rsaarelm

Karma: 632

rsaarelm 24 Nov 2025 11:35 UTC
1 point
0
on: Varieties Of Doom

LessWrongers dream of an unhurried future without having to fear death.

https://carado.moe/everything-is-okay.html is a dead link. Seems that all of the website is gone and purged from the Wayback Machine.

rsaarelm 18 Nov 2025 4:22 UTC
26 points
21
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Wei Dai’s Shortform

Nowhere on the whole wide internet works like that! Clearly the vast majority of people do not think that authors shouldn’t moderate their own threads. Practically nowhere on the internet do you even have the option for anything else.

Where’s this coming from all of a sudden? Forums work like this, Less Wrong used to work like this. Data Secrets Lox still works like this. Most subreddits work like this. This whole thread is about how maybe the places that work like this have the right idea, so it’s a bit late in the game to open up with “they don’t exist and aren’t a thing anyone wants”.

rsaarelm 17 Nov 2025 6:24 UTC
33 points
18
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Wei Dai’s Shortform
It feels like there’s a confusion of different informal social systems with how LW 2.0 has been set up. Forums have traditionally had moderators distinct from posters, and even when moderators also participate in discussions on small forums, there are often informal conventions that a moderator should not put on a modhat if they are already participating in a dispute as a poster, and a second moderator should look at the post instead (you need more than one moderator for this of course).

The LW 2.0 author moderation system is what blog hosting platforms like Blogger and Substack use, and the bid seems to have been to entice people who got big enough to run their standalone successful blog back to Lesswrong. On these platforms the site administrators are very hands-off and usually only drop in to squash something actually illegal (and good luck getting anyone to talk to if they actually decide your blog needs to be wiped from the system), and the separate blogs are kept very distinct from each other with little shared site identity, so random very weird Blogger blogs don’t really create that much of an overall “there’s something off with Blogger” vibe. They just exist on their own domain and mostly don’t interact with the rest of the platform.

Meanwhile, LW is still very much in the forum mold, the posts exist in the same big pool and site moderators are very hands-on, give warnings and can be talked to. Standalone blog author tier people mostly don’t seem to have come back to post a large volume of LW threads, and the dynamics are still very forum-like, so basically now there’s just the chaotic extra element that any random person who started a forum thread can act as moderator and moderate other users as well as their individual comments on their threads, and this adds weird drama and dysfunction to the forum social dynamic. Most of the time it happens it’ll also violate the informal rule that a moderator should not start moderating the dispute they themselves got initially involved in as a non-modhat poster.

EDIT: The third system mixed in is Facebook/Twitter style social media that’s a “steppe” instead of a “valley”, meaning that you have a steady stream of complete strangers coming in and out instead of a pool of a few dozen to a few hundred people who might have been around for over a decade. You want a very low friction ban mechanism on a steppe site since a lot of first interactions will be bad and usually indicate the drive-by stranger they’re from is not worth interacting with. On a valley site the person interacting with you is much more likely to be tightly invested in the very local area, so blocking them is bigger drama generator.

rsaarelm 14 Nov 2025 10:59 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: How do you read Less Wrong?

Reddit and HN also get it wrong, but less wrong than LW: they show the comment and its subthread, but not the surrounding context.

You can click on the “context” link in a HN subthread view to switch to the one you want.

rsaarelm 14 Nov 2025 8:01 UTC
3 points
0
on: How do you read Less Wrong?
I used to subscribe to front page posts RSS feed but gave up on it years ago because the signal-to-noise ratio went too low. Now I subscribe to user RSS feeds of a handful of old-timer users who seem to consistently have interesting things to say and then learn about posts they interact with. https://www.greaterwrong.com/ all the way.

rsaarelm 27 Oct 2025 16:29 UTC
3 points
2
on: On Fleshling Safety: A Debate by Klurl and Trapaucius.
I zoned out pretty hard around the time they got deep into the korrigibility debate, and started entertaining myself by assuming that the ship’s approach was actually The Outer Dark from Warren Ellis’ Authority, told from a different viewpoint.

