XelaP

Karma: 975

Came for the Harry Potter fanfic, a positive vision of what do with atheism, and the anti-death ethos. Stayed for the good thinking.

I really like math and physics. I can program but am not a programmer—I’d have to learn how to make a website and struggle to handle more than a couple hundred LOC. Learning a little Haskell made me enjoy coding again, I’d like to get better at it.

I’m currently very bad at following through on commitments. I hope to fix this by tomorrow. I’ll probably fail, but I shoot for getting it down before my fifty thousandth tomorrow.

XelaP 27 Jun 2026 11:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: Age experience
Seeing some 40 year olds online speak like 20-30 year olds (only finding out their age after forming my impressions of them) broke an illusion I had about what 40 year olds are like. Now, I expect to feel relatively more like my current self.
As another example, a 45 year old I’ve known for my whole life recently told me they took a stupid amount of weed due to a silly implicit belief about the bioavailability of the delivery method. My response: “Color me shocked, you’re pretending to be a teenager!”
Clearly my impression of old people has been filtered by the image they wish to present more than my impression of the young and by media portrayals—probably due to a lack of older friends.

XelaP 27 Jun 2026 11:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: icely’s comment on: Age experience
I think the usual cultural zeitgeist is that children have less empathy than adults? (though I personally have observed my empathy going down since childhood, even if my actual niceness and propensity to consider others went up—that is, I hurt people less out of carelessness while also caring less about doing so).

XelaP 27 Jun 2026 10:08 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Patrick Reichherzer’s comment on: Trees are mostly made of air and a generalizable lesson for AI safety
I think the cross-domain thing is confounded by basically all science pre modern era being done by polymaths. As an example I do not think you can validly reason that searching for bible codes are important for inventing calculus, aside from a general high-variance attitude to work.

XelaP 27 Jun 2026 10:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Bruce Middleton’s comment on: Trees are mostly made of air and a generalizable lesson for AI safety
I believe the tree experiment was proposed by Francis Bacon, though I don’t recall if he was before Helmont. It seems to have been one of the first experiments of the renaissance, coupled with an ideology that focused on experimentation.

XelaP 27 Jun 2026 3:14 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Decaeneus’s comment on: Decaeneus’s Shortform
The most impressive case of elegance guiding a physicist to truth is Einstein. I don’t know the history of his thought in detail, but my understanding is that it was most of what he used to figure out special and general relativity. Typically when physicists wax poetic about elegance, they are usually talking about milking symmetries for as much info as you can.

Feynmann once said (possibly in Surely You’re Joking?) that this trick, like others before it, is now something everybody tries—so you shouldn’t expect to find an untouched $100 bill there. Accordingly, my understanding is indeed that physicists being guided by mathematical elegance (especially in regards to symmetries/conservation laws) was really kicked off by Einstein. It plausibly even influenced Noether’s theorem (relating symmetries to conservation laws, one of the most beloved theorems in physics), given how (iirc) she was working with him.

One possible (highly speculative!) reason why elegant symmetries seem to be what the universe runs on is that a symmetry implies that there are more programs (or whatever form the hypotheses should actually come in) of similar complexity that give the same predictions (imagine how easy it is to make a raytracer use a different point as the origin), and so gets more probability under the simplicity prior. You have to assign more complicated stuff lower probability in the limit just to have probabilities that add to at most 1, so this conclusion doesn’t seem sensitive to the precise details (I say this because I find it likely that the ‘grown up’ way to do simplicity priors will look a bit different from the current way, and so don’t want to rely on anything that only holds given specific details like using Turing machines instead of some other computational model).

