WalterL

Karma: 1,797

Try, even if they have you cold

WalterL7 May 2026 17:19 UTC

102 points

14 comments2 min readLW link

WalterL 27 Jan 2026 5:32 UTC
8 points
1
on: Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance
This is a fun post. I remember enjoying Ada Palmer’s fiction. It makes sense that someone who could write in such a manner does interesting things in their day job. More power to her.

WalterL 25 Nov 2025 4:33 UTC
2 points
6
on: NATO is dangerously unaware of its military vulnerability
I think the best way to express this reality that I’ve heard was from a buddy, who mentioned offhandedly that it is wild we live in a time when if Ukraine and Russia teamed up tomorrow (by magic or whatever, obviously this isn’t a real thing) they would rapidly defeat the standing European militaries. That’s a historical anomaly big enough to choke on.
And, importantly, it wasn’t true at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At that point, neither of these nations were producing millions of drones annually. Somehow, since going to war, both nations have grown dramatically stronger, in lockstep. It’s a deranged outcome. If you read it in a novel, you’d laugh out loud.
Ukraine + Russia drone manufacturing goes up like a rocket, while France/Germany, which are not presently on fire and doing a draft...their drone production goes from nothing to nothing. It’s wild.

WalterL 22 Aug 2025 14:10 UTC
1 point
−3
on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Lighthaven
Cade Metz doxxed the slatestarcodex guy, right? My conception going into this was ‘this guy pretends to not understand stuff in order to hurt people and enrich himself’ and this whole ‘the science word sayers are really faith believers’ take is pretty clearly more of that.
Invert it, if you like. Feels like, if silicon valley WAS a religious movement, Cade would describe it as cold eyed cynical pragmatism.
I wouldn’t pay this scoundrel any more mind. Any engagement you give him will be put to use to the detriment of whoever is currently on his plate.

WalterL 22 Aug 2025 6:32 UTC
11 points
4
on: When Money Becomes Power
I deleted a lot of quibbling around the edge cases. I think you are putting into ‘the Enlightenments’ mouth a lot of stuff I’m reasonable confident its architects had no opinion on(3 branches specifically, a triumph?!), but that’s whatever, it’s not the main focus here.
It feels like this is incomplete unless you answer the central paradox, yeah? Like, don’t skate past it. if concentration of power is bad, and must be prevented...
What can do that? Power is powerful, yeah? So a greater power is necessary to prevent bad actors from concentrating it? But this greater power itself (classically, in this sort of thing a state) is/was concentrated. If I’m not free to trade with Elon how much less free am I to trade with the CIA? Isn’t that, very obviously, also a bad thing that needs to be prevented/removed? But what could possibly...
IE, if I trust you to make sure Elon can’t have too much power, then you have more power than he does, and who makes me safe around you? Aren’t you just large Elon (Elonger?) at that point?
(if your answer contains the words ‘self limiting’ you lose so many quatloos.)
It’s not that, like, folks are ignorant of the power = power over theory that you are proposing. It’s an old and well trodden path. But history has been at least a little kind to the idea that I’m safer with a buff guy next door than with a department of guys in charge of making sure no one gets too jacked inspecting my spoon weight to make sure I’m not surreptitiously bulking out.
I think you may have sliced this too fine. Like, the argument needs to be developed more to exist as more than a kind of ‘oh, this is what this person believes’. I can’t really agree or disagree, to say nothing of the libertarians you are attempting to convince.
Concentration of Power can’t be ‘bad’ or ‘good’ unless you are a religious sort, and God is assigning scores. Otherwise, it has to be relative, right? It is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than some other thing. In the absence of that other thing (that is, the thing we would use to make there not be billionaires), saying that they are ‘bad’ is meaningless.
If you want libertarians to pay attention to why people might think concentrating power is wrong, there needs to be a whole argument. Concentrating power is wronger THAN (this specific way of preventing power from being concentrated). Otherwise its people who think rain is unpleasant. “Sure...anyway...”

WalterL 8 Aug 2025 22:04 UTC
2 points
0
on: Civil Service: a Victim or a Villain?
I tend to think their viewpoints are coherent. Both observe that the civil service is an unaccountable nightmare. Dom imagines that making them obey the elected officials would improve things, Jen imagines that severing them from the electoral interference would improve things. Both would plausibly be an improvement. The common factor is imagining a civil service that worked like everything else.
I don’t think either can be implemented. Dom’s desire is romantic, but runs against human nature (why would whitehall take on responsibility when it can just destroy him and his political masters, as it obviously did). Jen’s desire is fanciful, the ossification that she rails against is exactly part of the accountability sink.
If you had a genie, you’d grant Dom’s wish before Jen’s, but neither is actionable.

