Alex Vermillion

Karma: 952

I found the community in spring 2020 through HPMOR which I found while bored and reading stories online. When I learned that there were other people using such witchcraft as “not only using reasoning on math exercises, but also issues in the real world”, I was sold.

Crocker’s Rules and Metahonesty are in effect (on me) at all times.

You can always message me and I will not be upset. No anxiety needed around “bugging” me.

If I say something and you think “Wow! He sounds like a moron who doesn’t understand humans!”, you’ve misunderstood and I was trying to make a more subtle point. Extend me charity and I’ll find it low cost to extend it to you.

Alex Vermillion 29 Jan 2026 16:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Your Strength as a Rationalist
It’s because a good model should fail to explain falsehoods. You can think of this in a mathy way as a model taking data and using it to narrow down which possible world you’re in. If it doesn’t narrow it down, it’s rather uninformative!

Alex Vermillion 23 Jan 2026 17:20 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Thresholding

I don’t know what to do about the general case where there’s a good tool, properly integrating that tool makes you more effective overall, but learning and starting to use that tool is likely going to lead to some mistakes, and also it’s hard to get good practice in to smooth those out.

I really like your response but want to highlight that I’m concerned about a different thing. I don’t think this is a Valley of Bad Rationality per se, but more a tightrope walk. You made it to the other end, but a lot of people fall off before then and become paranoid about social interactions.

Because of this, I’m not worried about minimizing risk while getting people onboarded, but mitigating risk that is perpetually ongoing.

I don’t know how to solve this issue either FWIW.

Alex Vermillion 18 Jan 2026 19:22 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Thresholding
I really like the concept and agree that a lot of Rationalist-community folks are walking around without it. I also think the concept is likely to be mishandled by a lot of people and to really make a mess of community dynamics because of how the current presentation isn’t paired with any helpful tips at how to use it.

I’ve seen this play out a couple times since the post’s publication:
1. Alice bumps into Bob while walking past.
2. Bob, who dislikes Alice, says “Ouch!” and makes a big fuss.
3. Bob tells the Meetup Organizer about this.
4. Alice says she just accidentally bumped into Bob and it’s not a big deal.
5. Bob tells the Meetup Organizer that, sure, it’s not a big deal, but Alice bumped into him 2 months ago as well, and she’s just Thresholding, which means Doing Bad Things But Not Often Enough To Be A Big Deal, so even if it’s not a big deal, we should make it one, and punish Alice.
6. The Meetup Organizer, who has always had a hard time with social situations, feels very proud to get a chance to apply their new Thresholding skill, and Alice gets in trouble.
The concept of Thresholding is really useful: it lets you stop doing rules lawyering and start using common sense. However, the people who need to learn about Thresholding do not have social common sense, and can often apply the idea in a very rigid way, making things even more exploitable for bad actors.

I do not have a good enough view of the whole of the community to know whether this second-order effect is small enough that the first-order effect is a good purchase at this price, and I really really liked Duncan’s essay, but I’m reluctant to promote the essay further for this reason.

Alex Vermillion 17 Jan 2026 17:50 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Angry Troll’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era
Thanks for the reply. I’m going to dip out (after reading your reply, if you choose to leave one), but I will in my last reply suggest you revisit my initial and revised wording, which said that nothing “compels” or “requires” you to change in this manner, not that you are forbidden from doing so.

You are fighting against a position I do not hold, and so cannot offer you the satisfaction of convincing me to abandon it. You made a claim which I interpreted as “You MUST follow this procedure”. I replied that nothing “MUST” be done, and now you are, if I’m reading you correctly, explaining that you MAY. I agree! You MAY! You also MAY NOT, so I think MUST is overblown.

Alex Vermillion 14 Jan 2026 16:19 UTC
8 points
7
in reply to: Sofia Panasiuk’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era
I have strong upvoted this because of how helpful I think it is to understanding the post (even for people who disagree with your methods, knowing what they are should be very helpful!)

I think those sound like awesome ways to facilitate high-quality conversation between many more people than otherwise. You need a way for beginners to get good, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to build those skills without some help. It almost sounds like your goal (getting lots of people involved and sharing ideas) is intentionally opposed to a discussion that’s solely among practiced debaters with extremely coherent arguments (and little room for disagreement, since “correct” thinkers shouldn’t diverge by much, presumably). That seems OK to me, but I’m not certain you’d agree.

Alex Vermillion 14 Jan 2026 16:12 UTC
2 points
−1
in reply to: Angry Troll’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era
Apologies for the offense, but luckily, (perhaps reciprocally to an error I made first) the sentence I set out to write differs greatly from the sentence you read. Perhaps a reword will help:

One is not required by facts to change one’s (terminal-ish) values.
1. It would be absurd to have meant “you (AngryTroll)”, but the grammatical feature of English where “you” refers to a general person makes good sense
2. The word “compel” was important there, not flourish. Even you (AngryTroll) are not required to change your moral accounting of other people by your beliefs about their intelligence. A different way this could go would be to go thr “It All Adds Up To Normality” route and realize that your accounting of other people is not necessarily dependant on their intelligence.
Sorry, I know that’s messy in that there’s a grammatical correction and a philosophical objection, but I think it would muddy the waters to leave either out of my reply.