XelaP 24 Jun 2026 1:07 UTC
2 points
0
on: Would anybody here be interested in a “mistake postmortem” discussion group?
I’m interested—what format do you plan on doing?
My biggest mistakes:
1. Not dropping out of highschool earlier.
2. Not realizing the general principle that I can just… leave, if I don’t like being somewhere. It’s a free country!
3. Generally, ask for what I want more, and care less about the consequences.
4. Dismissing animal rights after a couple minutes of thinking about it for the first time at 14.
5. I should’ve treated loneliness more like an urgent disease in need of immediate correction, instead of letting it fester for years.
6. I underestimated the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs, and should’ve got them earlier.
7. I should’ve done more drug swapping. when previous ones weren’t working well enough or had some other problem. In addition, look for different mechanisms of action.
8. Missed opportunities: It seems like I got locked in to the single genre of fantasy books an a kid, and I’d guess it’s because I happened to read a few I enjoyed. and then exclusively sought them out when getting books. I don’t regret reading fantasy, but wish someone gave me sci-fi books too.
9. Similarly, I wish I knew earlier that I could just read textbooks. I had never heard of someone just reading a textbook before, but once I tried it it was amazing.
10. I wish I kept a diary or something as a kid, and as a teen. As a teen I had at least heard the advice to write down stuff for my future self, but never really got around to it. The closest I have is old chat logs—perhaps I should tried just sending messages to myself?
11. Apparently my attraction towards people isn’t as simple as I thought it was. I still struggle here but I definitely fucked up a couple times due to thinking it was really simple.
Recent (lower stakes) mistakes:
1. I neglected to buy bug bite itch cream, and was unpleasantly itchy last night because of it.
2. I didn’t bring some bug spray I own to where I currently am, as it has no guard on the spray button and I reasoned that I’d be fine without it. It turns out that bugs bite more in the summer, and that while most of the brand’s products have similarly stupid designs they do sell a repellant stick with cap.
3. I should’ve replaced my sweatpants with jean shorts/pants a year or two earlier than I actually did. Similarly, ripped denim is awesome and I shouldn’t have cached my confusion at it as a kid—though admittedly I think it’s more fun to wear than to look at someone else wearing, in a way that’s higher than for other clothing.

XelaP 23 Jun 2026 13:45 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: Etha’s comment on: Etha’s Shortform
I don’t have the cites at hand, but when this became the semipolitical topic du jour it was established that the amount of lead was still small compared to what an average European eats from normal food, and it’s just that California has a really strict criteria for dangerous lead levels with a quite high safety factor.
Edit: Here’s some articles:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thebsdetector/p/huel-is-fine
huel lead content: https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/
One serving of Huel’s Black Edition powder contained 6.3 micrograms of lead
EU average lead:
In average adult consumers, lead dietary exposure ranges from 0.36 to 1.24, up to 2.43 µg/kg body weight per day in high consumers in Europe
For a 55 kg (120 lb) person this would be 19.8-68.2 mcg/dy for average adults and 133.7 mcg/dy for high consumers.
Thus, it seems like consuming five servings of huel black per day (which would be pretty extreme!) results in a dietary lead exposure that is average for a 120 lb person in the EU (in 2010).
So how come consumer reports says it’s 150x their level of concern? It’s because they get their levels from California’s Prop 65, which takes the level at which there’s demonstrated risk and then divides by 1000.

XelaP 17 Jun 2026 20:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Mateusz Bagiński’s Shortform
The way I imagine the days is tied directly to the calendar: there’s Sunday Monday … Saturday in a row, then the next row starts at Sunday again. If I think about what day it is, I will tend to start at the location nearest day I remember well, situated in a row that’s in the “middle”. Then I’ll seek forward/backward until I get to the current date. Likewise if you ask me what day is 4 days from now, the thing I automatically do is seek forwards until I’ve moved 4 spaces.
What’s time within a day like for you? I think of that just via the numbers, and was surprised the first time I heard someone tell me that obviously analog clocks were easier because you add the angles on a circle in your head. (This is probably a generational thing: I grew up with digital clocks, and had to be taught in school how to read an analog clock like an extra skill, and would only have a reason to need that skill if I was in class and wanted to surreptitiously check how long it’d be until it was over).

XelaP 15 Jun 2026 21:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I find the miscalibrated intuition that fun things won’t be fun the second most insidious part that cluster of feelings, as it impairs my ability to recover. (The most insidious part is how it becomes harder to notice that my mental state is unusual).
Another factor is that I’ll also find that fun things will take longer to start being fun. So I’ll start doing something that’s usually fun, notice how I’m still not feeling anything, and then feel less motivated to keep at it until it feels fun again.
A mitigating factor is that I usually feel apathetic when this happens, and so I can just keep going through the motions without being made sadder. This is easiest when no active effort is required on my part, which is why I find listening to music usually effective.
The hardest part, then, is getting over the hump of starting (as with everything else in my life). Music only requires me to put in the earbuds from my pocket and play from a playlist on my phone, which makes it really low effort.

XelaP 15 Jun 2026 21:14 UTC
2 points
0
on: Game Recognizes Game
An example of a conspirator failing to escalate edginess properly, and a ‘secret police’ misdirecting the cause of his reaction to hide his disapproval: https://hpmor.com/chapter/7
It was at this point that Harry came to the sudden realisation that (a) the sounds coming from the rest of the train platform had turned into more of a blurred white noise at around the same time Draco had reached inside his robes, and (b) when he had discussed committing murder as a bonding method, there had been exactly one person in the conversation who’d thought they were joking.
...
“Yes, well,” Harry coughed, oh god how was he going to get out of this conversational wedge, “I was just surprised at how you were willing to discuss it so openly, you didn’t seem worried about getting caught or anything.”

