philh

• philh 29 Oct 2025 9:39 UTC

  7 points

  4

  in reply to: Veedrac’s comment on: On Flesh­ling Safety: A De­bate by Klurl and Tra­pau­cius.

  Can you elaborate less metaphorically? I’m not sure what coincidence you’re pointing at.

• philh 27 Oct 2025 17:42 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: Brightline is Ac­tu­ally Pretty Dangerous

  Another part of the calculus here is that Brightline is faster than driving. Very roughly:

  Wikipedia says it takes 3:25 and Google says driving takes 4:03. If we call it half an hour saved per long distance trip, that’s ~1.5 million hours saved.

  Long distance trips were about 60% of the passenger miles in your model, so if we assume they were also 60% of the fatalities, that’s a statistical cost of $1.5 billion, or $1,000 per hour saved. (Minus some adjustment because cars also kill people, so we can call it $950 instead if we take the 20x number.) Compared to the $40/​hr that a life seems to be valued at (assuming a fatality represents 40 years lost and we value the cost at $13.7 million).

  ...I didn’t actually generate an advance prediction, but if I had I think it would have been at least an order of magnitude lower.

  By contrast: if we assume a fatality represents 40 years of life lost, and we value the cost at $13.7 million, that’s about $40/​hr.

• philh 18 Oct 2025 7:57 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: How I Be­came a 5x Eng­ineer with Claude Code

  Some details that might be relevant (in that I can imagine you’d get different results if the answers changed):

  • What language(s) is your codebase in?

    • If it’s an optionally-typed language, how much do you use types?

  • How big is it?

  • How familiar are you with it?

  • How big are the changes you typically have to make, across how many files?

  • How thorough are the existing tests?

  • How much of what you do is fixing bugs versus implementing features versus refactoring versus other?

  • Something like… how interesting is the code you write /​ how much boilerplate is there? Like I expect different amounts of help from the agent if a task looks like

    • Copy the 150 lines across five files that were used to implement this other feature, and change a few parameters.

    • Integrate with this new external API.

    • Improve performance of serializing and deserializing this data structure, when it’s streamed over a slow connection.

    • Change the underlying storage of this particular type from a search tree to a hashmap (most places we use the type won’t be affected, but a few places where we access internals need to be updated).

  (Or if you think some of these aren’t relevant, I’m interested to hear that too.)

• philh 17 Oct 2025 22:59 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: The Bio­chem­i­cal Beauty of Re­ta­tru­tide: How GLP-1s Ac­tu­ally Work

  Semaglutide (aka Ozempic and Wegovy) activates only GLP1Receptor. We’ve covered why that helps, but often comes at the cost of fatigue.

  Hm, I’m missing why it comes at the cost of fatigue?

• philh 11 Oct 2025 21:47 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Toni Kurz and the In­san­ity of Climb­ing Mountains

  Both Willy and Toni had been swept off. In the fall, the rope had tangled itself around Willy’s neck and strangled him. Edi, still at the top of the cliff face and tied to both the fallen men, had been smashed against a rock at the top, fracturing his skull before freezing to death soon after. But his frozen body remained pressed against the rock, saving Toni from certain death.

  Not important, just something I noticed: wikipedia has it that these causes of death were the other way around.

  [Willy] Angerer also fell and was killed when his body hit the rock face, while [Edi] Rainer quickly asphyxiated from the weight of the rope around his diaphragm.

  But it doesn’t source that claim specifically and I didn’t go hunting.

• philh 11 Oct 2025 21:37 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Toni Kurz and the In­san­ity of Climb­ing Mountains

  Incidentally, there’s a film called the Eiger Sanction involving an attempt to scale the Eigerwand, in which

  ³⁄₄ of the team die. (It sounds like the novel it’s adapted from was partly based on this event.)

  During filming:

  While the team was preparing to be helicoptered off the north face, [climbing advisor Mike] Hoover remembered they had not taken any footage from the climbers’ point of view of the boulders crashing down on them. With his handheld camera, Hoover and 26-year-old British climber David Knowles rappelled down to the ledge and took the needed footage. As they were gathering their gear, a huge rock broke free and smashed into the climbers, killing Knowles and leaving Hoover with a fractured pelvis and severely bruised muscles. Following an impromptu wake for Knowles, [director Clint] Eastwood considered cancelling the production, but the climbers persuaded him to continue, assuring him that they all knew the risks of their trade and did not want Knowles’ death to be meaningless.

