Warty

Karma: 159

Warty 19 Apr 2026 21:10 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: J Thomas Moros’s comment on: What’s the LessWrongist philosophy of mathematics?
Does structuralism hold that the statement of the Continuum Hypothesis has a truth value? If no, how does it differentiate between my hash of BB mod 2 statement and CH?

Warty 19 Apr 2026 20:58 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: What’s the LessWrongist philosophy of mathematics?
It suffices for me if there is one philosophy of mathematics that exhibits Less Wrongist virtues 🙂
The Yud view seems not very complete from this. I’m saddened to see I can’t access the Q&A videos, but I found a transcript of #14 about infinite atheism here. Note that the most infinite thing in my example suspicious statement is quantification over natural numbers.

I like both your posts, thanks for summarizing these views. I think in combination it somewhat dissolved the philosophical mystery for me, but there is still some normal empirical mystery left. The Mac Lane stuff reminded me of something I read at Terence Tao’s, about how mathematicians use different intuitions like geometric, economic.

[Question] What’s the LessWrongist philosophy of mathematics?

Warty19 Apr 2026 12:04 UTC

7 points

9 comments2 min readLW link

Warty 17 Apr 2026 18:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: testingthewaters’s comment on: testingthewaters’s Shortform
Isn’t “this program is thinking about X” a kind of semantic property?
By the definition used in the theorem, no. Semantic means input/output.
Rice’s theorem has low applicability to real life. You rarely need to take a completely arbitrary program as input, and when you do, non-semantic properties (e.g. this program does something within the first 10^9999 years of running it) are more interesting to you than semantic ones.
“Turing-completeness” is something of a pop-sci notion with no one precise meaning. Neural networks as used in LLMs can’t loop forever, which makes Rice’s theorem not apply to them.

Warty 14 Apr 2026 3:41 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: Warty’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
Maybe the real anti-violence is to retrospectively support any violence from your side, because that would hurt the cause and thereby de-incentivize violence 🤔

Warty 14 Apr 2026 3:34 UTC
5 points
1
on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals (especially in states that otherwise have functioning police). The factions that throw away all their morals lose the sympathy of the public and politicians, and then they fail. Terrorism is not an instant ‘I win’ button that people only refrain from pressing because they’re so moral. Society has succeeded in making it usually not pay off—say the numbers.
What are the statistics? I’m not convinced. It seems the sympathy part is mostly solved by having a large official wing that disavows any violence.
Directly stopping all AI is not the only way terrorism could raise P(pause). It also raises awareness of the cause, and causes terror which can change behavior.

Warty 3 Apr 2026 22:09 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Warty’s Shortform
Yes, it’s mysterious. With a singleton AI, selection doesn’t apply. So we could only say like, in the long run the replication-only aliens occupy more space than the side project ones. (Naively, it would seem you could still at least “defend your territory” if you spend 1% on fun.)
Still, when I hear speculations of what unaligned ASI will be doing it doesn’t mesh. Replicator feels to me an obvious default, some simplicity intuition as they call it.
Like if we imagine the universe across time, feels clean if the right part of the graph is “dumb superintelligent replicator era”

Warty 3 Apr 2026 19:23 UTC
−1 points
−4
on: Warty’s Shortform
standard yudkowskian belief is that superintelligence will “fill the lightcone” with something (paperclips if bad, people if good). seems sus to me, I would expect the law to be that life just fills space with itself asap. e.g. animals don’t make paperclips, just make themselves

Warty 22 Feb 2026 15:03 UTC
5 points
3
on: If you don’t feel deeply confused about AGI risk, something’s wrong
It feels deeply uncomfortable to be participating in an elite AI x-risk fellowship and tell your peer, manager, or mentor: “idk why ASI poses an existential risk.”
With some nuances, if you don’t know why ASI poses x-risk, a better word choice might be “idk if ASI poses x-risk”.

That frame of mind might be good for successfully executing strategies 1 and 3.

Warty 22 Feb 2026 14:31 UTC
20 points
14
on: The Spectre haunting the “AI Safety” Community
Persuasion. Getting people to care about it.
I thought persuasion was when you convince someone of something. It’s often an additional step after informing them of what you think is true.
In my experience, Persuasion is literally the easiest step.
I’m not convinced. Yud’s book came out months ago and it seems many important people have read it. I would think if the persuasion rate (of the top people) was not very low, things would look much different now.

