Vivificient

Karma: 219

Vivificient 7 Oct 2025 12:23 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: The quotation mark
I associate the Important Nouns with the Winne-the-Pooh stories, where they are used for a certain humorous effect.
Christopher Robin was sitting outside his door, putting on his Big Boots. As soon as he saw the Big Boots, Pooh knew that an Adventure was going to happen, and he brushed the honey off his nose with the back of his paw, and spruced himself up as well as he could, so as to look Ready for Anything.
It does suggest something like a specific concept, a recognized pattern; while also suggesting perhaps a pompousness and self-importance.

Vivificient 16 Sep 2025 12:09 UTC
9 points
3
on: A Thoughtful Defense of AI Writing
Falling in love isn’t just about romance. It’s about discovering new parts of yourself.
If an adult wrote this couple of sentences, I could ask them what they were talking about, and maybe hear a story about their personal love life. That would almost certainly be interesting—even if expressed in clunky language.
If a nine-year old wrote the same, I wouldn’t be so sure they knew what they were talking about, but I’d hold out hope for a charming anecdote about what they learned from their first crush.
But if I learned the nine-year-old had concluded it solely based on skimming all the books about love in their school library, then I would smile to myself and think, “Ah, how innocent: to write about love without having experienced it for oneself.”

Vivificient 2 May 2022 2:35 UTC
1 point
0
on: [$20K in Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
(one liner—for policy makers)

Within ten years, AI systems could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. The research required for this technology is heavily funded and virtually unregulated.

Vivificient 1 Nov 2017 13:56 UTC
8 points
0
on: An Equilibrium of No Free Energy
Thanks for this post. I’ve seen the term inadequecy before (mostly on your Facebook page, I think) but never had such a clear definition in mind.
There was one small thing that bothered me in this post without detracting from the main argument. In section IV, we provisionally accept the premise “grantmakers are driven by prestige, not expected value of research” for the sake of a toy example. I was happy to accept this for the sake of the example. However, in section V (the omelette example and related commentary about research after the second world war), the text begins to read as though this premise is definitely true in real life. This felt inconsistent and potentially misleading.
(It’s not like anyone in our civilization has put as much effort into rationalizing the academic matching process as, say, OkCupid has put into their software for hooking up dates. It’s not like anyone who did produce this public good would get paid more than they could have made as a Google programmer.)
I appreciated this throwaway example of inadequacy. It gave me a little lightbulb and propelled me forward to read the rest of the post with more interest.

Vivificient 6 Oct 2017 18:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Beta—First Impressions
Certainly! Here it is: https://i.snag.gy/8QxDsF.jpg
On that page, it is fine at normal zoom, but the problem occurs when I zoom out to 80%, at which point the text is roughly the same size as here. So I guess it is something to do with how the font is rendering at that size. Whether it is something wrong with my computer or with the font I don’t know.

Vivificient 6 Oct 2017 18:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Beta—First Impressions
Here is what I am seeing:
https://snag.gy/tvGpdx.jpg
I am on Chrome on Windows 10. Experimentation shows that the effect only happens when the page zoom is at 100%… if I zoom in or out, the w goes back to normal.

Vivificient 6 Oct 2017 7:25 UTC
1 point
0
on: Beta—First Impressions
The comment font has a weird lowercase ‘w’. It is larger than the surrounding letters. Now that I have noticed it, I can’t stop being distracted by it.

Vivificient 27 Mar 2016 1:55 UTC
52 points
0
in reply to: Huluk’s comment on: Lesswrong 2016 Survey
It is done. (The survey. By me.)

Vivificient 28 Oct 2014 23:02 UTC
33 points
0
on: 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I have taken the survey, including the digit ratio question.

Since there was a box to be included in the SSC survey, I just a little bit disappointed there wasn’t a question for favourite SSC post to go with the favourite LessWrong post question.

