Unnamed

Karma: 8,094

Unnamed 23 Jan 2026 23:13 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.
Mediocre criticism can get plenty of upvotes as long as it’s a culture fit.
If the author does a good job of pitching it to Less Wrongers, then the critical post can activate readers’ it’s virtuous to be open-minded mindset and turn their critical faculties towards the thing that the post is criticizing and away from the post itself. So instead of evaluating the post according to their ordinary standards of epistemics and quality, they instead try to find anything in it that seems good / insightful / overly neglected / provoking of new useful thoughts / on a promising track.

Unnamed 17 Jan 2026 3:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Evolution did a surprising good job at aligning humans...to social status
Seems like you’re mushing together several loosely related things, including what we might call model-based motivation, explicit long-term planning, unified purpose, and precisely targeted goals.
Model-based motivation: being motivated to do something in a way that relies on your internal models of the world, not just on direct sensory rewards.
Explicit long-term planning: being aware of your goal, explicitly planning ways to achieve it, following those plans including over periods of months or years.
Unified purpose: a person’s motivations and actions in a domain fitting together coherently to work towards a single purpose, even across contexts.
Precisely targeted goals: having the goal precisely match something that can be specified on other grounds besides what we can empirically observe that people aim for (like “inclusive genetic fitness” which is picked out by theory).
The godshatter post is mainly about the last two—people have a collection of fragmented motivations which helped towards the selected-for purpose in the contexts where we evolved. Your argument here is mainly about the first two.
I think that the first two are pretty common, and are found in human romantic/reproductive goals, e.g. long-term planning around having kids, or motivations to improve ones appearance in ways that you expect potential partners to find attractive. I think that the last two are pretty rare, including for status—most people have a collection of somewhat-status-related motivations (though perhaps a small fraction of people (sociopaths?) have status as a more unified goal), and I haven’t seen anyone specify the “status” target well enough to even check if people’s motivations aim at that precise target.

Unnamed 17 Jan 2026 0:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: Universal Basic Income and Poverty
You seem to think that this post poses a single clear puzzle, of the sort that could have a single answer.
I disagree. I think the post has clarity problems (especially in its definition of poverty in terms of “desperate scrabbling”, which conflates a lack of at least one essential material resource with anything at all that a person might desperately care about) and kind of gestures at various questions related to poverty.

Unnamed 12 Jan 2026 3:35 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
I haven’t given that article a close read, but on a quick look through it I find it basically not at all compelling.
It looks like it’s the genre of ‘this part of reality is surprisingly detailed, therefore be paranoid/nihilistic/cynical about it’.
This genre of article is saying: there’s this concept that you’ve been using, which you’ve been treating as a clean abstraction without really thinking much about where it can from, but if you look at where it comes from, there is a bunch of messy detail & judgments calls.
And that much, often, is true. But it’s written with an air of suspicion, or with explicit claims that therefore it’s all just a bunch of made-up nonsense. Which does not follow.
Numbers that involve judgment calls aren’t in general fake/nonsense/bullshit. I regularly use subjective probabilities, Fermi estimates, etc., and I imagine that you do too.
If you want, you can have the takeaway from this sort of article: “that’s right, I’ve been using this concept without really understanding the messy detail behind it. Do I care enough about this to want to understand where it comes from?”
If so, then you can go try to learn about it, using the processes that you usually use to learn about things. Try to find writing by economists explaining where inflation numbers and “real GDP” numbers come from, or some narrower question that you could dig into enough so that you have a . Have a conversation with Claude about it. Make a google doc where you think through what you would do if it was up to you to come up with number for “real GDP”, or to do whatever tasks people do when they rely on “real GDP” numbers. Etc.
This post of yours looks like it’s kinda trying to do some of that, although the things that you’d want to learn about might not fit into a lesswrong comment, and I don’t know if you’ll find anyone who is sufficiently well-informed about real GDP calculations and willing to spend the time to leave a detailed comment for you to get a good object-level answer here. And it reads like you’ve already maybe 70% bought in to the mood & the narratives of the post you’ve linked, which is not something that I’d recommend with this genre of post before you’ve tried to learn about it elsewhere. Maybe you can come back to this post afterwards and consider its reasoning after you have more grounding in the topic, but relying on this person’s judgment & narratives about some topic just because he’s the one who pointed out to you that it is surprisingly detailed seems like bad process.
To get a little more object-level: One thing that’s missing from the article (and your takeaways from it) is that most of the judgment calls that the economists who come up with “real GDP” numbers make are at the process level, of what procedures to use to assign a number to real GDP for a country for a particular year, given the various complications. When trying to answer a question like “what was US GDP in 1946“ they have limited degrees of freedom because they’re mostly just relying on the processes that they’ve decided to apply to answering that sort of question for all countries & years. Which is pretty different from “BEA economists eye-balling a bunch of factors and coming up with a number that “seems right””, even if both involve judgment calls.

