RamblinDash

Karma: 732

RamblinDash 13 Jan 2026 14:49 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: What potent consumer technologies have long remained inaccessible?
Yeah! The time between the invention of the bound book and the invention of the printing press was about 1400 years. In the intervening time, books were very expensive.

RamblinDash 7 Nov 2025 15:49 UTC
11 points
3
on: Did you know you can just buy blackbelts?
For a much less gameable and more fun version of Calibration Trivia, use the rules that the bar I play trivia at uses.
The game is broken up into rounds. Within a round, players/teams have 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 points that they can assign to their answer as they submit it. They can use each only once. Here is the sequence of events:
1. Read out the 5 categories for the 5 questions making up the round. This way folks know roughly how to allocate their points.
2. Read the first question. Folks must submit their answers and the number of points they will score if their answer is correct. These come in simultaneously on the same sheet. At this time they know the categories of the other 4 questions but don’t know the questions, so they will have to estimate their knowledge of the topic areas of questions 2-5, and compare that to their confidence about their answer to question 1.
3. Then do the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th questions the same way. Each point value can be used only once, so the maximum score is 30 points—but you can score up to 18 points even knowing only ²⁄₅ answers if you are correctly calibrated.
You can adapt this basic structure to test calibration more or less. You could, e.g., read all 5 questions and have folks assign the point values to all 5 answers before turning any of them in, or require assigning point values to the categories before hearing any of the questions. You could make the points a wager (allowing negative scores) - but allow people to bet zero some number of times. You could increase/decrease/change the point values per round.
But this basic structure allows you to reward good calibration without rewarding stupid calibration. Knowing some answers in this game is necessary but not sufficient to win.

RamblinDash 4 Nov 2025 18:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Eric Neyman’s Shortform
I think a significant amount of the probability mass within P(no AI takeover) is in various AI fizzle worlds. In those worlds, anyone outside AI safety who is working on making the world better, is working to increase the flourishing associated with those worlds.

RamblinDash 9 Oct 2025 16:41 UTC
1 point
0
on: Four Questions to Refine Your Policy Proposal
You can’t require people to “be safe” or “be kind” or “avoid suffering” – or, at least, you can’t do that using any of the legal and policy tools common in English-speaking countries.
This is not true, the entire area of Tort law (especially negligence law) is highly developed in English speaking countries, and is a series of elaborations on “take reasonable care to avoid harm to others.”

RamblinDash 4 Sep 2025 15:11 UTC
17 points
3
on: If I imagine that I am immune to advertising, what am I probably missing?
One thing you might be missing, and the reason that widely-viewed events are so valuable as ad space, is that one function of ads can be to create common knowledge among the audience of how other people might see the product.
For example, Corona beer has a beach vibe. They don’t just want you to know that it has a beach vibe, they want you to know that other people know that it has a beach vibe. That way, if you are going to a party and want to bring something that has a beach vibe, you’ll reach for Corona because you want to be seen by others as bringing the beach vibe. This is why ads on widely-viewed broadcasts like sports games disproportionately (tho not exclusively) focus on products that are consumed socially or in public rather than privately.

RamblinDash 23 Jul 2025 13:36 UTC
5 points
3
on: What are some good examples of myths that encapsulates genuine, nontrivial wisdom?
I often think about iconic comic book characters as essentially today’s version of these kind of mythical stories, which cut across people’s disagreements about religion. The story of Spider Man has been retold many times but generally contains a classic arc:
- Peter finds himself unexpectedly with a lot of power all of a sudden.
- Peter has an opportunity to use that power to do the right thing at effectively low cost to himself, and chooses not to for selfishness/laziness reasons.
- His choice not to do right has unforeseeable negative consequences both for society and for him personally.
- He then dedicates himself to saving people/fighting crime/etc.
- In many versions of the story, he pays a lot of personal costs for the time and energy he spends helping others, but he still does it.
- In many versions, at some point he gets burned out or panicked that it feels like his power to do good becomes an obligation he can’t escape, and he feels distraught by all the people he cannot help.
- In many versions, he eventually (through some dramatic event) comes to terms with his inability to save everyone, and learns that what he can accomplish is still valuable and good, even if he can’t save everyone.
I think its essentially an aspirational model of what it means to be a good person living a balanced life as you come of age and gain authority, power, and responsibility over others. And I do think that people absorb these truths from the story.

