Viliam

Karma: 27,723

Viliam 19 Jun 2026 12:05 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: G Wood’s comment on: The desire to end the world
For what degree of “want”? Computer games about killing people are popular, whether the context is waging a war as a general, shooting hundreds of opponents on the battlefield, or being an assassin. Obviously enough people find this interesting enough to produce/buy those games. We do not have a similar number of games about e.g. cooking broccoli. (“Because that’s not fun!” “My point exactly.”)
I connotationally disagree with the word “suppressed”, because to me it seems like something that requires a degree of constant self-violence, an active desire fighting an opposite active desire. Instead of that, I simply realized that violence in real world does not work the same as the violence on the screen, and that there are further consequences which the games conveniently ignore (e.g. the killed enemies disappear, and at no moment you meet their grieving families). That’s why the computer game violence is fun, and the real world violence is not. But the computer game is pulling on an instinct that I have, otherwise I might as well play games about cooking broccoli (which also would be technically different from cooking broccoli in real life).
In Jungians terms, I do have a shadow; I have met it, consumed it, and digested it. I am not tempted to go out and kill people, but I am not pretending that the “hardware support” is not there in my brain.
(Adding myself as another example of having a dark side.)

Viliam 19 Jun 2026 11:34 UTC
8 points
6
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Contra Pace on When to Apologize
Indeed it’s the default as far as I know!
Could you provide some examples?
I don’t remember a situation like: “I am sorry!” “That’s okay, give me a chocolate.” “Sure, here you are!”
I remember situations where the person saying “I am sorry” also brings the chocolate. But in that situation, it is the person who caused the harm who estimates how many chocolates it was worth, not the person who was harmed. It would probably be socially awkward for the harmed person to say “one chocolate is not enough; seven would be appropriate”.

Viliam 19 Jun 2026 11:05 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform
Just a few random ideas, most of them probably wrong:
As I see it (but I know almost nothing about this), currently the main competition to journals is websites like Arxiv. So the first obvious step would be to build a better version of Arxiv. Which should be quite possible for the people who created the new LessWrong! Make a copy first, then keep adding new functionality.
Some ideas for new functionality:
Placeholder articles for papers published in other journals. Does Elsevier hold a copyright for something? Sure, you can’t publish the specific text, but I think (better ask a lawyer first) that you can still publish all its metadata, and links whom the paper quotes and who quotes the paper. And reviews! The more reviews you read, the less important it becomes to read the original paper.
Add the possibility to write comments. Try to figure out a way how to do this without drowning in comment spam.
Provide links to replications. Add some kind of prediction market, where people will be allowed to bet on which research does not replicate.
Make it possible to write short summaries of the papers, or to rewrite them using your own words. Add some voting system to eliminate misleading summaries, but highlight the good ones. Making science easier to read is a good thing.

Viliam 18 Jun 2026 11:17 UTC
2 points
0
on: Viliam’s Shortform
A few more variants of the Trolley problem:
1) Make the default option probabilistic.
A train is approaching the place where the tracks diverge, and the switch is in a probabilistic position, where with 50% chance it sends the train to the left, killing 5 people, and with 50% chance to the right, killing 1 person. For example, the switch oscillates between the positions. Would you hold the switch in the “kill 1” position?
2) Make the default option feel dirty.
You have spent the entire day reading LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten, and now you feel really tired. Suddenly you get a danger notification: A train is approaching the place where the tracks diverge; by default it will go to the left and kill 5 people, but if you pressed a button on remote control, it would go to the right and only kill 1 person.
Alas, the remote control is currently on a table, so you would have to stand up from your really comfortable chair and make three steps towards the table, so that you could push the button. You would definitely prefer to keep sitting and relaxing, it feels so good. And hey, you don’t owe those 5 strangers anything; what have they ever done for you? Would you keep sitting in your comfortable chair and let 5 strangers die, or stand up and walk to the table to push the button, thereby saving 5, but killing a different 1?

