Richard_Kennaway

Karma: 7,994

Computer scientist, applied mathematician. Based in the eastern part of England.

Fan of control theory in general and Perceptual Control Theory in particular. Everyone should know about these, whatever subsequent attitude to them they might reach. These, plus consciousness of abstraction dissolve a great many confusions.

I wrote the Insanity Wolf Sanity Test. There it is, work out for yourself what it means.

Change ringer since 2022. It teaches learning and grasping abstract patterns, memory, thinking with your body, thinking on your feet, fixing problems and moving on, always looking to the future and letting both the errors and successes of the past go.

I first found an LLM useful (other than for answering the question “let’s see how well the dog can walk on its hind legs”) in September 2025. As yet they do not form a regular part of anything I do.

Richard_Kennaway 3 Nov 2025 17:56 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: A glimpse of the other side
A few more remarks about the contrast.

The vision of heaven is individual, spoken by “I”. The vision of hell is all couched in terms of a general “you”. The sufferer is unable to contemplate the idea that this is their own, individual state, but insists that this must be the condition of all.

The vision of heaven looks outward at the world, a place to find and create joy in. The vision of hell is turned in on itself. The character is curled up in a ball with eyes tightly shut, screaming forever at a world they refuse to see.

The vision of heaven is hopeful. The vision of hell is hopeless, at the end denying that any other state is possible for anyone.

The vision of heaven stands at 37 karma, that of hell, 133. (But the former is two days younger. It will be interesting to see where it stands in the days to come.)

Richard_Kennaway 3 Nov 2025 13:37 UTC
2 points
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on: Pepperoni and the end of morality
When you say “you”, are you talking about yourself, or is the monologist an imaginary victim of the utility egregore?

without any action in this engagement being able to be appropriately labeled “deliberate”

Well, there’s the root of it. Who is to be in charge, you or the soul-eating shoggoth that wants to nest behind your smiley face?

Richard_Kennaway 3 Nov 2025 13:16 UTC
6 points
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on: A glimpse of the other side
This post makes a striking contrast to this one by yourself two days ago.

The vision of heaven is written in the first person, while the vision of hell is written in the second. Are you saying that your life is like the first, while everyone else’s is like the second?

Or… what? Is either of these an account of reality, of what someone would see if they followed you around all day?

Richard_Kennaway 2 Nov 2025 13:59 UTC
28 points
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on: You’re always stressed, your mind is always busy, you never have enough time
You can just not do things.

Richard_Kennaway 31 Oct 2025 17:16 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: mhampton’s comment on: Thresholds for Pascal’s Mugging?
The uncertainties that will always be present for a real gamble make the Kelly bet rash, uncertainties about not only the numbers, but about whether the preconditions for the criterion obtain.

Because of this, Zvi recommends that Kelly is the right way to think, and you should evaluate the Kelly recommendation as best you can, but you should then bet no more than 25% to 50% of that amount. Further elaboration here.

Richard_Kennaway 31 Oct 2025 17:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: robo’s comment on: Thresholds for Pascal’s Mugging?
Kelly bets only apply to the situation where you have a choice to gamble or not, and not gambling leaves your wealth unaffected. When the Kelly bet is negative, that means you should decline the bet.

If the mugger is capable of confiscating 99.999999999999999% of your wealth, why is he offering the bet?

Richard_Kennaway 29 Oct 2025 22:10 UTC
6 points
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on: Thresholds for Pascal’s Mugging?
Option 10: Kelly betting.

If you bet repeatedly on a gamble in which with probability $p$ you win $k$ times what you bet, and otherwise lose your bet, the fraction of your wealth to bet that maximises your growth rate is $p - (1 - p) / k$ . This implies that no matter how enormous the payoff, you should never bet more than $p$ of your wealth. The probability you assign to unsubstantiated promises from dodgy strangers should be very small, so you can safely ignore Pascal’s Wager.

