philh

Karma: 7,796

philh Aug 6, 2025, 3:59 PM
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 Aug 5, 2025, 3:35 PM
4 points
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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 Aug 5, 2025, 11:16 AM
2 points
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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 Aug 5, 2025, 7:59 AM
9 points
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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 Aug 2, 2025, 3:03 PM
2 points
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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 Aug 2, 2025, 9:45 AM
2 points
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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 Aug 2, 2025, 9:26 AM
2 points
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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 Aug 1, 2025, 10:58 PM
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 Aug 1, 2025, 10:37 PM
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
(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 Aug 1, 2025, 9:02 PM
0 points
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on: Boots theory and Wikipedia
And just out of interest, here’s what the auto-glossary AI generates for the term:

philh Aug 1, 2025, 6:47 PM
6 points
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on: Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals
Related short story: Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang.

philh Jul 29, 2025, 8:42 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Recursions on LessOnline 2025
TracingWoodgrains revealed his legal name about a year ago.

philh Jul 29, 2025, 8:02 AM
2 points
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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 Jul 28, 2025, 7:34 PM
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 Jul 28, 2025, 5:04 AM
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.

philh Jul 27, 2025, 12:34 PM
16 points
11
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Make More Grayspaces
I’d be curious to hear about the signifiers for ‘real talk’ that other cultures have.

philh Jul 27, 2025, 11:04 AM
2 points
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in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Related: SS Eastland capsized maybe in part because of extra weight from the new lifeboats.

philh Jul 27, 2025, 10:25 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Anthropic Faces Potentially “Business-Ending” Copyright Lawsuit
Ah, so this is only talking about whether training on the material was fair use. I was surprised by the “getting books illegally and then training on them” thing.

Skimming the pdf (mostly ctrl+f “shadow”), it sounds like “downloading a book might not be illegal depending what you do with it”, which I hadn’t realized. p. 36:

as already discussed, even though that downloading is a separate use, it must be considered in light of its overall purpose. For instance, imagine a researcher who downloaded books from a shadow library in the process of writing an article on shadow libraries, and only did so for their research. That downloading would almost certainly be a fair use. Of course, in that example, the downloader has less ability to procure the books elsewhere than Meta did. But the point is that downloading from a shadow library, which the plaintiffs refer to as “unmitigated piracy,” must be viewed in light of its ultimate end.

(My previous understanding was that the rule was something like “if you already own something legally, you’re allowed to download it; but if not, you’re not”.)

...but now I don’t understand how this differs from the Anthropic case, which I summarized as
- This judge ruled that training on books you acquired legally is fair use.
- But Anthropic didn’t acquire the books they trained on legally. This judge also ruled that they’re liable for the copyright infringement involved in getting them illegally.
was that a bad summary?

philh Jul 26, 2025, 4:42 PM
2 points
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on: Anthropic Faces Potentially “Business-Ending” Copyright Lawsuit
Trying to summarize the legal matters and where I’m confused on them:
- This judge ruled that training on books you acquired legally is fair use.
- But Anthropic didn’t acquire the books they trained on legally. This judge also ruled that they’re liable for the copyright infringement involved in getting them illegally.
- The recent news is that this case has become a class action. That means any copyright holder of a book Anthropic trained on can join in easily.
  - Possibly even no need to join in before the conclusion? If Anthropic eventually has to pay out, I think they might need to have a fund set up such that anyone whose work they trained on can write in and say “you owe me money”. (At least I think this sometimes happens, e.g. “company sold a defective product and lost class action suit, anyone who bought the product can claim even if they didn’t hear of the suit in advance”. Sometimes also “and company has to make efforts to reach out to all customers to let them know”. Dunno if this sort of thing is the default.)
- In another case (“the Meta case”), a judge ruled that “getting books illegally and training on them” was fine, actually.
  - This doesn’t count for much, but my legal intuitions are saying “wait what”. Is this more reasonable than it sounds?
  - Why doesn’t it count as precedent in this case?
  - If Anthropic loses here, will that cause problems for Meta in their case?
- Did OpenAI and DeepMind do the same?

philh Jul 26, 2025, 4:13 PM
4 points
0
on: English writes numbers backwards
Flipped pronunciation
To me, this sounds bad enough to negate any benefits we might get from flipping the order we write numbers.