A Couple Useful LessWrong Userstyles

Alex Vermillion11 Jan 2026 21:26 UTC

39 points

0 comments2 min readLW link

Alex Vermillion 11 Jan 2026 20:26 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Angry Troll’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era
I think this is mostly wrong in ways that make it hard to reform it. From the top:

It is experimentally verifiable that most of them are not very smart.

is a very silly thing to say! What did you mean by this: that most of the world can’t cook broccoli? It is very hard to learn to cook broccoli, but because we all know how to do this, we don’t find it impressive. This sentence boils down to “Most people are not the smartest people”, a statement that I’d argue is directionally true but largely oversells itself (if you know how to graft trees, write a database, and repair a washing machine, you’re a very unusual person! Smugly declaring that the Common Rube is obviously dumber than you elides a lot of important information about the guy who fixed your car a few years back).

Continuing, we have

You have effectively been brought up in a church that indoctrinated you to think that all surviving hominins are “equal” and that those who disagree are evil and edgy.

an attempt to insulate this post from critique (after all, anyone who disagrees is just deluded!)

Then we have an is–ought confusion:

If you feel the value of an entity is increased by having a given level of intellectual ability, you’re just, allowed to think that.

And end on one last attempt to make sure any criticism is read as an attack instead of a correction

Just don’t say it out loud or the stupid apes will eat you. (Typical.)

In general, I think a LessWrong comment should at least attempt to approach its subject matter with a truth-seeking lens, not a conspiratorial bundle of shadowy assertions. It is the case that people have different skill levels at different tasks, and it’s further the case that a lot of these different skill levels are correlated (“G factor”). These facts are not enough to compel you to change your valuation of people, and they are not something that must be darkly alluded to on this website.

Alex Vermillion 6 Jan 2026 14:33 UTC
6 points
6
in reply to: moridinamael’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era

smug intellectual superiority is really difficult to maintain when you think about all the moronic buffoonery that you have committed in your life

I’d charge that it’s an error of reasoning to treat “Have I ever made a mistake?” and “Are my insights shallow or nonsensical?” as if they’re the same question.

More than even flattening two questions into one, your method suggests giving them both an interminate answer (“sometimes”)!

Alex Vermillion 6 Jan 2026 14:28 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Sofia Panasiuk’s comment on: In My Misanthropy Era
Not in a sarcastic way, but because I’m ignorant (and almost everyone here will be) and would appreciate you drilling down:

We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion.

This all sounds rather wishy-washy to me, but I suspect it’s not the full story. Could you paint a picture explaining how your group is investigating things more deeply than just chatting with people at a party? (Again, I’m not presupposing the answe is that you’re bad; I’m just trying to get you to add details at the top of the comments section)

Alex Vermillion 22 Nov 2025 21:22 UTC
1 point
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on: Why is American mass-market tea so terrible?
Wow, I’ve wondered this for a while and hadn’t gotten around to even attempting to figure it out. Thanks for writing

Alex Vermillion 11 Nov 2025 21:58 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: LLM-generated text is not testimony
I understand that you’re leaving and think that’s wise and healthy, but am leaving an explanation since I didn’t earlier (expecting a longer conversation).

What I am interested in is the process of a human writing a particular passage somehow. I can imagine a few scenarios and view them as similarly “testimonial”, given that they result in the same text:
1. A human writes a sonnet “solo”.
2. A human thumbs through the thesaurus for synonyms for “autumn”.
3. A human uses a computer to look up “nouns that begin with G”.
4. A human uses a computer to generate crappy sonnets and splices a few dozen together.
5. A human uses a computer to generate sonnets and selects one.
I view these as similarly at our current stage of computer sophistication because the intelligence that created the particular sonnet lives inside the human’s head. If they were just prompting Original ChatGPT with “write me a good sonnet”, the result would be bad, but in this article the claim was made that a sonnet we all liked would have its connection to human art and emotion severed if a computer generated it and was edited, and I think that argument proves too much since it seems to have me look down on thesaurus use.

(I will not reply further but really did not want to exit the thread without making my case for my position. I wanted to check whether this was the appropriate case to make or if something else would be more appropriate, but something is better than nothing)

Alex Vermillion 10 Nov 2025 18:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: LLM-generated text is not testimony

e.g. the LLM could tell a story that’s plausibly true, and happens to be actually true of some people, and some of those people generate that story with their LLM and post it. But I want to know who would generate that themselves without LLMs.

This snippet is my crux here (and perhaps yours?). I do not find it useful to make the distinction between writing a particular sonnet and generating thousands and selecting the same sonnet and only publishing that.

Alex Vermillion 5 Nov 2025 23:03 UTC
1 point
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on: GAZP vs. GLUT
This is still one of my all-time favorite LessWrong posts. I have thought sometimes about trying to play the “Follow the Improbability” game with friends at a meetup to see if I can get it to catch on, but I haven’t really formulated it to stick yet.

