Yair Halberstadt

Karma: 3,887

Yair Halberstadt 29 Apr 2026 17:40 UTC
4 points
3
on: Yair Halberstadt’s Shortform
(on the blue-red discourse)

We’ve finally created the scissor statement from the classic blog post, don’t create the scissor statement!

Yair Halberstadt 28 Apr 2026 18:42 UTC
22 points
1
on: Yair Halberstadt’s Shortform
People sometimes say things like “I bribed my child to have an injection with a packet of crisps”.

This is interesting because this clearly isn’t a bribe—it’s a straightforward deal: I got to vaccinate my child, you got a packet of crisps, we’re both better off.

A bribe is only possible when someone is representing someone else’s interests. Then you cut a deal where they abuse their responsibility in return for some personal benefit to them.

So why do people use the term? My guess it’s because it feels dirty since crisps aren’t healthy, and bribery has been extended to mean any deal that feels immoral?

Or maybe it’s because they feel they shouldn’t have to give the child anything for them to have an injection, since the injection is for the childs sake, and a bribe is frequently an extortion you shouldn’t have to pay.

Yair Halberstadt 28 Apr 2026 18:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: James Camacho’s comment on: In defense of parents
There definitely will… eventually. What bad things happen in between when we have 1 billion people too old to support themselves and 300 million working age people? When food prices go through the roof because there’s not farmers to produce food for everyone? When supply lines collapse because the modern economy is built on a certain density of population and minimum demand that no longer exists.

Yair Halberstadt 28 Apr 2026 17:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: James Camacho’s comment on: In defense of parents
I don’t think that would occur until we got to apocalypse levels of depopulation where a modern economy simply dissolves due to lack of workers. My assumption (given I and my wife are both highly intelligent, well off, are non-violent, don’t suffer from any significant physical or mental health issues, and are generally reasonable people) is that we are in the top say 10% of parents in terms of child welfare. If we don’t make the cut, and TFR is already about 1.5 without this rule, then in one generation world population would be 90% less, and if the desired traits aren’t maximally heritable, another generation would see it drop to 95-99%.

Yair Halberstadt 28 Apr 2026 6:23 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: In defense of parents
Agreed, I think I should have clarified that I’m only talking about younger kids, and I expect this to change as they grow older.

Yair Halberstadt 28 Apr 2026 3:28 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: In defense of parents
We’re taking about different ages here. Toddlers Vs 8 year olds.

Yair Halberstadt 27 Apr 2026 19:16 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: In defense of parents
I think that hugely depends on temperemant of the child. I was constantly getting into fights til labout the age of 11. Not in a bad way, they were mostly good fun, but yeah lots of fighting.

Yair Halberstadt 23 Apr 2026 8:27 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: 152334H’s comment on: Automated Deanonymization is Here
I was able to reproduce it myself with a simple “Guess who wrote this” on AI studio with a different snippet of Jeff’s work, so I’ll count myself persuaded.

It couldn’t identify me, even given a full unpublished draft, internet access, and the hint that I was a LessWrong author who’s not particularly famous on LessWrong. So I think that this is for now only a threat to internet-semi-famous people.

Yair Halberstadt 22 Apr 2026 15:30 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: 152334H’s comment on: Automated Deanonymization is Here
Note that by mentioning the people mentioned in that paragraph it already points it in the direction of less wrong/rationalist adjacent authors which makes it much easier.

Yair Halberstadt 22 Apr 2026 3:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Automated Deanonymization is Here
I recommend using aistudio to test Gemini whilst controlling exactly what it sees and what tools it can use (it exactly mimics the API)

Yair Halberstadt 22 Apr 2026 3:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: 152334H’s comment on: Automated Deanonymization is Here
Was search enabled on open router? Because now it can just find it via this blog post.

Yair Halberstadt 30 Mar 2026 6:20 UTC
6 points
−1
in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: Label By Usable Volume
That could be argued about every single thing in law, yet law continues to work.

Yair Halberstadt 26 Mar 2026 6:44 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Czynski’s comment on: Label By Usable Volume
It seems perfectly simple to measure, and they just need to contain at least that much, so companies would overshoot by a bit to make sure.

If a company claims it contains a litre, and a customer sues, all the company has to do is bring one to court. And have a representative get a litre out in a way that seems reasonable to the judge.

Yair Halberstadt 5 Mar 2026 4:55 UTC
6 points
0
on: How a Pinky Promise once stopped a war in the Middle East.
Small correction: Jordan was not involved in the 1973 war.

Yair Halberstadt 21 Feb 2026 18:08 UTC
2 points
0
on: AGI is Here
I think perhaps a more useful, less subjective definition of AGI is something along the line of:

Can perform most jobs that are:
- fully remote
- any average human can be trained to do
- can communicate by email or text, doesn’t require voice/video calls
Because if it really was generally intelligent why can’t it do that job?

Yair Halberstadt 20 Feb 2026 14:22 UTC
40 points
26
on: How To Escape Super Mario Bros
Overall I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but it’s not convincing.

The biggest problems are in this section:

The first is the machine itself. It is a computational device with audiovisual output. That implies its creators have sensory apparatus that processes both. They see. They hear.

Atmosphere dense enough for pressure wave propagation. Bilateral body plans with clustered sensory organs.

The machine has no idea that light or sounds exist. All it knows is that there’s two forms of output—both of which are interpretable to it. The evidence points equally strongly to creators running in Conway’s game of life as it does to ones in our universe.

Yair Halberstadt 5 Feb 2026 6:17 UTC
3 points
1
on: p-values are good actually
You give as an example a situation which is inherently not repeatable, where were forced to make do with reasoning under significant uncertainty and with very limited information, to decide what’s going on out of an incredibly wide hypothesis space. You correctly point out this is hard.

You then say that in a situation where we can perform repeated experiments to exclude one hypothesis P-values work ok.

But in that exact situation Bayesian reasoning works fine. Sure you might not agree on which alternative hypothesis is true but so long as both of you agree there are any alternative hypothesese that make it more likely to see the given results, after a few rounds you’ll have extremely low credence in the original hypothesis.

Yair Halberstadt 1 Feb 2026 18:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: On ‘Inventing Temperature’ and the realness of properties
What does it mean to raise the temperature by a fixed amount before we’ve defined temperature?

Yair Halberstadt 1 Feb 2026 17:40 UTC
3 points
0
on: On ‘Inventing Temperature’ and the realness of properties
Without having read the book, or knowing the history of temperature, an obvious property I’d want my scale of temperature to have is that the temperature of a mixture of identical substances at different temperatures is the weighted average of the constituent parts.

Then you can easily recreate the celcius scale. Let the temperature of freezing water be 0, and the temperature of boiling water be 100.

Mix 99 parts freezing water with one part boiling water, and mix well (and quickly, in an insulated environment). That’s 1 degree celcius.

Repeat for the other 98 combinations.

If we’re lucky the mercury in our thermometer moves up a constant amount each time, and we can avoid mixing things to calibrate our thermometer in the future. If we’re unlucky it doesn’t and we need to painstakingly calibrate all thermometers. If we’re really unlucky a scale that works on one substance doesn’t work on another and then we need to rethink this whole temperature thing again.

Yair Halberstadt 1 Feb 2026 17:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: What would it mean for the Myers-Briggs personality test to be pseudoscientific?

Is this standard for the MBTI?

The test we used did, I have very little further knowledge of the MBTI other than what was discussed on this course.