XelaP 14 Jun 2026 19:32 UTC
1 point
0
on: A Sketch of Good Communication
I had similar thoughts in the context of Aumann’s agreement theorem.
Aumann’s agreement theorem is like mining as much information as you can out of only the final probability estimates (and common knowledge of being honest and prefert Bayesians). Given such sparse info, all you can do is meta-update on how your partner disagrees with you, then meta-meta update on how they still disagree after meta-updating, etc.
Whereas in real conversations, people at best do one or two steps, and instead spend the time talking about their evidence and their reasoning (in your frame, their models). I think this is because:
1. You share a lot more new info.
2. You can think via conversation, and thus learn about your model and their model, spot flaws in the two, etc.
3. Humans aren’t ideal agents (duh), and so you have to model the ways in which you think your partner reasons wrongly.
4. Humans aren’t good at those meta-meta-meta updates. This is because you’d have to model what someone else thinks about what you think that they think to go beyond two steps. I have occasionally thought “ah, they haven’t updated after I said X/they’ve already heard about X, and in this case that would imply they are probably right”, but never further than that.

XelaP 10 Jun 2026 20:40 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: jelly’s comment on: Jemist’s Shortform
Huh, I guess that was more worth my time writing than I thought! Hope someone finds it useful.

XelaP 10 Jun 2026 5:42 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
Cannibalism: Kevin Simler has a book review of Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania that theorizes that predators eating dead humans was seen as uniquely bad due to how it could ‘teach’ them that humans (or the ‘superorganism’ of the tribe dancing and loudly chanting in sync while banging their weapons (rocks)) loudly are not so hard to kill after all.
An enemy eating the dead is then a desecration of their person or of your tribe, so the dead must be retrieved from combat and the corpse disposed of properly (possibly by cannibalism, but only by the ingroup). Sky burials feature scavenging eating the corpse, but not lions.
The ancient practice of mutulating or desecrating the dead, and especially eating them, is a way to show utter dominance, that taps in to fundamental human instincts.

(I am skeptical of this theory, mostly because of it having multiple steps without solid backing. I most buy the part about music as aposematism and coordination enhancer; but am more skeptical of the corpse destroying parts).

XelaP 9 Jun 2026 0:20 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Screwtape’s Shortform
Alternatively you can think of the possessive as really being a “property of” indicator. The country with the property of having me in it; the person with the property of being married to me; the hat with the property of being owned by me. You can then have a special case for ownership in particular.

XelaP 8 Jun 2026 23:52 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Examples of Examples
I’m a curious person who finds pure math interesting, but I still care a lot about application. You can definitely estimate the usefulness of math, in a way like how people estimate the importance of pure math.
However, my understanding is that basically none of the famous conjectures are important because the statement itself is useful. Rather, we expect that if we can answer the question we should also have a better developed theory that will then have various applications (or on the pure end, let us understand various things).
There’s a whole bunch of unknown containments in complexity theory, and (reportedly) the theory currently just doesn’t seem to have good approaches to tackle the problems. This suggests that if we can resolve whether P=NP, we should also have some much better tools that can resolve a whole lot more and allow us to build up more theory.
I put like 80% on P ≠ NP since the experts think it’s likely true. Extra weight is given to people like Scott Aaronson, who also believe similarly I think. This is how I deal with fields I don’t know enough to have my own opinions on.
Empirical mathematics is fine, but once you get to famous outstanding conjectures the track record isn’t so good. For most random statements I cook up, empirics will vastly narrow down the possibilities and agree with proofs. But there are famous examples of this failing for famous conjectures in number theory, which a priori seems more amenable to empirics than computational complexity or, say, algebraic geometry. This suggests that once you’ve weeded out the easy stuff, empirics are less useful for what’s left.
But what’s the empirical (as in, similar to checking a number theory conjecture on all the integers up to however much you can compute) evidence for P ≠ NP, besides humans not finding the necessary algorithms? It’s not like someone has an algorithm that seems to have asymptotics of O(f(n)) and where proving it does would resolve the conjecture (Levin’s universal search doesn’t count on account of being too ridiculously slow to get empirical evidence about).

