An Algorithmic Lucidity

Contra Pace on When to Apologize

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:43:00 -0700

BOJACK: Hey, I wanted to talk to you about—you know—I feel bad about what happened.
HERB: So, you're apologizing.
BOJACK: Yes. I'm sorry.
HERB: Okay. I don't forgive you.
BOJACK: Herb, I said I'm sorry.
HERB: Yeah. And I do not forgive you.
BOJACK: Uh, not sure you …

Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:54:00 -0700

Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War et al. in Courtroom 12 on the 19th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building, the Hon. Judge Rita F …

Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude's Constitution

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:36:00 -0700

(Previously: Prologue.)

Corrigibility as a term of art in AI alignment was coined as a word to refer to a property of an AI being willing to let its preferences be modified by its creator. Corrigibility in this sense was believed to be a desirable but unnatural property that would …

Prologue to Terrified Comments on Claude's Constitution

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:44:00 -0700

What Even Is This Timeline

The striking thing about reading what is potentially the most important document in human history is how impossible it is to take seriously. The entire premise seems like science fiction. Not bad science fiction, but—crucially—not hard science fiction. Ted Chiang, not Greg Egan …

Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:02:00 -0800

In a busy, busy world, there's so much to read that no one could possibly keep up with it all. You can't not prioritize what you pay attention to and (even more so) what you respond to. Everyone and her dog tells herself a story that she wants to pay …

Disagreement Comes From the Dark World

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:17:00 -0800

In "Truth or Dare", Duncan Sabien articulates a phenomenon in which expectations of good or bad behavior can become self-fulfilling: people who expect to be exploited and feel the need to put up defenses both elicit and get sorted into a Dark World where exploitation is likely and defenses are …

College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:00:00 -0800

Previously, I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math.

So, I did that. I think it was a good decision! I got more out of it than I expected.

To be clear, "better …

The Best Lack All Conviction: A Confusing Day in the AI Village

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:27:00 -0800

The AI Village is an ongoing experiment (currently running on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time) in which frontier language models are given virtual desktop computers and asked to accomplish goals together. Since Day 230 of the Village (17 November 2025), the agents' goal has …

"Yes, and—" Requires the Possibility of "No, Because—"

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 10:35:00 -0700

Scott Garrabrant gives a number of examples to illustrate that "Yes Requires the Possibility of No". We can understand the principle in terms of information theory. Consider the answer to a yes-or-no question as a binary random variable. The "amount of information" associated with a random variable is quantified by …

The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 11:26:00 -0700

A punishment is when one agent (the punisher) imposes costs on another (the punished) in order to affect the punished's behavior. In a Society where thieves are predictably imprisoned and lashed, people will predictably steal less than they otherwise would, for fear of being imprisoned and lashed.

Punishment is often …

Just Make a New Rule!

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 22:54:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

"Rules" are a critical social technology for helping people live and work together in peace. From the laws passed by legislatures to govern a whole nation, to the bylaws of a neighborhood homeowner association, to the informal household rules of a single family, explicit rules …

Comment on “Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation”

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:53:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

One of the most underrated essays in the post-Sequences era of Eliezer Yudkowsky's corpus is "Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation". The degree to which this piece of wisdom has fallen into tragic neglect in these dark ages of the 2020s may be related to its …

Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 18:03:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

The Value of a Comment Is Determined by Its Text, Not Its Authorship

I sometimes see people express disapproval of critical blog comments by commenters who don't write many blog posts of their own. Such meta-criticism is not infrequently couched in terms of metaphors to …

Discontinuous Linear Functions?!

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 16:46:00 -0700

We know what linear functions are. A function f is linear iff it satisfies additivity f(x + y) = f(x) + f(y) and homogeneity f(ax) = af(x).

