Unnamed

Karma: 8,120

Unnamed 7 Mar 2026 23:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: D&D.Sci Release Day: Topple the Tower!
Looking at the bonus objective, the Hero and path that looks most promising is
Warrior: Gremlin, Jaw Worm, Adamant Armor, Enchanted Shield, Sentries, Campfire, Vanishing Powder, The Champion
Reasoning
This run looks promising at first glance because it gets the two Warrior-specific treasures, and faces as few enemies as possible subject to that constraint (as the Warrior seems to fare better against bosses when he has faced fewer enemies).
The big concern with it is the boss battle. The Warrior did ever lose to the Sentries, but only about 2% of the time, and never when he had both Warrior treasures. And he never lost to Gremlin or Jaw Worm.
The Warrior had only an 87% win rate against The Champion when he had both Warrior treasures, including an 86% win rate when his other floors involved 3 enemies, 1 campfire, and 1 other-hero treasure (as this plan does—Vanishing Powder is a Rogue treasure). And one of the failed runs (23970) looks very similar to this plan: Staff of the Magi, Enchanted Shield, Slaver, Jaw Worm, Adamant Armor, Sentries, Campfire, The Champion. So this doesn’t seem like a guaranteed win.
But I don’t see anything better at this point. A Rogue run which gets the Cloak of Protection and the Vanishing Powder looks like an obvious alternative, but looking at similar runs that seems worse.
And when I look at win rate against The Champion in runs that made it to the final floor, by Hero & pairs of floors previously encountered, the top 3 highest win rates all involve the Warrior with Adamant Armor and another useful treasure (Boots of Swiftness, Enchanted Shield, or Cloak of Protection), each with a win rate of ~87%. So that includes my planned run (Hero with Armor & Shield) basically tied for first. None of the other floor pairs with a win rate over 65% look possible in this tower; Rogue with Cloak of Protection and Vanishing Powder is down at 55%.

Unnamed 7 Mar 2026 18:12 UTC
4 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Release Day: Topple the Tower!
My current choice for Torreador and path on the main problem:
The Warrior on the easy path, with the shield and all the campfires:
Enchanted Shield, Campfire, Jaw Worm, Campfire, Campfire, Campfire, Campfire, The Collector
Reasoning
I tried to find scenarios where a Hero had a 100% win rate against The Collector (given that they made it to the boss battle) and found one: when the Warrior had at least one of the two Warrior-specific treasures (Shield, Armor) and only faced 1 enemy along the way he had ²²⁸⁄₂₂₈ wins. That included ³¹⁄₃₁ wins when it was his only useful treasure (out of the 6: Shield, Armor, Boots, Cloak, Potion, Ring).
And would he survive that path to The Collector? The Warrior never lost to the Jaw Worm, and never lost to the first Enemy he faced. And only lost on floors with a Boss or Enemy. So making it to The Collector seems safe.

Unnamed 24 Feb 2026 21:40 UTC
21 points
12
in reply to: Richard Horvath’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
I don’t think it’s specific to sensitive topics, Richard just does a lot of sloppy thinking when he tries to engage with politics. His post/talk on more mundane political topics also led to a lot of people on LW & the EA Forum pointing out things he got wrong.

Unnamed 4 Feb 2026 2:07 UTC
4 points
0
on: The Median Researcher Problem
The median researcher hypothesis seems false. Something like an ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ distribution seems much more plausible, and is presumably more like what you’d find for measurable proxies of ‘influence on a field’ like number of publications in “top tier” journals, or number of researchers in the field who were your grad student. Voting “no”.

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.