only get the EHNC comments if it’s turned so far over in one direction that you also get the other stuff? Idk, doesn’t seem like that should be the case. Apart from anything else, “a version of Said who has very similar personality but is, like, less wrong about stuff” would IMO be a big improvement. (But maybe it’s harder to become less wrong with the dial set over there? Still, I dunno, doesn’t feel quite right.)

  But for whatever reason, it does seem like the good thing Said was providing is rare, and I’m sad about losing it.

  On net I’m pretty sure I agree with the ban. And I strongly appreciate the amount of thoughtfulness put into the decision and this post.

  1. ^

     For honesty’s sake I should admit the example I had in mind when I wrote that was a bit less obvious than I’d remembered. Said: “X is strictly superior to Y.” Me: “no it’s not for reasons A, B.” Said: “So just do Z, come on, this problem has been solved for decades.” Me: “Still has A, and only a partial solution to B because of C.” Said: (No reply.)

     It’s maybe not obvious that X is not strictly superior; and while I do think it’s obvious that Z still has problem A, Said admittedly never outright says it doesn’t… but like, still. This comment thread by itself isn’t a big deal of course, but I don’t think it’s particularly out of distribution for Said.

  What links here?

  • Wei Dai's comment on Ban­ning Said Ach­miz (and broader thoughts on mod­er­a­tion) by habryka (25 Aug 2025 0:37 UTC; 11 points)

• philh 24 Aug 2025 10:25 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Truth or Dare

  Thoughts on rereading.

  My reaction to several of the truths and dares is, like… ”???”. Like, some combination of “I can’t think of anything” and “I don’t really know what that means”.

  I dare you to briefly be your authentic self in a way that you know for a fact will be unpopular with the other people in the room. To prioritize your own values over consensus and social smoothness, even if only for a moment.

  I don’t instinctively come up with anything for this. After floundering for a bit I can come up with “I could… pull down my pants and scratch my balls? I guess? Is that really the kind of thing this is thinking of? And do I really think it’s going to be unpopular? But if I didn’t, why wasn’t I already doing it?”

  “I could… say out loud something that I believe but think most people here would find offensive? If I can think of something? But man, that doesn’t feel authentic, that feels like being deliberately provocative, it’s not like I had an urge to say it before I got this dare. At least not that I noticed?”

  “Honestly, what does me being authentic even mean?”

  And it mostly just feels like flailing.

  Like, I think I want to play truth or dare with Duncan, and I think Duncan would happily play it with me. But I also think there’s a risk that I get a bunch of things like this and I feel kinda left out. Not like excluded, but like “apparently there’s something y’all have that I don’t”. (Which wouldn’t be a disaster.)

  Maybe that means it’s not a good dare for me, a la “make sure you know who the challenge is ‘for.’” But then when I think about that I’m like… am I able to judge which people would be a good target for which dares? I’m not sure I am. This feels like a skill Duncan has more than me but I dunno about its distribution among other people.

  ...or maybe it means it is a good dare for me that would help me grow.

  Similar reaction from a different direction: “make a prank call to your ex”. I react like “whoa, hold on, my ex hasn’t opted in to this. Shoulder Duncan points at things like Benign Boundary Violations and Is That Your True Rejection? Okay but...” Like that one feels uncomfortable in a way that I’m not sure if it means I shouldn’t do it.

  ---

  In a game of truth or dare, how much thinking and elaboration do you generally anticipate/​encourage? Like, if someone’s given a dare, do you think they typically react like “hoo boy, okay, um. Right, here goes”? Or more like “ah, to check, what do you mean by _? Okay, hm. Give me a moment to think. … Does _ satisfy the intent? No, okay. … How about _?”

  I think I by-default imagine the first, but the second feels more likely to work well.

  ---

  I feel like it might be somewhat common for people to be simultaneously light-world in some parts of their life and dark-world in others. Like, I think someone can simultaneously have internalized senses of: “I’m good at my job, and a valued member of the company. My employer treats me well, and is going to keep doing that, but if that stopped I could quit; I’d probably find a new job easily, but I have enough savings that there’s no rush. If my manager asks me for something unrealistic I can say it’s unrealistic and no one’s going to yell at me. If I get sick I can take a week off without worrying that I’m going to get fired. … No one likes me as a person all that much, they just tolerate my presence. My friends say otherwise but they sure do seem to hang out with each other more than they hang out with me, and I can’t bring that up with them because I don’t want to lose them. Anyone I express romantic or sexual interest in gets distant, or just straight-up ghosts me. This new person seems friendly, but...”

  ---

  Good Will Hunting. Probably lots of other movies and books too, but that’s what comes to mind.