2025-10-12 - Lon­don ra­tio­nal­ish meetup—Periscope

• philh 6 Oct 2025 10:16 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Max Niederman’s comment on: No, That’s Not What the Flight Costs

  Did you update the post? By my read, Mis-Understandings’ comment still disagrees with it, in particular with

  The entire business of selling flight tickets is actually a loss leader for the airlines’ real business of selling miles.

  But I’m not sure if I’m reading right.

• philh 1 Oct 2025 11:54 UTC

  7 points

  2

  in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  By contrast the lives of factory farmed animals are incredibly gentle and easy, with almost no suffering

  I find this believable for cows, but not chickens.

  We have been breeding domestic animals for millennia to thrive in captivity

  As I understand it, factory farming conditions in the past 100-200 years are very different to what farmed animals experienced prior to that. If people in 1700 had tried raising chickens in conditions we raise them in today, the chickens would have died of disease and vitamin deficiencies.

  So sure, farmed chickens are probably very different from the wild chickens they’re descended from. But farmed chickens aren’t raised in the conditions we’ve been breeding them in for millennia.

• philh 23 Sep 2025 21:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: JustisMills’s comment on: Obli­gated to Respond

  As an audience member, I often passively judge people for responding to criticism intensely or angrily, or judge both parties in a long and bitter back and forth, and basically never judge anyone for not responding.

  I rarely notice myself judging someone for not responding.

  I do judge people for making mistakes, or for omitting important considerations. And when a person doesn’t reply to criticism, I’m more likely to believe they’ve made a mistake or an important omission.

Zendo for large groups

• philh 8 Sep 2025 17:38 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Critic Con­tri­bu­tions Are Log­i­cally Irrelevant

  I’m glad the idea got through despite that.

  Oh, I’d say it didn’t. At least not to me, and judging from my memory of the comments, not to many others either.

  That is, when I read the essay I thought: “Zack thinks that Oli and Duncan think X, and Zack thinks X is wrong. I think instead Oli and Duncan think X’, which is obviously true.”

  Judging from this comment, you actually thought Oli and Duncan think X’, and you think X’ is wrong. And sure, after reading the essay I thought “Oli and Duncan think X’”, so arguably the essay transmitted that to me. But it felt more like the essay pointed me in a direction that let me generate the hypothesis myself, rather than actually transmitting the hypothesis to me.

  Not sure if this is particularly a meaningful distinction.

  Different in what respect?

  This is kind of hard to answer because the distributions overlap, but they still seem like clearly different distributions to me. For example:

  • If I’m writing a post-like-thing, I need to come up with a topic, and I might change the topic half way through writing it. If I’m writing a comment-like-thing, I’m continuing with the topic that someone else started.

  • Post-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that I’ve picked myself is true/​useful, comment-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that someone else picked is false/​useless-or-harmful.

  • I’m more likely to try to come up with an analogy when writing a post-like-thing, and more likely to dive into an analogy when writing a comment-like-thing.

  • A post-like-thing usually can’t assume any one specific text as background knowledge. A comment-like-thing can typically assume the reader’s also read the thing I’m commenting on and knows the argument it’s making.

  • A post-like-thing is more likely to be written in the form of “fiction that communicates an idea” than a comment-like-thing is.

  Hypothesis: even when you (i.e. Zack) write top-level posts, they’re typically towards the comment-like side of things, and that’s part of why it’s not clear to you that there’s a difference. For example, this top-level post is fairly comment-like.

  It doesn’t need to, but should it?

  Meh, not a conversation I feel like having.

  To reiterate: you made an obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion. (“For a given comment, the same bytes are written to the database regardless of the author. So the text screens off the author; that is, given the text, the effect on the reader can’t change depending on the author.”) And you know the conclusion is wrong, but you still left the wrong argument in the text, without pointing out where the mistake was or even that there must be a mistake, and that bugged me.

  This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the post, but I felt like pointing at it and grumbling anyway.

• philh 4 Sep 2025 22:17 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: avalot’s comment on: When Both Peo­ple Are In­ter­ested, How Often Is Flir­ta­tious Es­ca­la­tion Mu­tual?

  Hm, to clarify...

