transhumanist_atom_understander

• transhumanist_atom_understander 13 Jun 2026 21:22 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Tak­ing woo se­ri­ously but not literally

  This is a tangent, but regarding the meta-analysis you linked saying that open-label placebos still work, what do you think of the interpretation (which I favor) that they don’t work but the patients think they do? I think this is supported by the comparison of self-reported vs objective outcomes in the study.

New­comb’s prob­lem from the grand-sys­tem and petty-sys­tem views

• transhumanist_atom_understander 6 Jun 2026 16:36 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Why do you need the story?

  I like what Epicurus did, at least when he was talking about the weather in the letter to Pythocles.

  Instead of giving one explanation of lightning, he gives multiple contradictory explanations. The point is they all fit the observations and are at least as plausible as “Zeus did it”.

  This feels right from a Bayesian perpsective, where uncertainty about a prediction about a future event F can come from averaging P(F|H) over all the hypotheses H compatible with past evidence E. (More properly P(F|H&E); it becomes P(F|H) when the hypotheses have no free parameters learned from the data.)

  I guess I want people to do more storytelling, not less; I want them to realize how cheap these plausible-sounding stories really are.

  And, of course, when certainty is appropriate, I want them to notice that their plausible-sounding alternatives actually do not fit the available evidence, or don’t predict it with the same strength. Epicurus failed at this, unfortunately, because he was dismissive of astronomy. So he said maybe the moon reflects sunlight and maybe it has its own light, when astronomers had already noticed that as the moon goes through its phases, the illuminated part matches the location of the sun.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 20 May 2026 16:08 UTC

  1 point

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  on: (Re)in­tro­duc­tion of a ra­tio­nal­ist dragon, and clar­ifi­ca­tions on Ziz’s character

  Concepts from Mage are used heavily by Michael Vassar, Ziz, and yourself. It got me curious and I’ve tried to engage through franchise fiction, but what I’ve read has been not good, and just, I guess, generic compared to what I’ve seen in posts. (Compare Ziz’s posts about the Nephandi to the generic cackling evil wizards in the franchise fiction, for example).

  It’s gotten me wondering how you all have engaged with the setting. Are you reading the franchise fiction? (If so, please give me recommendations.) Reading the rulebooks? Or running games?

  I’m also wondering about Wraith, since Ziz uses Wraith concepts extensively, especially Oblivion (though I understand her use isn’t directly the Wraith concept, but just something for which Wraith provides a useful analogy or reference). The only Wraith fiction I’ve read so far that seemed to really use the Psyche vs Shadow premise are John H. Steele’s stories: “Glimpses of Before”, and its sequel, “Some There Be That Shadows Kiss”. Were you all reading the rulebooks, reading the fiction, or did you actually run Wraith games? Wraith is so strange that sometimes I wonder whether anyone played it. Although when reading a review of a World of Darkness anthology, the reviewer said:

  I’ll be honest, Wraith has a really engrossing setting, but the few times I’ve played, it runs into the issue of every character actually being Psyche and Shadow, which gets confusing easily.

  This also seems to be an issue for authors, and it’s been disappointing reading a Wraith story where the Psyche vs Shadow conflict just gets some obligatory mentions rather than being the core of the drama. But anyway, a few times is not nothing, so someone played it. What about you and Ziz?

• transhumanist_atom_understander 21 Apr 2026 14:54 UTC

  1 point

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  on: 10 non-bor­ing ways I’ve used AI in the last month

  I wanted to share this post on social media about a half hour ago (so, like 7 or 7:30 am in California?), but couldn’t load the LessWrong frontpage:

  Application error: a server-side exception has occurred while loading www.lesswrong.com (see the server logs for more information).

  Digest: 262397541

  Just curious now what the issue was; it would be kind of funny, although I suppose only to me, if it was an issue introduced by the AI workflow you describe here.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 12 Mar 2026 14:33 UTC

  1 point

  1

  in reply to: James Payor’s comment on: Payo­rian co­op­er­a­tion is easy with Kripke frames

  I don’t think was a mistake.

  This gets at the deeper issue: how do we represent an action having a consequence? I don’t think it’s .

  In the Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, you don’t respond to my action, you respond to what you can prove about my action, so it’s really that’s important.

  But I think that even in single player games, we should think of the environment as containing an implementation of us which takes an action when it can prove it’s the “right” action, so even then it’s provability that has consequences.

  This may seem unnatural, but that’s just because considered decisions are unnatural, and mostly we just do stuff. But I think it’s a good model of thinking with a notebook open and plenty of time. That is, our model is that the consequences in the environment trace back to the existence of a proof in Peano Arithmetic.

  My only reservation really is that I think maybe it should be , where means provable with a consistency assumption. Otherwise, how do I know that my implementation in the environment (for a single-player game) or my opponent’s simulation of me (in the Prisoner’s Dilemma) will actually find a proof of before a proof of ? Even if is provable, the implementation or simulation could get to a contradiction first.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 10 Mar 2026 17:56 UTC

  6 points

  −1

  in reply to: James Payor’s comment on: Payo­rian co­op­er­a­tion is easy with Kripke frames

  If I’m the Payorian FairBot and you’re my opponent, I simulate you under the assumption that there’s a proof I cooperate; this is .