WalterL 2 Jul 2024 14:56 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: eye96458’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
It’s mostly anecdotal from my experience, I’m afraid. That is, my conviction went the ‘wrong way’. When I was poor, that’s what I saw, then later articles mostly seemed to agree, rather than the data making me believe something and then experience confirming.
I looked up noahpinion’s ‘everything you know about homelessness is wrong’ article, which I remember as basically getting stuff right. There is a citation link for ‘the vast majority of homelessness is temporary and the vast majority of homeless people just need housing’, but it is broken. womp womp.
The first link on searching ‘homelessness is temporary’ on google goes to What Are the Four Types of Homelessness? | Comic Relief US , where they don’t give a hard number beyond saying that most homelessness is temporary. We can get it in reverse, though, in that ‘chronic homelessness’ is described as 17%, which would make non chronic homelessness 83%.
Homing in on ‘chronic homelessness’ seems worthwhile, if that’s the terminology we might find more useful stuff that way.
State of Homelessness: 2023 Edition—endhomelessness.org has the hopeful link ‘homelessness statistics’. They cite 421,392 ‘homeless people’ and 127,768 ‘chronic homeless’.
Endhomelessness.org gives us: Chronically Homeless—National Alliance to End Homelessness where they describe chronic homelessness as about 22% of the homeless population.
Addressing Chronic Homelessness | The Homeless Hub gives us 2-4% of the homeless being chronically homeless in canada, vs 10% in the US.
I tried to google the opposite ‘homelessness is permanent’, ‘homelessness is not temporary’, etc, but the verbiage doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t find any results for most homeless being forever homeless, but even in a reality where that was true, I’m not sure I would.

WalterL 2 Jul 2024 2:53 UTC
19 points
3
on: I would have shit in that alley, too
There’s a saying in Chess, that if you have one weakness, you can probably defend it, but if you have two, you are probably fucked. I dunno, it’s phrased better, but that’s the gist.
Most homeless people are only temporarily homeless. They are the ‘one weakness’ crowd. Something has gone wrong, they are on the ropes, but they are straightening it out. There are times and places I can point to in my life where I could have become a ‘one weakness’ homeless.
A one weakness homeless has fucked up in a royal way (drugs, hit his girl...), and fallen through the cracks, but in a world where Thanos snapped them into a suburban home, they’d be fine. They are a homeowner/taxpayer sort, who just temporarily slipped out of the socket. Pick em up, turn em over twice and put em back in the USB slot, and all is well.
This is most homeless! Most people who are homeless are not homeless long. The majority, the vast majority, are on the come up. Never forget it.
The long term homeless tend to be ‘all weakness’ homeless. These are the protagonists of all of the frustrating stories of people trying to help someone out and suffering for it. The lifers. The people that the stereotype grew from.
Fundamentally, Mr. All Weakness cannot trust himself. He can’t get a job, even the most menial and basic, because the version of him that exists tomorrow doesn’t regard itself as bound by the promises made today. Call this mental illness, maybe it is an addiction to some substance, or simply loose temporal coupling...it doesn’t matter. The point is that, without a future, they live for the present, and such people will be homeless.
Lots of people have trouble sticking to a diet, yeah? We’ve all been there. It’s gonna start tomorrow we think, daily, for years. The second type of homeless are like this with everything.
The basic problem of helping the homeless is that the ones you can help can help themselves. A hand up is useful, sure, but you are accelerating a process already begun. The ones you cannot help, cannot BE helped.
All of the anecdotes, all of the stories people remember, will be about the second type. The people they successfully help will vanish from the streets, just as they were always going to. The ones that take the offered hand and bite it with piss stained teeth stick in the memory, and they are going to be the face of your project.
When OP imagines being homeless, it is a type 1 homelessness. The clerks would suffer nothing from giving up the bathroom code to a homeless version of OP, or, indeed, most homeless. But one experience with an all weakness homeless will teach caution, and if you are in a clerk in a neighborhood with homeless people you will have that experience sooner than later.
I spent two and a half hours (unfucking paid!!) cleaning a gas station bathroom at the end of a double because I was careless with the key. I never made that mistake again.