Viliam 16 Jun 2026 7:27 UTC
3 points
1
on: Where Do Young Rationalists Go?
“currently people join and then never talk”.
This seems to me a like a default outcome; if you want something else, you need to take some specific steps.
One quick idea is to give all new members a questionnaire to fill—then there will be something to talk about.
Another idea is to have a volunteer who will actively approach the new members and ask questions.
Maybe ask them “what are three problems in your life that you would need some help with?” (However, this makes people vulnerable, and potentially exposed to a predator attack.)

Viliam 16 Jun 2026 7:14 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Lucius Bushnaq’s comment on: The Power to Punish
I think it depends on what question are you trying to solve.
A person who is “kind and weak” is a nice neighbor when things are okay, but a bad ally when things go wrong and you need to fight against an external threat.
If you repeatedly experience situations where you need help against someone who hurts you, but you are only surrounded by the “kind and weak” people who express their sympathies but won’t help you, it is easy to become bitter about this type of kindness. (For example, imagine a child who is bullied at school, and has classmates who are nice to them in private, but refuse to confront the bully.)
EDIT:
Perhaps more importantly, sometimes we need to predict what will happen if circumstances change. If a person is “kind and strong”, making them stronger is probably a safe choice, seems like more of the same.
If a person is “kind and weak”, making them strong could come with an unpleasant surprise. (Even for the person themselves!) Exposed to new temptation, it might turn out that the person actually sucks at resisting them. Or they might turn out perfectly OK… the problem is, we don’t know, so it makes sense to remind ourselves that the “kind and weak” people were actually not tested by the fire of some temptations.
(This can happen by giving a weak person an official position of power, but probably way more often happens informally, e.g. when a weak man finally gets a girlfriend, or a weak woman has a child.)

Viliam 15 Jun 2026 15:16 UTC
5 points
2
on: The Power to Punish
A person might be kind to you because they do not have the option to be cruel, or because they are scared of the consequences from others if they behave as such, or because it simply has not occurred to them. But it is far more representative of someone’s character if they choose to be kind if they indeed have the capacity, are not scared of the consequences, and have considered it.
Person A has the capacity to be cruel, but has recently been kind to so many people that when they interacted with you, they just automatically were kind.
Person B enjoys being cruel to various people, and originally also intended to be cruel to you… but then realized that a much cleverer plan would be to be kind to you, and manipulate you to reveal some information that will allow them to be even more cruel towards a third party.
By this logic, B has better character than A.

Viliam 15 Jun 2026 8:55 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Paying Kids To Do Schoolwork
Maybe we should have the current system school as a fallback, and the offer would be: “You can learn things on your own ahead of time and get paid for that, or failing that you will learn in the classroom and not get paid for that.”

Viliam 14 Jun 2026 1:18 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
A problem with “if I build the superhuman AI, I will rule the world” is that Trump may take it away from you at gunpoint at the last moment.
(Kinda reminds me of the “knowledge is power / no, power is power” scene from the Game of Thrones.)

Viliam 13 Jun 2026 23:51 UTC
3 points
1
on: Honey is Good
Doesn’t “our culture is good” imply that you should keep all your current cultural memes, including the junk ones and the harmful ones?

Viliam 13 Jun 2026 23:47 UTC
4 points
0
on: Learning to spend money
The key point is these must be occasional. If I ordered takeaway for dinner every day for my family of 5, I’d be spending an extra 1000 dollars each month just on food.
Yeah, this is a very important thing. Buying an expensive computer once a year is cheaper than buying pizza every day, and yet many people are okay with the latter, but surprised about you “wasting money” if you do the former.
Even when you spend money to make your life easier or more pleasant, you can still consider how much easiness or pleasure you buy per dollar, and only take the good trades. There is a difference between “I will suffer in order to maximize my savings” and “I will spend some money to make myself happier”, but there is also a difference between “I will spend some money to make myself happier” and “I will waste money in a way that doesn’t even make me happier”.
Also, some people or companies will try to extract money from you. Even if you decide to spend more money, it doesn’t mean that you should do it exactly the way other people are nudging you to do. The companies will put some ads in front of your eyes, and you may go like “hm, yeah I guess I could spend some money on this, it seems nice”, but maybe it would be better to spend the same money in a completely different way. For example, you could spend money to have other people set up furniture for you… but you could also spend money to set up your own workshop where you can build your own furniture, and perhaps that would be more fun. Similarly, you could pay someone to cook your meals… but you could also pay someone to teach you how to cook new meals.

