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jimrandomh
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LessWrong developer, rationalist since the Overcoming Bias days. Jargon connoisseur.

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28Jimrandomh's Shortform
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6y
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296
AI Task Length Horizons in Offensive Cybersecurity
jimrandomh4d30

I edited the post to fix the images.

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Jimrandomh's Shortform
jimrandomh4d40

So, first: The logistical details of reducing wild impact biomass are mooted by the fact that I meant it as a reductio, not a proposal. I have no strong reason to think that spraying insecticide would be a better strategy than gene drives or sterile insect technique or deforestation, or that DDT is the most effective insecticide.

To put rough numbers on it: honeybees are about 4e-7 by count or 7e-4 by biomass of all insects (estimate by o3). There is no such extreme skew for mammals and birds (o3). While domesticated honeybees have some bad things happen to them, they don't seem orders of magnitude worse than what happens to wild insects.

Caring highly about insect suffering, in a way that scales linearly with population, does not match my values but does not seem philosophically incoherent. But because of the wild/domestic population skew, avoiding honey for this reason does seem philosophically incoherent.

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Jimrandomh's Shortform
[+]jimrandomh5d-8-7
Jimrandomh's Shortform
jimrandomh1mo72

It's worth noting that, under US law, for certain professions, knowledge of child abuse or risk of harm to children doesn't just remove confidentiality obligations, it creates a legal obligation to report. So this lines up reasonably well with how a human ought to behave in similar circumstances.

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Jimrandomh's Shortform
jimrandomh1mo95

In this particular case, I'm not sure the relevant context was directly present in the thread, as opposed to being part of the background knowledge that people talking about AI alignment are supposed to have. In particular, "AI behavior is discovered rather than programmed". I don't think that was stated directly anywhere in the thread; rather, it's something everyone reading AI-alignment-researcher tweets would typically know, but which is less-known when the tweet is transported out of that bubble.

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Was the K-T event a Great Filter?
jimrandomh1mo60

An alternative explanation of this is that time is event-based. Or, phrased slightly differently: the rate of biological evolution is faster in the time following a major disruption, so intelligence is more likely to arise shortly after a major disruption occurs.

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Jimrandomh's Shortform
jimrandomh1mo50

If so that would be conceptually similar to a jailbreak. Telling someone they have a privileged role doesn't make it so; lawyer, priest and psychotherapist are legal categories, not social ones, created by a combination of contracts and statutes, with associated requirements that can't be satisfied by a prompt.

(People sometimes get confused into thinking that therapeutic-flavored conversations are privileged, when those conversations are with their friends or with a "life coach" or similar not-licensed-term occupation. They are not.)

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Jimrandomh's Shortform
jimrandomh1mo*7111

Pick two: Agentic, moral, doesn't attempt to use command-line tools to whistleblow when it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral.

You cannot have all three.

This applies just as much to humans as it does to Claude 4.

Reply511
Scroll Snapping
jimrandomh2mo20

Chrome on MacOS.

Reply1
Scroll Snapping
jimrandomh2mo43

Tried it. Hated it. If I scroll a little bit with a momentum-scrolling touchpad, then when it settles, it will sometimes move back to where it was, undoing my scroll. The second issue is that if I scroll with spacebar or pgup/pgdn, the animation is very slow (about 10x slower than it is for me on most pages).

I think there could be a version of this that's good, where it subtly biases the deceleration curve of fling-scrolls to reach a good stopping point, but leaves every other scroll method alone. But this isn't it.

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28Jim Babcock's Mainline Doom Scenario: Human-Level AI Can't Control Its Successor
2mo
4
331Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong
3mo
70
281Arbital has been imported to LessWrong
5mo
30
101Open Thread With Experimental Feature: Reactions
2y
189
35Dual-Useness is a Ratio
2y
2
68Infohazards vs Fork Hazards
3y
16
103LW Beta Feature: Side-Comments
3y
47
90Transformative VR Is Likely Coming Soon
3y
47
138LessWrong Now Has Dark Mode
3y
31
102Salvage Epistemology
3y
119
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Bayes' rule
2mo
Ignorance prior
5mo
Hiring
5mo
Chesterton's fence
5mo
(+45/-45)
Axiom
5mo
AI arms race
5mo
Adversarial Collaboration (disambiguation)
5mo
Adversarial Collaboration (disambiguation)
5mo
(+130)
Adversarial Collaboration (Alignment Technique)
5mo
Adversarial Collaboration (Alignment Technique)
5mo
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