Practically, yes, but that’s like doing tax fraud and getting away with it bc your income is low and they don’t bother with you. Would be nice to understand the actual legalities.
romeostevensit
Karma: 11,330
I clicked the title hoping to understand whether my social media posts will get me arrested when flying to the uk.
Great to see, I have long wondered about such an analysis. I think RAM is a good indicator of what a speed crunch looks like.
I’m curious if anyone has thoughts on investment theses under speedup. Presumably it isn’t just bottleneck but the rate of change of different bottlenecks.
I enjoyed reading this.
I never looked closely into tarot and I didn’t know about the inverted thing. Based on my experience with psychotherapy and pedagogy, having a bunch of concepts paired with their near enemies sounds incredibly useful, actually.
A lot of people I talk to have very poor interoception. Due to limited variety in their theory of mind, they wind up believing that people giving energy descriptions are just imagining things and making a big deal out of random phenomena. But interoception is a trainable skill, and probably varies by two orders of magnitude in experienced strength. People who lean woo are generally towards the upper end of this scale and were drawn towards woo because it’s the only place they found people taking about their experiences in a way that makes any sense at all. Standard social polarizing effects then kick in to enhance those beliefs.
One thing that occurs across lots of woo is the assumption of discovery rather than creation. As mentioned above, I think one can train skills, explicitly or implicitly, that makes you more the sort of person these things apply to by conditioning the nervous system into certain expected patterns of activation. I see spiritual traditions as bundling claims about how it is best to organize a human nervous system, along with a bunch of free parameter claims about what those configurations and resultant experiences ‘mean.’
Maybe upstream of attribute substitution? Get better and better at answering certain types of queries, so you round off other queries to the ones you are already good at.
One of the main ways that people cheat at first person shooters is wall hacks, x-ray vision. Being able to see exactly when an opponent will pop out is an almost unbeatable advantage when wielded by a skilled player. Blacklight retribution was an FPS where you could activate wall hacks at will as part of the game. The only caveat: you couldn’t use your weapons while doing so, forcing a trade-off between information and execution. Since everyone has this power, the game elevated up a meta level. You can influence what others think your actions will be, though you don’t know exactly when you are being observed. This taught me the interplay between intentions and revealed intentions via legible action.
are we doing venn diagrams? https://imgur.com/a/h6GMNF3
My thought as well. Since flops has limits on speed of growth, $/flop would need to grow quickly. Did $/watt grow very quickly as people found better uses for the energy and built out the complements to support that?
my claim is on the margin. It is about apportioning effort amongst the parliament of values such that we get strong advocates for marginal views that carry some value.
There was a comment on astralcodex from a judge recently that was nice and I’d think it would look like more engagement on that front. It reminds me of the situation with banks in 2008 where the general public has a wildly different understanding than the basic facts that any bank accountant could tell you about eg swaps and fractional reserves.
I wish I had a rec here.
Courts are amazing
I’ll say something stronger: rationality reckons with econ but badly needs a reckoning with law, the thing that tries to actually do CEV for real humans and societies.
In an ideal world, their intersection helps people price risk, and do exception handling on risk mismanagement. In the real world, it is coopted in order to obfuscate risk and increase internality/externality arbitrages.
This made me think of a novel to me moral principle: when choosing among goods, the best is the one the greatest number of people oppose (modulo Bayesian updates on why they oppose it).
(The following is an exercise in testing LLM creative writing prompts. Hence why it is not a full post. Text almost entirely generated by Claude)
The Breakfast Question
The question spread the way questions do — innocuously, tucked inside a philosophy blog post nobody would admit to reading. By Tuesday it was a tweet. By Thursday it was on bus shelter ads in four cities, though nobody could say who bought the space.
Most people died mid-thought.