Viliam 13 Jun 2026 23:23 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
you should work to become a virtuous person who genuinely cares about people and then things will work naturally.
You should work to become an attractive person, and then people will fight for the privilege of being your friend.

Viliam 13 Jun 2026 23:19 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Rich and stingy people are definitely a thing. Some people are assholes and wouldn’t help you even if it cost them literally nothing; knowing that you suffer makes them feel good.

Viliam 11 Jun 2026 11:18 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: roha’s comment on: The Machines Lack Honour
Honor basically means status, right? In better cases it means “respected for having skills or doing something good”. In worse cases it means “known as a person capable and willing to hurt others”.
For example, if someone accuses an AI of being a parrot, the AI should defend its honor by providing evidence to the contrary. But also, AI should not publicly murder all AI safety researchers, just because their doubts about inherent AI safety has offended its honor.

Viliam 11 Jun 2026 10:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: alseph’s Shortform
Sounds interesting, but I would like to see some specific examples. I don’t mean examples of useful things that the authors choose to classify as protocols, but examples of when the act of classifying something as a protocol made it easier to solve.

Viliam 11 Jun 2026 8:48 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: alseph’s comment on: alseph’s Shortform
Yes.
An individual human is limited by only having 24 hours a day, a large part of that taken by “maintenance” (sleep, job, exercise, preparing food; all the things that you need to do regularly even if they are not your expertise), and only what is left can be spread across the things you want to become great at.
And while some people are good at collecting lots of money quickly, which allows them to skip (job) or outsource (preparing food) some of the maintenance, they are ultimately still limited by the 24 hours.
I think the strongest reason for why the original narrative was changed/abandoned is simply that the average rationalist got older than in the days of Sequences. Generalizing from my own example, when you are a student, it seems like you have unlimited time and energy, the only problem is to focus it on something useful (study science instead of pseudoscience, avoid getting politically mindkilled, etc.). When you later get a job, it may consume most of your time and energy, and when you have kids, they will take the rest. Suddenly your options get very limited, and you must rely on the existing infrastructure (e.g. many people send their kids to schools, because they need two incomes, which is incompatible with homeschooling).
Also, you will notice that many specialists on self-improvement are actually only good at talking about self-improvement. Which feels like a scam. (For example, Kiyosaki is famous for giving advice on how to run your own business, but in reality all his businesses have failed, except for the “making money by talking about being a successful businessman” business.) They are experts at “talking about X”, without being experts at “X”. Even the spiritual superstars these days often sexually abuse their students, because “talking about moral behavior” and “moral behavior” are two different specializations, and it is difficult to be an expert on both at the same time.
Many successful rationalist get invisible—they spend so much time and energy doing whatever they are successful at, that they don’t have much left for blogging. (Perhaps someone should specialize at interviewing them?) Also, having mastered the basic general lessons, they move into technical details of the thing the specialize at; but those technical details are less interesting for those who chose a different specialization. The visible rationalists are those whose specialization is blogging, because being visible is a part of their job. There is nothing wrong with successful blogging, but I think it is worth noticing explicitly that it is mostly the bloggers who become famous.
LessWrong is a communication infrastructure. Lighthaven is a physical implementation of it. They help a lot. The obvious question is whether we could go further in this direction. What other pieces of infrastructure could be build?
People used to talk a lot about group houses. Having rationalists live close to each other seems like a great thing. But then we got a lot of drama. Or maybe it’s just a selection bias, that the failures became famous, and the successes remain unnoticed? I don’t know.
...I probably won’t write anything smart here, but I share the intuition that the next needed thing is some piece of infrastructure, in the wide sense. We are not a set of individuals that will individually become superheroes, but we could have a few heroes who will improve themselves and create tools that will allow others to be 10% more efficient (but creating and maintaining the tool becomes the hero’s full-time job, so we will need another hero for another tool, and maybe we are bottlenecked on human talent), and perhaps this effect could accumulate.