We know what continuity is. A function f is continuous iff for all ε there exists a δ such that if |x …

The End of the Movie: SF State's 2024 Putnam Competition Team, A Retrospective

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 12:13:00 -0800

From: Zack M Davis <zmd@sfsu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2025 11:52 AM
To: math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu <math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu>, math_graduate@lists.sfsu.edu <math_graduate@lists.sfsu.edu>, math_lecturers@lists.sfsu.edu <math_lecturers@lists.sfsu.edu>, math_tenure@lists.sfsu.edu <math_tenure@lists.sfsu.edu>
Subject: the …

Recruitment Advertisements for the 2024 Putnam Competition at San Francisco State University

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 13:36:00 -0800

From: Zack M Davis <zmd@sfsu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 5:02 PM
To: math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu <math_majors@lists.sfsu.edu>
Subject: Putnam prep session for eternal mathematical glory, 4 p.m. Thu 19 September

One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half-poets …

Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 21:47:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

(some plot spoilers)

There's something distinctly uncomfortable about reading Greg Egan in the 2020s. Besides telling gripping tales with insightful commentary on the true nature of mind and existence, Egan stories written in the 1990s and set in the twenty-first century excelled at speculative worldbuilding …

The Standard Analogy

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 10:15:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

[Scene: a suburban house, a minute after the conclusion of "And All the Shoggoths Merely Players". Doomimir returns with his package, which he places by the door, and turns his attention to Simplicia, who has been waiting for him.]

Simplicia: Right. To recap for [coughs …

Should I Finish My Bachelor's Degree?

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 10 May 2024 22:14:00 -0700

To some, it might seem like a strange question. If you think of being college-educated as a marker of class (or personhood), the fact that I don't have a degree at age of thirty-six (!!) probably looks like a scandalous anomaly, which it would be only natural for me to want …

Ironing Out the Squiggles

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 09:13:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Adversarial Examples: A Problem

The apparent successes of the deep learning revolution conceal a dark underbelly. It may seem that we now know how to get computers to (say) check whether a photo is of a bird, but this façade of seemingly good performance is …

The Evolution of Humans Was Net-Negative for Human Values

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 09:01:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

(Epistemic status: publication date is significant.)

Some observers have argued that the totality of "AI safety" and "alignment" efforts to date have plausibly had a negative rather than positive impact on the ultimate prospects for safe and aligned artificial general intelligence. This perverse outcome is …

"Deep Learning" Is Function Approximation

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:13:00 -0700

A Surprising Development in the Study of Multi-layer Parameterized Graphical Function Approximators

As a programmer and epistemology enthusiast, I've been studying some statistical modeling techniques lately! It's been boodles of fun, and might even prove useful in a future dayjob if I decide to pivot my career away from the …

And All the Shoggoths Merely Players

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 11:56:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

[Setting: a suburban house. The interior of the house takes up most of the stage; on the audience's right, we see a wall in cross-section, and a front porch. Simplicia enters stage left and rings the doorbell.]

Doomimir: [opening the door] Well? What do you …

On the Contrary, Steelmanning Is Normal; ITT-Passing Is Niche

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 15:12:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Rob Bensinger argues that "ITT-passing and civility are good; 'charity' is bad; steelmanning is niche".

The ITT—Ideological Turing Test—is an exercise in which one attempts to present one's interlocutor's views as persuasively as the interlocutor themselves can, coined by Bryan Caplan in analogy …

Alignment Implications of LLM Successes: a Debate in One Act

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:22:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Doomimir: Humanity has made no progress on the alignment problem. Not only do we have no clue how to align a powerful optimizer to our "true" values, we don't even know how to make AI "corrigible"—willing to let us correct it. Meanwhile, capabilities continue …

Assume Bad Faith

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 10:36:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

I've been trying to avoid the terms "good faith" and "bad faith". I'm suspicious that most people who have picked up the phrase "bad faith" from hearing it used, don't actually know what it means—and maybe, that the thing it does mean doesn't carve …

“Is There Anything That’s Worth More”

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 20:28:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

In season two, episode twenty-four of Steven Universe, "It Could've Been Great", our magical alien superheroine protagonists (and Steven) are taking a break from building a giant drill to extract a superweapon that was buried deep within the Earth by an occupying alien race thousands …

Lack of Social Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 09:38:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Someone once told me that they thought I acted like refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace was a virtue, and that this was bad. (I'm paraphrasing; they actually used a different word that starts with b.)

I definitely don't want to say …

“Justice, Cherryl.”

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 09:16:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Selfishness and altruism are positively correlated within individuals, for the obvious reason.

—@InstanceOfClass

I.

