philh

Karma: 8,391

philh 23 Mar 2026 11:08 UTC
4 points
0
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
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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
8 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
6 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
3 points
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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
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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?

philh 3 Mar 2026 13:17 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: Lorxus’s comment on: OpenAI employees: Now is the time to stop doing good work.
Is your claim here that anyone who had heard of these things would endorse this post’s recommendations?

London rationalish meetup—Arkhipov

philh3 Mar 2026 0:08 UTC

10 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

philh 26 Feb 2026 8:58 UTC
4 points
0
on: Whack-a-Mole is Not a Winnable Game
This is the so-called buy-borrow-die strategy, and is a known loophole in current tax law.
(My impression from /r/askeconomics is that this is mostly a myth. One reason to expect it to be mostly-a-myth: if you borrow money for 30 years until you die, you’re paying 30 years of interest on that money, which is gonna be more than capital gains tax on just turning your stock into money.)

philh 21 Feb 2026 11:06 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: ToasterLightning’s comment on: Can Claude teach me to make coffee?
That was explained above:
First question: Which direction leads to your kitchen? [Phil note: LW interprets fully-bold paragraphs as headers and puts them in the table of contents. I don’t want spoilers, so here’s some TOC-busting non-bold text.]

philh

Thoughts on the Pause AI protest

Lon­don ra­tio­nal­ish meetup—Arkhipov

London rationalish meetup—Arkhipov