Unnamed 29 Dec 2025 18:55 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Did you have a different vision for how to get really good AI X-risk legislation passed?
I’d interpreted your post has already implicitly sharing something like orthonomal’s view, since I took you to be arguing that we should prioritize getting a small number of legislators who really Get It.

Unnamed 29 Dec 2025 18:52 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
It sounds like your view is that (say) a House with 5 legislators who are amazing on AI X-risk, 15 who seem like they’re kinda pretty good, and 415 others is actively worse than one with 5 amazing legislators and 430 others?
I’m not sure why you think this. I’d think that most of the ways in which the pretty good legislators could be disappointing would make them more similar to the 415 others, or less influential, rather than actively worse. And often it would still be somewhat helpful to have them in Congress, e.g. they’d generally be more likely than random legislators to vote for a good AI bill that has a chance at becoming law.
One big way it could backfire to have a pretty-good-seeming legislator in the house is if they become a leading voice on AI while having misguided views on AI. But the concern about candidates who have a combination of prioritizing AI, being very competent, and having misguided views on AI feels different than just having extremely high standards for amazingness on AI X-risk.

Unnamed 23 Dec 2025 6:29 UTC
13 points
1
in reply to: lilkim2025’s comment on: The Revolution of Rising Expectations
The first is simple, unemployment. It’s calculated in a way that is very favorable to the government^[1], because the government decides how it’s calculated and generally wants to look like things are going well. Labor force participation, a statistic that more accurately captures the share of the productive population that is being squandered, has fallen precipitously from 2005 to around 2015, enjoyed a slight increase from 2015 to 2019, and then taken a nosedive afterwards, never recovering to its 2019 high. Since 2005, a full four percent of the population—one out of 25 people—have dropped out of the labor force. This is the sort of thing that affects everything, from the national psyche to the social fabric to, of course, our ability to use the country’s human resources efficiently.
Prime age employment to population ratio is a better measure, and it does not show a decline since 2005.
The measure that you picked goes down if the population gets older and includes a larger share of retired people (which it has) or if more people age 16-24 are in school rather than working (which has also been happening).

Unnamed 14 Dec 2025 17:22 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: niplav’s Shortform
Previous discussion

Unnamed 5 Dec 2025 23:01 UTC
10 points
8
on: D&D.Sci Long War: Defender of Data-mocracy Evaluation & Ruleset
Rows 1677, 54048, 93530, and 141774 look anomalous—they should be guaranteed wins but are marked as losses. (3 of them pit 1 Laser Lance & 1 Rail Rifle vs. 2 Arachnoid Abominations.)

Unnamed 5 Dec 2025 3:06 UTC
6 points
4
on: Do we have terminology for “heuristic utilitarianism” as opposed to classical act utilitarianism or formal rule utilitarianism?
Criterion of rightness vs. decision procedure (also: multi-level utilitarianism)
Ideas similar to these were present to some degree among early utilitarians like Mill and Sidgwick, and the concepts were crystallized by later philosophers including Bales (1971) and Hare (1981).

