tslarm

Karma: 841

tslarm 24 Feb 2026 18:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
Yes, I get it, I’m very ignorant. (If you needed to get that off your chest, you could perhaps have said it directly in one sentence, rather than spending 10000 words patiently implying it.) But you’re still handwaving the interesting parts.
Obviously “I am in the first 10% of people” is a prediction; I already agreed to rephrase it as “I will eventually turn out to have been in the first 10% of people”. I’m not trying to deduce anything from the fact that it ‘sounds implausible’, and I’m not trying to bring any information back in time from the moment it turns out to be true or false in my case. I’m noting that it will definitely turn out to be false from the perspective of 90% of people who ever live, and asking why *this* fact is obviously irrelevant to the credence I should give it.
The answer is not “bayesianism, obviously”. Bostrom, even back when he was writing about this stuff, was not a heathen frequentist, and he wasn’t as stupid as me. (I’m pretty sure he’d even heard of causality.)

tslarm 15 Feb 2026 4:14 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
I’m a little puzzled why I’m having to point this out
You’re having to point it out because you kept emphatically insisting on the opposite! But now you’ve clarified that obviously we can and do have evidence about future events that are not fully predictable, I don’t understand how this strand of your argument holds together. It was presented as support for this claim:
Statements like “by definition, “I am in the first 10% of people” is false for most people” are incompatible with Bayesianism: you just broke one of its fundamental assumptions: causality. What you meant was “By definition, “He was in the first 10% of people” will, once we’re extinct, turn out to have been false for most people.” — I hope that careful distinction makes it entirely clear why the Doomsday Argument is nonsense?
You haven’t explained why that temporal distinction is so crucial, and why this rephrasing doesn’t serve the same purpose as the original statement in the doomsday argument:
“By definition, “I will eventually turn out to have been in the first 10% of people” will eventually turn out to have been false for most people”
As far as I’m concerned, “I will eventually turn out to have been in the first 10% of people” is obviously what “I am in the first 10% of people” meant in the first place. So what’s the important difference here?
(All claims about the future are claims about what will eventually turn out to be the case, and arguably all are also claims about what will eventually turn out to have been the case, i.e. that present conditions were such as to lead to the later outcomes. I feel like maybe there’s an important disagreement, or misunderstanding on my part, adjacent to this, but I can’t pin it down based on what you’ve written.)
One thing I should check, since we got tripped up once on absolutes: are you saying the doomsday argument is simply invalid and has literally no bearing on your probabilities? Or are you saying it has non-zero but negligible force?
(I didn’t downvote you, by the way; although we’re evidently both finding this a bit frustrating, I appreciate your sincere engagement throughout this discussion! No pressure to keep responding, though, if you feel it’s no longer worthwhile.)

tslarm 14 Feb 2026 13:57 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
I still feel like you’re focusing mainly on refuting things I haven’t said and don’t think, but, in any case, this is just obviously untrue:
Now, apply all the relevant evidence we have accumulated so far to these priors, using Bayes rule. Which is: none whatsoever.
we have no evidence, and we know for a fact that the evidence doesn’t yet exist so we can’t just go find it
I’d prefer to stick to the actual range of possible futures, rather than artificially limiting it to two extreme cases, but regardless—are you really saying nothing we know, and nothing we might conceivably discover, could update us in one direction or the other? That if, tomorrow, you learn that a rogue ASI has already begun construction of a carbon-fibre paperclip factory and has declared its intention to convert every human into paperclips by 2031, this is irrelevant because information can’t flow backwards in time?

tslarm 14 Feb 2026 5:53 UTC
1 point
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on: Coping with Deconversion
First, I sympathise! And I don’t think your sadness is a mistake; I grew up with quite fuzzy religious beliefs and moved away from them gradually, but if I had been a true believer I think I would have felt a great sense of loss. And I’ve certainly felt (and sometimes continue to feel) a range of negative existential emotions that could have been comforted or completely obviated by religious belief. But I don’t think your new worldview has the ramifications you’re implying it does.
Why should anything matter if we’re just arbitrary self-reinforcing arrangements of chemicals?
We’re not “just” that, unless you’re taking for granted that “arbitrary self-reinforcing arrangements of chemicals” have the capacity for joy, suffering, love, creativity, kindness, and so on and so on. And if you are taking that for granted, well, the question almost answers itself! If someone’s suffering and you comfort them, or if you have a family and you love them, why on earth shouldn’t that matter?
It matters to those other people, and I’m guessing that, at least at some level, it also still matters to you. I think you can choose to embrace that, rather than talking yourself out of it just because there’s probably no divine third party who also cares.