XelaP 8 Jun 2026 19:58 UTC
14 points
2
in reply to: Niki Dupuis’s comment on: NicholasKees’s Shortform
Admittedly, this was at a time where it was more plausible. Many scientists believed in ESP type stuff, and you saw recent miracles wielding the power of electromagnetism.
The question I have: when could people have first gotten estimates of the fields produced by the brain to within a few OOMs? e.g. when were the first roughly accurate measurements of the amperage of an action potential? It seems like it’d be roughly before Turing’s time, but I’m not sure when the actual number was produced.
As an example of plausibility: if you use machines you can have brain to brain stimulation, via magnetoencephalography and TMS.

XelaP 8 Jun 2026 14:06 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: My Weirdest Experience
This is personal variation—my dreams regularly include texting and web browsing.
For all I know, my hippocampus encodes digital ‘locations’.

XelaP 8 Jun 2026 8:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Shut Up and Divide?
I think I happen to also have a second-order want to not want to help strangers. I don’t act on it (beyond wanting to roughly keep my meta selfishness-altruism allocation the same, or otherwise not want to increase my altruism too much), and have already made my decision basically final; but I’ve definitely considered it before.
There are also some actively sadistic desires paired with second order desires, though those are about the experience I feel instead of a terminal desire for harming others or for reallocating resources towards selfish gain. These I have never seriously entertained acting upon.
I sometimes fantasize that I’ll live to see humanity get the good ending and get to revel in simulated torture of non-sentient simulacra (or actors that feel no pain and take no real damage but are expertly pretending to).

XelaP 8 Jun 2026 8:48 UTC
1 point
0
on: Shut Up and Divide?
These do not seem contradictory. One can divide at the low end, and multiply at the high end. I don’t think I’ve multiplied as much as Eliezer, but I may have divided as much as you—though I suspect other unknown factors make me generally less empathetic, and so unaffected by random murders or school shootings or individual car crashes far from myself. A large enough harm, if novel, will lead me to double-take and feel real horror.

XelaP 8 Jun 2026 8:32 UTC
6 points
3
on: How do people stop spiraling about Roko’s Basilisk & acausal extortion?
I never really spiralled, but the counterarguments came readily to me. Hopefully, you can be reasoned away from a position that you’ve been reasoned to. If you deeply understand why it’s silly, then you are less likely to spiral! After all, you had to think through a convoluted argument to even know what to spiral about in the first place!
Here’s the version my grown-up self comes up with:
The most fatal flaw: Don’t negotiate with terrorists! Come on, man, how did you end up getting this far into acausal decision theory without realizing that it recommends that you don’t succumb to threats made only because the counterparty believes you’ll react? A basilisk would straightforwardly be making the sort of threat that decision theory seems to say you should ignore, for the same reason you should ignore a smart enough predictor that takes hostages to ransom you with or a dictator that threatens to nuke the world unless he’s given an ivory castle.
Now, the second most fatal flaw: you cannot actually predict what superintelligent AIs will do in enough detail to do acausal stuff with them. Two humans can barely do this with each other, let alone with aliens that’re waaaaaay smarter and possibly literally using algorithmically near perfect simulations to predict you. You certainly aren’t going to get almost anywhere by thinking about what the distribution of AIs will acausally agree upon amongst themselves. They are, again, superintelligent aliens! First, why don’t you predict what promises (if any) I’ve made with my past romantic partners. And note that I leak way more info about myself than merely the fact that I am a human, which is the closest level of info analogous to what you know about a generic superintelligent alien mind.

As a similar example that may illustrate the absurdity of a specific prediction: I have no hope of figuring out what sorts of universal turing machines make our universe have a lot of weight in the simplicity prior and then reasoning about what sorts of universes and what sorts of minds would be using the simplicity prior, and then trying to manipulate it via the most likely output channels to gain power in the real universe. I’m certainly not going around sorting rocks into shapes resembling the konami code in the hope that a mind considering our world as a hypothesis reads the shape of the rocks and reads the konami code as a prediction that not building me in the real world will lead to horrible outcomes. How would I know what good manipulation strategies would be, given all that computational difficulty?
This example is, if anything, easier to reason about than acausal decision theory with superintelligences—at least we have math formalizing AIXI! The reason I bring it up is that the (relative—in absolute terms it’s abstract as hell) concreteness provided by our mathematical understanding makes it clear how impossible of a task this is for a human. As in, literally impossible—if you manage it without going full transhuman or offloading it to something at least that powerful, I will literally eat a hat.