• philh 6 Aug 2025 15:59 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: DaystarEld’s comment on: Emo­tions Make Sense

  Thanks. I have more thoughts but not gonna try to bring them out right now at least.

  Also as an aside, the hockey ring situation is from Inside Out 2: in the first one Sadness signals to Riley’s parents that she is very unhappy

  I don’t know how accurate my memory is.^[1] But the scene I remember is from the first movie. Joy’s spent the movie asking what Sadness is even good for, and then she sees some of Riley’s memories. In one of them, Riley is sitting alone on a swing under a tree branch, sad because some sport event didn’t go how she wanted, I think specifically because she didn’t perform as well as she wanted. And her friends come cheer her up, and Joy realizes (and exposits to the viewer) that Sadness shows people we need help.

  (Actually, a thing just occurs to me about this scene. I don’t remember if her friends were also her teammates. But if they were, then “my friends all hate me now” is an at-least-vaguely reasonable hypothesis to hold, and them coming to cheer her up shows that they don’t. Though I still wouldn’t frame this as “Sadness shows people we need help”.)

  I assume the thing you describe also happens, but I don’t remember it :p. Assuming the scene I remember happens at all, my guess is it happens before yours? In which case Joy’s realization and exposition aren’t driven by your scene, though they probably are driven by more than just the scene I remember.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     Related anecdote: I remember that the sixth rule of Fight Club is “there is no sixth rule”. I remember the cadence and delivery of that line. That is not the sixth rule of Fight Club.

• philh 5 Aug 2025 15:35 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: DaystarEld’s comment on: Emo­tions Make Sense

  Neither of those. I’ll try to recap the conversation from my POV:

  In my first comment, I distinguish between

  1. Situations where I’m sad, and my friends can help me fix the thing I’m sad about.

  2. Situations where I’m sad, and my friends can make me less sad but can’t fix the thing I’m sad about.

  (And my memory of the film is that the “oh! Sadness signals your friends to come help!” revelation is about a (2), which makes the revelation feel unconvincing to me. Like, I think the argument presented in the film isn’t very good; but I can come up with a better argument myself, so I’m not questioning the conclusion.)

  Then I read pjeby as saying that in both types of situations, sadness signals allies to come help; but the help they offer isn’t to fix the problem, the help they offer is to do harm reduction.

  And in my second comment, I’m specifically focusing on the (2)s, and asking how your allies do harm reduction in those situations.

• philh 5 Aug 2025 11:16 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: Emo­tions Make Sense

  ensuring that you aren’t as harmed by your loss

  So the thing that I don’t remember the film answering, and that I think your comment doesn’t answer either, is: how do they do this?

  Like, first we need to ask “if I didn’t feel sad, how would I be harmed by my loss?” That seems easy enough. If I accidentally flushed my wedding ring down the toilet: I’m down an item that has sentimental (and perhaps monetary) value. If I’ve lost a Smash Bros tournament: well, winning would have been some kind of gain, and I’ve lost the possibility of that. But perhaps there are also less obvious harms.

  And then we need to ask “how is this harm lessened by my allies showing they care about me?” I don’t have a clear answer to that. I still don’t have my wedding ring or the possibility of a Smash Bros tournament victory.

  We could say “well, you’re still just harmed by your loss, but with sadness you get extra friend time which is good, so the net is less overall harm”. But… I dunno, doesn’t ring true to me. Like for one thing this leaves out that on top of the object level harm, you get the unpleasant sadness emotion.

  If we additionally stipulate that I’m worried that my friends and loved ones will all desert me, now that I’ve lost my wedding ring/​the tournament—then sure, them coming to show their support fixes that. That kind of thing is what I was gesturing at with “cognitive distortions”, but tbf maybe it’s not always a distortion.

• philh 5 Aug 2025 7:59 UTC

  9 points

  0

  on: Emo­tions Make Sense

  The primary intuition pump it provides is showing something like, “What might go wrong if someone loses their ability to feel X emotion,” where X in the film is Sadness.

  In the plot, when Sadness is missing, the protagonist Riley can’t express that something is wrong in a way that helps her family notice and help her. Once Sadness returns and is given control, Riley starts to cry on the bus, signaling to herself that she doesn’t actually want to run away from home. When she returns to her house, she starts crying more, no longer suppressing her sadness and showing them in a visceral, hard-to-fake way that she’s actually in a really bad place, and needs help.

  Hm, I’d been thinking that I didn’t feel like Inside Out did a great job of showing why Sadness is useful.

  I’ve only seen it once, when it was in cinemas. But the specific scene I remember was, Riley does badly in a hockey game or something, and feels sad, and her friends come to comfort her, and Joy realises “oh, sadness lets our friends know we need help!” But… why does she need help? Other than “because she’s sad”, it’s not clear to me. What help do her friends give? They cheer her up, i.e. make her not sad. (In my memory, we don’t hear any specific words they say.) So why not just skip the sadness?