Dr. Miriam Osei was the first epidemiologist to notice the pattern in the bodies. They weren’t sick. They weren’t poisoned. Their faces held a kind of arrested expression — not pain, exactly, but the particular tension of a mind pulling in two directions. She described it in her notes as the look of a door being opened from both sides simultaneously. The neuroscientists came next. The mechanism, they determined, was a prion-adjacent structure that assembled itself in the default mode network — the seat of simulation, projection, retrospection. Of imagined alternatives. It lay dormant until the host attempted to model a world that was not the world. Then it folded, catastrophically, taking everything nearby with it. The virus was, in this sense, extraordinarily precise. It had no interest in memory. It had no interest in regret per se, or hope, or planning. It targeted specifically the act of forking — of holding two timelines simultaneously, comparing them, asking which was better. The question was simply the key that fit the lock.
The survivors organized quickly, as survivors do. Manny had never been a philosophical man. He woke each morning and ate whatever was in the refrigerator without ceremony, without considering whether he should have bought different groceries, without projecting forward to lunch. When the question reached him — his cousin read it aloud at the table, and then his cousin’s face did the thing — Manny had simply blinked. “I ate eggs”, he thought. They were fine. His prions had nothing to grip. He became, within six months, a mayor of sorts. The community he led was not stupid. This was the thing the surviving intellectuals struggled to articulate to each other, in the first weeks, before most of them died reaching for counterfactual comparisons mid-sentence: the survivors were not cognitively impaired. They could reason. They could infer. They could solve problems. They simply could not — constitutionally, neurologically, perhaps spiritually — wonder what would have happened if. A child named Soo-Ah, age seven, turned out to be a gifted engineer. She could look at a broken thing and understand immediately what it needed. She had no capacity to imagine a version of the thing that had never broken, no grief for the pristine alternative. She simply fixed what was in front of her. Manny watched her work one afternoon and felt something he couldn’t name. It was close to awe.
The philosopher who had written the original blog post survived too. This was either ironic or fitting, depending on your capacity for that distinction — which, increasingly, was not a capacity anyone had. Her name was Dr. Lena Voss, and she had survived because she had been, for the previous four years, working on a paper arguing that counterfactual reasoning was not native to human cognition but was instead a learned and fragile heuristic — a cognitive prosthetic that cultures had developed and individuals had adopted, unnaturally, like shoes. In arguing this, she had trained herself to notice the exact moment she began to fork a timeline. And in noticing it, she had learned, slowly, to stop. She had not intended this as prophylaxis. She had not imagined — there, that, she would catch herself, stop — she had not expected her work to be anything other than a small contribution to embodied cognition literature. She lived because she had learned to stay inside the actual. She spent her remaining years teaching others to do the same, though the ones who most needed it were already dead.
What was lost was enormous and everyone knew it without being able to articulate it precisely. Not imagination — the survivors dreamed richly, planned, invented. What was lost was the particular human ache of the other branch — the version of yourself who turned left, who said yes, who ate the eggs or didn’t. The mourning of paths not taken. The comfort of a road untraveled that you could return to, mentally, in the dark. Soo-Ah fixed things beautifully and never wondered what they might have been. Manny made good decisions and never second-guessed them. They were, in some technical sense, happier. Whether this was a mercy or the final joke of the virus — whether the question had, in answering itself, answered more than it asked — was a thought that died with those who could have thought it.
I think there’s an excellent case to be made for tech employees who are convinced the singularity is near, a transferable preservation in case a loved one goes terminal in the next few years is a good bet when that cost is a fraction of their annual salary.
Was able to reproduce in a chrome incognito window but worked in regular chrome and firefox. I didn’t want to paste in a bunch of ai text and the formatting breaks as well
I think it is has been net positive for people to begin having earnest conversations about their real reasons for things in public rather than filter everything through a particular discourse norms filter that in practice means people don’t share their real reasons.
this should be a post not just shortform?
Claude recommended that VCG as a kind of inverse Shapley often works better in the real world by encouraging truth telling. As a bonus, it handles damages (as opposed to benefits) slightly more easily.
This is an interesting idea