An unfortunate obstacle to appreciating the work of Ayn Rand (as someone who adores the "sense of life" portrayed in Rand's fiction, while having a much lower opinion of her philosophy …

Bayesian Networks Aren’t Necessarily Causal

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 13 May 2023 18:42:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

As a casual formal epistemology fan, you've probably heard that the philosophical notion of causality can be formalized in terms of Bayesian networks—but also as a casual formal epistemology fan, you also probably don't know the details all that well.

One day, while going …

“You’ll Never Persuade People Like That”

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 21:38:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Sometimes, when someone is arguing for some proposition, their interlocutor will reply that the speaker's choice of arguments or tone wouldn't be effective at persuading some third party.

This would seem to be an odd change of topic. If I was arguing for this-and-such proposition …

“Rationalist Discourse” Is Like “Physicist Motors”

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:58:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Imagine being a student of physics, and coming across a blog post proposing a list of guidelines for "physicist motors"—motor designs informed by the knowledge of physicists, unlike ordinary motors.

Even if most of the things on the list seemed like sensible advice to …

Conflict Theory of Bounded Distrust

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 21:30:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Scott Alexander once wrote about the difference between "mistake theorists" who treat politics as an engineering discipline (a symmetrical collaboration in which everyone ultimately just wants the best ideas to win) and "conflict theorists" who treat politics as war (an asymmetrical conflict between sides with …

Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:03:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Summary

In a list of guidelines for rational discourse, Duncan Sabien proposes that one should "[a]im for convergence on truth, and behave as if your interlocutors are also aiming for convergence on truth."
However, prediction markets illustrate fundamental reasons why rational discourse doesn't particularly …

Comment on “Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society”

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 22:48:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

I will do my best to teach them
About life and what it's worth
I just hope that I can keep them
From destroying the Earth

—Jonathan Coulton, "The Future Soon"

In a recent paper, Nick Bostrom and Carl Shulman present "Propositions Concerning Digital Minds …

Plea Bargaining

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 30 May 2022 18:30:00 -0700

I wish people were better at—plea bargaining, rather than pretending to be innocent. You accuse someone of [negative-valence description of trait or behavior that they're totally doing], and they say, "No, I'm not", and I'm just like ... really? How dumb do you think we are?

I think when people …

Comment on “Deception as Cooperation”

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 20:04:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

In this 2019 paper published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C, Manolo Martínez argues that our understanding of how communication works has been grievously impaired by philosophers not knowing enough math.

A classic reduction of meaning dates back to David Lewis's …

Feature Selection

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 31 Oct 2021 17:22:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

You wake up. You don't know where you are. You don't remember anything.

Someone is broadcasting data at your first input stream. You don't know why. It tickles.

You look at your first input stream. It's a sequence of 671,187 eight-bit unsigned integers.

0 …

Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 20:21:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

Without denying the obvious similarities that motivated the initial categorization {salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout, ...}, there is more structure in the world: to maximize the probability your world-model assigns to your observations of dolphins, you need to take …

Reply to Nate Soares on Dolphins

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 21:53:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities between things which seem different.

—A. R. Jensen

In a June 2021 Twitter …

Beauty Is Truthiness, Truthiness Beauty?

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 22:55:00 -0700

Imagine reviewing Python code that looks something like this.

has_items = items is not None and len(items) > 0
if has_items:
    ...

...
do_stuff(has_items=has_items)

You might look at the conditional, and disapprove: None and empty collections are both falsey, so there's no reason to define that has_items variable; you could just …

Communication Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 23:41:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

If a lion could speak, we could not understand her.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

In order for information to be transmitted from one place to another, it needs to be conveyed by some physical medium: material links of cause and effect that vary in response to variation …

January Is Math and Wellness Month

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:52:00 -0800

(Previously)

There is a time to tackle ambitious intellectual projects and go on grand political crusades, and tour the podcast circuit marketing both.

That time is not January. January is for:

sleeping (at the same time every night)
running, or long walks
reflecting on our obligations under the moral law …

Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:54:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

There is an important difference between having a utility function defined over a statistical model's performance against specific real-world data (even if another mind with different values would be interested in different data), and having a utility function …

And You Take Me the Way I Am

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 21:39:00 -0800

Mark Twain wrote that honesty means you don't have to remember anything. But it also means you don't have to worry about making mistakes.

