Ysamuels

Karma: 16

Ysamuels 16 Jul 2026 16:00 UTC
1 point
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on: Quote request: “if even the Sun requires proof”
Why do I believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow?
Because I’ve seen the Sun rise on thousands of previous days.
Ah… but why do I believe the future will be like the past?
Even if I go past the mere surface observation of the Sun rising, to the apparently universal and exceptionless laws of gravitation and nuclear physics, then I am still left with the question: “Why do I believe this will also be true tomorrow?”
Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, Eliezer Yudkowsky
The Problem of Induction, first published by David Hume in 1739, is potentially a longstanding crack in the foundations of science. From LessWrong’s tag:Induction page:
Modern views of induction state that any form of reasoning where the conclusion isn’t necessarily entailed in the premises is a form of inductive reasoning [...] “The sun has always risen, so it will also rise tomorrow”. [...] Contrary to deduction, induction can be wrong since the conclusions depend on the way the world actually is, not merely on the logical structure of the argument.
There has historically been a problem with the justification of the validity of induction. Hume argued that the justification for induction could either be a deduction or an induction. Since deductive reasoning only results in necessary conclusions and inductions can fail, the justification for inductive reasoning could not be deductive. But any inductive justification would be circular.
Dissolving the Problem of Induction, Liron
One of these maybe?

Ysamuels 18 May 2026 18:54 UTC
1 point
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on: On Overconfidence
Also – one good heuristic is to look at what experts in a field think. According to Muller and Bostrom (2014), a sample of the top 100 most-cited authors in AI ascribed a > 70% probability to AI within a century, a 50% chance of superintelligence conditional on human-level, and a 10% chance of existential catastrophe conditional on human level AI.
Well, there’s some pretty heavy selection bias for all the “mean” probabilities in the linked study that cause it to skew from the commentator’s assigned probablility of one in a million, namely that AI researchers are intelligent enough not to assign “one in a million” probabilties to things. If they weren’t that would seriously affect the average and make it significantly closer to his. Might want to take that into account.

Ysamuels 18 May 2026 18:33 UTC
1 point
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on: On Overconfidence
Consider how Nobel-Prize winning atomic scientist Ernest Rutherford dismissed the possibility of nuclear power as “the merest moonshine” less than a day before Szilard figured out how to produce such power. In 1901, Wilbur Wright told his brother Orville that “man would not fly for fifty years” – two years later, they flew, leading Wilbur to say that “ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions”. Astronomer Joseph de Lalande told the French Academy that “it is impossible” to build a hot air balloon and “only a fool would expect such a thing to be realized”; the Montgolfier brothers flew less than a year later.
(11 years later...) These sort of examples prove nothing if you don’t take into account the size of the group from which you are selecting, as you yourself have pointed out. I think this is a bad argument for a good conclusion. Thanks for the great posts!

Ysamuels 18 May 2026 18:00 UTC
1 point
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on: Haifa, Israel—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
anyone know anything about this guy? his only posts have been these meetups right?

Ysamuels 15 May 2026 12:57 UTC
2 points
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on: ysamuels’s Shortform
Seems to me the world can either (A) exist in a form “better” or preferable, whatever that means, to this one—in which case we should: try to figure out what the characteristics of that preferable world are, what the best framework for arriving there is, and work towards it - or (B) it doesn’t, there is no preferable state—in which case it can literally never matter what we do. It also seems to me that the “preferable state” must be objectively better in order for what we do to matter. So, based on the above, we should act on the assumption that the world can exist in a state objectively preferable to its current one.
Some problems I can imagine being brought up are:
- What if it is logically impossible for there to be such thing as a “preferable” world? -
Well… Good question, but nothing is really impossible, only very highly improbable—even if it seems logically impossible, I may well have made a mistake in my calculations, right? I can’t imagine being Pascal mugged even matters here—if there is no preferable state of existance it really doesn’t matter if I “lose my wallet” or waste my life on something that doesn’t exist.
- How would you prove that you should desire the “preferable” world or work towards it even if it exists?
...Ok, good question. Maybe we should “mug ourselves” with that too??
- Even if the world doesn’t exist as objectively better than it currently is, you still prefer certain states of existance. You should work toward them even if they aren’t objectively any better.
Never understood this. Why should I if reality is no better in that state than in any other?
I’m pretty new here, so could someone point me to good discussions of meta ethics of this sort here or elsewhere, offer a different framework for thinking about this than my dichotomy, or explain my mistakes above?