  Like, we can imagine that I (in the UK) might flirt with someone by telling her “you’re very pretty”, and she’d likely receive subtext like “philh is possibly interested in going on a date with me, or kissing me, or having sex with me”. (Or something. I don’t claim to be an expert in flirting.)

  Is it that in France, it’s common for a man to tell a woman “you’re very pretty” (or “tu es très jolie” according to Google translate), and it would still have that subtext? And maybe additional stuff like “in the UK there’s a higher bar for expressing that subtext than in France; in the UK you’re not supposed to express that subtext if you’re in a relationship with someone else, where in France it’s fine”?

• philh 4 Sep 2025 22:03 UTC

  21 points

  0

  on: Critic Con­tri­bu­tions Are Log­i­cally Irrelevant

  I sometimes see people express disapproval of critical blog comments by commenters who don’t write many blog posts of their own. Such meta-criticism is not infrequently couched in terms of metaphors to some non-blogging domain.

  The paragraphs you quote are both metaphors analogizing some non-blogging domain to… something. It’s not clear to me that the thing they’re analogizing to is “writing posts on LW, specifically as opposed to comments on LW”. Like, it seems that you think in Habryka’s comment

  The situation seems more similar to having a competitive team where anyone gets screamed at for basically any motion, with a coach who doesn’t themselves perform the sport, but just complaints [sic] in long tirades any time anyone does anything, making references to methods of practice and training long-outdated, with a constant air of superiority.

  the analogy is that the coach writes blog comments and the team members write blog posts. But skimming a few comments up and down in that thread, that’s not a hypothesis I’d generate. (I’ve read the thread previously but don’t remember it in detail.) Possibly the post it’s on makes it more plausible as a hypothesis, but like, the comment in question is very deep into a thread.

  And similarly, in Duncan’s comment

  There’s only so much withering critique a given builder is interested in receiving (frequently from those who do not themselves even build!) before eventually they will either stop building entirely, or leave to go somewhere where buildery is appreciated, rewarded, and (importantly) defended.

  It seems you think the builders are meant to be the blog posters and the people criticizing them are the blog commentators. But again, if I re-skim the post, this isn’t clear. I think the strongest short-snippet evidence for it comes from the line

  the commenter most frequently complained about by the former authors was a person who did not themselves write posts

  ...but this line was written by Vaniver. Duncan quoted it in bold, but I don’t think that means Duncan would necessarily draw the line at “people who write posts versus people who write comments”. I’d guess he wouldn’t, and for that matter that nor would Vaniver.

  It seems to me that posts-versus-comments is a helpful stand in for the actual distinction that people care about here, which is...

  ...well, it’s hard to pin down, which I think is part of why people use metaphor. Writing “words that stand by themselves, that provide value to a broad spectrum of people even if they haven’t read certain specific other words” versus “words that are mostly only worth reading if you’ve read some specific other words and didn’t happen to spot a specific mistake in them”? I don’t think that’s quite right, but pointing in the right general direction. (E.g. “part five in an ongoing sequence” might need parts 1-4 as context, but still be in the category that I’m trying to gesture at with the stand-by-themselves description.)

  Obviously both kinds of writing can be written as both comments and posts, but there’s clear correlation for which is written as which. Describing them as posts versus comments probably isn’t ideal, but I think it’s mostly okay.

  And if we assume people are talking about these other categories, instead of as posts and comments, then:

  it’s not even clear to what extent comment-writing and post-writing are even different activities, rather than just being the same activity, writing.

  I claim that yes, these two different types of writing are significantly different activities.

  ---

  Because it would be the same sequence of bytes, the effect of rendering those bytes as text on a monitor and showing them to a human would be the same. The human reading the comment has no way of knowing who or what wrote those bytes to the database. In in the language of causal graphical models, we can say that the text of the comment “screens off” the process that produced it.

  Who wrote this comment” is also written into the database, and rendered on the page! You can e.g. choose whether or not to read the words after looking at my username! The effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by my username does not need to be the same as the effect of rendering these bytes as text preceded by another username!

  ...I’m pretty sure you know this? At any rate, later down you seem to know that it is possible to know who a comment was authored by. But I found it weirdly frustrating to have this obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion lying around.

• philh 25 Aug 2025 11:30 UTC

  23 points

  15

  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

  23 points

  5

  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?

  • Which top au­thors did Said Ach­miz drive away? by Sting (2 Sep 2025 0:08 UTC; 48 points)
  • 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.