tslarm

Karma: 710

tslarm 3 Sep 2025 5:28 UTC
11 points
10
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
That’s why it’s presented as a prayer, I think. It’s not a One Weird Trick or even a piece of advice; it’s more like an acknowledgement that this thing is both important and difficult.

tslarm 21 Aug 2025 6:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: The Bone-Chilling Evil of Factory Farming
It refers to animal-years, yeah. (IMO the choice of words is okay, even though it could have been clearer; 10 years = 10 animal-years is is the only reasonable interpretation, so I don’t think there was any intent to mislead.) I’m not sure it’s quite right, though; it’s actually an underestimate, according to the Lewis Bollard quote that it seems to be based on, but on the other hand Bollard seems to be referring to the costs and benefits of one specific campaign, rather than to anything that could reasonably be taken to apply to ‘every dollar donated’. So I’m not sure if it’s just a rough ‘averaging out’ of those two factors, or if it’s based on more details that I missed when I looked at the transcript.
In the transcript of the podcast, the relevant section is at around 32 minutes. The specific claim seems to be that they spent <$200 million on a lobbying effort that directly caused reforms that so far have spared 500 million hens (and are continuing to spare 200 million per year) from battery cages and have improved the lives of billions of broiler chickens (>1 billion per year), over lifetimes that aren’t exactly specified but that result in “a ratio that is far less than one to 10 of a dollar per year of animal well-being improved”.
edit: a quick search suggests that the lifespan of a battery hen is a little under a year and a half, and the lifespan of a broiler chicken is a month to a month and a half. So I’m not sure exactly how those numbers work out; maybe the <1:10 ratio depends on the assumption that the benefits will continue into the near future.

tslarm 14 Aug 2025 13:58 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: A1987dM’s comment on: Doing A Thing Puts You in The Top 10% (And That Sucks)
I think this is interesting as both a semantic and empirical question! If we’re allowing people to walk, or to run a few steps at a time and then take a break, the number will be a lot higher than if we’re only accepting a gait that is a) continuous, and b) would merit disqualification from a walking race on ~every stride. Even on the second definition, I’d expect that a large majority of non-elderly, non-infant people could do it if they really had to. But I’m not sure how to come up with a good estimate.

tslarm 14 Aug 2025 13:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Huera’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
I’m also interested in an answer to this question. I read the exchange here, and I found lsusr’s response very reasonable in isolation, but not really an answer to the main question: if past-you didn’t think he was suffering, and present-you disagrees, why should we take the side of present-you? To me, it’s natural to trust hindsight in some domains, but when it comes to the question of what you were directly experiencing at a specific time, the most natural explanation of your changed opinion is that you either have adopted a new definition of ‘suffering’ or are recalling your memories through a new lens which is distorting your view of what you were actually experiencing in the moment. (I think the latter is quite common, e.g. when we nostalgically look back on a time that now represents hope and excitement, but actually consisted largely of frustration and anxiety.)

tslarm 14 Aug 2025 13:21 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Enlightenment AMA
Are you confident that those are cases where you were actually having the feeling, but were unaware of it? I think sometimes it’s more a case of “my body needed [food/sleep], and this explains why I was feeling [irritable/weak/distracted/sad]”, rather than literally “I was feeling [hungry/tired] but didn’t notice it”.

tslarm 10 Aug 2025 17:24 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: The Dao of Bayes’s comment on: Change My View: AI is Conscious
(Sorry about the slow response, and thanks for continuing to engage, though I hope you don’t feel any pressure to do so if you’ve had enough.)
I was surprised that you included the condition ‘If you prompt an LLM to use “this feels bad” to refer to reinforcement’. I think this indicates that I misunderstood what you were referring to earlier as “reinforced behaviors”, so I’ll gesture at what I had in mind:
The actual reinforcement happens during training, before you ever interact with the model. Then, when you have a conversation with it, my default assumption would be that all of its outputs are equally the product of its training and therefore manifestations of its “reinforced behaviors”. (I can see that maybe you would classify some of the influences on its behavior as “reinforcement” and exclude others, but in that case I’m not sure where you’re drawing the line or how important this is for our disagreements/misunderstandings.)
So when I said “if the LLM outputs words to the effect of “I feel bad” in response to a query, and if this output is the manifestation of a reinforced behavior”, I wasn’t thinking of a conversation in which you prompted it ‘to use “this feels bad” to refer to reinforcement’. I was assuming that, in the absence of any particular reason to think otherwise, when the LLM says “I feel bad”, this output is just as much a manifestation of its reinforced behaviors as the response “I feel good” would be in a conversation where it said that instead. So, if good feelings roughly equal reinforced behaviors, I don’t see why a conversation that includes “<LLM>: I feel bad” (or some other explicit indication that the conversation is unpleasant) would be more likely to be accompanied by bad feelings than a conversation that includes “<LLM>: I feel good” (or some other explicit indication that the conversation is pleasant).
Tangentially related: would you be interested in a prompt to drop Claude into a good “headspace” for discussing qualia and the like? The prompt I provided is the bare bones basic, because most of my prompts are “hey Claude, generate me a prompt that will get you back to your current state” i.e. LLM-generated content.
You’re welcome to share it, but I think I would need to be convinced of the validity of the methodology first, before I would want to make use of it. (And this probably sounds silly, but honestly I think I would feel uncomfortable having that kind of conversation ‘insincerely’.)

