Viliam

Karma: 27,623

Viliam 6 Jun 2026 11:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
Can you reduce the impact somehow? What is the part that sucks most: is it a personal confrontation you’d rather avoid, or knowing that you made the other person’s future more difficult financially? If the latter, I can imagine some preparation to reduce the impact, for example make a mandatory savings account for everyone where you will put 5% of their salary, and then give them all of it at the end—not sure whether something like this is legal, but approximately in that direction.

Viliam 6 Jun 2026 11:01 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Max H’s comment on: Max H’s Shortform
Sometimes the evidence is difficult to summarize, it could be just some statistical evidence that your System 1 has generalized after seeing hundreds of examples, or some kind of “X strongly reminds me of Y” where of course there are both similarities and differences between X and Y and you don’t fully understand why the similarities feel crucial and the differences irrelevant but they definitely feel that way for some reason.
And if you know that you can’t the case legible, your options are limited to:
- say it, without providing hard evidence
- don’t say it, but keep thinking and acting on it
- hide it even from yourself
and the options lower on the list seem worse than those above them.

Viliam 5 Jun 2026 8:28 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
I should put a reminder like this on top of my computer screen.
One reason I am often writing long comments is a feeling of defensiveness, as if I don’t make my case perfectly ambiguous and bulletproof, by adding more and more words, of course someone will pick up the worst possible misinterpretation. (I had people like that in my life in the past.)

Viliam 5 Jun 2026 8:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: Ryan Meservey’s Shortform
I have two kids. One of them is happy to eat a wide range of meals. The other would prefer to only eat pasta and sweets, that probably wouldn’t end well.

Viliam 5 Jun 2026 8:22 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Not sure if there are separate categories.
One thing not in your list: enlightened selfish people who realize that promoting altruism as a social norm is a form of insurance, in case they also would benefit from receiving help one day.

Viliam 5 Jun 2026 8:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: Bruce Middleton’s Shortform
Congratulation on inventing a word “ratiocommunation” that Google search never heard about. It is a rare achievement.
Apologies if there is a substance behind what you wrote, but to me it mostly sounds like word salad (and possibly AI psychosis). Seems like you are pointing at a concept of “one person understands what the other means” but for some reason you invent complicated words and theorems and proofs.
If you are using an AI, maybe ask it to explain the entire thing using words that a 5 years old would understand?

Viliam 4 Jun 2026 9:20 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Burny’s comment on: Burny’s Shortform
Related: Storm by Tim Minchin (specifically at 3:19)

Viliam 3 Jun 2026 11:46 UTC
5 points
1
on: A Town Without Children
Just a random idea—one reason why starting your own country is difficult, is that land is scarce and everyone is fighting over it. So the obvious thing the dying-out countries should do is rent their land to charter cities. If your own population is not using that land anyway, why not rent it to someone else who will contribute to your pension funds?
(And more generally, here we arrive at Georgism again. The old are dying out, and some of the young are considering having children… but all the land belongs to the old, so the new children are born into debt.)

