philh

Karma: 8,405

philh 20 Apr 2026 17:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: Let goodness conquer all that it can defend
The one thing it’s hard to imagine anyone stopping was the smallpox and such. It would have happened sooner or later unless the entire progress of technology was put on halt. Mass deployable vaccines before transoceanic sail ships seem unlikely. Someone would have gotten to the other side and even had their intentions been the best possible, people would have died out of sheer ignorance.
I don’t know if you need vaccines. From memory, the incubation time of smallpox is about half the transatlantic voyage time (2 weeks versus 4 weeks)? I don’t know how much we know about how the first smallpox case crossed the Atlantic, or whether it happened more than once. But I wonder whether a policy on long voyages of “if we notice someone on board has smallpox, we make them walk the plank to protect everyone else on board” (not even thinking about the people at the destination) might have been a) possible in a nearby world and b) effective?
(I’m vaguely aware that the voyage wasn’t nonstop, they’d go via e.g. the Azores(?), presumably with a chance to pick up smallpox there. Maybe that sinks the idea.)

philh 11 Apr 2026 11:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Lorxus’s comment on: Does descaling a kettle help? Theory and practice
Why do you recommend it?
I actually have a new kettle now, and scale is either a bigger problem or a more visible one, so I’ve been descaling it every few months give or take. The main thing I dislike about vinegar is that (if I interpret my observations correctly) it boils at a lower temperature than water, and the kettle trips off at 100° instead of at “my contents are boiling”; so if I don’t wait there to turn it off then it boils over. If citric acid doesn’t have that specific problem then I’d happily swap.

philh 26 Mar 2026 23:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?
Yeah, I think I’ll keep trying 3g/night for a bit and then maybe explore 10g/day. That feels like a pretty inconvenient dose to be taking, but so it goes.
I had been wondering how much of the effect comes from the timing and how much comes from just getting more. There must be a time delay in the process of “glycine enters your stomach, makes its way into your bloodstream, gets incorporated into glutathione, and that helps clear ROS”. But I figured, sleep lasts a while, it could well be that the glutathione starts doing its work an hour after you take the glycine; and maybe if you take it earlier in the day, it’s all used in other things by the time you get to sleep.
But “no, 3g just before sleep isn’t enough at the right time to help with sleep” is also not surprising.

philh 26 Mar 2026 0:19 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: philh’s comment on: Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?
Night 1: I got to sleep quickly, woke briefly after 1 ¹⁄₂ hours, woke up early again with muscle cramp (I expect this at least to be unrelated). I’d rate as “worse sleep than normal”. Didn’t notice myself being out of distribution for daytime alertness conditioned on sleep.
Night 2: got to sleep quickly, woke early, but sleep quality seemed fine. Not obviously out of distribution for alertness.
Nights 3-8: failed to keep detailed logs. I think I’ve slept quickly every night (good if related), and often woken up early (bad if related). Neither of those is very out of distribution. Been mildly sick which probably confounds things too. Inclined to keep taking it.

philh 23 Mar 2026 11:08 UTC
6 points
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on: Is fever a symptom of glycine deficiency?
I’ve ordered some glycine and plan to start taking 3g/day before sleep and see what happens. (I don’t plan to blind myself or deliberately measure anything. I guess my watch might have some stats that show changes?)

philh 22 Mar 2026 15:58 UTC
2 points
0
on: [Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 4. The “short-term predictor”
And now we have our answer: why do we need ≈300,000 short-term predictors? Because there are lots of signals in the nervous system—peripheral nerves, cortex output lines, cortex-to-cortex signals, etc.—and a great many of those signals can benefit from being predicted-and-preempted.
Do you think the mapping of these predictors to the thing-being-predicted is essentially hardcoded? Like, the genome specifies that I’ll have a particular nerve, and that I’ll have a short-term predictor for that nerve; and that I’ll have short-term predictors for particular cortex-to-cortext signals, but not others; and so on?
Or more like, the genome specifies that I’ll have ≈300,000 short-term predictors, and then there’s some other process that chooses what’s being predicted and assigns predictors to them?

philh 17 Mar 2026 0:31 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
Just to add: oh, the number isn’t quite what I thought. It’s not “a third of people renew”, because the people who renew have to go through a first time first. It means “mean number of times a person renews” is 0.5. When someone renewed, I don’t know if you knew how many times they’d been. But I’d guess the distribution looks more like “half of people renew once” than like “a quarter of people renew twice”?