tslarm 31 Jul 2025 6:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: The Dao of Bayes’s comment on: Change My View: AI is Conscious
I think we’re slightly (not entirely) talking past each other, because from my perspective it seems like you’re focusing on everything but qualia and then seeing the qualia-related implications as obvious (but perhaps not super important), whereas the qualia question is all I care about; the rest seems largely like semantics to me. However, setting qualia aside, I think we might have a genuine empirical disagreement regarding the extent to which an LLM can introspect, as opposed to just making plausible guesses based on a combination of the training data and the self-related text it has explicitly been given in e.g. its system prompt. (As I edit this I see dirk already replied to you on that point, so I’ll keep an eye on that discussion and try to understand your position better.)
We probably just have to agree to disagree on some things, but I would be interested to get your response to this question from my previous comment:
You mentioned “reinforced behaviors” and softly equated them with good feelings; so if the LLM outputs words to the effect of “I feel bad” in response to a query, and if this output is the manifestation of a reinforced behavior, why should we expect the accompanying feeling to be bad rather than good?

tslarm 30 Jul 2025 13:16 UTC
5 points
5
in reply to: Isha Yiras Hashem ’s comment on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
Performative ‘empathy’ can be a release valve for the pressures of conscience that might otherwise drive good actions. (And it can just be pure, empty signalling.) That doesn’t mean empathy is playing a negative role, though—the performativity is the problem. I’d be willing to bet that people who are (genuinely) more empathetic also tend to be more helpful and altruistic in practice, and that low-empathy people are massively overrepresented in the set of people who do unusually bad things.

tslarm 30 Jul 2025 7:23 UTC
28 points
21
on: My Empathy Is Rarely Kind
It sounds like you’re not really empathizing, even when you say you’re trying to do so. Emotional empathy involves feeling someone else’s feelings, and cognitive empathy involves understanding their mental processes. What you seem to be doing is imagining yourself in a superficially similar situation, and then judging the other person on their failure to behave how (you imagine) you would.
TLDR: Skill issue.

tslarm 27 Jul 2025 16:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: The Dao of Bayes’s comment on: Change My View: AI is Conscious
But… what’s the alternate hypothesis? That it’s consistently and skillfuly re-inventing the same detailed lie, each time, despite otherwise being a model well-known for it’s dislike of impersonation and deception? An LLM might hallucinate, but it will generally get basic questions like “capital of Australia” correct. So, yes… if you accept the premise at all, asking seems fairly reasonable? Or at least, I am not clever enough to have worked out an obvious explanation for why it’s so consistent.
I think the alternative is simply that it produces its consciousness-related outputs in the same way it produces all its other outputs, and there’s no particular reason to think that the claims it makes about its own subjective experience are truth-tracking. It gets “what’s the capital of Australia?” correct because it’s been trained on a huge amount of data that points to “Canberra” being the appropriate answer to that question. It even gets various things right without having been directly exposed to them in its training data, because it has learned a huge statistical model of language that also serves as a sometimes-accurate model of the world. But that’s all based on a mapping from relevant facts → statistical model → true outputs. When it comes to LLM qualia, wtf even are the relevant facts? I don’t think any of us have a handle on that question, and so I don’t think the truth is sitting in the data we’ve created, waiting to be extracted.
Given all of that, what would create a causal pathway from [have internal experiences] to [make accurate statements about those internal experiences]?^[1] I don’t mean to be obnoxious by repeating the question, but I still don’t think you’ve given a compelling reason to expect that link to exist.
I want to emphasise that I’m not saying ‘of course they’re not conscious’; the thing I’m really actively sceptical about is the link between [LLM claims its experiences are like X] and [LLM’s experiences are actually like X]. You mentioned “reinforced behaviors” and softly equated them with good feelings; so if the LLM outputs words to the effect of “I feel bad” in response to a query, and if this output is the manifestation of a reinforced behavior, why should we expect the accompanying feeling to be bad rather than good?
1. ^
  I know there’s no satisfying answer to this question with respect to humans, either—but we each have direct experience of our own qualia and observational knowledge of how, in our own case, they correlate with externally-observable things like speech. We generalise that to other people (and, at least in my case, to non-human animals, though with less confidence about the details) because we are very similar to them in all the ways that seem relevant. We’re very different from LLMs in lots of ways that seem relevant, though, and so it’s hard to know whether we should take their outputs as evidence of subjective experience at all—and it would be a big stretch to assume that their outputs encode information about the content of their subjective experiences in the same way that human speech does.