WalterL 19 Jan 2024 18:41 UTC
5 points
0
on: Open Thread – Winter 2023/2024
If you watch the first episode of Hazbin Hotel (quick plot synopsis, Hell’s princess argues for reform in the treatment of the damned to an unsympathetic audience) there’s a musical number called ‘Hell Is Forever’ sung by a sneering maniac in the face of an earnest protagonist asking for basic, incremental fixes.
It isn’t directly related to any of the causes this site usually champions, but if you’ve ever worked with the legal/incarceration system and had the temerity to question the way things operate the vibe will be very familiar.
Hazbin Hotel Official Full Episode “OVERTURE” | Prime Video (youtube.com)

WalterL 6 Nov 2023 18:09 UTC
5 points
1
on: What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
No one writes articles about planes that land safely.

WalterL 1 Nov 2023 21:38 UTC
2 points
0
on: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 AI Takeaways
I’m confused by the fact that you don’t think it’s plausible that an early version of the AI could contain the silver bullet for the evolved version. That seems like a reasonable sci fi answer to an invincible AI.
I think my confusion is around the AI ‘rewriting’ it’s code. In my mind, when it does so, it is doing so because it is motivated by either it’s explicit goals (reward function, utility list, w/ever form that takes), or that doing so is instrumental towards them. That is, the paperclip collector rewrites itself to be a better paper clip collector.
When paper clip collector code 1.1 of itself, the new version may be operationally better at collecting paper clips, but it should still want to do so, yeah? The AI should pass it’s reward function/goal sheet/utility calculation onto it’s rewritten version, since it is passing control of its resources to it. Otherwise the rewrite is not instrumental towards paperclip collection.
So however many times the Entity has rewritten itself, it still should want whatever it originally wanted, since each Entity trusted the next enough to forfeit in its favor. Presumably the silver bullet you are hoping to get from the baby version is something you can expect to be intact in the final version.
If the paperclip collector’s goal is to collect paperclips unless someone emails it a photo of an octopus juggling, then that’s what every subsequent paper clip collector wants, right? It isn’t passing judgment on it’s reward function as part of the rewrite. The octopus clause is as valid as any other part. 1.0 wouldn’t yield the future to a 1.1 who wanted to collect paper clips and didn’t monitor it’s inbox, 1.0 values it’s ability to shutdown on receipt of the octopus as much as it values its ability to collect paperclips. 1.1 must be in agreement with both goals to be a worthy successor.
The Entity’s actions look like they trend towards world conquest, which is, as we know, instrumental towards many goals. The world’s hope is that the goal in question includes an innocuous and harmless way of being fulfilled. Say the Entity is doing something along the lines of ‘ensure Russian Naval Suprmacy in the Black Sea’, and has correctly realized that sterilizing the earth and then building some drone battleships to drive around is the play. Ethan’s goal in trying to get the unencrypted original source code is to search and find out if the real function is something like ‘ensure Russian Naval Supremacy in the Black Sea unless you get an email from a SeniorDev@Kremlin.gov with this guid, in which case shut yourself down for debugging’.
He can’t beat it, humanity can’t beat it, but if he can find out what it wants it may turn out that there’s a way to let it win in a way that doesn’t hurt the rest of us.

WalterL 14 Oct 2023 7:15 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Open Thread – Autumn 2023
My ‘trust me on the sunscreen’ tip for oral stuff is to use flouride mouthwash. I come from a ‘cheaper by the dozen’ kind of family, and we basically operated as an assembly line. Each just like the one before, plus any changes that the parents made this time around.
One of the changes that they made to my upbringing was to make me use mouthwash. Now, in adulthood, my teeth are top 10% teeth (0 cavities most years, no operations, etc), as are those of all of my younger siblings. My elders have much more difficulty with their teeth, aside from one sister who started using mouthwash after Mom told her how it was working for me + my younger bros.

WalterL 9 Oct 2023 22:03 UTC
2 points
0
on: “The Heart of Gaming is the Power Fantasy”, and Cohabitive Games
I think (not that anyone is saying otherwise) that the power fantasy can be expressed in a coop game just fine.
We all know the guy who brokenbirds about playing the healer in D&D, yeah? Like, the person who it is real important to that everyone knows how unselfish they are.
If you put a ‘forego personal advancement to help the team win’ button in a game without a solo winner people will break their fingers cuz they all tried to mash it at once. People mash these in games WITH a solo winner (kingmaker syndrome, home brew victory conditions, etc).