RamblinDash 9 May 2025 19:48 UTC
1 point
5
on: Full Practical Guide on Diet, Nutrition, & Health
Strong downvoted, because this “guide” makes a lot of bold claims with zero backup.

RamblinDash 2 May 2025 20:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TFD’s comment on: Ex-OpenAI employee amici leave to file denied in Musk v OpenAI case?
One other thing has to do with the procedural posture. On a motion to dismiss, Courts are not generally supposed to evaluate facts at all. A motion to dismiss is essentially an argument by the defense that, even if all those accusations are true, they don’t amount to a legal claim.
By contrast, a preliminary injunction does look at facts. So one reason for different treatment of the Encode brief vs. the ex-employees brief is that they were submitted in response to different motions.

RamblinDash 3 Apr 2025 14:05 UTC
2 points
0
on: On Pseudo-Principality: Reclaiming “Whataboutism” as a Test for Counterfeit Principles
One of the most common forms of Whataboutism is of the form “You criticize X, but other people vaguely politically aligned with you failed to criticize Y.” (assuming for argument that X and Y are different but similar wrongs)
The problem with that is that the only possible sincere answers are necessarily unsatisfying, and it’s hard to gauge their sincerity. Here’s what I see as the basic possibilities.
- Y and X are equally bad, my allies are wrong about this [but what are you gonna do about it?]
- Y is bad but X is genuinely worse because of …. (can sound like a post hoc justification)
- Y and X are equally bad, but I still support my side because the badness of Y is outweighed by the goodness of A, B, etc.
- Y is actually not bad because of ….
- You are right, Y is terrible, I abandon my allies [and join … what? If Y is disqualifying X surely is too...]
The PCC is a lot more valid when its actually the same person taking inconsistent positions on X and Y. Otherwise your actual interlocutor might not be inconsistent at all but has no plausible way of demonstrating that.

RamblinDash 11 Feb 2025 14:50 UTC
22 points
9
on: What About The Horses?
The problem with this argument is that it ignores a unique feature of AIs—their copiability. It takes ~20 years and O($300k) to spin up a new human worker. It takes ~20 minutes to spin up a new AI worker.
So in the long run, for a human to economically do a task, they have to not just have some comparative advantage but have a comparative advantage that’s large enough to cover the massive cost differential in “producing” a new one.
This actually analogizes more to engines. I would argue that a big factor in the near-total replacement of horses by engines is not so much that engines are exactly 100x better than horses at everything, but that engines can be mass-produced. In fact I think the claim that engines are exactly equally better than horses at every horse-task is obviously false if you think about it for two minutes. But any time there’s a niche where engines are even slightly better than horses, we can just increase production of engines more quickly and cheaply than we can increase production of horses.
These economic concepts such as comparative advantage tend to assume, for ease of analysis, a fixed quantity of workers. When you are talking about human workers in the short term, that is a reasonable simplifying assumption. But it leads you astray when you try to use these concepts to think about AIs (or engines).

RamblinDash 17 Jan 2025 14:41 UTC
11 points
0
on: Patent Trolling to Save the World
This idea kind of rhymes with gain-of-function research in a way that makes me uncomfortable. “Let’s intentionally create harmful things, but its OK because we are creating harmful things for the purpose of preventing the harm that would be caused by those things.”
I’m not sure if I can formalize this into a logically-tight case against doing it, but it seems conceptually similar to X, and X is bad.

RamblinDash 17 Jan 2025 14:39 UTC
5 points
2
on: Tax Price Gouging?
Just to make the math easy, let’s suppose the gouging tax is 50%.
The air purifiers problem seems like not a big problem? If they are normally “worth” $150 and you value having them at $300, you could post them up for sale at $450. Then, if someone really needs them, you get your $300, they get their air purifier, and $150 goes to disaster relief. This tax only prevents the trade if the buyers would buy them for $300 but not for $450, which limits the amount of deadweight loss here to a maximum of $149, rather than potentially unbounded deadweight loss under current policy.