tslarm 14 Feb 2026 5:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
I’m afraid I don’t get this at all; I still have no idea why the second paragraph is relevant or why you think I’m building into my priors the assumption that I have access to information that I don’t know and couldn’t predict. I think it’s completely normal to consider predictions about the future to have truth values regardless of whether the eventual outcome could be calculated with certainty now. I think you’re saying that a prediction about the future only has a truth value if the person making it (or someone else who lives at the same time as them?) could, at least in theory, determine that truth value now. If so, and if that’s crucial to the point you’re making, then that’s the part I need you to explain/defend.
But if I assume you’re right and change the statement to “By definition, “I will eventually turn out to have been in the first 10% of people” will eventually turn out to have been false for most people”, what changes and why does this render the argument nonsense?
edit: one thing that could point to an important disagreement is the phrase “or even estimating it”. If you mean we are in a state of complete ignorance with respect to the eventual truth or falsehood of statements about the eventual total number of people, i.e. we currently have no relevant information, I think that’s obviously false. I can argue the point if needed, but first I want to check if that is what you mean.

tslarm 9 Feb 2026 16:54 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: A Perfect Resurrection
We don’t need to deny that there’s a meaningful first-person perspective, only that any particular first-person perspective is special (in this case, special in that it’s the ‘true’ continuation of the original). When a perfect copy is made, two meaningful first-person perspectives exist, they both see themselves as continuations of the original, and neither is more right or wrong than the other in any deep sense.

tslarm 9 Feb 2026 11:42 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MarkelKori’s comment on: A Perfect Resurrection
From my perspective, unless there is something akin to a soul or disembodied consciousness, there’s simply no fact of the matter here beyond the more granular facts. I don’t think “the same consciousness” means anything more than the prosaic ways in which we might define it, e.g. with reference to overlapping chains of experience and memory. We instinctively care about it, but I think that’s fairly easy to explain as a byproduct of our self/other distinction and self-preservation instinct and so on.

tslarm 9 Feb 2026 10:58 UTC
1 point
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on: A Perfect Resurrection
When you ask “would this be the same conscious experience”, do you have a clear idea of what “the same conscious experience” means, and you’re wondering whether the world works in such a way that the concept would hold in these hypotheticals? Or is it a concept that feels important, but which you can’t pin down, and your goal here is to analyse it?

tslarm 6 Feb 2026 15:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Liron’s comment on: How Dario Amodei’s “The Adolescence of Technology” Delegitimizes AI X-Risk Concerns
I think that’s a reasonable interpretation of the actual serious content of the post, and my understanding of Eliezer’s position basically matches yours. But the post starts like this:
tl;dr: It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.
And it sticks with the ‘death with dignity’ framing, talking about doubling our chances of survival from 0% to 0%, striving to earn ‘dignity points’ to take to our graves, and so on. It’s also explicitly presented as a MIRI thing, not just a personal Eliezer thing.
Underneath all this, of course, he is talking about doing actually useful things to increase our survival odds (albeit from ‘negligible’ to ‘still basically negligible’). But both the surface-level framing and the actual emotional content are drenched in despair and fatalism.
It’s probably clear that I think the ‘death with dignity’ framing is bad and unhelpful, but obviously I can’t be sure that Eliezer’s post did more harm than good. You and Harlan evidently hate being cast as inevitable-doomers, though, and if this was an unfair and harmful move on the part of Amodei, I think communications like the Death With Dignity post are partly to blame for making it a viable one.

tslarm 6 Feb 2026 5:08 UTC
5 points
2
on: How Dario Amodei’s “The Adolescence of Technology” Delegitimizes AI X-Risk Concerns
Harlan 0:17:13
A really repeated theme is the inevitability thing. It’s pretty frustrating to hear, as someone who’s spending effort trying to help with this stuff in some kind of way that we can, and for someone to characterize your camp as thinking doom is inevitable. If I thought it was inevitable, I would just be relaxing. I wouldn’t bother doing anything about it. There’s some sense in which if it was inevitable, that would be worse, but it would also mean that we didn’t really have to do anything about it.
Liron 0:17:42
Just to repeat your point in case viewers don’t get the connection: Dario is saying that doomerism is so unproductive because the Yudkowskis of the world — he doesn’t explicitly name Yudkowsky, but he’s basically saying our type — we think that we’re so doomed that we’re just fear-mongering, and it’s pointless.
Eliezer played directly into this with his Death With Dignity “”joke”″. The past is past, but if you guys haven’t yet said openly and plainly “fuck that, it was the product of personal exhaustion and being too cute by half, and whatever level of irony it was on it doesn’t represent us”, maybe that would be worth doing.
(It was just an April Fool’s joke wouldn’t count, because the post obviously had an element of “ha ha only serious”. By design, the serious meaning was impossible to pin down, but to pretend the whole thing was simple first-level irony would be insulting.)

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 6:02 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
But you are implicitly assuming that you already know this process is in fact going to continue. So it’s rather as if you asked Fred, and he told you yeah, there’s always a big rush at the end of the day, few people get here as early as you.
I didn’t mean to imply certainty, just uncertain expectation based on observation. Maybe I asked Fred, or the other customers, but I didn’t receive any information about ‘the end of the day’—only confirmation of the trend so far.
(I’m not trying to be difficult for the sake of it, by the way! I just want to think these things through carefully and genuinely understand what you’re saying, which requires pedantry sometimes.)
edit in response to your edit:
But if you know for a fact that all the customers are only 10 minutes old (including you) so decided to come here less than 10 minutes ago, then the only reasonable assumption is that there’s a very fast population explosion going on, and you have absolutely no idea how much longer this is going to last, or how soon Fred will run out of chili and close the shop. In that situation, your predictability into the future is just short, and you just don’t know what’s going to happen after that — and clearly neither does Fred, so you can’t just ask him.
I think I’m not quite understanding the distinction here. Why is there an important difference between “this trend is based on mechanisms of which I’m ignorant, such as the other customers’ work hours or their expectations about chili quality over time” and “this trend is based on different mechanisms of which I’m also ignorant, i.e. birth rates and chili inventory”?

