robo

• roboMay 28, 2025, 11:31 AM

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: As­so­ci­a­tion taxes are col­lu­sion subsidies

  Cool, yes, I agree. But the reason other insiders don’t like that public criticism is because it reduces their status by association. Your colleagues paid to get a position in a status hierarchy which you are devaluing, and they make you internalize those costs.

• roboMay 28, 2025, 1:27 AM

  13 points

  6

  in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: As­so­ci­a­tion taxes are col­lu­sion subsidies

  I don’t think I agree at all. Relevant quotation, Larry Summers talking to Elizabeth Warren
  
  > “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.
  
  People come with features vectors of which clusters they are bucketed into (Harvard graduate, east bay rationalist, FTX employee, etc). Your reputation is tied to the reputation of that cluster, whether you want it to or not.

  Whistleblowers are rare and their effects are minor. In-group cooperation and collusion is a large part of human affairs.

  EDIT I agree with you, and just didn’t understand what you said. My rephrase would be the article had it backwards:

  Prediction: If consortment was less endorsement—if it were commonplace to spend time with your enemies—then it would be more commonplace to publicly report small wrongs.

  This is reversed. It’s the wrong-doers who are avoiding interactions with anyone who might publicly report small wrongs.

• roboMay 15, 2025, 10:48 PM

  12 points

  0

  on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies

  Online advertising can be used to promote books. Unlike many books, you are not trying to make a profit and can pay for advertising beyond where the publisher’s marginal costs equals marginal revenue. Do you:

  • Have online advertising campaigns set up by your publisher and can absorb donations to spend on more advertising (LLM doubts Little, Brown and Company lets authors spend more money)

  • Have $$$ to spend on an advertising campaign but don’t have the managerial bandwidth to set one up. You’d need logistics support to set up an effective advertising campaign.

  • Need both money and logistics for an advertising campaign.

    • Alphabet and Meta employees get several hundred dollars per month to spend on on advertising (as incentive to dogfood their product). If LessWrong employees at those companies setup many $300 /​ month advertising campaigns, that sounds like a worthwhile investment

  • Need neither help setting up an advertising campaign nor funds for more advertising (though donations to MIRI are of course always welcome)

• roboMay 15, 2025, 5:33 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies

  I’m very glad you’ve used focus groups! Based solely on the title the results are excellent. I’m idly curious how you assembled the participants.

  Do you have a way to get feedback from Chinese nationalists? (“America Hawks” in China?).

• roboMay 15, 2025, 1:14 PM

  26 points

  4

  in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Any­one Builds It, Every­one Dies

  Given the potentially massive importance of a Chinese version, it may be worth burning $8,000 to start the translation before proofreading is done, particularly if your translators come back with questions that are better clarified in the English text. I’d pay money to help speed this up if that’s the bottleneck^[1]. When I was in China I didn’t have a good way of explaining what I was doing and why.

  1. ^

     I’m working mostly off savings and wouldn’t especially want to, but I would to make it happen.

• roboMay 14, 2025, 8:47 AM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Oc­to­ber The First Is Too Late

  It’s a reference to the title of a novel by Fred Hoyle.

• roboMay 1, 2025, 10:41 PM

  5 points

  0

  on: Don’t ac­cuse your in­ter­locu­tor of be­ing in­suffi­ciently truth-seeking

  “I think you are being insufficiently truth-seeking” is definitely a thing I would want people to say to me sometimes. Sometimes I think dumb things (like rationalizing) and it’s obvious to other people but I have no idea.

• roboMay 1, 2025, 6:11 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: David Udell’s Shortform

  Its a function that eats points in a manifold and spits out (linear functions that eat (linear functions satisfying Leibniz rule that eat (differentiable functions that eats points on a manifold and spit outs real numbers) and spits out real numbers) and spits out real numbers), obviously.

• roboApr 30, 2025, 7:02 AM

  12 points

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: gw­ern’s Shortform

  I’ve thought about the doomsday argument more than daily for the past 15 years, enough for me to go from “Why am I improbably young?” to “Oh, I guess I’m just a person who thinks about the doomsday argument a lot”
  
  Fun “fact”: when a person thinks about the doomsday argument, they a decent change of being me.