rsaarelm 22 Sep 2025 5:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: The Rising Sea
I’m having a hard time finding examples in that list that feel like they really match the idea. Most of them seem to be about people figuring out they’re in a Matrix and then punching the Matrix Lord in the face. One example I remember which does go directly from realization to nonexistence is Orqwith in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. The idea that you can directly affect the physical universe, though not necessarily to the point of nonexistence, by messing with sufficiently complex calculations shows up pretty much as is in Greg Egan’s Luminous.

rsaarelm 23 Aug 2025 7:44 UTC
11 points
2
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
I’m pretty sure people drifted away because of a more complex set of dynamics and incentives than “Said might comment on their posts” and I don’t expect to see much of a reversal.

rsaarelm 23 Aug 2025 6:12 UTC
10 points
7
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren’t very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn’t familiar with Substack, so their brain just went “random AI slop site, ignore”.

rsaarelm 23 Aug 2025 4:46 UTC
35 points
−8
on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
Bad call. You don’t exactly have an unlimited supply of people who have a solid handle on the formative LW mindset and principles from 15 years ago and who are still actively participating on the forums, and latter-day LessWrong doesn’t have as much of a coherent and valuable identity to stand firmly on its own.

A key idea in the mindset that started LessWrong is that people can be wrong. Being wrong can exist as an abstract thing to begin with, it’s not just an euphemism for poor political positioning. And people in positions of authority can be wrong. Kind, well-meaning, likable people can be wrong. People who have considerate friendly conversations that are a joy to moderate can be wrong. It’s not always easy to figure out right and wrong, but it is possible, and it’s not always socially harmonious to point it out loud, but it used to be considered virtuous still.

A forum that has principles in its culture is going to have cases where moderation is annoying around something or someone who doggedly sticks to those principles. It’s then a decision for the moderators whether they want to work to keep the forum’s principles alive or to have a slightly easier time moderating in the future.

rsaarelm 18 Aug 2025 4:50 UTC
7 points
6
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
How did you connect the objects you see as glowing with UV light specifically? Couldn’t the glow be a hallucination or a perceptual rewiring like the persistent “breathing wallpaper” LSD users can start seeing, or some different physical property entirely? Can you see UV light emitted by machines that should be invisible like a person in the newscientist link claims he could after he got an artificial lens?

On leaving hospital, I decided I deserved a pint of bitter. Standing at the bar of my local pub, I noticed that their device for detecting counterfeit banknotes was emitting very bright bluish light. I mentioned this to the barman, who looked at me with a very quizzical expression but made no comment. I then realised that he couldn’t see the light: it was visible through my right eye alone.

rsaarelm 17 Aug 2025 8:46 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
Huh, apparently this is a thing. Retinas can see into UV, but UV light is normally filtered out by the lens.

Young adults can see UV light

Claude Monet got cataract surgery in his 80s and might have started seeing into UV with the filtering lens gone.

Medical article about cataract surgeries and UV protection

No idea how you could start seeing UV by rewiring your brain if your eyeballs still have the original lenses though.

rsaarelm 14 Aug 2025 14:22 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA

what do you mean by “psychic pain”?

As far as I’ve understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn’t the way you want. “Regret” and “yearning” both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.

If you’ve looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.

rsaarelm 14 Aug 2025 8:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: clone of saturn’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA

Presumably we have the capacity to suffer because it facilitated our survival somehow. How are you so sure you don’t need to hear the message suffering was sending you?

We could try to figure this out by teaching lots of people to get rid of suffering and then watching them to see if it fucks them up.

rsaarelm 14 Aug 2025 5:57 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA

This seems more like referring to a completely different thing, which is not suffering, but calling it “suffering” for some reason.

Well, yes. It’s a translation of a word that’s used somewhat like technical vocabulary in meditation tradition. Article about the translations, Dukkha is a bummer.

rsaarelm 5 Aug 2025 8:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: How to tolerate boredom?
Meditation isn’t supposed to make the pain go away, it’s supposed to train you to suffer less from the pain. So for meditation the idea would just be to make it a game of seeing if you can train to do it longer and better despite the averse feelings, and learn to detach from the feelings. But if your internal motivation is toast, that might be hard to make happen. You might try seeing an actual meditation teacher about this.