Let me raise an inconvenient world for you: there are two types of actions in politics, fake and real. For fake actions such as signing a vague statement, attention/information might suffice. For real actions such as passing a law that will prevent lots of money from being made, persuasion of the underlying worldview is necessary.

I happen to think we do live in this world 🙂

Warty 14 Feb 2026 0:32 UTC
6 points
5
on: Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information
People don’t express anger and hatred for no reason. When they do, it’s because they have reasons to think something is so bad that it deserves their anger and hatred.
That’s often false, people also express anger and hatred to:
- get attention
- make the target look bad and themselves look good
- activate lizard brain in the audience
There are in fact norms agains some (genuine or not) expressions of anger. The question of applying norms is another nontrivial question. Which is why Goofusia’s take is plausible (what she is exploiting if you will).

Warty 3 Feb 2026 20:36 UTC
1 point
0
on: Warty’s Shortform
Yudkowskian self help thought is weird such as the “firewall” (between beliefs and what would be good to believe)
But I think my mind doesn’t work with the firewall, for example if I slightly delulu myself that my efforts will work out I have energy and such, and idk how to get these benefits with the firewall.
I recall it was a big problem for me for a few weeks when I was reading hpmor

Warty 30 Jan 2026 7:01 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
propaganda (in its literal meaning, “public communication aimed at influencing an audience and furthering an agenda”)
Wiktionary at the link marks that usage as dated, I wouldn’t call it “its literal meaning”. I believe the closest current single word would be “advocacy”.

Warty 28 Jan 2026 3:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jchan’s comment on: Disagreement Comes From the Dark World
I see how it makes sense but it was super freaking hard for me to understand why “Cassandra/Mule”. These words mean so many things I guess

Warty 27 Jan 2026 17:37 UTC
6 points
1
on: Disagreement Comes From the Dark World
Real-world disagreements tend to persist; they’re predictable—in flagrant contradiction of how the beliefs of Bayesian reasoners would follow a random walk. From this we can infer that typical human disagreements aren’t “honest”, in the sense that at least one of the participants is behaving as if they have some other goal than getting to the truth.
Technically, it’s sufficient if one of the participants incorrectly believes this about the other. If I incorrectly believe you’re a bus arrival time scammer, we won’t converge despite both being honest.

Warty 20 Jan 2026 19:50 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
wait, neuron stuff is discrete?

Warty 19 Jan 2026 20:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Warty’s Shortform
I have a basic understanding of QC. So in my understanding ok sometimes two branches can cancel each other out, or go back to the same state. Still, I would think there is enough “butterfly effect” type stuff that many worlds get split up to never meet again. And for each of those there’s a really small complex number.

Warty 17 Jan 2026 10:57 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: FlorianH’s comment on: Warty’s Shortform
I don’t think this can be exactly right. I have googled some largest numbers in the universe (space and time) and they were < 10^100. Then I turned to computing 1/the magnitude of the amplitude of our branch. At that point I have some probability distribution of what that number is, and it can be surprising (aka seem fake) if it’s exponentially more than the previous numbers.
It seems quite clear to me that is a valid form of reasoning that has ever worked correctly. It may turn out to be wrong in this case, but my vibe tell is that something is up with the amplitude.
Some form of this reasoning could work for the cat in your example, e.g. comparing the width of a hair to the size of the house he’d get the order of the order of magnitude of earth (math not checked).
This might work better or worse depending on the version of Occam’s razor, which I have uncertainty over.

Warty 17 Jan 2026 0:55 UTC
2 points
−9
on: Warty’s Shortform
Many Worlds seems fake because doesn’t that imply the universe is tracking a complex number with magnitude in the order of 10^-10^100 for the branch that we live in? Since the worlds have to split up all the time.
all the other quantities (number of atoms in the universe, planck times since the big bang) are only a singly stacked exponential like 10^100
Also whats the precision of these amplitude numbers.

Warty 8 Jan 2026 19:31 UTC
10 points
4
in reply to: davekasten’s comment on: davekasten’s Shortform
Wasn’t translator supposed to be a normal stable job? Allegedly they were hit hard by google translate even pre-llm

Warty

[Question] What’s the LessWrongist philos­o­phy of math­e­mat­ics?

[Question] What’s the LessWrongist philosophy of mathematics?