Richard_Kennaway 27 Oct 2025 10:17 UTC
−3 points
−2
on: Uncommon Utilitarianism #3: Bounded Utility Functions
McGee’s argument is akin to the following piece of mathematics, separate from utility theory. What is $- 1 + 2 - 3 + 4 - 5 + 6...$ ?

Clearly, it is equal to $(- 1 + 2) + (- 3 + 4) + (- 5 + 6) . . .$ , which equals $1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + . . .$ , which is $+ \infty$ .

Clearly, it is equal to $- 1 + (2 - 3) + (4 - 5) + (6 - 7) . . .$ , which equals $- 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - . . .$ , which is $- \infty$ .^[1]

We do not respond to this paradox by supposing there must be a maximum and a minimum integer. We cannot, because mathematics, even more than physics, is a coherent whole in which we cannot change one thing without changing everything. We must instead accept the fact that not all sequences converge.

It may seem like one can answer McGee’s paradox by saying “oh well, I guess my utility function’s bounded”, but coherence problems will still arise, which I was alluding to in asking how you might find the bounds and what sort of magnitude you imagine for them. What happens in someone’s quest for maximising utility when they begin to succeed? To approach the maximum possible utility they could ever have? One would have to find oneself caring less and less about every new thing, until one’s future is the torpor of “utility death”, jaded beyond all caring. This is indeed a standard trope in fiction, but if death is a solvable problem, I would expect utility death to be so also.
1. ↩︎
  By choosing different sequences, one can produce examples where either or both of the limits of the regrouped sequences is finite.

Richard_Kennaway 27 Oct 2025 6:43 UTC
3 points
−1
on: Uncommon Utilitarianism #3: Bounded Utility Functions
If your utillity is finite, how would you determine its bounds?

If the bound is a practical figure, and not up in the ↑↑↑↑-sphere, that looks rather like scope insensitivity. If it is up there, it is indistinguishable from unbounded in the practical realm.

Richard_Kennaway 25 Oct 2025 10:33 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Document’s comment on: Rationality quotes: August 2010
Necroposting, but for the knowledge of posterity, this was originally posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden to Usenet on 9 August 2000, in rec.arts.sf.fandom.

Richard_Kennaway 25 Oct 2025 8:34 UTC
3 points
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on: I will not sign up for cryonics

What difference does it make whether I die in 60 years or in 10,000? In the end, I’ll still be dead.

Does it make a difference whether you die in 60 years or in 60 days? If it does, at what point do you despair of the value of further years, and why?

My own preferred lifespan is “more”. (Although despite that, I also have no plans to sign up for cryonics.)

Richard_Kennaway 24 Oct 2025 18:23 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jesper L.’s comment on: Reminder: Morality is unsolved
You have half a dozen job offers. Which one do you take? The one with the biggest potential upside? The lowest potential downside? Expected value? Expected log value? Depends on your attitude to risk.
You have half a dozen schemes for how society should be organised. From behind the veil of ignorance, are you willing to risk the chance of a poor position for the chance of a better one? Depends on your attitude to risk. Even behind the veil, different people may rate the same proposal differently.
I must admit to not having read Rawls, only read about his veil of ignorance, but I am sceptical of the very idea of designing a society, other than for writing fiction in. Any designed civilisation will drift immediately on being set in motion, as people act as they see fit in the circumstances they are in. Planned societies have a poor track record. The static societies of the past, where once a cobbler, always a cobbler, are generally not regarded as something we would want to bring back.
As a pure thought experiment, one can imagine whatever one likes, but would this bridge, or that distant rocky tower, stand up?
Artist credit: Rodney Matthews. I love his art, and that of the very similar Roger Dean, but I appreciate it as fantasy, and am a little sad that these things could never be built. Notice that the suspension bridge is only suspended on the nearer half.

