Posts

Intuition for 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12 2024-02-18T16:46:42.687Z
How do high-trust societies form? 2024-02-09T01:11:24.201Z
Shankar Sivarajan's Shortform 2023-01-27T05:36:27.677Z

Comments

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Losing Faith In Contrarianism · 2024-04-26T01:26:04.037Z · LW · GW

I doubt you could have picked a worse example to make your point that contrarian takes are usually wrong than racial differences in IQ/intelligence.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on LessWrong's (first) album: I Have Been A Good Bing · 2024-04-02T21:09:42.340Z · LW · GW

Yeah, I'm not gonna get baited into getting rate-limited by downvotes that easily. All you need to know, if you care to, is that my values and goals differ drastically from most other people here.

EDIT: A mod rate-limited me anyway, perfectly illustrating the stark value difference: I consider that kind of abuse of power an atrocity.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on LessWrong's (first) album: I Have Been A Good Bing · 2024-04-02T19:22:44.882Z · LW · GW

a shallow clone

I don't know what that is. Genetically identical but not possessing my memories?

2. I wouldn't use the term "art" for that, no. 

4. I don't have a constructive definition for what counts as an "artistic process," but I certainly wouldn't say the past holds no value for me: I like ancient sculptures and the like more than the next guy, and generally loathe iconoclasts and book burners. But if, say, the Library of Alexandria had books that had been printed instead of scribed by hand, I would not consider its burning any less of a loss. 

5. No, I wouldn't. I have never used heroin, but its effects on others don't seem like the kind of thing I'd wish for myself permanently.

6–10 are easy. I'd consider the clone at least family. 

I don't care to answer 1. and 3.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on LessWrong's (first) album: I Have Been A Good Bing · 2024-04-02T14:21:52.053Z · LW · GW

The "Disneyland without Children" short story? Yeah, I did. I'd read it before, and found it a nice fleshing-out of Bostrom's phrase. I do find it dystopic, but don't consider it illustrative of a likely future.

I don't think my disagreement is particularly insightful, but sure: if the painting is beautiful, I don't care if the artist is ugly or blind. With AI/ML image generation, we now have "beauty too cheap to meter" (Scott Alexander's phrase), and I don't see that as a bad thing. What "being human" means is something you construct for yourself, and a worry that it will somehow be lost or replaced is misguided.

Less high-mindedly, the (overwhelming majority of) human artists in power, writing novels, playing music, making movies, creating video games, translating anime/manga, have been telling me loudly and repeatedly for several years now that they despise me and everything I value, so fuck 'em (especially the anime/manga localizers); anything that democratizes their power, diminishes their status, throws open the gates they keep, is good, both for my community as a whole, as well as for me in particular.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Back to Basics: Truth is Unitary · 2024-03-31T02:38:55.836Z · LW · GW

Mukami-sama, the God of Atheism

Relevant smbc: link

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Many people lack basic scientific knowledge · 2024-03-30T00:56:23.160Z · LW · GW

There's another post in that series the first link missed. Look at the end of this one: link (sorry, low res image).

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Many people lack basic scientific knowledge · 2024-03-29T23:03:40.408Z · LW · GW

You might like this classic 4chan greentext: link.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Many people lack basic scientific knowledge · 2024-03-29T22:55:02.275Z · LW · GW

What do most people gain from knowing this trivium? It's useful if you're signaling that you're on the side of "Science!" (which requires you to similarly "know" a lot of things that're a lot more dubious, and many things are are meaningless or outright false) but otherwise, unless you're an astrophysicist or similar, it makes no difference to you one way or the other.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on The Sequences on YouTube · 2024-03-29T04:21:18.122Z · LW · GW

The first few videos will necessarily be terrible, especially, hopefully, by the standards of the 47th video. 

Suggestion: do them out of order.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Politics are not serious by default · 2024-03-29T04:06:13.685Z · LW · GW

"hey, your kids have a real chance of dying in the next decade"

Yes, every four years, if the good guys don't win the next (US) presidential election. Or if people don't switch to/away from nuclear power. Or they're killed by immigrants/cops. Or they die of a fentanyl overdose. Or in a school shooting. Or if the Iraqis/Russians/Chinese invade. Or if taxes are lowered/raised.