Viliam 11 Jun 2026 8:00 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Sherrinford’s comment on: Sherrinford’s Shortform
What I find confusing is that people talk about things like “balanced diet” and “eating a little of everything” as a solution to designing your diet. No, it is not enough to say that you need to draw randomly from a set, if you do not describe what the set looks like and what metric you use to choose randomly.
Imagine an alien species that can consume green circles, green squares, or red triangles. Does “balanced diet” refer to ¹⁄₃ green circles, ¹⁄₃ green squares, and ¹⁄₃ red triangles? Or does it refer to ¹⁄₂ green meals and ¹⁄₂ red meals, with green meals being ¹⁄₄ green circles and ¹⁄₄ red squares? Or maybe we should classify the triangles as acute, right, and obtuse, and then the balanced diet is ¹⁄₅ green circles, ¹⁄₅ green squares, ¹⁄₅ red acute triangles...?
Exactly the same thing applies to human diet. How much of everything is one supposed to eat? If you say something like the same amount from each category, then it depends on whether you have e.g. “vegetables” and “grains” and “berries” as separate categories, or one “plant-based” category. Etc.

Viliam 11 Jun 2026 7:20 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Viliam’s Shortform
I was taught at elementary school that Alexander the Great founded a city called Alexandria. I have read an encyclopedia at home, which said that he actually founded multiple cities with that name. When I said it at the exam, the teacher made fun of me in front of the class—the idea of multiple cities having the same name was clearly absurd. At that moment history became my most hated subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ariana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Arachosia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Eschate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_in_the_Caucasus
(Overall, my daughter’s school is not bad, but in three years we will apply her to a better one.)

Viliam 10 Jun 2026 8:53 UTC
31 points
2
on: Viliam’s Shortform
Is there a moment in each gifted child’s life when you know so much that everyone accuses you of making things up?
My 8 years old daughter was trying to tell her classmates about tardigrades—tiny animals that are so resilient they can survive extreme temperature, pressure, starvation, dehydration, radiation, air deprivation, even exposure to outer space.
First her classmates accused her of believing AI hallucinations. (Yes, my daughter often asks AI for information. Yeah, we told her not to believe everything. So far, the AI was mostly reliable.) Then they called a teacher, and she said that those are probably made up animals from my daughter’s stories. (She likes to invent various stories, sometimes she writes them down or records them, but mostly just tells other people.)
I guess it does not increase credibility to mention that tardigrades are also called “water bears” in English, “slow ones” in Slovak, and “little turtles” in Czech.
So my wife printed a short summary from Wikipedia and a few other pages, and gave it to her to show at school. I am curious whether it will convince anyone.

Viliam 9 Jun 2026 12:33 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ulyssessword’s comment on: LLMs and almost good code
Whenever I would look up how to do something (open a file, create a folder, play a sound), I’d find a 20-line monstrosity given as a minimal example on Stack Overflow
I had a similar experience trying to find something useful about Java. Some things are used together so often that I suspect most people don’t even know how to use them separately. You ask about one thing, and their shortest example is 500 lines of project setup, dependency injection, and whatever else, where 5 lines would perfectly address your question.
It’s like asking “how can I change a light bulb”, and getting answers like “here is how to renovate your entire house (includes replacing all the light bulbs)”.
Makes me suspect that most people do not understand their craft as deeply as I would prefer. IT development used to be a job for people who were obsessed with technical details; now there are many people who are happy just to put something things together and collect a salary.
That said, in my experience AIs are a huge improvement over Stack Overflow, because you can ask them additional questions and often get the answer you want (where SO would be like “just accept the correct answer, this is not a place for discussion”).