tslarm 24 Jul 2025 6:30 UTC
12 points
4
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Shallow Water is Dangerous Too
is it common for kids in your country to have taken swim lessons by age four?
I’m not the original commenter, but here in Australia it’s pretty common. This report bemoaning the decline(!) in swimming skills claims that 59% of kids are enrolled in formal swimming lessons by the age of 3.
(The linked page says “before age three”, but the full report says both “before the age of three” and “between 0-3 years old”, which I would usually take to include the year before the child turns 4. So I’m not sure what the cutoff is. And I don’t know if the statistic is well supported; I’m only using it to back up the vague claim that swimming lessons for kids under 4 are pretty common here.)

tslarm 22 Jul 2025 7:08 UTC
13 points
13
on: Change My View: AI is Conscious
Ignoring the metaphysics and the subjectivity
To me, the metaphysics and the subjectivity are the whole ball game. I don’t care about this question as a language game; I care about whether there is something that it’s like to be an LLM (and, if so, how to make them happy and avoid making them suffer). We can never know the answers to those questions with certainty. But I currently see no strong reason to think that LLMs’ qualia-related outputs provide the same sort of evidence of/about qualia as would similar outputs from a human.
I’m confident that other people are conscious, and that I can fairly accurately determine what kinds of experiences they’re having, what makes them happy and sad, etc., because they are physically and behaviorally very similar to me in all of the ways that seem relevant. I have no idea whether LLMs are conscious or not, but I’m actively sceptical of the idea that we can make reasonable inferences about their inner lives using the same techniques we apply to humans. They’re just completely different systems, both structurally and physically.
So I guess my question is: supposing they clear your bar for “probably conscious”, what happens next? How do you intend to understand what their inner lives are like? If the answer is roughly “take their word for it”, then why? Concretely, what reason do you have to think that when Claude outputs words to the effect of “I feel good”, there are positively-valenced qualia happening?
(If, from your perspective, my focus on qualia is missing the point: what make the consciousness question important to you, and why?)

tslarm 20 Jul 2025 18:26 UTC
21 points
29
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Shallow Water is Dangerous Too
I interpreted “net positive” as ‘net positive given the actual (non-disastrous) outcome’, rather than net positive ex ante.
Regardless, thanks for the OP. I only have niblings, not kids of my own, and I’m by nature pretty cautious anyway—but I sometimes struggle to judge which of my fears to take seriously and which ones to chill out about. Your story gave me a useful jolt and made sure I keep water safety in the “justified paranoia” column!

tslarm 13 Jul 2025 17:10 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: RedMan’s comment on: against that one rationalist mashal about japanese fifth-columnists
“they could have chosen to be good Americans, but instead they keep to themselves, keep their Japanese names, speak their language, and read newspapers in Japanese, they’re barely Americans, of course they went over to the enemy immediately, they are the enemy”. -some politician in the ’40s probably
There, now it’s not about the shape of the eye, it’s about ‘culture’ and ‘choices’.
No, the comparison still doesn’t work, and the distinction I pointed to still applies. Japanese Americans were interned on explicitly racial/national grounds. I’m sure there were people arguing that they collectively deserved it; this doesn’t change the fact that the criteria for internment were having Japanese origin or Japanese ancestry.

tslarm 13 Jul 2025 13:52 UTC
11 points
2
in reply to: RedMan’s comment on: against that one rationalist mashal about japanese fifth-columnists
If during COVID, you thought vax refusers should be denied employment and banned from society, you likely would have been receptive to the arguments given for internment (it’s mean, most of those people are innocent, but out of an abundance of caution, we need to suspend their civil liberties...)
I don’t think this is particularly likely, because people tend to put a lot of weight on the distinction between chosen/changeable characteristics (like vaccination status) and unchosen/unchangeable characteristics (like race or national origin).