  So, to stay in the Payorian spirit, I could also simulate you under the assumption that there’s a proof I defect.

  That makes me think that a Payorian PrudentBot would satisfy

  Since there’s no third program involved, I can just define and to clean this up a bit:

  The reason this looks right to me is because when we start drawing Kripke frames it does look like I (PrudentBot) am doing two simulations of you (my opponent), to see what you do assuming my provable cooperation and defection. Let’s assume . Then (and yes, is ),

  I’ll cooperate if this can’t be satisfied, meaning we need to show contradictions in two different sets of requirements on the Kripke model. The first is the one from my post:

  That’s the one where I simulate you assuming there’s a proof that I cooperate. We rule this out if, in that world, you cooperate (contradicting the in ).

  The other:

  This is the one where I simulate you assuming there’s a proof I defect. We rule this one out if, in that world, you defect (contradicting the in ).

  So, if you cooperate in the simulation where there’s a proof I cooperate, and defect in the simulation where there’s a proof I defect, we rule these both out. That means we can’t satisfy the conditions imposed by my defection, meaning I cooperate.

  That sounds prudent.

  As for the Löbian PrudentBot testing its opponent on DefectBot and how that seems arbitrary. I mentioned in the FairBot vs FairBot section of my post that looks suspiciously like I’m simulating you facing CooperateBot. This was troubling to me because I shouldn’t care whether my opponent exploits CooperateBot. Similarly, in this proposed Payorian PrudentBot, looks suspiciously like simulating my opponent against DefectBot.

  However, I think it’s not really? Although that brings to mind something missing from my post. In my post, when I’m simulating you, I never actually give you the full description of myself. I think a general version of this method requires an additional premise, repeating the description of myself but wrapped in a provability modality so it’s accessible in the simulations. Then my simulated opponent in doesn’t see a CooperateBot; rather, it sees whatever bot I am, but we assume there’s a proof I cooperate. Well… I hope this is different than just running my opponent against a CooperateBot, but I’m worried.

  I’m not really sure how any of this will turn out, and I don’t have time to try it on paper right now or learn to use any of the automated tools. But in any case I think it’s good to record what seems like the obvious Payorian PrudentBot, at least to me, even if, as before, the solution ends up non-obvious.

Payo­rian co­op­er­a­tion is easy with Kripke frames

• transhumanist_atom_understander 16 Dec 2025 2:05 UTC

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  in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform

  Interesting. Have they shared the GPT chatlog? I don’t see it anywhere.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 5 Dec 2025 18:21 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Koko­ta­jlo’s Shortform

  It may actually be more affordable to build some kinds of high cost-per-kg structures (e.g. datacenters, high-tech factories) in space than on land.

  Than in Berkeley, you mean.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 27 Nov 2025 4:15 UTC

  4 points

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  on: CFAR up­date, and New CFAR workshops

  Interesting to see what you’ve been reading, but I’m also wondering if you’ve been reading about the history of the human potential movement.

  Previously you wrote:

  My lead guess is that the barriers and tricky spots we ran into are somewhat similar to those that lots of efforts at self-help /​ human potential movement /​ etc. things have run into

  It was a long time before I placed rationalism in what I now think of as its proper context. Or rather, two contexts: the human potential movement, and the tradition that Drexler calls “exploratory engineering” (≈L5 society culture).

  And I don’t think it was just me that missed this; Scott’s Yes, We Have Noticed The Skulls seems to be looking at a completely different reference class (and even says we’re making new mistakes, the opposite of your later conclusion).

  I’d be interested in whatever you have to say about this context or how you acquired it (not necessarily recently, I realize). It seems like an important subject, and if you’re restarting CFAR workshops I suppose you must have had some sources to conclude that you’re not making the familiar mistakes this time.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 20 Oct 2025 21:16 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  That’s interesting—if it’s broken down not into single amino acids, but a mixture of single amino acids, dipeptides, and tripeptides, that still fits with how I understand the system to work; like we’re breaking it down into pieces, but not reliably into single units, sometimes two or three. And then collagen consists of distinctive tripeptide repeats, so the tripeptides you get from collagen are a distinct mixture rather than just random 3-mers, I didn’t think of that. That these tripeptides actually do something is surprising if true, but why not.

