johnswentworth

EDIT TO ADD: a friend suggested I add a warning at the top of this post. The wording is theirs, but I basically endorse it. "Warning: The author of this post describes speedy seductions that rely on context and body language to understand what women want without asking directly. It...

Assumed background: Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff induction. Suppose I have some data , and I go looking for the models (i.e. programs) which best compress that data. I find two different programs, and , which both reproduce the data using approximately the same number of bits, and that seems to...

You’re at a party/bar/whatever. Across the room, you see an attractive stranger. Your eyes meet. You hold her gaze for a moment. She glances away, then back again. You both look at each other, quietly staring. So begins the flirtation. A month ago, I went to a sex club for...

Part of what makes a pencil a good object is that all its parts share approximately the same rotational velocity - i.e. it's a rigid body object. Part of what makes a squirrel a good object is that its parts share approximately the same genome. Part of what makes the...

There’s a standard story which says roughly "motivated reasoning in humans exists because it is/was adaptive for negotiating with other humans". I do not think that story stands up well under examination; when I think of standard day-to-day examples of motivated reasoning, that pattern sounds like a plausible generator for...

Every time I see someone mention statistics on nonconsent kink online, someone else is surprised by how common it is. So let’s start with some statistics from Lehmiller[1]: roughly two thirds of women and half of men have some fantasy of being raped. A lot of these are more of...

What’s “The Plan”? For several years now, around the end of the year, I (John) write a post on our plan for AI alignment. That plan hasn’t changed too much over the past few years, so both this year’s post and last year’s are written as updates to The Plan...