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Richard_Kennaway
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Computer scientist, applied mathematician. Based in the eastern part of England.

Fan of control theory in general and Perceptual Control Theory in particular. Everyone should know about these, whatever subsequent attitude to them they might reach. These, plus consciousness of abstraction dissolve a great many confusions.

I created the Insanity Wolf Sanity Test. There it is, work out for yourself what it means.

Change ringer since 2022. It teaches learning and grasping abstract patterns, memory, thinking with your body, thinking on your feet, fixing problems and moving on, always looking to the future and letting both the errors and successes of the past go.

As of May 2025, I have yet to have a use for LLMs. (If this date is more than six months old, feel free to remind me to update it.)

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7Richard_Kennaway's Shortform
3y
77
Self-Control is now an Engineering Problem
Richard_Kennaway8h2-1

I'm building a company called Overlord.

As in, "I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords"?

What you are describing is the very opposite of self-control.

Reply
Towards plausible moral naturalism
Richard_Kennaway1d*40

I believe the Christian doctrine, or at least a Christian doctrine, is that the moral law is both natural and supernatural, these attributes being united, not separate.

According to this view, we can all discern what is good. We all know that killing people and taking their stuff is wrong, that torture is wrong, and so forth. These things are written on our hearts and we cannot not know them, although we may twist our minds into knots trying to not know them. On lesser issues or more complex situations we can legitimately be unsure or mistaken, despite our best attempts to discern with the help of reason what is written on our hearts. But we are also assisted by divine revelation, especially through the person of Jesus, and by the expositions of the learned.

The Good is not subject to God's will, neither is God's will subject to the Good. God's will is one with the Good, and the natural law is one with the supernatural.

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Zero sum expectations as an explanation of omnicide-indifference
Richard_Kennaway1d64

Most people distinguish between intentional acts and shit that happens.

One reason is that the intentionality implies different ongoing risks. If a friend dies in a traffic accident, that’s bad. If a friend is assassinated by the secret police, that’s bad, but I also have to wonder if I’ll be next.

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Comment on "Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation"
Richard_Kennaway1d50

I’ve probably read everything Eliezer has written on LW, and have read at least large parts of HPMOR and planecrash, but I am less familiar with other places he may have written. This by him is new to me. Is there anywhere else on the net I should follow?

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O(1) reasoning in latent space: 1ms inference, 77% accuracy, no attention or tokens
Richard_Kennaway3d40

And now it's back to -11. That wasn't me withdrawing my upvote, it was someone else whacking it with a -7. What is this, war in heaven? I do wish there was more commentary.

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O(1) reasoning in latent space: 1ms inference, 77% accuracy, no attention or tokens
Richard_Kennaway4d30

I have to confess that it was my strong upvote that brought it back from -12 to -4. Not because I thought it was so worthy, but to get it above the -5 default threshold for people to see it at all, which I felt it had prematurely fallen below. At some point I'll remove the upvote to restore the cosmic balance, unless I see reason to think it is truly strongly upworthy.

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O(1) reasoning in latent space: 1ms inference, 77% accuracy, no attention or tokens
Richard_Kennaway4d*70

I can't evaluate the software myself, so I'm curious to know why the downvotes. Is this a crank posting that leads nowhere, or does it publish dangerous capabilities that would lead everywhere?

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Win-Win-Win Ethics—Reconciling Consequentialism, Virtue Ethics and Deontology
Richard_Kennaway5d72

"The rules say we must use consequentialism, but good people are deontologists, and virtue ethics is what actually works."

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

"Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Consciousness of abstraction
Richard_Kennaway7d20

If the issue is what I thinks, what could be better?

Grappling with the issue, instead of cataloguing the various things that have been said about it by all the philosophers you mentioned. You have spoken of Aristoteleanism, Platonism, Hegel, Kant, Korzybski, and Eliezer. As categories of attribution to authors, they are of the World (each of these people was or is a definite individual), but as categories of ideas about categories, they are of Man, lines of no particular interest.

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Consciousness of abstraction
Richard_Kennaway7d*20

The answer that seems obvious to me is that some categories carve the world at its joints (chemical elements), some do not (shoe sizes), and some are in between (planet). What questions remain?

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11The world according to ChatGPT
3mo
0
6Arguing all sides with ChatGPT 4.5
3mo
0
69Please do not use AI to write for you
11mo
34
40Reflexive decision theory is an unsolved problem
2y
27
23Ten variations on red-pill-blue-pill
2y
34
16Arguing all sides with ChatGPT
2y
1
7Richard_Kennaway's Shortform
3y
77
25Humans pretending to be robots pretending to be human
3y
14
16“The Wisdom of the Lazy Teacher”
4y
5
38Migraine hallucinations, phenomenology, and cognition
4y
6
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