  I guess what I was thinking was that when you eat collagen, it doesn’t become your collagen. Which seems to be true: your collagen is made at the ribosome from single amino acids, not assembled from the kind of dipeptides and tripeptides discussed in the paper. So it’s not like you get collagen by eating collagen, the way you get vitamin B12 by eating vitamin B12. But if there’s some totally separate biological effect… well, I can’t rule it out.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 20 Oct 2025 16:30 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Shibetoshi Doggomoto’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  Right, it depends on the vegan diet. Grains and legume protein are complementary, one deficient in branched chain amino acids, the other deficient in sulfur-containing amino acids, if I recall correctly. I think it’s an easy failure mode of a vegan diet to be all legume protein, and the gluten-free trend has made this even worse, but that’s a rant for the other day. The point here is that when it comes to dietary protein, all that matters is the amino acid composition. Every protein, including collagen, is broken down in the stomach into component amino acids. And that’s why collagen supplements are a scam, and while I am broadly sympathetic to the message of this post I think rationalists should do better.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 14 Oct 2025 23:56 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  I eat oysters but am otherwise vegan. The reason I didn’t just go with standard veganism is something like the more general arguments in this post. I had my reasons for nitpicking the details of this post; rationalists should learn some science and thereby be less wrong than the rest of the cultic milieu. But I want to comment again to focus on the positive: this post was a great reminder that I’m not a real vegan and why, and I’ve been making more of an effort to get oysters since reading it.

  What links here?

  • transhumanist_atom_understander's comment on Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming by KatWoods (20 Oct 2025 16:30 UTC; 1 point)

• transhumanist_atom_understander 13 Oct 2025 15:50 UTC

  8 points

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  in reply to: Jan Betley’s comment on: The Thir­teen-Cir­cle Paradox

  And if you want a “certified lower bound on their difference” you can use the Lagrange error bound for the Taylor series. The naive reasoning is that the error of the Taylor series is about the size of the first term you leave out. With the Lagrange error bound you get something like that rigorously. With well-behaved functions like sqrt and sin there’s no obstacle to proving that we’ve gotten the third digit correct (that is, that our error is <0.00001 and so can’t change the third digit). So if they differ in the third digit of our bounded numerical computation, they’re different numbers.

  I haven’t actually done that carefully in this case that but the bound depends on the maximum of a higher derivative for the function. For sin that should have absolute value at most 1. For sqrt… well, we don’t want to expand around x=0, but if we expand around say x=4, these derivatives I think are not just bounded, but go to zero.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 29 Sep 2025 21:33 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  Wait, you think people need to eat collagen? Collagen is just a kind of protein, it’ll get broken down into raw amino acids in the stomach. There can be issues with a vegan diet not getting complete protein (that is, low on one or more essential amino acids) but there’s nothing special about collagen specifically.

  What links here?

  • transhumanist_atom_understander's comment on Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming by KatWoods (14 Oct 2025 23:56 UTC; 1 point)

• transhumanist_atom_understander 4 Sep 2025 16:29 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: All Ex­po­nen­tials are Even­tu­ally S-Curves

  I’m surprised at how hard it is for me to think of counterexamples.

  I thought surely whale populations due to the slow generation time, but it looks like humpback whale populations have already recovered from whaling, and blue whales will get there before long.

  Thinking again—in my baseball example, gravity is pulling the ball into the domain of applicability of the constant acceleration model.

  Maybe what’s special about the exponential growth model is it implies escape from its own domain of applicability, in time that grows slowly (logarithmically) with the threshold.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 4 Sep 2025 2:22 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Löb’s Lemma: an eas­ier ap­proach to Löb’s Theorem

  I remember this by analogy to Curry’s paradox.

  Where the sentence from Curry’s paradox says “If this statement is true, then $p$”, $\Psi$ says “if this statement is provable, then $p$”, that is, $\square \Psi \to p$.

  In Curry’s paradox, if the sentence is true, that would indeed imply that $p$ is true. And with $\Psi$, the situation is analogous, but with truth replaced by provability: if $\Psi$ is provable, then $p$ is provable. That is, $\square \Psi \to \square p$.

  But, unlike in Curry’s paradox, this is not what $\Psi$ itself says! Replacing truth with provability has attenuated the sentence, destroyed its ability to cause paradox.

  If only $\square p\to p$, then we would have our paradox back… and that’s Löb’s theorem.

  This is all about $\square \Psi \to \square p$, just about one direction of the biimplication, whereas the post proves not just that but the other direction. It seems that only this forward direction is used in the proof at the end of the post though.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 4 Sep 2025 1:49 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: All Ex­po­nen­tials are Even­tu­ally S-Curves

  You say “if we are to accurately model the world”...

  If I am modelling the path of a baseball, and I write “F = mg”, would you “correct” me that it’s actually inverse square, that the Earth’s gravitation cannot stay at this strength to arbitrary heights? If you did, I would remind you that we are talking about a baseball game, and not shooting it into orbit—or conclude that you had an agenda other than determining where the ball lands.

  What if I’m sampling from a population, and you catch me multiplying probabilities together, as if my draws are independent, as if the population is infinite? Yes there is an end to the population, but as long as it’s far away, the dependence induced by sampling without replacement is negligible.

  Well, that’s the question, whether to include an effect in the model or whether it’s negligible. An effect like finite population size, diminishing gravity, or the “crowding” effects that turn an exponential growth model logistic.

  And the question cannot be escaped just by noting the effect is important eventually.

• transhumanist_atom_understander 3 Sep 2025 3:38 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Yud­kowsky on “Don’t use p(doom)”

  Eliezer in 2008, in When (Not) To Use Probabilities, wrote:

  To be specific, I would advise, in most cases, against using non-numerical procedures to create what appear to be numerical probabilities. Numbers should come from numbers.