Richard_Kennaway 24 Oct 2025 14:17 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jesper L.’s comment on: Reminder: Morality is unsolved
I know where it comes from, and it has always seemed arbitrary to me. Why Rawls’s maximin rather than average, or some other weighting? In everyday life, people make decisions for themselves and for others all the time without being certain that they will turn out well. Why not the same for ideas for how society as a whole should be organised?

Richard_Kennaway 24 Oct 2025 8:00 UTC
2 points
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on: Reminder: Morality is unsolved

This means that you are operating under the veil of ignorance. You should make sure that the morality you decide on is beneficial whoever you are, once it takes effect.

Why would I not instead maximise my expectation, instead of maximising the worst case?

Richard_Kennaway 23 Oct 2025 9:53 UTC
2 points
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on: Homomorphically encrypted consciousness and its implications
Brains are already, in effect, encrypted. That is, we don’t know how they work. We can’t trace the wiring in useful detail and see exactly how they produce some visible action, even things as simple as engaging in conversation or walking without falling over. (We don’t know nothing at all, but we don’t know enough by a long way.) The same applies to LLMs. We do know how LLMs are trained, but we do not know how the resulting LLM works. Their behaviours are encoded in their parameters and we have no decryption key.

Richard_Kennaway 18 Oct 2025 18:06 UTC
3 points
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on: Using Bayes’ Theorem to determine Optimal Protein Intake
I’m curious to know how many people here measure their food at all?

Richard_Kennaway 17 Oct 2025 19:45 UTC
5 points
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on: How To Vastly Increase Your Charitable Impact
When death is near (as it always is), you could leave it all to someone who will continue to invest it. When will it be time to actually do good with it, instead of putting it off until it’s doubled?

Richard_Kennaway 16 Oct 2025 16:55 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: A New Global Risk: Large Comet’s Impact on Sun Could Cause Fires on Earth
With some Googling, I found a simple formula. Assuming an ideal elliptical orbit, the distance at perihelion is $v^{2} / 2 g$ , where v = velocity at aphelion and g is the gravitational acceleration there. For this distance to be the radius of the Sun, we get $v = \frac{1}{r} \sqrt{2 G M R}$ , where G = gravitational constant, M = mass of Sun, R = radius of Sun.

At r = 10000 AUs, this is 0.27 metres per second. At 100,000 AUs, 0.027 m/s — or 1 inch per second. Despite the Sun’s attraction, it’s still a small target at that distance.

Richard_Kennaway 14 Oct 2025 12:34 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: David Bravo’s comment on: The 5 Obstacles I Had to Overcome to Become Vegan

Besides, can I know what makes you disagree with veganism as a moral stance? Is it for instance that you don’t believe animals are sentient?

“Sentient” is a word used rather elastically, but the consensus of definitions on the net seems to be “the ability to experience feelings and sensations”. I believe the animals I eat — all the usual ones you’ll find in restaurants and shops, plus the occasional less common one (horse, emu) — experience feelings and sensations. (Maybe not shrimp.) Nevertheless, I’m fine with them being raised to be killed and eaten. People shouldn’t maltreat their pets, and I wouldn’t eat primates, but that is about the limit of my caring. I have donated to charities that support people, but never to animal charities.

ETA: And for the same reasons, I wear leather, and eat eggs, honey, and figs. Other things that do not trouble me are that we use bees as tools to pollinate crops, use bone meal as fertiliser, some limestone is made of dead animals, sizeable fossils are visible in the marble pavements of some Italian towns, and that the history of life on Earth is a history of death on Earth.

Richard_Kennaway 12 Oct 2025 12:00 UTC
2 points
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on: The 5 Obstacles I Had to Overcome to Become Vegan
I’m not one of the downvoters here, but nor an upvoter. On the one hand, big yay for taking a difficult moral stand. On the other hand, the stand itself is not one I agree with. And a small boo for daydreaming that “I have found the Truth! Therefore one day all will agree with me and look back with disgust on the unenlightened beings that surround me!”