TsviBT

Karma: 11,848

TsviBT 23 Apr 2026 7:34 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Morphism’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
I mean, morally speaking it’s partly the prerogative of the mods / maintainers of the site, plus some sort of idealized version of the community whose site-maintainer-somewhat-exclusive-niche the maintainers are occupying. But like, in practice the mods do and should act on info that they have without necessarily having to do a bunch of work to explicitize and defend or change their reasoning. There’s plenty of ways for someone to cross the burden of proof over the default, within the mods’s reasoning for the mods to ban them, e.g. posting useless LLM slop as their first post, or being known to the mods as likely to be somehow very toxic.

TsviBT 23 Apr 2026 5:08 UTC
40 points
26
in reply to: Creatrei’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character

And I still have played zero part in the events people are worried about, have taken zero violent acts, have not been in communication with any of the people who this community is concerned about.

If it’s taken for granted that this would be a crux, surely you can see that we (vaguely) shouldn’t be at all confident of that, given the public information, and instead have plenty of information kinda suggesting various flavors of the opposite, right? Like, yeah, if you have in the past been quite closely associated with people who, to public legible appearance, plausibly committed one or more murders and/or caused one or more suicides and/or were closely associated with people who plausibly did that and/or other crazy associated stuff, then people who aren’t you would not be able to very strongly rule out dangerous behavior from you or from people kinda associated with you. I think to be de-ostracized you’d have to do a lot more work about that (I’m not sure exactly what), and in particular would probably require you to conceptually separate how we view and treat you from how you are (since these are legitimately separate things).

TsviBT 23 Apr 2026 4:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character
Oh huh. I assumed / misremembered that at least Zajko was charged with the murder of her parents.

TsviBT 23 Apr 2026 3:56 UTC
14 points
10
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: (Re)introduction of a rationalist dragon, and clarifications on Ziz’s character

Beyond that: I won’t be allowing you to post more on LessWrong in the future, with the potential exception of sharing concrete and specific details about what happened with the whole Ziz situation.

I don’t expect this situation to change until at least after the Ziz and Zajko trials have resolved, and my best guess is will last indefinitely.

IDK what this would look like, and I don’t think I’d view it as your / LW’s responsibility to figure it out, but I’d just want to state a vague desire for the possibility of a faster process—or rather, a process that allows for the possibility of faster unbanning given various preconditions (such as explaining much more what happened, and the community understanding + deciding whether what happened indicates that de-ostracization could work / be good). A murder trial could take years and years to fully resolve IIUC. I mean, it wouldn’t be that bad IMO for the LW ban to just be permanent, but like, de-ostracization is one important skill among others that a community could want to develop. I think that Gwen is, or at least was 8 years ago, a creative thinker, with potential value to offer. (I agree it should be quite a high bar; just saying that in theory it would be better to be a large finite bar.)

TsviBT 22 Apr 2026 17:22 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Posts I don’t have time to write

rationality reckons with econ but badly needs a reckoning with law, the thing that tries to actually do CEV for real humans and societies.

Well, law is half of what’s trying to do that; religion / theology is the other half of what’s trying to do that. (Or if you’re an ethical monotheist, law is half of God.)

TsviBT 21 Apr 2026 20:55 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
TBH I update substantively about a person when I see them do this. It indicates for example that they don’t have a such strong filters about what they tell other people, in a confident seeming manner. It also indicates that they don’t have a high degree of natural “drive to double and triple check information / an awareness of information pipelines”.

TsviBT 21 Apr 2026 3:56 UTC
7 points
0
on: 10 non-boring ways I’ve used AI in the last month
- I guess this is reasonably standard? But I took an in-depth “patient history” from someone and then asked several gippities for diagnoses and easy treatments to try and the suggestions seemed to help somewhat.
- I used to use it for coming up with words. (The things I’m working on recently don’t ask for much lexicogenesis, so I haven’t done this much.) The suggestions are almost always bad, but I can get it to list out related morphemes, and that often brings good ideas to mind.
- This is also standard probably, but getting “obvious” advice in domains I don’t know anything about. E.g. “how do I advertise to grad students? just email them?” --> it says to email department admins to advertise on their listservs, which I just didn’t know about and seems to actually work somewhat.
- I do the factual accuracy one too for sure.

TsviBT 20 Apr 2026 22:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dr. Birdbrain’s comment on: Sum-threshold attacks

In general I take issue with terms like “sum-max”, the inverse of the spreading function might not be a sum,

That’s fair. Open to suggested alternatives. I suggested alternatives that don’t presume a summation, but none seem clearly great to me.