Vivificient 21 Jan 2014 18:57 UTC
16 points
0
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
Making things happen with positive thinking requires magic. But myths about the health effects of microwaves or plastic bottles are dressed up to look like science as usual. The microwave thing is supposedly based on the effect of radiation on the DNA in your food or something—nonsense, but to someone with little science literacy not necessarily distinguishable from talk about the information-theoretic definition of death.

I’m not sure that signing papers to have a team of scientists stand by and freeze your brain when you die is more boring than cooking your food without a microwave oven. I would guess that cryonics being “weird”, “gross”, and “unnatural” would be more relevant.

Vivificient 21 Jan 2014 17:38 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: Brillyant’s comment on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
Upvoted for providing a clear counterexample to Yvain’s assertion that people would find immortality to be “surely an outcome as desirable as any lottery jackpot”.

This suggests that a partial explanation for the data is that “experienced rationalists” (high karma, long time in community) are more likely to find immortality desirable, and so more likely to sign up for cryonics despite having slightly lower faith in the technology itself.

Vivificient 21 Jan 2014 14:28 UTC
26 points
0
on: Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously
Your conclusion is possible. But I’ll admit I find it hard to believe that non-rationalists really lack the ability to take ideas seriously. The 1 = 2 example is a little silly, but I’ve known lots of not-very-rational people who take ideas seriously. For example, people who stopped using a microwave when they heard about an experiment supposedly showing that microwaved water kills plants. People who threw out all their plastic dishes after the media picked up a study about health dangers caused by plastics. People who spent a lot of time thinking positive thoughts because they have heard it will make them successful.

Could it be that proto-rationalists are just bad at quantifying their level of belief? Normally, I’d trust somebody’s claim to believe something more if they’re willing to bet on it; and if they aren’t willing to bet on it, then I’d think their real level of belief is lower.

Vivificient 17 Jan 2014 6:53 UTC
−2 points
0
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Things I Wish They’d Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome
IQ—I could hire excellent tutors to make myself more intelligent, though definitely only to a certain point. More to the point, I could hire smart people to think of good ideas for me. I’ll concede that I couldn’t buy the experience of thinking like someone smarter than myself.

emotional states—Hire some psychologists to figure out what experiences causes people to have them, then buy those experiences.

personal achievements—This one I’ll give you; you can’t buy achieving something for yourself.

honour—This is a very vague term to me.

Vivificient 17 Jan 2014 6:19 UTC
3 points
0
on: Things I Wish They’d Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome
I find it a fun game trying to think of things that money can’t buy (but that it is possible for people to get in other ways). It’s difficult to think of a lot of answers, especially allowing for strategies like hiring someone to train you to become the kind of person who gets x. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is specific anything, such as the friendship of a specific person.

Vivificient 13 Jan 2014 6:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Axel’s comment on: AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything
How hard did you find it to be to organize/run a meetup? How did that compare to what you expected?

Vivificient 28 Nov 2013 22:43 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: hydkyll’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
See this wiki page for links to discussion of Free Will in the sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will

Vivificient 27 Nov 2013 14:25 UTC
−3 points
0
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor
I’m not sure if I understand what you’re suggesting. As I understand it, the argument isn’t that Walmart is literally getting subsidies. It’s just that Walmart employees are getting welfare, so Walmart doesn’t have to pay to support them, reducing Walmart’s costs hypothetically compared to an equivalent company which paid their workers a better wage.

So if you created a company which provided as good of working conditions as possible, your employees wouldn’t need welfare, so you wouldn’t be benefiting from the “subsidies”. Also, your costs would go up, so you’d be more likely to go out of business than Walmart.

Vivificient 27 Nov 2013 1:21 UTC
4 points
0
on: Probability and radical uncertainty
I don’t have a full strategy, but I have an idea for a data-gathering experiment:

I hand you a coin and try to get you to put it in the box for me. If you refuse, I update in the direction of the box harming people who put coins in it. If you comply, I watch and see what happens.

Vivificient 22 Nov 2013 3:05 UTC
59 points
0
on: 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
I have never posted on LW before, but this seems like a fine first time to do so.

I am really very curious to see the results of the real world cooperate/defect choice at the bottom of the test.