Alex Vermillion 5 Nov 2025 22:52 UTC
1 point
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on: LLM-generated text is not testimony
But, a bit similarly to how high-level actions don’t screen off intent, text does not screen off thought. How you want to interpret and react to text, and how you want to interact with the person who published that text, depend on the process that produced the text.
While I am also irritated by AI-written text being sent to me unlabeled, I think this is just outright incorrect (or “proves too much”).

I think the “GAZP vs. GLUT” argument is exactly my complaint: it is not by random chance that those two texts were the same. Some process refined the two texts the same, and that process is what I care about.

Alex Vermillion 5 Nov 2025 22:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Vermillion’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
Hello, name doppleganger. I also liked the story, though I’ll admit to skimming the back half once it was unsurprising for a while (metaphors for something I already know about can be that way sometimes). I am imagining a short book of parables like this as an add-on to If Anyone Builds It to which a much shorter version of this (defending only on ONE front instead of MANY) would be a welcome addition.

Alex Vermillion 5 Nov 2025 22:35 UTC
10 points
16
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
I don’t think this is true. This sounds like an issue that stems from the manner in which one approaches conversations, not the sorts of things one talks about.

I do not expect a longer comment on discussion to be useful to this thread (or, more importantly, to the post it’s under), but I would like to put some chips down on the idea that talking to people in respectful and non-smug ways can be a good way to talk about “things that actually matter”.

Alex Vermillion 28 Oct 2025 17:19 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: p’s comment on: How To Dress To Improve Your Epistemics
Honestly, not to sound like a fop, but if you trust yourself to moderate opinions you hear, go for something “old fashioned” like https://www.gentlemansgazette.com/ and learn some of the old-timey rules and then work forwards from there. Like many squishy disciplines, modern fashion is hopelessly complicated with 15 levels of counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-signaling, and going back to the basics can help.

Try to learn things like:
- How do I know if a shirt fits?
- What’s the basic mold than men’s outfits were built around (hint, it’s the suit) and how does the shadow of this hang over modern fashion?
- Why do we care about “clashing” outfits, and how do I know if two pieces of clothing “clash”? What colors go together, what patterns go together, etc?
- What materials exist, and how do I, personally, feel about including them in an outfit?

Alex Vermillion 28 Oct 2025 17:07 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: How To Dress To Improve Your Epistemics
I often get very frustrated responses when people come to me for design feedback and I respond with things like “well, I think this website is communicating that you are a kind of 90s CS professor? Is that what you want?”

I know you (literally and explicitly, in similar words) say it, but this is also true of fashion and fashion advice; you are choosing what message to convey, not whether to convey one.

In the post it says:

Of course, there are lots of other options besides literally just a leather jacket. As a general rule, any outfit which makes people ask “are you in a band?” signals coolness. Personally, I usually wear all black, including suit pants and jacket from a tailor in Shanghai, Converse sneakers, a black hat, and sunglasses.

I have nothing against John and am not commenting on John. However, there were multiple kids at my highschool who thought they would dress like they were in a band and then they’d be cool. We thought these kids were losers, because they acted like aliens with self-esteem issues looking for hacks that would make them cool.

A different way to think about fashion is to ask “What do I want people to think of me?” and “Who do I think of that way, and how do they dress?”. If you want to look cool, you should be thinking of people who are cool and how they pick their clothes, not wearing sunglasses at night^[1].

Just like how websites can choose to look like Facebook or like Youtube or a ’90s computer science professor, in fashion there are a thousand ways to look cool and you need to select the appropriate style. Don’t dress up in a snazzy suit to volunteer washing oil off of ducks, don’t wear your leather jacket to a wedding, and maybe throw some faux-minimalism on your website if you’re trying to make it look trendy.

You have to find your niche though! The explicit moral of this comment is have an intended message.

Personally, I would always recommend dressing in high quality clothing^[2] that is conspicuously not trendy (not bad looking, just not stuff that signals having just been bought) and that fits you well. This would be really bad advice for some subcultures!
1. ↩︎
  Note: “coolness”, specifically, in fashion often comes from violating some rule, which means anyone wearing Standard Cool Garb looks more like a James Dean wannabe than anything else
2. ↩︎
  Don’t complain about it being expensive just yet: if you’re in the US, somewhere a mile away from you, a resale store is hanging up clothes amounting to hundreds of dollars in sticker price and charging dozens of dollars for it.

Alex Vermillion 26 Oct 2025 18:39 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
It doesn’t really seem that similar to me at all?

“All illegal drugs should be legal, if you buy them at a special government-managed shop, under the condition that you sign up for several months of addiction treatment.”

“Supervised Injection Sites” are missing the bit where you get legal immunity in exchange for locking yourself into rehab, which is the core of the idea. The idea isn’t just “there should be a place where you can do drugs without being arrested”, or even the (really cool) idea “there should be a place where you can do drugs with medical attendants”. The idea is “drug users have messed up discounting rates, can we legally lock them into rehab using their drug cravings?”

Alex Vermillion

A Cou­ple Use­ful LessWrong Userstyles

A Couple Useful LessWrong Userstyles