(I know it’s a rough number, and this is also making assumptions like “this is a steady state” and “the people you see aren’t selected for renewal”, but this seems like a useful order-of-magnitude calculation.)

philh 16 Mar 2026 21:34 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
(To be clear, my main point in this comment was to make the ethical distinction between sacrificing yourself and sacrificing your child, not to talk in detail about the ethics of either of them.)
I agree with you directionally relative to where I think modern western culture lands. I do also think there are cases where I’m willing to say “yup, if you made that trade, you and your trading partner would be better off; no, I don’t think you should be allowed to do it”. Sometimes for collective-bargaining reasons, sometimes for other externalities reasons, sometimes for “this is too hard for the law to distinguish from other cases” reasons, maybe sometimes also for other reasons that I’m not thinking of now. The cases where I’m willing to say this vary depending on the surrounding economic circumstances.
The parents of a child hold legal rights over them that are, at least while I’m squinting, comparable to the control and authority a master wields over a slave (albeit with very different incentives).
I guess here I was thinking of “selling your child into a worse situation than the one they’re in now”, but I do admit that sometimes, selling them into indentured servitude might improve their situation.
...but even then, if they don’t want it, I think you should have a much higher bar for it than for selling yourself into indentured servitude.

philh 16 Mar 2026 21:01 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
How much of the disagreement here is thinking about “can people who know what to look for figure it out it easily” versus thinking about “can people who have just encountered this figure it out easily”?
At first, I didn’t know there were open and close blocks. I thought the AI content was one paragraph with an open but no close. When I saw the |o thing, I didn’t know it was a close until I read some comments and scrolled back up.
Now that I do know… I dunno, I think scanning for the font that indicates “this is the start of an LLM block” is harder for me than scanning for an open paren? But also, the LLM block in the post is taller than my normal browser window, so it might be the case that neither the opening nor the closing delimiter is on my screen.

philh 16 Mar 2026 20:29 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
Maybe a third of the patients I saw were there to renew an existing work permit.
Oh, that’s much more than I would have guessed!

philh 16 Mar 2026 15:09 UTC
9 points
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on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
The people who know best still queued up for hours in the hopes of returning
This is selection bias, right? You saw the people who went once and tried to return, but not the people who went once and regretted it. (Or is this sentence based on something else?)

philh 16 Mar 2026 15:05 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: My Willing Complicity In “Human Rights Abuse”
Selling oneself or one’s children into servitude without cancellation clauses and little to no rights?
This phrasing sounds like these are pretty similar types of actions, but I I want to point out that they’re very different. There are clear strong reasons to forbid “selling one’s children into servitude” that don’t apply to “selling oneself into servitude”. (Those reasons being summed up by “children are not your property”.)
Should selling oneself also be forbidden? Maybe! I intuitively lean yes. But it’s a lot less obvious to me than the former. Are there or have there been cultures where selling oneself is permitted but selling one’s children is forbidden?

philh 15 Mar 2026 17:26 UTC
7 points
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on: Solar Storms
Epistemic status: some errors pointed out and since disentangled in the comments. LLM-use for much of the research. I regret having published this without going through academics online first, and will do so now, and edit the post accordingly. There is surprisingly little research on solar storms’ effects on electric grids and solutions to those out there.
Note: I don’t know when this was posted, or whether you’ve subsequently updated it. I can see there are comments saying the post has significant errors, and I don’t know whether those apply to the current version.
Do you think the major errors are fixed? If so, my recommendation would be to say so explicitly with some explanation of why you think that (e.g. a link to a comment from someone who knows what they’re talking about, saying “current version seems basically correct to me”).

philh 12 Mar 2026 19:32 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: davekasten’s comment on: Thoughts on the Pause AI protest
Was there anyone at the event who represented themselves as a leader of Pull the Plug?
I don’t remember. I’m pretty sure one or more of the protest organizers represented themselves as being representatives of pull the plug, but I don’t remember who they were or what positions they said they had.

philh 11 Mar 2026 20:35 UTC
24 points
1
on: Less Dead
This sounds really cool!
Do you know how it would work if someone not living in America wanted to use your services?

philh 8 Mar 2026 22:36 UTC
4 points
2
on: Videogames for Rationalists
Mindustry is Factorio + tower defense. I haven’t actually played Factorio so I don’t really know how they compare, but because Mindustry has discrete levels my guess is it’s “less good at the thing Factorio is especially good at”. But I liked Mindustry a lot. (At least its Erekir world, I didn’t play Serpulo.)

philh 8 Mar 2026 22:20 UTC
5 points
0
on: Videogames for Rationalists
Previous list of puzzle games, +1 to A Monster’s Expedition and Baba is You.

Previous recommendation of Understand, but I haven’t played that myself.

philh 6 Mar 2026 23:01 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Thoughts on the Pause AI protest
Well, but right wing protests also take place sometimes, right?

Thoughts on the Pause AI protest

philh6 Mar 2026 21:50 UTC

131 points

18 comments7 min readLW link

(reasonableapproximation.net)

philh 3 Mar 2026 13:35 UTC
16 points
0
on: I’m confused by the change in the METR trend
Even if the estimated date of change is off by a month or two, it would still mean that the trend changed before o1-preview was released, and several non-CoT models would still be on the faster trend.
What happens if you fit one trendline to the non-CoT models and one to the CoT, instead of a temporal breakpoint?