The point where you have started the task and then get bored and stop sounds like the key point here. Can you try focusing (maybe in the sense of Gendlin’s focusing) on what goes on in detail with your mind, the task and how you’re conceptualizing working on the task right now and in the future? My experience is that I can procrastinate on starting a task but when I do start it, if it’s something like housework I’ve done it hundreds of times before and can go on autopilot.

I guess it’s mostly housework-like autopilotable stuff for me now. After 20 years of trying I threw in the towel on getting myself to do stuff that’s difficult, I don’t really want to do, and not doing it won’t literally get me killed, which pretty much crashed the whole studying-and-employment pipeline.

rsaarelm 31 Jul 2025 9:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: October The First Is Too Late
If the story doesn’t have a title, but people want to discuss it, some kind of title will get established by convention, and it should be something that “sounds right” for the story. “Clarity didn’t work...” doesn’t sound right to me as the title of the story. Also now that you reminded me of this, I went “wait, wasn’t the story just commonly known as The Whispering Earring”, and indeed, here’s /r/rational calling it that in 2019.

rsaarelm 27 Jul 2025 7:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Croup and Vandemar, where one is a talky weasel and the other is a simple-minded bruiser, seem to be the Evil Duo subtype.

rsaarelm 28 Jun 2025 12:20 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: [Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines
There’s maybe a stronger definition of “vibes” than Rafael’s “how it makes the reader feel”, that’s something like “the mental model of the kind of person who would post a comment with this content, in this context, worded like this”. A reader might be violently allergic to eggplants and would then feel nauseous when reading a comment about cooking with eggplants, but it feels obvious it wouldn’t then make sense to say the eggplant cooking comment had “bad vibes”.

Meanwhile if a poster keeps trying to use esoteric Marxist analysis to show how dolphin telepathy explains UFO phenomena, you’re might start subconsciously putting the clues together and thinking “isn’t this exactly what a crypto-Posadist would be saying”. Now we’ve got vibes. Generally, you build a model, consciously or unconsciously, about what the person is like and why they’re writing the things they do, and then “vibes” are the valence of what the model-person feels like to you. “Bad vibes” can then be things like “my model of this person has hidden intentions I don’t like”, “my model of this person has a style of engagement I find consistently unpleasant” or “my model is that this person is mentally unstable and possibly dangerous to be around”.

This is still somewhat subjective, but feels less so than “how the comment makes the reader feel like”. Building the model of the person based on the text is inexact, but it isn’t arbitrary. There generally needs to be something in the text or the overall situation to support model-building, and there’s a sense that the models are tracking some kind of reality, even though inferences can go wrong, different people can pay attention to very different things. There’s still another complication that different people also disagree on goals or styles of engagement, so they might be building the same model and disagree on the “vibes” of it. This still isn’t completely arbitrary, most people tend to agree that the “mentally unstable and possibly dangerous to be around” model has bad vibes.

rsaarelm 22 Jun 2025 5:55 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Said Achmiz’s Shortform
I feel like it’s a thing where you should use human moderator judgment once the account isn’t new. Figure out how the person is being counterproductive, warn them about it, and if they keep doing the thing, ban them. Ongoing mechanisms like this make sense for something like Reddit where there is basically zero community at this point, but on LW if someone is sufficiently detached from the forum and community that it actually makes sense to apply a mechanical paper cut like the rate limit on them after years of them being on site and accumulating positive karma, they probably shouldn’t be here to begin with.

The basic problem is that it’s not treating the person as a person, like a human moderator actually talking to them and going “hey, we think you’re not helping here, here’s why … in the future could you …” (and then proceeding to a ban if there’s no improvement) would be. People occasionally respond well the moderator feedback, but being hit by the rate limiter robot is pretty likely to piss off just about any invested and competent person and might also make them go “cool, then I’ll treat your thing as less of a community made of people and more like a video game to beat on my end as well”, which makes it less likely for things to be improved in the future.