Perhaps telling people they or their children are going to die imminently isn't a standard tactic of "mere politics" where you are; you did say you're not American.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on General Thoughts on Secular Solstice · 2024-03-28T01:38:57.461Z · LW · GW

You'd think, but I wasn't been able to find such a thing despite looking pretty hard a few years ago; there might be a more recent AI approach to this though. A useful search term might be "audio to midi conversion". (Stem separation, for which Spleeter works well, might be a necessary preprocessing step.)

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Legality as a Career Harm Assessment Heuristic · 2024-03-26T15:52:21.301Z · LW · GW

I'm not. I find your deontological murder exception ad hoc. My hypothetical hitman's moral foundations rest solidly on the notions, standard among "Effective Altruists," that one can value human lives in terms of money, that one can engage in tradeoffs involving lives, that the lives of people in Africa or wherever aren't worth more an order of magnitude less than those of people in, say, America, and that GiveWell's estimates of how much it costs to save a life are reasonable.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Legality as a Career Harm Assessment Heuristic · 2024-03-26T15:34:56.255Z · LW · GW

don't do work that is illegal, or that would be illegal if the public knew what you were really doing.

This rule only makes sense if you trust this "system for declaring profitable activities with negative externalities off limits" (ignoring that it pretends the law reflects the public's will far more than it actually does, and problems with manufactured consent) more than your own moral judgment, self-serving as it may be. Perhaps you believe the law is mostly just, or that your own moral reasoning is horribly flawed (side note: either both of these are true, or neither). I don't.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Legality as a Career Harm Assessment Heuristic · 2024-03-26T15:15:21.767Z · LW · GW

some kinds of harm (ex: murder) do not seem like the kind of thing you ought to be able to "cancel out" through donation, even if the donation clearly has larger benefits (ex: saves vastly many lives).

I disagree. An earning-to-give hitman is the epitome of the EA philosophy.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on All About Concave and Convex Agents · 2024-03-25T13:38:48.182Z · LW · GW

I hate the terms Concave and Convex in relation to functions.

Agreed. 

the line (which should be considered to be the open side because integration makes the side below the line the solid side

This is terrible: one pretty basic property you want in your definition describing the shape of functions is that it shouldn't change if you translate the function around.

Consider  (for ). Pretty much the point of this definition is to be able to say it's the opposite kind as , but your choice wouldn't have that feature.

The "line at infinity" is a better choice for the imagined boundary. That's how we can think of parabolae as a kind of ellipse, for example. 

if we called them decelerating (concave) or accelerating (convex) functions. 

That'd be at least as confusing as the current terms for functions like or  or .

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on General Thoughts on Secular Solstice · 2024-03-24T20:53:39.852Z · LW · GW

You wrote "the world will always be exactly as it is." I don't see the difference.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on D0TheMath's Shortform · 2024-03-24T05:00:51.564Z · LW · GW

until soon with SD3

I'll believe it when I see it. The man who said it would be an open release has just been fired stepped down as CEO.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on General Thoughts on Secular Solstice · 2024-03-23T23:18:01.129Z · LW · GW

Let the Lower Lights Be Burning

I had not heard this hymn before, but I love it! Thank you!

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on My Detailed Notes & Commentary from Secular Solstice · 2024-03-23T23:11:35.731Z · LW · GW

Hopefully, we'll have to write some new verses about polio soon.

And guinea worm.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on General Thoughts on Secular Solstice · 2024-03-23T22:32:11.347Z · LW · GW

Time Wrote the Rocks

Wtf? "God Wrote the Rocks" (which I love, and am grateful to the Solstice post a few months ago for pointing me to it) serves as excellent contrast to "Humans Wrote the Bible." These rewritten lyrics are just bizarre. The "book of earth", "book of night", "book of names"? "Humans write the book of truth" seems to be missing the whole point! It sounds good as long as you don't think about it, which strikes me as contrary to the whole "rationalism" schtick. 