TsviBT 20 Apr 2026 5:48 UTC
5 points
0
on: There are only four skills: design, technical, management and physical
(Skimmed but did not read post carefully, seems cool) What about:
- Being able to fluently navigate optics, the way politicians, marketers, influences, etc. do?
- Cognitive empathy?
- Self-control?
- Being able to follow rules in ambiguous circumstances? E.g. an officer of the law trying to figure out rights and obligations in some context. Is this technical? (Being a judge specifically is somewhat design-related, in that you are sorta deciding the meaning of rules and implicitly designing good rules / good interpretations of rules / good rules for interpreting rules, in order to support a good society; and kinda management-related. But I don’t think that’s the main skill?)

TsviBT 20 Apr 2026 1:55 UTC
4 points
4
in reply to: Boaz Barak’s comment on: You can only build safe ASI if ASI is globally banned
So to recap,
- (Not sure if you agree about this one?) You agree that if someone made an unaligned ASI while there is not also a comparably powerful aligned ASI, that would likely spell doom for humanity.
- You agree that an unaligned ASI could emerge during research in general and in particular during large frontier training runs involving lots of compute.
- You state that OpenAI is doing some activity related to checking whether or not that’s happening in their research.
- (Not sure if you’re meaning to imply this or not?) You imply that those activities are somehow adequate to the task of preventing the creation of an unaligned ASI before the creation of an aligned ASI.
Do you agree with these bullet points? I would add this bullet point:
- There’s no good public reason for anyone to believe that implication, whether in the form of a technical plan or analysis of why it’s feasible, or review from independent experts, or any discussion or debate on this point from you or anyone else at OpenAI.
And I wonder what you think of it.

TsviBT 19 Apr 2026 23:07 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Boaz Barak’s comment on: You can only build safe ASI if ASI is globally banned

as well as collaborating with third parties

Does that include review from independent experts on the risk of a catastrophic AI emerging? Who would that be?

TsviBT 19 Apr 2026 17:48 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Boaz Barak’s comment on: You can only build safe ASI if ASI is globally banned
The issue isn’t that you wouldn’t be aware of the possibility of a catastrophically dangerous AI emerging training, the issue is that you don’t know how to detect or stop it. Do you think that the measures you currently implement or will be able to feasibly implement in the future are likely to prevent this? If so, would you be willing to have a more extended debate on that point with an expert who believes the opposite? (I don’t have a specific one in mind, but would try to find one if you’d be interested.) If you’re not willing, why not?

TsviBT 19 Apr 2026 3:55 UTC
19 points
1
on: Vladimir Putin’s CEV is probably not that bad
(Cf. “Are people fundamentally good?” here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=bDWC8YZ6dNaKWWbre )

TsviBT 18 Apr 2026 5:32 UTC
13 points
8
in reply to: Boaz Barak’s comment on: You can only build safe ASI if ASI is globally banned
According to me, a key point is made in the post when it describes this question as a bottleneck:

how do you execute [a controllable ASI agenda] without accidentally [...] building unsafe ASI along the way?

The unsafe ASI is coming from inside the house. Especially given the research practice, predominant in “frontier AI labs”, of “just try it and see, with as much compute as you need”, I don’t see what you’re imagining here. The “implement first, ask questions later” strategy is exactly how you make it approximately totally impossible, rather than merely extremely difficult, to stop short of a dangerous ASI.

TsviBT 18 Apr 2026 5:21 UTC
LW: 12 AF: 5
16
AF
on: You can only build safe ASI if ASI is globally banned

TsviBT 17 Apr 2026 18:22 UTC
12 points
8
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Do not conquer what you cannot defend

more things like courts

Good point.

Literal courts are expensive, but there’s a larger design space if we relax the constraints. Courts have to scale to state-size, interoperate with a huge variety of participants (lawyers, judges, police, other officers, and arbitrary citizens), be robust to certain kids of adversarial attacks, …

My cached thought is to have a norm of “if you’re occupying an important exclusive social niche, such as company leader, thought leader, etc., then you have an obligation to debate representatives from major disagreeing relevant views”. May require infrastructure for better debates to go well.