Unnamed 26 Nov 2025 6:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: D&D.Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast
Updated choice
I’ll go with ABDMOPV.
My second choice would be FGHOPTV.
My process
This is mainly based on a linear model which includes all pairwise interactions, with a few adjustments:
- also accounts for number of sweet dishes (AEGH) - too many or too few is bad
- also accounts for number of spicy dishes (CFKSV) - too many or too few is bad
- also accounts for total number of dishes—too many or too few is bad
- I made the linear interaction sparse, rounding small coefficients to zero
- Displacer Dumplings seem to be irrelevant to meal quality, so I’m averaging in the same meal with or without D (but picking whichever one happened to do better)
- I slightly averaged in a couple other models that I tried which aren’t as accurate on their own as the linear interaction model
I haven’t been able to reduce the error all the way down to where it seems to be among repeat meals, but it’s not that far off.
My opinion on other entries
I would attend James Camacho’s AGORTV feast if I wasn’t hosting my own

Unnamed 23 Nov 2025 1:23 UTC
2 points
0
on: Evrart Claire: A Case Study in Anti-Epistemology
A big part of what Evrart is doing is frame setting. What kind of person is he, what is the nature of your relationship with him and how does that relate to specific things that you might do, what is his role in the city, etc.? He comes right out and tells you, trying to directly influence how you think of him and the social scripts & roles that you see as applying. And if you come to him in another frame that he doesn’t want, he sidesteps that framing rather than interacting in the role that that frame puts him in.
Also related: his larger-than-life personality. He crafts a personality that 1) fits with the frames he wants (friendly, gregarious, nice) and which 2) gives him leeway for acting outside normal social expectations, such as by putting forward a frame or sidestepping one (it’s a strange thing to do but that’s Evrart being Evrart). Something about his personality even makes it seem kind of okay for him to put forward frames that seem implausible or inaccurate. (Though IMO he is not able to do this in a way that avoids seeming fishy.)

Unnamed 23 Nov 2025 1:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: D&D.Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast
Updated observations
Taking another look after sleeping on it, I did find some of the sorts of meal-crafting patterns I was expecting, with effects from number of sweet dishes (AEGH) and number of spicy dishes (CFKSV). I actually crafted a ‘number of sweet things’ variable last night (AEGHP), but I just threw it in a linear model rather than looking at the data.
Updated choices
CDGHMOPS is still the best option according to my new best model. ABDMOPTV the new choice for doing well according to every decent model while still being close to the best according to my new best model. If I was picking now I’d go with the latter.

Unnamed 22 Nov 2025 8:48 UTC
6 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Thanksgiving: the Festival Feast
If I was going to replicate a successful historical meal, it would be
#1078, ABFGKOP, which had a quality of 18 and models well. That’s a safe option for a good feast.
But I’d rather do something original, and
the best option according to the best model I’ve found is CDGHMOPS. Another plausible choice is AGOPRTV, which does very well in every decent model that I’ve tried.
Observations
With American Thanksgiving, I’d mostly expect the more dishes the better, because each person can choose which subset of the dishes they want to eat. The biggest costs are to lack of variety, because each person wants variety (e.g. some protein and some dessert) and different people want different things (e.g. spicy, not spicy, meat, meatless). Also, occasionally dishes are complementary (e.g. pie & ice cream, or cake & ice cream).
The Feasts here are apparently not like that, because that is not how the data looks. Perhaps the dishes have strong odors, or the custom is to have some of everything, or the foods have unexpected magical interactions in your belly.

Unnamed 19 Nov 2025 20:27 UTC
18 points
1
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: 7 Vicious Vices of Rationalists
or “7 Vicious Virtues”

Unnamed 19 Nov 2025 5:10 UTC
9 points
3
on: Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket
It’s interesting that this post is framed in terms of status. That seems more like an illustration of the flexibility of what “status” can mean than something essential to the main point of the post.
I could imagine pretty much the same point being made, with most of the same content, without referencing status at all (for a big success don’t just join the default competitive arena). Or it could instead be framed as how to be high status, where big success option is the high-status option (climbing the ordinary competitive ladder is upper-middle class at best, actual high status routes around that whole competition).
Within the compressed summary “Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket”, a lot of the post’s main content winds up within the particular way that the word “status” is being used here.