RamblinDash 8 Nov 2024 11:49 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
Sorry

RamblinDash 7 Nov 2024 15:46 UTC
−3 points
2
on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
Many states have already passed something like this, which only takes effect once enough states sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
However, I think it’s unlikely that this will get over the 270 hump anytime soon, because right now GOP-run states (correctly) perceive that the EC has a pro-GOP tilt (for now at least); and the swing states benefit a lot from swing status.

RamblinDash 1 Nov 2024 19:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Wbrom’s comment on: Dentistry, Oral Surgeons, and the Inefficiency of Small Markets
Those kinds of VC-run business can also often have other problems. For example, Aspen Dental was sued for deceptive marketing.

RamblinDash 1 Nov 2024 19:10 UTC
13 points
2
on: Prediction markets and Taxes
It’s not true that you can’t pay negative taxes on your betting market losses, at least if you are someone who uses prediction markets routinely. You are allowed to deduct your gross gambling losses from your gambling gains, and you only pay tax on the net gain. See https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/at-02-53.pdf.

RamblinDash 25 Oct 2024 1:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
Just to push back a little—I feel like these people do a valuable service for capitalism. If people in the reviews or in the press are criticizing a business for these things, that’s an important channel of information for me as a consumer and it’s hard to know how else I could apply that to my buying decisions without incurring the time and hassle cost of showing up and then leaving without buying anything.

RamblinDash 13 Oct 2024 21:54 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
I treat chatGPT as a vibes-ologist; it’s good for answering questions about like which X is most popular or what do most people think about X. I agree it’s less good for “X is true”

RamblinDash 9 Oct 2024 13:30 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Sweetgum’s comment on: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
Well, you don’t see them as much because they don’t necessarily interact with the metaphorical pope(s)/cardinal(s)/etc. I’m just talking about all the thousands of people who have read the sequences and/or other foundational rationalist texts, interpreted them for themselves, and did their best to apply those lessons in their own lives. Many such people exist! They just don’t live in the Bay Area, don’t necessarily go to rationalist meetups, and might not be active LW posters. So the reason I don’t have examples for you is precisely because Active in the Rationalist Community is highly correlated with both “LW readers are likely to know who this person is” and/or “this person is publicly identifiable as a Rationalist,” and also with “Catholic within this metaphor”—Official Rationalist Spaces are effectively catholic churches, in the metaphor. Of course you won’t find a ton of protestants there!
The Protestant/Catholic schism was fundamentally over whether the Bible should be interpreted by the Pope and the Catholic church, with the role of the faithful to listen to their priest and take what they say as the Received Interpretation of the Word of God, or instead whether each individual Christian should become literate, and read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Of course, there were particular points of dispute but they all stemmed from this—is it possible for the Pope to be wrong, and if so, what does that say about our faith?
The Catholic position was, it is not possible for the Pope to be wrong within the bounds of our faith, and therefore if there is proof that the Pope is wrong then it would prove that our faith is wrong. The Protestant position was, like, of course its possible for the Pope to be wrong, he’s just some guy. So when Martin Luther was saying “it is possible for the Pope to be wrong” that was a big f’in deal. But you don’t see modern protestants going around defiantly asserting that it’s possible for the Pope to be wrong—they know there are millions of people who already agree with this idea, and it just kinda seems silly or beside the point for them? A protestant generally doesn’t care what the Pope thinks any more than they care what other prominent world leaders think.
This comment probably won’t get a ton of readership on an old post, but if you understand my metaphor and think you are “protestant,” please react with Checkmark, even if you are mostly an LW lurker. If you understand and you think you are “catholic”, react with Xmark. If you think this metaphor makes no sense or is fundamentally wrong, then I guess react with something else.

RamblinDash 1 Oct 2024 16:45 UTC
6 points
6
on: Conventional footnotes considered harmful
Footnotes are good in translated works. I read the 3-body trilogy translated into English, and it was very helpful to have notes from the translator explaining certain points of cultural context that a Chinese reader would be expected to be familiar with.