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 5:44 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
But that’s not how I’m thinking of it in the first place—I’m not positing any random selection process. I just don’t see an immediately obvious flaw here:
- by definition, “I am in the first 10% of people” is false for most people
- so I should expect it to be false for me, absent sufficient evidence against
And I still don’t quite understand your response to this formulation of the argument. I think you’re saying ‘people who have ever lived and will ever live’ is obviously the wrong reference class, but your arguments mostly target beliefs that I don’t hold (and that I don’t think I am implicitly assuming).

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 5:24 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: sam’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
Sorry about the double reply, and it’s been a while since I thought seriously about these topics, so I may well be making a silly mistake here, but --
There’s a shop that uses a sequential ticketing system for queueing: each customer takes a numbered ticket when they enter, starting with ticket #1 for the first customer of the day. When I enter the shop, I know that it has been open for a couple of hours, but I have absolutely no idea when it closes (or even whether its ‘day’ is a mere 24 hours). I take my ticket and see that it’s #20. I have also noticed that the customer flow seems to be increasing more than linearly, such that if the shop is open for another hour there will probably be another 20 customers, and if it’s open for a few more hours there will be hundreds. Should I update towards the shop closing soon, on the grounds that otherwise my ticket number is atypically low? If so, wtf, and if not, what are the key differences between this and the doomsday argument?

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 4:46 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
“viewed from an achronous perspective, a low probability event has occurred — just like they always do right at the start of anything”
What’s the ‘low probability event’? I think this is the kind of framing I was disagreeing with in my original reply; there seems to be an implicit dualism here. So your reply isn’t, from my perspective, addressing my reasons for finding anthropic reasoning difficult to completely dismiss.

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 4:17 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
If I roll a million-sided die, then no individual number rolled on it is more surprising than any other, not even a roll of 1 or 1,000,000 — UNLESS I’m playing an adversarial game where me rolling a 1 is uniquely good for my opponent. Then if I roll a 1 I should wonder if the die was fixed.
Yes, but if you haven’t looked at the die yet, and the question of whether it’s showing a number lower than 100 is relevant for some reason, you’re going to strongly favour ‘no’.
(That’s not quite how I think about anthropic problems, though, because I don’t think there’s anything analogous to the dice roll—hence my original complaint about smuggled dualism.)

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 4:02 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
I don’t think you need completely specious reasoning to get to a kind of puzzling position, though. For us to be in the first <relatively small n>% of people, we don’t need humanity to spread to the stars—just to survive for a while longer without a population crash. And I think we do need some principled reason to be able to say “yes, ‘I am in the first <relatively small n>% of people’ is going to be false for the majority of people, but that’s irrelevant to whether it’s true or false for me”.

tslarm 4 Feb 2026 3:51 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Canaletto’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
Oh yeah, I should have made this clear in my reply to you (I’d written it in a different comment just a moment before):
I do find anthropic problems puzzling. What I find nonsensical are framings of those problems that treat indexical information as evidence—e.g. in a scenario where person X (i.e. me) exists on both hypothesis A and hypothesis B, but hypothesis A implies that many more other people exist, I’m supposed to favour hypothesis B because I happen to be person X and that would be very unlikely given hypothesis A.

tslarm 3 Feb 2026 17:20 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Canaletto’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
Yep (assuming I don’t have a prior that heavily favours the red door case for some reason), but in this case I think I’m just applying ordinary bayesian reasoning to ordinary, non-identity-related evidence. The information I’m learning is not “I am this person”, but “this person is still alive”. That evidence is 99 times more likely in the green door case than the red door case, so I update strongly in favour of the green door case.

tslarm 3 Feb 2026 17:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: sam’s comment on: The Meta-Anthropic Argument
Fair point, and I do find anthropic problems puzzling. What I find nonsensical are framings of those problems that treat indexical information as evidence—e.g. in a scenario where person X (i.e. me) exists on both hypothesis A and hypothesis B, but hypothesis A implies that many more other people exist, I’m supposed to favour hypothesis B because I happen to be person X and that would be very unlikely given hypothesis A.

tslarm 2 Feb 2026 11:14 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: social lemon markets
I feel like this is coming from quite a male perspective. Obviously looks play a huge role in attractiveness for both genders, but for the average straight man you wouldn’t be missing very much if you modeled their shallow/early-impressions attraction to women as 100% looks-based, whereas for the average straight woman that wouldn’t work as well. So your event might be quite informative for the straight women who participated, but potentially confusing for the straight men.