  Like, there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and with help the wrong thing can be fixed and then I won’t be sad”. (My life has been work-sleep-work-sleep for weeks.) And then there are situations where “something is wrong, and I’m sad about it, and it can’t be fixed”. (It turns out I’m not as good as my opponent at Smash Bros.) If we’re saying the value of sadness is “it signals people to come help us”, then it doesn’t make so much sense in the second case, right? And I only remember the film showing the second case.

  Maybe with the bus thing, the film also shows things being wrong that can be fixed, and sadness signalling that?

  (And, what is the value of sadness in that second case? One possible answer is “we didn’t evolve the ability to emotionally distinguish between things that can be fixed and things that can’t”, which sounds plausible but is also a curiosity stopper. Another is “not wanting to feel sad when we lose pushes us to win”, which, idk, doesn’t feel good enough. Another is “even if the thing itself can’t be fixed we have cognitive distortions that can be (like I suck at Smash Bros, I provide no value to the world)”—that kinda rings true to me, but of course it brings up the “why do we have cognitive distortions” question....)

• philh 2 Aug 2025 15:03 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

  Oh, interesting. When I had a prepaid meter (2016ish) I went to a shop, but I’m not sure if buying it online wasn’t an option at the time or just no one told me about it.

• philh 2 Aug 2025 9:45 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

  I find it hard to be greatly bothered

  I think it’s very reasonable not to be greatly bothered by this.

  I do think it matters a little bit. If people are talking about “boots theory” and don’t mean the same thing, they’re going to communicate less well than if they unpack their definitions.

  But I absolutely think of this as a hobby horse of mine. I do fully recommend that people avoid using the term “boots theory”, because it’s unclear. But I’m not trying to recruit people into a crusade against it.

  I’m not sure what explanation of what economic phenomenon you’re saying “boots theory” is today used to mean.

  I mean that there’s no single economic phenominon it’s today used to explain. When people talk about “boots theory”, it’s not clear what they mean, and that’s a problem when they’re trying to explain something.

  Your earlier article (unlike this one) seems mostly to be claiming that the theory is generally offered as an account of why rich people are rich.

  Ah, that wasn’t my intent. My earlier article was claiming (among other things) that the theory as written is an account of why rich people are rich, whether or not people offer it as that. It didn’t take a strong position on how people do in fact offer it; in this article I’ve looked at that question in more detail.

• philh 2 Aug 2025 9:26 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

  So my read is “E.W. is actually claiming that sin is just treating people like things. She doesn’t want the listener to tone it down to some less absolute position.”

  Maybe the listener gets closer to the truth by doing that. But it’s not what E.W. intends. If the listener gets closer to the truth by adding nuance, then E.W. loses points both for being wrong and for interrupting to say “no nuance!” If E.W. herself tones it down while saying “no nuance!” then, well, let’s notice this and let it affect how seriously we take her in future.

  (This doesn’t apply to Vimes, who was never challenged; or to Pratchett, who should not in general be assumed to endorse things his characters say.)

• philh 1 Aug 2025 22:58 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

  Similarly, when in Carpe Jugulum Granny Weatherwax tells a hapless young Omnian priest “sin is treating people as things, and that’s all there is to it”[1] I don’t think we should actually take Pratchett to be seriously claiming, or even to be representing E.W. as seriously claiming, that there is literally no other moral principle besides “don’t treat people as things”.

  According to this reddit thread, the full quote is

  “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

  “It’s a lot more complicated than that—”

  “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

  “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”

  “But they starts with thinking about people as things...”

  (And yes, it’s Carpe Jugulum.)

  I feel like you’re saying “okay, but she’s not really saying....” And the E.W. in my head is glaring at you because she just explained that yes she is really saying.

• philh 1 Aug 2025 22:37 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

  Vimes, in-story, is obviously aware that Sybil Ramkin has a vast amount of inherited wealth that far outweighs any benefit she might have obtained from being able to spend less by buying higher-quality things with higher up-front costs.

  Vimes obviously should be aware of this. I’m not super confident that the passage in question was written with Pratchett being aware of Vimes being aware of it.

  So when you protest that people

  don’t seem to realize that the thing they’re quoting is saying “rich people spend less money than poor people, and that’s why they’re rich”

  I think you’re being unfair. Yes, that’s what the thing they’re quoting literally says. No, that’s not sufficient reason to think that it’s exactly what Pratchett’s character meant, still less to think that it’s exactly the point Pratchett himself was meaning to make.

  Oh, I don’t think people should think that either Vimes or Pratchett believed the literal words.

  But I’d still like if they noticed that the literal words say something very different than their interpretation.