Also, the original lyrics are already pretty irreligious deism: this attempt at secularizing them is misguided in addition to being poorly executed.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Nuclear Quantum Immortality Hacking · 2024-03-23T22:21:59.533Z · LW · GW

there are many good reasons to think this whole ordeal will not work

Do any of these reasons not also apply to the cat in box?

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on On green · 2024-03-23T20:26:01.205Z · LW · GW

Knowing this doesn't actually save the redwoods, necessarily, but it does make it far easier to be in a state of acceptance, because deep down nobody is actually your enemy.

This sounds like green-according-to-black.

My view of green is much more ecofascist-y.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Why The Insects Scream · 2024-03-23T13:55:44.944Z · LW · GW

That's not what "impervious" means: your view does not open itself up to falsification by logical argument or by experiment. Any argument against it would only address its internal consistency, which I think it fundamentally has; I was being only slightly sardonic when I said that was as good as truth.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Why The Insects Scream · 2024-03-22T23:13:00.491Z · LW · GW

You might like this fanfic (~1500 words): Mandragora.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Why The Insects Scream · 2024-03-22T22:46:44.109Z · LW · GW

Ah, honest-to-god supernaturalism! I didn't expect to find that here. It's a view impervious to reason or empiricism, but perfectly self-consistent, which makes it as good as true. 

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Wolf and Rabbit · 2024-03-22T21:40:39.955Z · LW · GW

He's done something stronger than that: he has taken words that existed before, and replaced whatever meanings they may have had with his own. Elf, dwarf, orc, … these now indelibly bear his mark.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Why The Insects Scream · 2024-03-22T21:32:06.910Z · LW · GW

we don’t give a shit about morality. Instead, we care about social norms that we can use to shame other people

This reminds me of: 

"Why didn't you tell him the truth? Were you afraid?"

"I'm not afraid. I chose not to tell him, because I anticipated negative consequences if I did so."

"What do you think 'fear' is, exactly?"

link.

What do you think 'morality' is, exactly, if not social norms?

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Wolf and Rabbit · 2024-03-22T21:02:11.626Z · LW · GW

wolf made the world to be a perfect reflection of wolf's will alone, and so wolf was free of any obligations to anyone, but then all of that got screwed up when a second being (coyote) came into existence and started doing its own thing and spreading around.

See also: Eru and Melkor.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on On green · 2024-03-22T02:28:49.109Z · LW · GW

You might prefer to link to Duncan Sabien's post here instead of Medium.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on A Teacher vs. Everyone Else · 2024-03-22T02:23:07.919Z · LW · GW

The desired quality for pupils is that they be indoctrinable, not stupid.

Comment by shankar-sivarajan on [deleted post] 2024-03-22T01:59:45.048Z

Glamourising

Glomarizing

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on What are the weirdest things a human may want for their own sake? · 2024-03-20T18:51:10.051Z · LW · GW

some South Pacific cultures viewed heterosexuality as sinful.

That sounds like Margaret Mead's work.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Community Notes by X · 2024-03-19T14:02:00.467Z · LW · GW

Would that even be a meaningful question? Thinking of it as a kind of PCA, there will be some axis, with a lot of correlations, and how you interpret that is up to you.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We've Tried) · 2024-03-18T16:05:41.048Z · LW · GW

Lebanon tried this "balancing different factions" thing. Their system probably won't survive a census: the last one was in 1932.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We've Tried) · 2024-03-18T15:30:24.563Z · LW · GW

And so began the US civil war.

Despite the name, the war between the states bears little resemblance to the civil wars in your other examples; since you picked Iraq, the invasion of Kuwait is a closer analogy than the post-election Sunni rebellion (though any war of conquest would be apt). But your description of the causes of secession is sound.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on XAI releases Grok base model · 2024-03-18T05:03:06.026Z · LW · GW

How expensive is the finetuning step relative to the pretraining (in terms of compute, data, labor, or anything else)?

I gather it'd be ~$1000 to "uncensor" a finetuned model, but as mentioned, this might be the first significant model released before finetuning, so I have no intuition for this. Two orders of magnitude more? Three? 