• roboApr 22, 2025, 7:23 AM

  7 points

  2

  in reply to: martinkunev’s comment on: Why Should I As­sume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?

  This is true, and it strongly influences the ways Americans think about how to provide public goods to the rest of the world. But they’re thinking about how to provide public goods the rest of the world^[1]. “America First” is controversial in American intellectual circles, whereas in my (limited) conversations in China people are usually confused about what other sort of policy you would have.

  1. ^

     Disclosure: I’m American, I came of age in this era

• roboApr 21, 2025, 8:33 AM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: robo’s comment on: Why Should I As­sume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?

  (Counterpoint: for big groups like bureaucracies, intra-country variances can average out. I do think we can predict that a group of 100 random Americans writing an AI constitution would place more value on political self-determination and less on political unity than a similar group of Chinese.)

• roboApr 20, 2025, 9:13 AM

  21 points

  9

  on: Why Should I As­sume CCP AGI is Worse Than USG AGI?

  There’s more variance within countries than between countries. Where did the disruptive upstart that cares about Free Software^[1] come from? China. Is that because China is more libertarian than the US? No, it’s because there’s a wide variance in both the US and China and by chance the most software-libertarian company was Chinese. Don’t treat countries like point estimates.

  1. ^

     Free as in freedom, not as in beer

• roboApr 18, 2025, 10:56 AM

  1 point

  −9

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: jacquesthibs’s Shortform

  Of course, I agree, it’s such a pattern that it doesn’t look like a joke. It looks like a very compelling true anecdote. And if someone repeats this “very compelling true anecdote” (edit and other people recognize that, no, it’s actually a meme) they’ll make AI alignment worriers look like fools who believe Onion headlines.

• roboApr 18, 2025, 2:22 AM

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: jacquesthibs’s Shortform

  This is a joke, not something that happened, right? Could you wrap this in quote marks or put a footnote or somehow to indicate this is riffing on a meme and not a real anecdote from someone in the industry? I read a similar comment on LessWrong a few months ago and it was only luck that kept me from repeating it as truth to people on the fence about whether to take AI risks seriously.

• roboApr 17, 2025, 12:39 PM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: O O’s comment on: LWLW’s Shortform

  LessWrong is uncensored in China.

• roboApr 15, 2025, 3:10 AM

  77 points

  48

  on: The 4-Minute Mile Effect

  I know it’s not your main point, but for the actual 4-minute-mile I’m on the side of the null hypothesis. In a steady progression, once any one arbitrary threshold is crossed (4:10 minutes, 4:00 minutes, 3:50 minutes), many others are soon to follow.

  

  Trolling a bit, perhaps we could talk about a “4-Minute-Mile Gell-Mann Effect”. Events that to outsiders look like discontinuous revolutions look to insiders like minor ticks with surprising publicity.

• roboApr 13, 2025, 2:09 AM

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: adamz­erner’s Shortform

  A standard trick is to add noise to the signal to (stochastically) let parts get over the hump.

• roboApr 12, 2025, 3:37 PM

  2 points

  1

  on: Does this game have a name?

  BTW, feed this post into ChatGPT and it will tell you the answer

• roboApr 12, 2025, 3:17 PM

  4 points

  0

  on: Weird Ran­dom New­comb Problem

  Somewhat mean caveat emptor for other readers: I just spent an hour trying to understand this post, and wish that I hadn’t. It’s still possible I’m missing the thing, but inside view is I’ve found the thing and the thing just isn’t that interesting.^[1]
  

  1. ^

     Feeding a program its Gödel numbering isn’t relevant (and doesn’t work?!), and the puzzle is over perhaps missing out on an unfathomably small amount of money^[2].

  2. ^

     By “unfathomably small” I mean ≈$\frac{1}{2^{{10}^{{10}^{googol}}}}$ dollars. And, sure, there could be a deep puzzle there, but I feel that when a puzzle has its accidental complexity removed you usually can produce a more compelling use case.

• roboApr 6, 2025, 3:58 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: O O’s comment on: O O’s Shortform

  Could you spell this out? I don’t see how AI has much to do with trade. Is the idea that AI development is bounded on the cost of GPUs, and this will raise the cost of outside-China GPUs compared to inside-China GPUs? Or is it that there will be less VC money e.g. because interest rates go up to combat inflation?