  For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that (1) Pratchett’s actual opinion on this is roughly what the Wikipedia article says,

  Why are you pretty sure of this? (And, do you mean the definition that the Wikipedia article gives, along with examples that don’t match the definition; or do you mean that Pratchett would think of Wikipedia’s examples as being examples of the concept, and Wikipedia’s definition is unnecessarily limited?)

  Why do you think Pratchett was thinking something similiar to Wikipedia, and not instead

  • an explanation not of why the rich are rich, but why the poor stay poor

  • why being poor sucks so badly

  • buying in bulk

  • even someone with only (modern numbers) $500,000 in assets (house, car, stuff, some investments) and a part time non-profit job that pays $25,000 a year is going to live a more comfortable life than someone in Vimes position of ~$1,000 in assets and $75,000 a year

  • When the author labels it a “theory of socioeconomic unfairness,” he’s being deeply ironic. You’d expect that analyzing one’s own economic problems would help them to solve them. Instead, Vimes’ theories seem to be keeping him poor.

  • If you broaden it to include expenditure and accumulation of all resources, not just money, then it’s mostly true.

  • every place where rich people are able to become richer because they have more money to start out with

  (Guess: perhaps you think some of these are “close enough to Wikipedia that it’s fine to use one name to refer to the vague cluster”, and the rest are “obviously silly”?)

  (It’s definitely true that some people who talk about “boots theory” mean something different from what Pratchett meant, but that always happens.)

  I think it happens more with “boots theory” than other things, and I think “~no one interprets it literally” is a large part of that. (“Non-literal interpretations” is a much broader space than “literal interpretations”.)

  Aside, a comment I previously left:

  My intent was to talk about how it’s interpreted by internet culture, not how Pratchett originally intended. E.g. I quote quora users discussing it, and only briefly nod towards what Pratchett might have meant. In hindsight I think I should have been clearer about that. There’s a few comments (here and on LW) saying what Sam Vimes would have been thinking, and while that’s interesting, it doesn’t seem super relevant to me and I’m not sure if the commenters think it’s particularly relevant or just an interesting aside. (I certainly don’t object to interesting asides!) My position is something like...

  One can reasonably ask what Sam Vimes believed; and what Pratchett himself believed; and whether the literal words are a good description of those beliefs; and if not, whether that was deliberate on Pratchett’s part; and what was actually true of Ankh-Morpork; and so on. But while those are reasonable questions to ask, none of them seem super relevant to how boots theory is used today. (Some of them might bear on how we think of Pratchett as a writer or thinker, but I’m not trying to judge Pratchett.) When it was originally written, it was written in service of storytelling. When it’s used today, it’s used to explain an economic phenomenon, so it needs to satisfy different constraints. If it does badly at that, which I think it does for reasons explained in the post, then it shouldn’t be used for that purpose.

  Maybe I should have been clearer this time, too.

• philh 1 Aug 2025 21:02 UTC

  0 points

  0

  on: Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

  And just out of interest, here’s what the auto-glossary AI generates for the term:

  

Boots the­ory and Wikipedia

• philh 1 Aug 2025 18:47 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: Do Not Ren­der Your Counterfactuals

  Related short story: Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang.

• philh 29 Jul 2025 8:42 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Re­cur­sions on LessOn­line 2025

  TracingWoodgrains revealed his legal name about a year ago.

• philh 29 Jul 2025 8:02 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: An­thropic Faces Po­ten­tially “Busi­ness-End­ing” Copy­right Lawsuit

  Clarification: IIUC (which I may well not) this is an industry-level “must”, not a legal “must”. Along the lines of, there’s a powerful union and if you join them they require you to license your work; if you don’t join them then a lot of people won’t work with you so you won’t be able to do a bunch of other stuff you want to do.

• philh 28 Jul 2025 19:34 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: sjadler’s comment on: A case for courage, when speak­ing of AI danger

  I have different intuitions about “causing someone not to be born” versus “waiting for someone to be born, and then killing them”. So I do think that if someone sets in motion today events that reliably end in the human race dying out in 2035, the moral cost of this might be any of

  1. “the people alive in both 2025 and 2035”

  2. “everyone alive in 2035”

  3. “everyone alive in 2035, plus (perhaps with some discounting) all the kids they would have had, and the kids they would have had...”

  according to different sets of intuitions. And actually I guess (1) would be rarest, so even though both (2) and (3) involve “caring about future people” in some sense, I do think they’re important to distinguish. (Caring about “future-present” versus “future-future” people?)

• philh 28 Jul 2025 5:04 UTC

  5 points

  3

  in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: English writes num­bers backwards

  Note that there’s no reason you can’t do decimal grouping with little endian numbers, as OP demonstrates. This feels like a strawman.