dbohdan's Shortform
Jun 13, 20251
Replying toOn Owning Galaxies
I think I made a mistake about your assumptions. I interpreted the parties in your original comment as superhuman non-ASI versions of the human galaxy owners rather than themselves ASIs.
Let's see if I understand your reply correctly. You posit that the participants will be able to design a mechanism that from N levels upstream (factories of factories) recursively creates honest audit systems. For example, an evil participant may wish to construct an audit system that is absolutely reliable for trade and anything else but allows them to create, hide, and erase all traces of creating torture simulations (once). If the ASIs are able to prevent this, then they can escape game-theoretic traps and enjoy cooperation without centralizing.
Replying toOn Owning Galaxies
You'd prefer to at least cede a limited degree of ownership by maintaining constrained auditing systems that prove to your counterparties that you're not using the galaxy to produce (much) suffering without proving anything else, and they’d be willing to let you have it for much less, in that case.
This idea seems unstable for inherent reasons, not just because of human stupidity. The reasons why it's unstable help explain exclusive ownership. I'm not sure galaxies are viable units of ownership; I'll just say "galaxy" to match the original comment. I'll assume multipolarity.
Single-auditor versions fail because of easy exploitation. If the asset holder controls the audit channel, they can omit or falsify critical... (read more)
What do you think about the denial-of-wallet risk with this migration? From what I've read about Vercel on ServerlessHorrors (a partisan source) and in random internet comments, you can make costly mistakes with Vercel, but they'll waive the charges.
I was looking for a term for my diet that indicated adherence and came up with "intermittent intermittent fasting". ("Time-restricted time-restricted eating" doesn't have the same ring.)
Does it make sense that LW voting arrows are arranged the way they are? This is how they look right now:
username 12h ▾ 1 ▴ ✘ 5 ✔
My intuition protests, and I think I know why. Upvote and downvote arrows are usually stacked vertically, with the upvote arrow on top. When you translate vertical to left-to-right text, you get what was above to the left and what was below to the right. It means the following horizontal arrangement:
username 12h ▴ 1 ▾ ✔ 5 ✘
What skills would be transferable for the planning stages of all three examples?
The baseline planning skill is having a start-to-end plan at all as opposed to winging it or only thinking ahead in an ad hoc manner. One step beyond this is writing the plan down, perhaps as a checklist. You can use the written copy to keep track of where you are, refine the plan, and simply to not forget it.
A step beyond, which seems rarer and less automatic for people than the previous, is to employ any kind of what they call a "work breakdown structure": a systematic mapping from higher-level steps ("find out the legal requirements for filming a car chase") to lower-level steps ("ask indie filmmaker chat what legal firm they recommend").
This, um, dramatically changes the picture. It could be nothing.
As a heavy user of the Internet, I didn't recognize this copypasta. My mistake was only googling a large chunk in double quotes.
Edit: "Dramatically" is intended as a pun on "drama", hence the italics. I think the new information changes the picture significantly, and yet the bio remains a red flag.
I don't broadly approve of trying to diagnose people over the Internet, nor am I qualified to, but it's striking how much the "i love mind games" bio suggests borderline personality disorder. It has chronic feelings of emptiness ("i have no passions or goals in life."), instability in interpersonal relationships ("i love mind games, i love drama, i love fake people.", "i would not hesitate to betray any of my loved ones at any moment."), negative self-image ("[...] really no reason for anyone to be around me."), and so on.
If you are dating and this bio doesn't make your HUD light up bright red, you are in danger. Read up on personality disorders so you can make more informed decisions about people you are getting involved with.
i learned something about agency when, on my second date with my now-girlfriend, i mentioned feeling cold and she about-faced into the nearest hotel, said she left a scarf in a room last week, and handed me the nicest one out of the hotel’s lost & found drawer
— @_brentbaum, tweet (2025-05-15)
you can just do things?
— @meansinfinity
not to burst your bubble but isn't this kinda stealing?
— @QiaochuYuan
What do people mean when they say "agency" and "you can just do things"? I get a sense it's two things, and the terms "agency" and "you can just do things" conflate them. The first is "you can DIY a solution to your problem; you don't need permission and professional... (read more)
... (read more)GBDE, or Geom-Based Disk Encryption, has specific features for high-security environments where protecting the user is just as important as concealing the data. In addition to a cryptographic key provided by the user, GBDE uses keys stored in particular sectors on the hard drive. If either key is unavailable, the partition can’t be decrypted. Why is this important? If a secure data center (say, in an embassy) comes under attack, the operator might have a moment or two to destroy the keys on the hard drive and render the data unrecoverable. If the bad guys have a gun to my head and tell me to “enter the passphrase or else,” I want
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Why don’t rationalists win more?
The following list is based on a presentation I gave at a Slate Star Codex meetup in 2018. It is mirrored from a page on my site, where I occasionally add new "see also" links.
Possible factors
- Thinkers vs. doers: selection effects [1] and a mutually-reinforcing tendency to talk instead of doing [2]
- Theoretical models spread without selection [2]
- Inability and unwillingness to cooperate [2]
- People who are more interested in instrumental rationality leave the community [2]
- Focusing on the future leads to a lack of immediate plans [2]
- Pessimism due to a focus on problems [1]
- Success mostly depends on specific skills, not general rationality [1]
- Online communities are fundamentally incapable of increasing instrumental rationality ("a
This is the affect heuristic at work in design. I think it actually applies in two ways: