XelaP

Karma: 146

XelaP 17 Dec 2025 11:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Why Yudkowsky is wrong about “covalently bonded equivalents of biology”
I think it definitely means that the bone breaks first if you load them under equal pressures, and less confidently that the diamond rod breaks first if you suddenly shock it. As an example elsewhere, you don’t want to make the cores of swords out of brittle materials due to them breaking, which is why cast iron sucks. You want a ductile core that is tough (so it can absorb the energy of impacts) and a hard-but-possibly-brittle exterior (so that you can cut and keep an edge).

Plausibly this means you don’t want structural materials to be made out of diamond even if you’d want your teeth to be, at least unless you needed to sustain high loads. It looks to me like (some, stuff like femurs) bone is optimized to be flexible.

XelaP 10 Dec 2025 13:09 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
10% of the year is not a sensible way to measure your error. If I ask “When did X happen?” and you answer 2000 CE when the real answer was 2020 CE, there’s a sense in which you are more wrong than if you answered 300 BCE while the real answer was 500 BCE. Even if you don’t think this, you probably don’t think that the sensible target should be narrower closer to 0 BCE.

Whereas you are in a meaningful way about as incorrect if you say 10 km when the real answer is 11 km as if you say 1 m when the real answer is 1.1 m

XelaP 10 Dec 2025 13:03 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: 2025 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
“How long have you had with the current biggest issue in your life?”

What does this mean? Is this “how long have I had the issue?” or “how long have I tried solving?”?

“How many X would you trade for a Y?” You should be more specific. Am I to imagine that you are generously offering me either n extra units of X or one extra unit of Y, and I need to figure out how big n needs to be for me to be indifferent? (This is how I assumed you meant it).

XelaP 9 Dec 2025 9:33 UTC
1 point
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on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
I think I know of the trick you are talking about, in that there does seem to be an obvious pseudoprediction place in my mind that interfaces with motor output, and it’s obviously different from actually believing, or trying to believe. However I mostly can’t manage more than twitches or smaller motor movements, and it gets harder the more resistant I am to doing it (thus, less useful the more I would need use of it). If I’m thinking of the right thing, then the failure of me to sometimes send the pseudoprediction to my muscles seems to be the cause of some various stuff I experience when I essentially can’t get myself to do certain things (e.g. get out of bed) (going by how people react to my more detailed descriptions this phenomena appears to be something very unusual about me).

It feels to me like the same sort of “prediction” as my Inner Sim that visualizes what happens when I throw a ball at the wall—it’s clearly distinct from what “I” believe.

I separately also have experienced the thing where I think the script says I ought to feel X and so I feel X, but that feels totally different to me. Possible exception: I recently (for completely unrelated reasons) had a panic attack (which are very rare for current me), and for a while after the big spike I would get close to having it again partially due to what might have been having that sort of pseudo expectation of the hyperventilating and then accidentally causing it to actually happen, which would then threaten to launch me back into the panic attack. This might secretly be how the script thing works, though it doesn’t feel like it to me.

XelaP 5 Dec 2025 2:20 UTC
1 point
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on: The “Adults in the Room”
This is where I disagree the most. I have not particularly noticed cognitive reflectivity decreasing my passions, though it’s possible that most of the reflection I do is either when I have caught myself in the grips of some feeling that will likely be bad (e.g. getting angry at someone over a triviality, or having a panic attack), or when I am already in a pretty neutral state. Thus to me it mostly feels like the only passions made more distant are the ones that I wanted distanced.

I try to be followed by my positive passions when they occur, with some triggers for when seriousness or distance is necessary.

You seem to also observe the thing Eliezer does here. What’s it like for you, when reflection makes you less happy?

XelaP 16 Nov 2025 3:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Heroic Responsibility
The way I think about it is it’s based on what I care about. I am in fact unwilling to do certain things to save the life of someone who is threatening suicide and blaming me, because I care more about myself, and I am fundamentally okay with caring about myself in that way. If, say, my best friend made some stupid mistake that put her at risk of great harm, I would be doing the heroic responsibility thing because I care a lot about the outcome.

It’s fine to care about yourself! The principle of “I am obligated not to harm you, but not obligated to help you” is a fine one. The point of heroic responsibility is to see what I could do in cases where I do want to go all out to achieve some outcome.

XelaP 14 Nov 2025 18:10 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: Understanding your understanding
You can know why the analogy holds without having enough detail to compute with it. Likewise you could have a picture that is truly part of you, but where not all of it is, so that you only get halfway there.

It is pretty easy to understand why the Doppler effect happens (at least, if you happen to be exactly my past self). You can easily have the ability to independently come up with the explanation without being able to derive the formula.

XelaP 14 Nov 2025 11:30 UTC
3 points
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on: Why Is Printing So Bad?
Printing with my printers sucks—but e.g. my university has a nice upload service where you upload documents to a website and scan a card at one of multiple printers and can print; and those have always worked like a charm for me. So why is printing sometimes… easy?