Ysamuels 14 May 2026 17:35 UTC
1 point
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on: The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
This seems like it could have been so controversial for being what, looking back, may have been a good idea but would have been a bad/low-likelyhood-of-success treatment in most similiar situations, since it does not seem probable that appealing to the OCD would be a good long-term idea in most other situations. Similiarly, in the “two consenting siblings have incestous sex with contraceptive measures and suffer no adverse psychological affects was what they did immoral” thought experiment I think maybe many people are confused by the fact that while we know post-fact there were no adverse psychological affects it would have actually seemed probable before the act that there would be to some degree (assuming these siblings are like most people, for whom I think this enterprise would be a bad decision).
(Don’t know if you still read comments but) Thanks so much for your posts, they’re always very enlightening and extremely fun to read!

Ysamuels 5 May 2026 10:29 UTC
1 point
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on: ysamuels’s Shortform
(Not on AI! basic morality)
1. There is a difference between how objectively bad an event is (how far it is from what would have happened in a perfect world) and how bad the person that did it is (how completely they failed to try to do the right thing). Just as someone can kill someone entirely by accident, even when people do things intentionally, there is a dissonance between how bad you have to be to do it and how bad the action’s consequences are.
2. People are usually less bad than the bad things they do. The consequences of a terrorist’s actions are unspeakably, infinitely evil, causing incredible pain, but the people don’t actually need to be as bad as the things they do in order for them to do them. I personally know kids who are quite nice to me, but wouldn’t think twice about doing truly terrible things to innocent people because of where they live. I don’t think they are as bad as the things they would be okay with doing. They’re mostly good people who’re just completely failing at being good moral agents. (This is the lenses through which I read the depressing descriptions of the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram experiment, etc. Yes, it’s important to know how easily people can be led to do the wrong thing, but it doesn’t actually mean people are bad).
3. If classical utilitarianism is the best moral framework, we should to help people regardless of their goodness or badness, so we should value the deterrence of further offenders but not punishment for its own sake. If having a multiple-values system is the best moral framework and we value justice, we still in most cases shouldn’t punish severely for its own sake, since most people aren’t as bad as the things they do.
Seems to me we generally shouldn’t intrinsically value punishment, even of people who did truly horrible things, whether judicially or extrajudicially.
This is obviously not a particularly sophisticated point and I doubt anyone here disagrees with it, but people’s failure to internalize it does seem to be a significant source of conflict and suffering across the globe. On a much smaller scale, it helps me be much more patient with people who really tick me off in my life by reflecting that while what they did may have harmed or annoyed me significantly, they would not have had to be particularly bad or uncaring to do it—it could be just another form of a mistake.
Does anyone disagree on any of the above points, or on my definitions?

Ysamuels 5 May 2026 9:36 UTC
2 points
−1
on: Heroic responsibility is morally neutral
I personally judge people^[1] based on how hard they seem to be trying to do what is right. It would seem to me that someone who genuinely believes something but doesn’t follow through on its implications is somewhat morally culpable, or at least loses points for it. Of course, you can also be morally culpable for not being very careful to make sure that you’re actually right about what you should be doing. Since many people don’t do that, you correctly observe that the objective moral gains may offset to zero.
So it seems to me that while you’re probably right that heroic responsibility is not enough to ensure objectively good results, I do think it’s a sign of a person’s moral strength, regardless of their other failings.
Thanks for the post!
1. ^
  That is, people’s moral integrity.

The Power of Assumption

Ysamuels29 Mar 2026 11:58 UTC

15 points

4 comments2 min readLW link

ysamuels’s Shortform

Ysamuels29 Mar 2026 11:43 UTC

1 point

2 comments1 min readLW link

Ysamuels 22 Mar 2026 10:27 UTC
1 point
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on: Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease
The disagreement between Sandy’s husband and doctor centers around the idea of “disease”. If obesity, depression, alcoholism, and the like are diseases, most people default to the doctor’s point of view; if they are not diseases, they tend to agree with the husband.
This could be seen as use of a heuristic, being that if the goal is to get mentally & physically healthier, treatment is likely to have negative affects that outweigh the positive if it is being used as a solution for “problems of character” rather than disease. So I guess the question is whether that is an useful/accurate heuristic.

Ysamuels 4 Mar 2026 15:19 UTC
1 point
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on: Open Thread Winter 2025/26
Hello,
Great to find LessWrong and people thinking about thinking. Very new too all this but trying to get my head screwed on as straight as I can as fast as I can.
I am a high school student formerly from the US now living in Israel. Wanted to know if anyone has top recommendations for content/ideas from the rationality or adjectant communities? Or other groups that might be helpful to bringing my thinking to the next level?
Thanks

Ysamuels 4 Mar 2026 15:08 UTC
1 point
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on: Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization
I think you’re thinking of a combination of the Biblical stories of Samuel 1, 14 with Jonathan and Saul, and Judges 11 with Jeptath’s daughter (who’d have thought my religious education would ever come in handy on lesswrong!)