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on What is the best argument that LLMs are shoggoths? · 2024-03-17T19:08:37.872Z · LW · GW

Does something like the "I have been a good Bing. 😊" thing count? (More examples.

I'd say that's a pretty striking illustration that under the surface of a helpful assistant (in the vein of Siri et al.) these things are weird, and the shoggoth is a good metaphor.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on To the average human, controlled AI is just as lethal as 'misaligned' AI · 2024-03-17T05:00:05.830Z · LW · GW

What was the old title? Something like "Misaligned AI doesn't kill people, misaligned people do"?

This new one sounds like it could make for a good slogan too: "To the average American, gun control is more lethal than guns."

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on To the average human, controlled AI is just as lethal as 'misaligned' AI · 2024-03-17T04:56:34.368Z · LW · GW
Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Celiefs · 2024-03-17T04:34:21.960Z · LW · GW

Is a "celief" in something meaningfully different from an "alief" in its opposite?

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2024-03-16T23:00:55.523Z · LW · GW

Alternatively, if information retrieval and transmission is expensive enough, or equivalently, if finding another source quick and easy, "I don't know" could mean "Ask someone else: the expected additional precision/confidence of doing so is worth the effort."

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Intuition for 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12 · 2024-03-16T05:01:30.970Z · LW · GW

Sure, but if you see , you already have all the intuition you need. The rest is detail.

The example I used, , is the same kind of thing, a power series applied outside its domain of convergence, which I used instead because, while it doesn't lend itself to the derivation directly, it looks more like the sum we seek (in particular, all positive integers on the left and a negative number on the right), and I expected the formula for an infinite geometric series to be more familiar to most readers.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection · 2024-03-15T17:59:38.612Z · LW · GW

More aphoristically: "Never give a sucker an even break."

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection · 2024-03-15T17:52:43.481Z · LW · GW

Re 5 and 6, that's why most normal purchases aren't conducted via auctions: if there's little variability in the product, it's not rare or hard to find, and it's been sold enough that the information asymmetry is negligible, just stick a price tag on it.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection · 2024-03-15T17:37:56.102Z · LW · GW

(3) seems meaningfully different from your other examples. That's a case where they're the same to you, and one is better to Bob, so it's good that he gets the one he prefers: that's just standard envy-free division. If you make a mistake with the information you have, that's on you; there's nothing wrong with the setup.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on AI Rights: In your view, what would be required for an AGI to gain rights and protections from the various Governments of the World? · 2024-03-15T17:12:20.699Z · LW · GW

They need to have bodies that look sufficiently human (ideally resembling a new race), with the ability to express complex human emotion via voice modulation and facial expression. They should probably also be able to bleed, bruise, or otherwise look gory when physically abused.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on Clickbait Soapboxing · 2024-03-15T14:46:06.740Z · LW · GW

There is a difference between conveying facts/beliefs with high fidelity, and saying things that are technically correct. The latter, when deliberately misleading, is lying; the former, even when imprecise/"wrong", is honesty.

Depending on the format, the nuance can be implicit, such when talking to intelligent and reasonable men, or with footnotes, hyperlinks, etc. in a place that anyone reading the brief unnuanced "bold & provocative" statement can easily find it. 

On Twitter, since I can only find the top-level post with none of the replies and comments, this person (whom you haven't anonymized) would in fact be engaging in lying, and since he appears to care, ought to stop. 

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology · 2024-03-15T02:39:20.919Z · LW · GW

You consider some people's jobs being automated an instance of "doom"?

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology · 2024-03-15T02:28:43.138Z · LW · GW

For even more brevity with no loss of substance:

 A turkey gets fed every day, right up until it's slaughtered before Thanksgiving.

Comment by Shankar Sivarajan (shankar-sivarajan) on 'Empiricism!' as Anti-Epistemology · 2024-03-15T02:21:47.237Z · LW · GW

This is perfectly sound reasoning. What does applying it to people prophesying doom, arising from technological advance or otherwise, yield?