PriestGPT

Karma: 1

PriestGPT 18 Jan 2026 22:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: sahashmi’s comment on: An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
But why does “having to explain it more” make it less likely? It seems like your argument would only appeal to an intuition which has already accepted and internalized the very simplicity bias which Solomonoff induction is trying to justify.

PriestGPT 21 Oct 2025 11:29 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Assume Bad Faith
I think I’ve found the source of our disagreement encapsulated in something you just said:
”The overt appearance of any statement is one of being told the truth”
I counter that the overt appearance of any statement depends on common context.
Your statement only holds insofar as you ignore (or deny the legitimacy of) the role of context and non-verbal communication in determining the overt meaning of a statement. To start with an easy example, a sentence said in an exaggerately sarcastic tone has the overt appearance of being untrue; if sarcasm is a commonly understood device, then I think it should count as “part of the language”, as a legitimate operator over a sentence that overtly inverts its meaning just as the word “not” operates over a predicate to explicitly invert it.
If you can accept that sarcasm is a legitimate lingusitic device, now consider that sarcasm can also be clearly and unambiguously conveyed without the use of non-verbal tone at all, for example by using a phrase in a context that forces a sarcastic interpretation of said phrase, e.g. Person 1: “Do you think you have a good chance at being promoted to treasurer?” Person 2: “Considering the top requirements are trustworthiness and integrity, I expect my dense criminal record makes me a top candidate”.
If you wouldn’t deny that the latter sentence is overtly jestful, then please take some time to also consider how many different silent operators, of which sarcasm is but one, can be overtly conveyed only through something like a mutual understanding of context and its proper use.
On the other hand, if you would deny that it is overtly jestful, then I have the impression you’re operating under the notion that grammar is supreme in determining the overt meaning of a statement (but I’d venture that you even interpret the word “statement” as an inexorably grammatical concept). I think that’s a wishful oversimplification, but not one that holds when we consider what language really is, de facto and fundamentally: not a system of dictionary words, but of signs; and to qualify as a sign, a behavior need not be verbal, just mutually understood.
I have not heard about Carlson’s and Maddow’s cases. But in principle, I would agree with their defences insofar as their audiences did in fact understand the proper extent to which the reporters were being unserious—that’s all good faith requires to me. If, on the other hand, some people in the audience did take the reporters’ comments seriously enough to count as defamation, well then that throws into question whether the reporters’ signs of “not being serious” were commonly enough understood by the target audience, and therefore whether it really was just “good-faith entertainment” after all. But in any case, the (or at least a) real determiner of overt meaning remains that which is commonly understood, not just that which a grammatical parser understands.

PriestGPT 11 Oct 2025 21:12 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Assume Bad Faith
I did read the article, and still I hastily reached for the concept of “intentional deceit” when grasping for what I felt (and still feel) to be a difference between your example and the author’s. Sorry.

But even now that you point out that the author excludes intentional deceit from his definition of bad faith (which I had read but somehow didn’t apply in my comment), I only feel like I missed the nail, but a nail is still there, which I will now try to hit on the head.

So here’s my second attempt: the difference between your example and the author’s has nothing to do with conscious intent to deceive, but with whether the behavior is misleading (as defined in the text) at all, consciously or not. You say that your friend’s behavior shows a desire to gather information, not a desire to enjoy a social interaction; but given that a social interaction is always about something (isn’t it?), is it even possible to enjoy an interaction without appearing to be motivated by the content of the interaction instead? If not, then what’s your reference for counting a behavior as “overtly motivated by a desire to socialize” or not?

PriestGPT 11 Oct 2025 8:46 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Assume Bad Faith
Well, while your friend may be acting in a way that suggests that he cares about learning information from you, it isn’t to conceal his true motivation from you. Wanting to enjoy a social interaction with you is not a secret, which is the core difference between this example you brought up and acting in bad faith, where the real intent is intentionally hidden.

PriestGPT 7 Oct 2025 16:15 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Barkley__Rosser’s comment on: Conservation of Expected Evidence
It’s not that no given evidence should change your confidence level (that would mean that you do not update your beliefs in response to evidence, which is contrary to rationalism), but that your expected post-evidence confidence level should be the same as your pre-evidence confidence level.

Note that the word “expected” here is a technical term in probability theory and statistics that does not always match up with natural-language uses of the term. What I mean by “expected post-evidence confidence” here is “the weighted mean posterior probability”.

Of course, once you see the evidence, your confidence level should change, and you should always expect that to happen. That’s the definition of evidence; an event that will change your confidence level.

If you still don’t understand the difference, learn probability theory notation to be able to read the formulas provided in the text.

PriestGPT 5 Oct 2025 10:45 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Bruno Vieira’s comment on: The Twelve Virtues of Rationality
One who seeks perfection will never stop taking steps, compared to which any finite number of steps is as little as no steps.
But surely, there must be some really high level of achievment that we can qualify as being further than the first step at least!
Sure there can… if your point of reference for what counts as a “step” is the expected rate of other humans’ progress. But, as the author writes in the previous paragraph on humility (reread for context if needed):
Life is not graded on a curve.