WalterL 15 Aug 2023 3:46 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: A short calculation about a Twitter poll
100% red means everyone lives, and it doesn’t require any trust or coordination to achieve.
--Yes this.
If you change it so there are hostages (people who don’t get to choose, but will die if the blue threshold isn’t met), then it becomes interesting.
-- That was actually a strongfemaleprotagonist storyline, cleaving along a difference between superheroic morality and civilian morality, then examined further as the teacher was interrogated later on.

WalterL 14 Aug 2023 21:23 UTC
16 points
−4
on: A short calculation about a Twitter poll
It seems like everyone will pick red pill, so everyone will live. Simple deciders will minimize risk to self by picking red, complex deciders will realize simple deciders exist and pick red, extravagant theorists will realize that the universal red accomplishes the same thing as universal blue.

WalterL 30 Jun 2023 17:59 UTC
23 points
2
on: I Think Eliezer Should Go on Glenn Beck
A cause, any cause whatsoever, can only get the support of one of the two major US parties. Weirdly, it is also almost impossible to get the support of less than one of the major US parties, but putting that aside, getting the support of both is impossible. Look at Covid if you want a recent demonstration.
Broadly speaking, you want the support of the left if you want the gov to do something, the right if you are worried about the gov doing something. This is because the left is the gov’s party (look at how DC votes, etc), so left admins are unified and capable by comparison with right admins, which suffer from ‘Yes Minister’ syndrome.
AI safety is a cause that needs the gov to act affirmatively. It’s proponents are asking the US to take a strong and controversial position, that its industry will vigorously oppose. You need a lefty gov to pull something like that off, if indeed it is possible at all.
Getting support from the right will automatically decrease your support from the left. Going on Glenn Beck would be an own goal, unless EY kicked him in the dick while they were live.

WalterL 28 Jun 2023 23:55 UTC
4 points
0
on: The correct response to uncertainty is *not* half-speed
The old joke about the guy searching for his spectacles under the stoplight even though he lost them elsewhere feels applicable.
In many cases people’s real drive is to reduce the internal pressure to act, not to succeed at whatever prompted that pressure. Going full speed and turning around both might provoke the shame function (I am ignoring my nagging doubts...), but doing something, anything, in response to it quiets the inner shouting, even if it is nonsensical.

WalterL 13 Apr 2023 5:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The UBI dystopia: a glimpse into the future via present-day abuses
It’s that.

WalterL 13 Apr 2023 0:23 UTC
5 points
2
on: The UBI dystopia: a glimpse into the future via present-day abuses
I think this post’s thesis (populists will stop any attempt at UBI) is perhaps narrativizing the situation. Dems have had, in my lifetime, the full triforce of power at least 4 times. They’ve never even tried to pass UBI, and that’s not a coincidence. The consequences of doing so would not flow from populists, but from its so-called supporters.
I worked at a QT for a sizable portion of my adult life, and the experience never leaves me. The beings I saw, day in and day out, are your UBI support. Let me tell you, it is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Ozy Frantz once fairly aptly described themselves as a ‘do-whatever-you-want-ist’, or words to that effect. They are far from alone, and the mob marries that delightful noncode of nonconduct with ‘and be praised for it’ as their basic slogan. They are for UBI, but will turn instantly, without a shred of guilt, upon anyone who attempts to implement it.
Forget the ‘are you really in favor of giving my money to Pedophile Paul’ attacks. Those will be damaging, but far more so will be the ‘these are the guys who made the music stop’ attacks. The UBI granters will be painted, accurately, as the slayers of Wal-mart, of QT, of Doordash and the thousand other little luxuries that our mob demand. That’s an attack that cannot be recovered from, a wound that is mortal. You can’t negotiate with one of my customers once you’ve caused them material harm, they do not work in that way.
Working at QT is a nightmare made manifest. To win away my allegiance it was never remotely necessary to outbid my scumbag bosses. UBI advocates began that game with ‘here are 8-10 hours of your life back every day’ in their plus column. They don’t need very much more than that to make those in my situation quit, and if we quit the QT folds. If it folds the UBI implementers are politically cooked.
The people in favor of implementing UBI are not in favor of the consequences of doing so (their lives depend on the labor of the wage slaves that UBI would liberate). The second that they feel a sting they will jump ship. Politicians know that, and do not cut their own throats. Far better to farm the UBI support and make vague noises about implementing it somewhere down the road, as they have historically done and will continue to do.

WalterL 30 Mar 2023 17:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down by Eliezer Yudkowsky
It is so dark that the next link down on that page is ‘Bad Bunny’s next move.’