Unnamed 17 Nov 2025 21:05 UTC
26 points
2
on: Diagonalization: A (slightly) more rigorous model of paranoia
I count 5 strategies in this post & the previous one, rather than 3:
1. Blinding. Block information input from the adversary to you.
2. Privacy. Block information output from you to the adversary.
3. Disempowerment. Don’t let the adversary have control over parts of the environment that you care about.
4. Vindictiveness. Do things that are opposed to the adversary’s interests.
5. Randomness. Do things that are hard for the adversary to predict.
#3 Disempowerment was least explicitly stated in your writing but was present in how you talked about purging / removal from your environment. Examples: Don’t have a joint bank account with them, don’t appoint them to a be in charge of a department in your organization, don’t make agreements with them where they have the official legal rights but there’s a handshake deal that they’ll share things with you.
Truman’s response to the Red Scare included all (or at least most) of the first 4 strategies. It was primarily #2 Privacy—in fact the Soviet spies were mainly doing espionage—acquiring confidential information from the US government—and purging them was blocking them from getting that information. But Truman was worried about them doing subversion (getting the US government to make bad decisions) which would make purging them #3 Disempowerment. And executing them (rather than just firing them) makes it #4 Vindictive too.
The Madman Theory example in the other post is mainly about vindictiveness (it’s a threat to retaliate), even though it’s done in a way that involves some randomness.
#5 Randomness feels least like a single coherent thing out of these 5. I’d break it into:
5a Maximin. Do things that work out best in the worst case scenario. This often involves a mixed strategy where you randomize across multiple possible actions (assuming you have a hidden source of randomness).
5b Erraticness. Thwart their expectations. Don’t do the thing that they’re expecting you to do, or do something that they wouldn’t have expected.
Though #5b Erraticness seems like an actively bad idea if you have been fully diagonalized, since in case you won’t actually succeed at thwarting their expectations and your erratic action will instead be just what they wanted you to do. It is instead a strategy for cat-and-mouse games where they can partially model you but you can still hope to outsmart them.
If you have been diagonalized, it’s better to limit your repertoire of actions. Choose inaction where possible, stick to protocol, don’t do things that are out of distribution. The smaller the set of actions that you ever do, the fewer options the diagonalizer has for what to get you to do. A hacker gets a computer system into a weird edge case, a social engineer gets someone to break protocol, a jailbreaker gets an LLM into an out-of-distribution state. An aspiring diagonalizer also wants to influence the process that you use to make decisions, and falling back on a pre-existing protocol can block that influence. I would include this on my list of strategies, maybe #6 Act Conservatively.
Looking back through these, most of them aren’t that specific to diagonalization scenarios. Strategies 4 (Vindictiveness) & 5a (Maximin) are standard game theory which come up in lots of contexts. I think that strategies 1-3 fall out of a fairly broad sense of what it means for someone to be an adversary—they are acting contrary to your interests, in a way that’s entangled with you; they’re not just off somewhere else doing things you don’t like, they are in some way using you to get more of the thing that’s bad for you. In what ways might they be using you to get more of the thing? Maybe they’re getting information from you which they can then use for their purposes, maybe they’re trying to influence what you do so you do what they want, maybe you’ve let them have control over something which you could have disallowed. Strategies 1 (Blinding), 2 (Privacy), and 3 (Disempowerment) just involve undoing/blocking one of those.

Unnamed 17 Nov 2025 20:15 UTC
15 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Paranoia: A Beginner’s Guide
That helped give me a better sense of where you’re coming from, and more of an impression of what the core thing is that you’re trying to talk about. Especially helpful were the diagonalization model at the end (which I see you have now made into a separate post) and the part about “paranoia to me is centrally invoked by high-bandwidth environments that are hard to escape from” (while gesturing at a few examples, including you at CEA). Also your exchange elsewhere in the comments with Richard.
I still disagree with a lot of what you have to say, and agree with most of my original bullet points (though I’d make some modifications to #2 on your division into three strategies and #6 on selective skepticism). Not sure what the most productive direction is to go from here. I have some temptation to get into a big disagreement covid, where I think I have pretty different models than you do, but that feels like it’s mainly a tangent. Let me instead try to give my own take on the central thing:
The central topic is situations where an adversary may have compromised some of your internal processes. Especially when it’s not straightforward to identify what they’ve compromised, fix your processes, or remove their influence. There’s a more theoretical angle on this which focuses on what are good strategies to use in response to these sorts of situations, potentially even what’s the optimal response to a sufficiently well-specified version of this kind of scenario. And there’s a more empirical angle which focuses on what do people in fact do when they think they might be in this sort of situation, which could include major errors (including errors in identifying what situation you’re in, e.g. how much access/influence/capability the adversary has in relation to you or how adversarial the relationship is) though probably often involves responses that are at least somewhat appropriate.
This is narrower than what you initially described in this post (being in an environment with competent adversaries) but broader than diagonalization (which is the extreme case of having your internal processes compromised, where you are fully pwned). Though possibly this is still too broad, since it seems like you have something more specific in mind (but I don’t think that narrowing the topic to full diagonalization captures what you’re going for).