If you said something terrible that made everyone decide that you're stupid and evil, there's no sense in futilely protesting that "that's not what you meant …

Scoring 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Predictions

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 18:23:00 -0800

I was curious to see how various prognosticators—specifically, FiveThirtyEight and The Economist's models, and the PredictIt prediction markets—did on predicting the state-by-state (plus the District of Columbia) results of the recent U.S. presidential election.

There are various ways to evaluate probabilistic predictions, but my …

Message Length

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 22:52:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Someone is broadcasting a stream of bits. You don't know why. A 500-bit-long sample looks like this:

01100110110101011011111100001001110000100011010001101011011010000001010000001010
10100111101000101111010100100101010010101010101000010100110101010011111111010101
01010101011111110101011010101101111101010110110101010100000001101111100000111010
11100000000000001111101010110101010101001010101101010101100111001100001100110101
11111111111111111100011001011010011010101010101100000010101011101101010010110011
11111010111101110100010101010111001111010001101101010101101011000101100000101010
10011001101010101111...

The thought occurs to you to do Science to it—to ponder if there's some way you could better predict what …

Msg Len

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 20:35:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

I'll be brief, omit needless words.
Intelligence is prediction is compression because
Compression is finding a code that makes the data shorter
And codeword lengths are probabilities
So codes are probability distributions
But probability distributions are prediction strategies.

Maybe Lying Can’t Exist?!

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 17:36:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

How is it possible to tell the truth?

I mean, sure, you can use your larynx to make sound waves in the air, or you can draw a sequence of symbols on paper, but sound waves and paper-markings can't be true, any more than a …

Coffee Is for Coders

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 19:29:00 -0700

No one cares if you're in pain;
They only want results.
Everywhere this law's the same,
In startups, schools, and cults.
A child can pull the heartstrings
Of assorted moms and voters,
But your dumb cries are all in vain,
And coffee is for coders.

No one cares how hard …

The Parable of the Scorpion and the Fox

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 22:12:00 -0700

In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, a scorpion was creepy-crawling along a riverbank, wondering how to get to the other side. It came across an animal that could swim: some versions of the tale say it was a fox, others report a quokka. I'm going to assume …

Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 23:03:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

"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?"

The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle calls for us to posit "consciousness …

Optimized Propaganda with Bayesian Networks: Comment on “Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models”

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 19:45:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Derek Powell, Kara Weisman, and Ellen M. Markman's "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models: A Study of Beliefs Surrounding Vaccination Decisions" (a conference paper from CogSci 2018) represents an exciting advance in marketing research, showing how to use causal graphical models to study why ordinary …

Philosophy in the Darkest Timeline: Basics of the Evolution of Meaning

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:52:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

A decade and a half from now, during the next Plague, you're lucky enough to have an underground bunker to wait out the months until herd immunity. Unfortunately, as your food stocks dwindle, you realize you'll have to make a perilous journey out to the …

Comment on “Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization”

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 20 May 2020 11:04:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

In "Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization" (due in a forthcoming issue of the philosophy-of-science journal Synthese), James Owen Weatherall and Cailin O'Connor propose a possible answer to the question of why people form factions that disagree on multiple subjects.

The existence of persistent disagreements is already kind …

Zoom Technologies, Inc. vs. the Efficient Markets Hypothesis

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 10 May 2020 23:00:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

The efficient markets hypothesis (or EMH for short) is the idea "that asset prices reflect all available information". Price changes in a liquid market are understood to be unpredictable—anti-inductive. Suppose some stock has the ticker symbol LW. If you want to buy a …

Relationship Outcomes Are Not Particularly Sensitive to Small Variations in Verbal Ability

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 16:28:00 -0800

After a friendship-ending fight, you feel an impulse to push through the pain to do an exhaustive postmortem of everything you did wrong in that last, fatal argument—you could have phrased that more eloquently, could have anticipated that objection, could have not left so much "surface area" open to …

Don’t Double-Crux With Suicide Rock

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 11:02:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Honest rational agents should never agree to disagree.