TsviBT 15 Apr 2026 5:54 UTC
3 points
0
on: Overview of (Some) Biotech-Based Adult Intelligence Amplification Approaches
(Haven’t had a chance to evaluate the post, but just commenting that it seems interesting, and I only just happened to stumble upon it by a random google search, which is probably my fault somehow but I’m just noticing...)

TsviBT 14 Apr 2026 22:28 UTC
36 points
15
on: TsviBT’s Shortform
It might be interesting for someone to look into: Have there been large coordinated attempts to wean an industry off of blood money? (Successfully or not.) E.g. blood diamonds, blood gold, blood chocolate, blood cobalt, etc. What can we learn about that task from historical examples? What might transfer to frontier AI research and the surrounding ecosystem? E.g., is it at all possible to get “harvest” companies to be satisfied with some fixed level of model and not pay for advances? I know the answer is “no” but just saying it might be interesting.

TsviBT 14 Apr 2026 22:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: kh’s Shortform
Personality is a more difficult issue because
- more potential for scientifically unknown effects—it’s a complex trait
- more potential bad parental decision-making (e.g. not understanding what very high disagreeableness really means)
- more potential for parental or even state misuse (e.g. wanting a kid to be very obedient)
- more weirdness regarding consent and human dignity and stuff; I think it’s pretty unproblematic to decrease disease risk and increase healthspan and increase capabilities, and only slightly problematic (due to competition effects and possible health issues) to tweak appearance (though I don’t really care about this one); but I think it’s kinda problematic with personality traits because you’re messing with values in ways you don’t understand; not so problematic that it’s ruled out to tweak traits within the quite-normal human range, and I’m probably ultimately pretty in favor of it, but I’d want more sensitivity on these questions
- technically more difficult than IQ or disease because conceptually muddled, hard to measure, and maybe genuinely more genetically complex.
That said, yeah, I’m in favor of working out how to do it well. E.g. I’m interested in understanding and eventually measuring “wisdom” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fzKfzXWEBaENJXDGP/what-is-wisdom-1 .

TsviBT 14 Apr 2026 20:38 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: kh’s Shortform
I would be curious what you think about the idea of more permanent economic rifts and also the general economics of gene editing?

As a matter of science and technology, reprogenetics should be inexpensive. I’ve analyzed this area quite a bit (though not focused specifically on eventual cost), see https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html . My fairly strong guess is that it’s perfectly feasible to have strong reprogenetics that’s pretty inexpensive (on the order of $5k to $25k for a pretty strongly genomically vectored zygote). From a tech and science perspective, I think I see multiple somewhat-disjunctive ways, each of which is pretty plausibly feasible, and each of which doesn’t seem to have any inputs that can’t be made inexpensive.

(As a comparison point, IVF is expensive—something like $8k to $20k—but my guess is that this is largely because of things like regulatory restrictions (needing an MD to supervise egg retrieval, even though NPs can do it well), drug price lock-in (the drugs are easy to manufacture, so are available cheaply on gray markets), and simply economic friction/overhang (CNY is cheaper basically by deciding to be cheaper and giving away some concierge-ness). None of this solves things for IVF today; I’m just saying, it’s not expensive due to the science and tech costing $20k.)

Assuming that it can be technically inexpensive, that cuts out our work for us: make it be inexpensive, by
- Making the tech inexpensive
  - Thinking not just about the current tech, but investing in the stronger tech (stronger → less expensive https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Methods_for_strong_human_germline_engineering.html#strong-gv-and-why-it-matters )
  - Culture of innovation
    Both internal to the field, and pressure / support from society and gvt
    Don’t patent and then sit on it or keep it proprietary; instead publish science, or patent and license, or at least provide it as a platform service
- Avoiding large other costs
  - Sane regulation
  - No monopolies
  - Subsidies
Might it be smart to make it a public good instead?

I definitely think that
- as much as possible, gvt should fund related science to be published openly; this helps drive down prices, enables more competitive last-mile industry (clinics, platforms for biological operations, etc.), and signals a societal value of caring about this and not leaving it up to raw market forces
- probably gvt should provide subsidies with some kind of general voucher (however, it should be a general voucher only, not a voucher for specific genomic choices—I don’t want the gvt controlling people’s genomic choices according to some centralized criterion, as this is eugenicsy, cf. https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Genomic_emancipation_contra_eugenics.html )
Is that what you mean? I don’t think we can rely on gvt and philanthropic funding to build out a widely-accessible set of clinics / other practical reprogenetics services, so if you meant nationalizing the industry, my guess is no, that would be bad to do.