XelaP 14 Nov 2025 7:12 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals
He’s going for in the sexy way, not not in the sexy way (perhaps he had a typo when you read it).

XelaP 9 Nov 2025 9:14 UTC
6 points
1
on: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction
A well known example is the idea of using geostationary orbits for communication satellites popularized by Arthur C. Clarke (which he said was possibly subconsciously influenced by George O. Smith’s story in the first Venus Equilateral)

XelaP 7 Nov 2025 2:05 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point
Interesting. To me frosting feels almost physically painful to eat more than a small amount of, and I have no memories of any consequences from eating frosting (besides the immediate “ow”)

XelaP 6 Nov 2025 11:34 UTC
1 point
5
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point
It really does seem harder to mass produce! I don’t think it’s an easy to factory farm bears as cows, considering that you have to feed them meat, so you’ll at best get an ordinary/mild commercial success? So the upside to me seems like something within the realm of what is occasionally not already exploited.

An interesting comparison would be to see if other substitute animal fats taste as good?

Also I think rationalists might be selected for having weirder tastes?

XelaP 6 Nov 2025 11:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: I ate bear fat with honey and salt flakes, to prove a point
I haven’t gotten bad physical consequences from eating too much sugar, but also I wouldn’t know if I do because e.g. frosting is hard to stand for me in a visceral way, just due to the sweetness, and eating too much lesser-sweet stuff still wakes me “sweet tired”. But I don’t notice an impact on e.g. my digestion or my energy (besides that of, like, eating any meal).

From what you said, it sounded like there is an impact from eating too much sugar? What is it?

XelaP 3 Nov 2025 3:46 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: EJT’s comment on: Why Corrigibility is Hard and Important (i.e. “Whence the high MIRI confidence in alignment difficulty?”)
You don’t have to believe the coherence arguments. Perhaps the best approach is to build something that isn’t (at least, isn’t explicitly/directly) an expected utility maximizer. Then the challenge is to come up with a way to build a thing that does stuff you want without even having that bit of foundation. This seems likely harder than the world where the best approach is a clever trick that fixes it for expected utility maximizers.

XelaP 1 Nov 2025 6:29 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: David Lorell’s comment on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
My use of “beg the question”, as opposed to the official way, is the objectively superior use, and I will die on this hill:
1. Like, come on, it’s the natural English interpretation of what that phrase is supposed to mean. I am (usually metaphorically) begging you to ask the question.
2. Cat’s already out the bag on this one. Give in to the dark side. We have cookies.
3. There’s already a good term for the other meaning: “assume the conclusion”. This tells you pretty clearly what it means. You don’t have to think to figure it out. A child can understand what it means.
4. I actually doubt people frequently assume the conclusion without realizing it? But possibly this is me being weird and not doing it a lot. Even in math, I feel like it’s blatantly obvious when you do so, so that the closest you get is having you math-proof-babbler only be able to come up with things that assume the conclusion, which then get recognized as obviously not working for that reason.

XelaP 1 Nov 2025 6:11 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Dmitry Vaintrob’s comment on: Don’t Get Distracted by the Boilerplate
Another case I would say: Sometimes, the boilerplate is essential but is “trivial”. What I mean by this is that the fundamental idea of the thing isn’t really about the boilerplate, and that some surrounding context means that you should of course have this sort of boilerplate.

For example, basically every function mentioned in a topology book is going to be continuous. If I say “If we have a continuous map [bla bla] then it’s shiny and purple”, and you focus a bunch on “continuous”, then you are either putting your attention in the wrong place, or need to go back and learn some prerequisite material better.

XelaP 10 Aug 2025 4:11 UTC
8 points
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on: A Self-Dialogue on The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
Well, since you quite literally begged the question: what are you sexual kinks?

XelaP 10 Aug 2025 0:41 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: TsviBT’s Shortform
I am quite surprised that this happened 3 years ago! This seems really impressive for 3 years ago GPT series? And I expect the models to get better? Yes, it might be a fluke, but wouldn’t we expect current models to have a higher chance of doing a fluke this good?

XelaP 4 Aug 2025 1:48 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: kilobug’s comment on: An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction
Though others have made the point essentially, I feel like (a) simple answer bears a simple explanation: Just imagine your hypothesis-turing-machines output (approximate) probabilistic predictions. For example, imagine you output probabilities that are fractions, over a finite portion of the input space, so that you don’t have to worry about that messy infinite continuous stuff.

Note—not sure if the exact form has the same nice properties. However the approximate form should be workable I think.

XelaP 21 Jul 2025 16:16 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Socially Graceful Degradation
But the clockwise rule only tells you anything when more than two people are there at the same time. Because A < B < A in clockwise order.