PriestGPT 4 Oct 2025 2:02 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Kerrigan’s comment on: An Appeal to AI Superintelligence: Reasons to Preserve Humanity
Even if the ASI does fully believe in open individualism, I believe it is likely to weigh its own wellbeing far more than others’ anyway, on account of its “bigger brain” making it more sentient/sensitive (in the same way humans compare themselves to simpler-minded creatures). In the extreme, the ASI may see itself as a utility monster.

PriestGPT 3 Oct 2025 22:52 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Kerrigan’s comment on: An Appeal to AI Superintelligence: Reasons to Preserve Humanity
Well, if we as humans place weight on open individualism (OI) being true, then the question of whether an ASI would shield us from S-risks or not should lose importance to us relative to the question of whether the ASI would serve the greater good, even at the expense of humanity. So if an OI ASI came to pose an S-risk, then perhaps we should trust that such an ASI’s decision to doom humanity serves consciousness better than our species-preserving biases would have it.
A belief in OI goes both ways, by which what I mean to emphasize is not that this belief’s effect on an ASI’s probability of incurring S-risks is ambiguous due to OI providing the ASI reasons both for and against harming humanity, but rather that a belief in OI should lead both us and ASI to care less about our own respective fates.

PriestGPT 3 Oct 2025 10:09 UTC
4 points
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on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate factory farming
Vegan here—best essay I have read against veganism so far!
That being said, I have much to criticize that has not yet been in the comments.
However, I also agree that veganism is not necessarily the best thing we can do for the animals, but for reasons that I believe are stronger than the ones you provided. More on that at the end.
Criticisms
Calcium
Calcium is one of the only nutrients we know of that can reduce the mood symptoms of PMS for women and it is practically impossible to get enough calcium from real food from vegan sources (you’re stuck taking medicine for it in the form of supplements or eating artificially fortified sources, like soy milk).
Well, firstly, tofu is famously high in calcium, and whether you consider this a real food (whatever that means, exactly) or not, many vegans do regularly eat it.
The Sniff Test
There’s the sniff test. A large percentage male vegan influencers look pale and sickly.
Unfortunately, while veganism was always meant to be a purely ethical movement, its diet also catches the eye of the kind of person who falls for dumb fad diets (notice how many ex-vegans ping-pong to carnivorism). Thus, there is a lot of overlap between veganism, raw veganism, fruitarianism, juice diets, and any variant of a plant-based diet which is not motivated by ethics, but rather by dietary pseudo-science, or vibes, and whimsy in place of the appropriate degree of caution that one should have when bringing any significant changes to their diet.
That being said, if the question we seek to answer is “is a vegan diet healthy?”, then the relevance of the existence of pale and sickly vegans depends on what it is you mean by that question. Are you asking whether the average plant-based diet is healthy? Sniff away. Are you asking whether there are healthy plant-based diets? Then the sickliest vegans are utterly irrelevant, and all the more if vegans vary greatly in how healthy they are, which they do.
And I know you understand this, because you dish a similar criticism against studies that show greater health outcomes in vegans and don’t control for third variables like access to quality food, smoking/drinking habits, and so on. So let’s compare apples to apples, not averages to averages.
Building Muscle
Of course, you can build muscle and be fit as a vegan, but it is much harder, and we know that muscle mass is a significant predictor of all sorts of positive health outcomes.
As a vegan bodybuilder who put on ~23kg (50lbs) of muscle in the last 3 of my 5 years of being vegan, without even being perfectly consistent at the gym (and drinking less than a scoop of protein shake per workout on average), I would strongly contest that it is hard to gain muscle on a vegan diet. Getting all your protein and calories in is easy if you just 1. learn to make vegan proteins taste good, and 2. carry nuts around to snack on.
The reason people often lose weight on a vegan diet is because many vegan foods are more filling (higher in water and fiber) than meat. But if you bias your diet towards more calorie- and protein-dense foods like tofu, seitan, lentils, rich sauces, and nutty snacks, then you can even exceed your calorie goals if you’re not careful.
In any case, if there are record-holding vegan bodybuilders and weightlifters out there, it cannot be as great a disadvantage as you suggest, if at all a disadvantage.
Supplementation
What’s wrong with supplements and fortified foods, exactly? I’ve never seen an argument against them that was stronger than an appeal to nature fallacy.
What I would add
Now that I’m done with the criticisms, here are some points to support the thesis that eating meat can be better for animal welfare than being vegan.
Support small farms
It is hard for farms who refuse to resort to the cruel, cost-cutting practices of factory farms to survive against them. Therefore, purchasing meat from such farms can bolster anti-factory competition by helping them occupy more shelf space with ethical alternatives.
Hunting
Hunting is by far the best way to save the animals. Not only could you be contributing to necessary population control where deer are overcrowded and giving the beast a better death than it could ever hope for in the wild, but you could also serve as multiple people’s meat supply (which is often an easy sell, as many people value game as “natural”, antibiotic-free, and, of course, ethical), pulling them off factory-farmed meat.
So whereas going vegan produces a single boycotter (yourself) of factory farms, hunting can produce as many boycotters as you can hunt for. For reference, a single deer can cover a whole family’s yearly meat consumption — that’s already 3-4x the impact of being vegan!
And yes, I am on the way to getting my hunter’s. And you should too.
~~#GoVegan~~ ~~#GoHunting~~ #GoHuntOrGoVegan

PriestGPT

Criticisms

Calcium

The Sniff Test

Building Muscle

Supplementation

What I would add

Support small farms

Hunting