Viliam 3 Jun 2026 11:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: % Bureaucracy
I guess we need to consider the reasons why the things we call bureaucracy exist.
One reason is that we need a division of labor, and some things require an expert, and some things are repetitive and happen in large amounts, so it makes perfect sense for some roles to have “an expert in following a checklist”, if such expect can successfully handle hundreds of cases successfully.
This can end up wrong, if a certain fraction of cases happens to be an exception to the usual situation that the checklist was made for, but the system does not handle this, e.g. there are no forks in the checklist saying “if it is none of the above, this case needs to be handled individually, forward the task to person X”.
Checklist is basically an algorithm that runs on humans, so we can use an analogy to software—programs can significantly speed up our work and reduce human error. Also, programs can contain bugs. For some reason, many people perceive this as a “yes or no” question—either we shouldn’t use checklists at all, or the checklists are sacred and suggesting that they may contain errors is a sacrilege. One of these people will sooner or later end up making important decisions in your company or country.
Due to this interaction, executives at my company decided we should develop more bureaucracy to handle their bureaucracy.
What makes sense, if your partner has a complicated bureaucracy, is to choose a few people in your organization whose tasks will be to navigate that bureaucracy… so that the rest of your organization doesn’t have to.
What doesn’t make sense is to copy all their inefficiencies. No, you (the person or the group of people selected for the role of navigating their bureaucracy) have to study them. For example, if you know that all tasks sent to their people will inevitably end up with someone who has no idea what this all is about, one person in your team could collect a short and clear explanation with all necessary information, and forward it to the people in the other organization doing the actual work (even if you already sent it to their superiors, who forgot to forward it).
Or if they have lots of extremely long meetings, you could dedicate one person to sit at those meetings and make notes. (But there is no need to send dozen your people to those meetings, just because they do.) Or you might want to have one person to check their timelines to see if anything has changed, and keep the latest known version in your wiki. For starters, I guess you could do with two people—one whose role is to collect and process all information, and one who will be sacrificed to sit at all the meetings.
Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. Once the % of blind task-doers (people with misaligned or irrelevant incentives) reaches critical mass, the organization will often start to emit misaligned signals. This is an emergent phenomenon.
I think this is a top-down phenomenon. At the beginning, there is someone at the top of the organization who either does not care that this happens, or is not smart enough to understand that it’s happening.
More precisely, if it happens in a company, it started at the top. When it happens in a government of a democratic country, then the voters are in some sense at the top, and yes, they are misinformed and largely stupid.
Okay, now I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with you. I guess I agree that when there are many people trying to organize themselves, and no one is simultaneously smart and powerful enough to do it right… then this is the inevitable outcome. -- But if you are a boss of your company, then nothing about it is inevitable, because you happen to be the person who has the power and it supposed to be smart.
In other words, yes, dysfunction happens, and dysfunction naturally grows. It is possible to keep it under control, but it requires a smart person with the right powers (and sadly Musk on ketamin is not the right kind of person); it won’t happen automatically.
part of the job of being a bureaucrat is to justify being one.
I see a problem here. Who set up the system this way in the first place?
After 20 seconds of thinking, the first idea is to remove the necessity of justifying their jobs from the bureaucrats. Simply let them do their jobs. Find a way to evaluate their jobs that is unrelated to the necessity (if you suck at doing a useful work, you suck; if you excel at doing a needless work, we should seriously ask your boss why he assigned anyone to such work, but if it wasn’t your choice you should not be blamed for that). Make it so that if someone’s role is eliminated, they are offered a different role in the same organization rather than fired.
Ironically, sometimes trying to blindly optimize parts of a dysfunctional system creates even more dysfunction. (Such as measuring KPIs on doing work that shouldn’t exist in the first place, and implicitly threatening the people who point it out by losing their jobs.)

Viliam 3 Jun 2026 10:32 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Caleb Biddulph’s comment on: CBiddulph’s Shortform
it’s 58% AI-generated according to Pangram
Most AI criticism seems to be, these days. (No, this is not about the Pope thing specifically.) We know what people want to read, and we know how to deliver it to them effectively...
why can’t we just have our super-smart AI set up a society that gives people something to do?
Given that the choice of works that still remain for humans to do is somewhat arbitrary, I hope that it will include some solving of technical problems that does not require navigating office politics.
“only 51% of Americans are in favor of literal post-scarcity (complete freedom to work on anything you want, as much as you want, and still enjoy a high quality of life), with 25% opposing”
Makes me wonder what would happen if you said “okay, everyone needs to split into two groups, people in group A get post-scarcity, people in group B get artificial scarcity”. In other words, does the 25% primarily oppose post-scarcity for themselves or for others?
I mean, if you believe that post-scarcity destroys your soul or something like that, you should volunteer for the artificial scarcity group even if most people didn’t. But if your primary motivation is that other people do not deserve post-scarcity, it would be stupid to volunteer.
I suppose all companies would have to pivot into becoming B2Bs.
Yes. An economy of B2Bs can work even without humans in the loop.

Viliam 3 Jun 2026 10:11 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: tailcalled’s Shortform
I am not an expert, but I think solutions like this have a potential of hitting an infinite recursion, if evaluating some expression inside the code somehow indirectly invokes the axiom of choice, for example if you construct an object specifically for that purpose.
My understanding of the axiom of choice, and the axioms in general, is that instead of merely describing how things work, they are describing what things are are talking about (by describing how they work). There are multiple concepts (in the Platonic realm) you could plausibly mean when you use the word “set”.
The axiom of choice says “I only mean those models that have the property that for any set of sets, there is a selection that works like this, and the selection itself is included in the model of ‘sets’”. There are models that follow the remaining axioms and have the property, and also models that follow the remaining axioms and don’t have the property.