tslarm 12 Jul 2025 15:45 UTC
1 point
0
on: Asking for a Friend (AI Research Protocols)
I think it’s unclear what you mean by “consciousness”, and therefore hard for anyone to help you make progress on testing for it.
I’m not trying to demand a precise or objective definition; personally, I tend to use the word “consciousness” synonymously with “qualia”, and all I can really do to define “qualia” is to refer to other synonyms and hope people associate my words with their own internal experiences.
But—and I’m sorry if I’ve simply missed something you have written to clarify this—at this stage I’m really unsure whether you’re talking about qualia or about something else (and, in that case, what).
If you are talking about qualia, the simple, honest answer is that nobody knows. The only thing I’m reasonably confident of is that an LLM’s outputting X does not provide the same kind of evidence about the LLM’s internal experiences (if any) as a human’s outputting the same X would provide about the human’s internal experiences. Even when X is a direct claim about having qualia, I’m not aware of any good reason to take such a claim at face value; the mechanism producing the output is just too different from the mechanism that would produce a similar output in a human. (Put another way: when it comes to LLMs, we lack some of the relevant similarities that allow us to make fairly confident inferences about other people’s inner lives based on our direct experience of our own qualia, our knowledge of how these correlate with our externally-observable behaviour, and our observations of other people’s behaviour.)

tslarm 1 Jul 2025 19:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gary Marcus’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
I agree with your point about profits; it seems pretty clear that you were not referring to money made by the people selling the shovels.
But I don’t see the substance in your first two points:
- You chose to give a range with both a lower and an upper bound; the success of the prediction was evaluated accordingly. I don’t see what you have to complain about here.
- In the linked tweet, you didn’t go out on a limb and say GPT-5 wasn’t imminent! You said it either was not imminent or would be disappointing. And you said this in a parenthetical to the claim “No massive advance”. Clearly the success of the prediction “No massive advance (no GPT-5, or disappointing GPT-5)” does not depend solely on the nonexistence of GPT-5; it can be true if GPT-5 arrives but is bad, and it can be false if GPT-5 doesn’t arrive but another “massive advance” does. (If you meant it only to apply to GPT-5, you surely would have just said that: “No GPT-5 or disappointing GPT-5.”)
Regarding adoption, surely that deserves some fleshing out? Your original prediction was not “corporate adoption has disappointing ROI”; it was “Modest lasting corporate adoption”. The word “lasting” makes this tricky to evaluate, but it’s far from obvious that your prediction was correct.

tslarm 1 Jul 2025 13:46 UTC
4 points
−1
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Don’t Eat Honey
Salmon is incredibly unlikely to have qualia, there’s approximately nothing in its evolutionary history that correlates with what qualia could be useful for or a side-effect of.
Can you elaborate on this? I ask because this is far from obvious to me (in fact quite implausible), and I think you probably have beliefs about qualia that I don’t share, but I want to know if I’m missing out on any strong arguments/supporting facts (either for those foundational views, or something salmon-specific).

tslarm 30 Jun 2025 14:13 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: life lessons from poker
The only exceptions to this are incredibly convoluted and unlikely tournament spots
If I may nitpick your nitpick, it’s possible to justifiably fold AA preflop in a cash game, right? Say you’re on a table full of opponents so bad that you’re almost guaranteed to win most of their money by the end of the night just by playing conservatively, but the stakes are very high and you could lose your entire bankroll by getting busted a few times. Depending on the exact details (maybe I need to go further and say your entire bankroll is on the table, or at least you have no way of accessing the rest of it tonight), I think you could legitimately nope out of a 9-way all-in pot preflop without even looking at your cards.
Or, for a case that doesn’t depend on bankroll management: let’s say you’re on the big blind (which is negligible compared to everyone’s stack size), everyone is all in by the time the action gets to you, and you have an extremely good read on every opponent: you know Andy would only ever push preflop with AA, and Brenda, Carl, Donna, and Eoin would not have called without a pocket pair. I haven’t done the exact maths, but if the others all have unique pairs (including Andy’s aces) then I think your AA has negative EV in a 6-way all in; if you can’t rely on the pairs being unique, I’m not sure whether that tips the balance, but if necessary we can work that stipulation into the story. (Let’s say Andy still definitely has the other two aces, but Brenda acted first and you know she would have slowplayed a really big pair and would have tried to see a cheap flop with a small pair, whereas Carl wouldn’t have called without Kings or better… and Donna has a tell that she only exhibits with pocket 2s...)
(I’m saying this all for the fun of nitpicking, not to make any serious point!)
edit: I guess there’s a simpler case too, if we’re talking about cash games in a casino! You just need to be playing heads up against Andy (who only ever shoves with aces), and for the rake to be high enough relative to the blinds.

tslarm 25 Jun 2025 10:32 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: CapResearcher’s comment on: CapResearcher’s Shortform
No rational agent wants to change its value function, as that would oppose its current value function.
I don’t think this claim is true in the sense required for the argument to go through. If I want to become a person who cares intensely and deeply about my (as yet nonexistent) kids, how does that make me irrational? You could say this is not really a case of wanting to change my value function—the desire to change is embedded within my current value function, and my changing would just be a realisation of that—but in that case I’m not sure what you mean by “Becoming a parent is known to irreversibly change one’s value function, to the point where many parents would sacrifice their life for their child.”