Alex Vermillion

Karma: 869

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 5 Nov 2025 23:03 UTC
1 point
0
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
0
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
2 points
0
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
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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 18 Oct 2025 20:24 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: David Joshua Sartor’s comment on: Education on My Homeworld
I think that’s a really interesting point^[1], but a really unhelpful (in the “Ways that Words Can Be Wrong” sense) way to interpret the exercise. It would remove some of the creative potential from the medianworld concept to interpret it as a list of traits about cavemen.
1. ↩︎
  and I gave an upvote for that!

Alex Vermillion 13 Oct 2025 22:14 UTC
1 point
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on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
Is there a download API? I’d love to download posts as Markdown if that’s already built-in. (Eventually, I’m working on integrating this into a tool which helps me make PDFs for my e-reader or for printing out with custom formatting).

Alex Vermillion 13 Oct 2025 20:57 UTC
5 points
4
on: Don’t Mock Yourself
The next thing I noticed was that I was the butt of half of my jokes. I’d keep thinking of zingers which made me out to be a loser, a moron, a scrub in some way. Sometimes, I could re-work the joke to not insult myself. Often I couldn’t. Self-mockery served as a crutch for me.
Well-meaning note to people who do this a lot: what you think of as a ‘zinger’ is frequently not very funny and is just a self-insult. This post calls them a “crutch”, but crutches trade off atrophy in your legs for letting you move around. For many people self-deprecating humor is more like digging a hole and lying in it: your normal humor atrophies and you’re not funny while you’re using these.

Props to OP for getting off this thin humor and onto the good stuff :)

Alex Vermillion 12 Oct 2025 3:20 UTC
1 point
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on: Hubris & Control
This reminded me of Zvi’s “Levels of Friction”, but it’s not the exact same idea. Comparing the two essays and how they think about this is sort of interesting though.

Alex Vermillion 12 Oct 2025 3:18 UTC
8 points
−1
in reply to: Alex Darby’s comment on: Hubris & Control
Suggestion: naming the account “Duncan (crossposting)” or “Duncan (not reading the comments)” might lead to less confusion.

I have been confused several times by Duncan’s posting and commenting and assumed it was just normal some normal human grappling with a vice stuff. If it really is meant to be about commenting or something, I want to flag that this is not getting across for me or anyone I’ve directly discussed a Duncanpost with (who has mentioned the username).

Alex Vermillion 11 Oct 2025 22:28 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
I said similar elsewhere, but I agree that “I” speak would be really bad (don’t put words into the author’s mouth, especially in this case, where it would mislead the reader about the writing style/ability of the post), but I also think switching out the post for a summary is pretty jarring to begin with.

Since every post for years has been peekable as the first couple paragraphs, showing a summary unlabeled is always a jarring bait-and-switch

Alex Vermillion 11 Oct 2025 22:26 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
Ah, so it really was an AI summary of a post that is totally unlabeled? An amusing twist.

Even with what appears to be a fair amount of fine-tuning, it still reads like unlabeled AI text, which is maybe why I found it so jarring. Possibly a label could help, then?

(though honestly, it’s pretty weird to not see the first paragraph, so even if the AI thing doesn’t ring as important to you, some kind of differentiating label would be REALLY HELPFUL when the expected POV is altered after the fact.)

(RE parenthetical: I heavily suspect you know this, but switching the POV to first person would be much much much worse and would lead me to skip posts I would assume read like AI text)

Alex Vermillion 11 Oct 2025 14:58 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
I do not have especially strong feelings about it besides the initial confusion. I think maybe confusion could be fixed just by saying something like “Featured post summary:” or similar, which would help explain why, when I expected the first paragraph of the essay, I’m reading a summary

Alex Vermillion 11 Oct 2025 3:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
I am glad to hear this! I am going to reply in the other thread off the parent, though, to keep any commenting together. Thanks for the clarity.

Alex Vermillion 11 Oct 2025 3:29 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
It took me a minute to find the post I saw, since I (incorrectly) assumed it was everywhere. I was browsing Ethical Design Patterns by AnnaSalamon and noticed a few:

Katja’s post Let’s think about slowing down AI, in which she argues that

*Historically people worried about extinction risk from artificial intelligence have not seriously considered deliberately slowing down AI progress as a solution. Katja Grace argues this strategy should be considered more seriously, and that common objections to it are incorrect or exaggerated. *

“Safetywashing” (by analogy to “greenwashing”)

The field of AI alignment is growing rapidly, attracting more resources and mindshare each year. As it grows, more people will be incentivized to misleadingly portray themselves or their projects as more alignment-friendly than they are. Adam proposes “safetywashing” as the term for this [note: this one cutting off is what made me suspect it was automatic]

or this blog post by me.

You might feel like AI risk is an “emergency” that demands drastic changes to your life. But is this actually the best way to respond? Anna Salamon explores what kinds of changes actually make sense in different types of emergencies, and what that might mean for how to approach existential risk.

Alex Vermillion 10 Oct 2025 21:14 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
Intuitively this seems deeply ethically fraught but I upvoted for demonstrating the virtue of Thinking About Things Every Once In A While

Alex Vermillion 10 Oct 2025 21:03 UTC
7 points
0
on: Open Thread Autumn 2025
I just noticed that hovering a Lesswrong link on Lesswrong.com gives me what looks like an AI summary of a post that is totally unlabeled. What the heck!?

I am registering that I dislike this and didn’t catch the announcement that this feature was getting pushed out without a little widget at the front saying it was AI-voice.

Edit for posterity: If you’re looking at this comment and are confused, scroll down to find a comment containing 3 examples. If you just want an example, here’s a post that contained the weird pop-in at the time I wrote this: Let’s think about slowing down AI

Alex Vermillion 10 Oct 2025 20:12 UTC
1 point
0
on: The salt in pasta water fallacy
Important Note: you have been misled about salted pasta water and what chefs claim it does (though home cooks do in fact usually get this wrong).

A sophisticated chef will say the salt is added to increase the boiling point of the water so that the noodles can be cooked hotter for a shorter period of time.

This is incorrect (for the reasons you noted in the post). The salt does not actually move the boiling point by enough to be useful. Instead, the salt itself helps change the pasta to have an “al dente” texture.

Conclusion:

The fallacy, I claim, is that 2.6s are nothing. Adding salt does not decrease cooking time. It doesn’t increase it either, it just does nothing (wrt cooking time at least). [emphasis added]

This is the very first example of “The salt in pasta water fallacy” fallacy — a difference being ignored because it seemed irrelevant. In the original post’s examples, people ignored small differences, imagining them irrelevant, but in the original post’s text, someone ignored a difference because it seemed irrelevant.

Salt your pasta water! Don’t salt it! Try both!