Unnamed 15 Nov 2025 5:38 UTC
76 points
15
on: Paranoia: A Beginner’s Guide
I downvoted this post because it felt slippery. I kept running into parts that didn’t fit together or otherwise seemed off.
If this was a google doc I might leave a bunch of comments quickly pointing to examples. I guess I can do that in list format here.
- The post highlights the market for lemons model, but then the examples keep not fitting the lemons setup. Covid misinformation wasn’t an adverse selection problem, nor was having spies in the government, nor was the Madman Theory situation.
- “there are roughly three big strategies” is a kind of claim that I generally start out skeptical of, and this post failed to back that one up
- The description of the CDC and what happened during covid seems basically inaccurate, e.g. that’s not how concerns about surfaces played out
- The Madman Theory example doesn’t feel like an example of the Nixon administration being in an adversarial information situation or being paranoid. It’s trying to make threats in a game theory situation.
- The way you talk about the 3 strategies I get the sense that you’re saying: when you’re in an adversarial information scenario here are 3 options to consider. But in the examples of each strategy, the other 2 strategies don’t really make sense. They are structurally different scenarios.
- A thing that I think of as paranoia centrally involves selective skepticism: having some target that you distrust, but potentially being very credulous towards other sources of views on that topic such as an ingroup that also identifies that target as untrustworthy or engaging in confirmatory reasoning about your own speculative theories that don’t match the untrusted target. That’s missing from your theory and your examples.
- The thing you’re calling “blinding” includes approaches that seem pretty different. A source I distrust is claiming X, and X seems like the sort of thing they’d want me to believe, so I’ll (a) doubt X, (b) find some other method of figuring out whether X is true that doesn’t rely on that source, or c) go someplace else so that X doesn’t matter to me. I associate paranoia mainly with (a), or with doing an epistemically atrocious job of (b), or a self-deceiving variant of (c).
- Despite all the examples, there’s a lack of examples that are examples of the core thing—here’s an epistemically adversarial situation, here’s a person being paranoid, here’s what that looks like, here’s how that’s relatively appropriate/understandable even if not optimal, (perhaps also) here’s how that involves a bunch of costs/badness (from the concluding paragraph this is maybe part of the core, though that wasn’t apparent before that point)
What links here?
- Diagonalization: A (slightly) more rigorous model of paranoia by habryka (16 Nov 2025 7:56 UTC; 34 points)

Unnamed 14 Nov 2025 4:07 UTC
6 points
0
on: 8 Questions for the Future of Inkhaven
As a reader, I wish there was more filtering or signal boosting to help bring some Inkhaven posts to my attention.
There are a few ways that could happen. It could be something reddit-like where there’s a centralized place which at least has links to all the Inkhaven posts and people can upvote them. It could be something like LW curation where some moderators pick a few posts to curate (possibly some of them could even be cross-posted and curated on LW). It could be a linkpost style thing (as Vaniver has been done some of) where people post links to some of their favorite Inkhaven posts.
I could imagine setting up Inkhaven with the intention of having the residents do linkposts. Maybe each Sunday is linkpost day when residents are encouraged to make their daily post a linkpost (with no word requirement) where they link to 1-3 of their best posts from the past week, 3-10 other Inkhaven posts from the past week that they liked, and optionally a few things from elsewhere. Then on Monday there could be a centralized roundup post which links to all of those linkpost and all the posts which got multiple recommendations in those linkposts.