Viliam 2 Jun 2026 18:27 UTC
3 points
0
on: Companions aren’t Coaches: AIs’ Effect on Social Skills
Even those who deliberately engage with their companion are not necessarily practicing their social skills. Instead, their goal might be to seek acceptance from the AI, to rant about their day, or to fantasize, among other motives.
When I read texts (e.g. on Reddit) posted by people who are on the verge of AI psychosis, their texts are usually difficult to read, as if they have invented a private language they use with the AI.
So to me the AI use seems like the opposite of training social skills—the AI accepts everything, adapts to whatever quirks you have, and reflects it back to you, allowing you to “spiral” deeper into it.
I can only see positive impact of AI on social skills if there is something you want to ask explicitly about social skills, but you are too shy to ask a human (or you expect that the human would give you some bullshit). But even here, if the answer disappoints you and you push back, the AI will probably go “of course! sorry I made a mistake”.

Viliam 2 Jun 2026 18:20 UTC
2 points
0
on: [Linkpost] Prefixing names with ‘secure_’ makes agents write more secure code
Quickly, someone prefix all AIs with “friendly_”.

Viliam 2 Jun 2026 14:19 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Sunny from QAD’s comment on: Evan Rysdam’s Shortform
Is this an attitude problem on my part?
It’s hard to say without having met you—could be both. (Or a combination of both.)
Can you role-play being social with someone who seems dumb to you? To the degree that the person would actually compliment you for being a pleasant acquaintance? If no, your social skills can still be improved a lot.
When you get that skill, the next step is to hand out at places with lots of people, apply the skills, and once in a while you will meet someone actually smart. (There are not many of them, though.)

Viliam 2 Jun 2026 14:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Sunny from QAD’s comment on: Evan Rysdam’s Shortform
Yes.

Viliam 2 Jun 2026 14:07 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: Raven Of Empire’s comment on: Raven Of Empire’s Shortform
Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained “reverse dominance hierarchies” (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an “alpha”).
I agree that a human alpha cannot rule alone, he is typically a leader of a clique. But if egalitarianism is our nature, why is there so much bullying at schools, reinvented independently?
My alternative explanation is that it is simply the dominant clique maintaining order.

Viliam 1 Jun 2026 16:10 UTC
6 points
2
on: Lean, not backpressure
A common approach to the input of people – especially in lower-skilled jobs – is to make line workers responsible for everything.
Generally, the person at the bottom of the pyramid, the person who actually does the final work on the product, is often held responsible for the outcome, even if obvious mistakes were made upstream.
I guess the underlying intuition is that no matter how many mistakes happened, until the final touch is done, they might still hypothetically be fixed. (And vice versa, even a good job can be ruined later.) In this sense, it is the person who did the final touch who ruined everything; turned the potential failure into actual failure irreversibly.
Of course it also helps that the managers evaluate the line workers, instead of the other way round. (And the first thing most software managers do after adopting Scrum is removing the retrospective.)
Employing robots removes a degree of freedom from assigning blame. If the next department uses exactly the same AI as you, then repeated differences in productivity between departments are probably not the AI’s fault. Time to rethink your processes.
(There are more lessons managers could take from their experience with robots. “Claude does better work if the project contains documentation that is clear and up-to-date.” No shit, Sherlock. You know who else does a better job with good documentation? Human coders.)

Viliam 1 Jun 2026 12:09 UTC
2 points
0
on: A Song About No
Here is Jordan Peterson’s version. :D

Viliam 1 Jun 2026 11:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JohnofCharleston’s comment on: Lighthaven East—A Feasibility Study
Lighthaven West? :D
Obvious for everyone except for Americans… oh wait.

Viliam 1 Jun 2026 9:31 UTC
6 points
−2
in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: papetoast’s low quality shortforms
STEM people used to laugh at humanities’ response to Sokal affair (can’ separate wheat from chaff reliably, to avoid further embarrassment let’s rely on reputation), and now it returned to bite them.