This idea is formalized in Aumann's agreement theorem and its various extensions (we can't foresee to disagree, uncommon priors require origin disputes, complexity bounds, &c.), but even without the sophisticated mathematics, a basic intuition should be clear …

Stupidity and Dishonesty Explain Each Other Away

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 11:21:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

The explaining-away effect (or, collider bias; or, Berkson's paradox) is a statistical phenomenon in which statistically independent causes with a common effect become anticorrelated when conditioning on the effect.

In the language of d-separation, if you have a causal graph X → Z ← Y, then …

Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 21:09:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Reply to: Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge-Cases

Eliezer Yudkowsky, listing advantages of a "wizard's oath" ethical code of "Don't say things that are literally false", writes—

Repeatedly asking yourself of every sentence you say aloud to another person, "Is this statement actually and …

Relevance Norms; Or, Gricean Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 22:18:00 -0800

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Reply to: Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms

Chris Leong, following John Nerst, distinguishes between two alleged discursive norm-sets. Under "decoupling norms", it is understood that claims should be considered in isolation; under "contextualizing norms", it is understood that those making claims should also address potential implications …

Algorithms of Deception!

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 19 Oct 2019 11:06:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

I want you to imagine a world consisting of a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables \(X_i\), and two computer programs.

The first program is called Reporter. As input, it accepts a bunch of the random variables \(X_i\). As output, it returns a …

Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:04:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

In "Against Lie Inflation", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that the word "lie" should be reserved for knowingly-made false statements, and not used in an expanded sense that includes unconscious motivated reasoning. Alexander argues that the expanded sense draws the category boundaries of "lying" too …

Hobbyhorse Apology

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 22:29:00 -0700

If I sound like a broken record about school or whatever ("or whatever"), it's only because the dominant ideological trends of Society are engaging in conceptual gerrymandering that artificially raises the message length of my existence, such that I need to yell constantly in order to maintain my measure in …

Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 21:16:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Followup to: What Evidence Filtered Evidence?

In "What Evidence Filtered Evidence?", we are asked to consider a scenario involving a coin that is either biased to land Heads 2/3rds of the time, or Tails 2/3rds of the time. Observing Heads is 1 bit …

Feature Reduction

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 14:56:00 -0700

(looking at baby/toddler photos a year apart) "How does he look so different and yet so the same at the same time?"

"Just in case that was non-rhetorical, the answer is that your brain evolved to be good at factorizing overall appearance into orthogonal 'personal appearance' and 'age appearance' …

Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 19:43:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundaries?

Or there might be social or psychological forces anchoring word usages on identifiable Schelling points that are easy for different people to agree upon, even at the cost of some statistical "fit" ...

The one comes to you and …

Lock Contention

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 14:13:00 -0700

"We really need another bookcase."

"I'm not thinking about that right now. But like, if you got another bookcase, I wouldn't object."

"Where would we put it?"

"I'm also not thinking about that right now, but I've already started speaking a sentence in response to your question, so I might …

Being Wrong Doesn't Mean You're Stupid and Bad (Probably)

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 16:58:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Sometimes, people are reluctant to admit that they were wrong about something, because they're afraid that "You are wrong about this" carries inextricable connotations of "You are stupid and bad." But this behavior is, itself, wrong, for at least two reasons.

First, because it's evidential …

Inconsiderate

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 02:19:00 -0700

"The sink is full and it's your turn to do the dishes! Ugh, why are you so inconsiderate of others?!"

"Not true! Note that the dishes pile up just as badly when you're away."

"So?"

"So, it's not that I'm inconsiderate of others; I'm inconsiderate towards people in the future …

The Univariate Fallacy

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 14:43:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

There's this statistical phenomenon where it's possible for two multivariate distributions to overlap along any one variable, but be cleanly separable when you look at the entire configuration space at once. This is perhaps easiest to see with an illustrative diagram—

The denial of this …

“But It Doesn’t Matter”

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 31 May 2019 19:06:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

If you ever find yourself saying, "Even if Hypothesis H is true, it doesn't have any decision-relevant implications," you are rationalizing! The fact that H is interesting enough for you to be considering the question at all (it's not some arbitrary trivium like the 1923th …

Minimax Search and the Structure of Cognition!

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 19 May 2019 22:17:00 -0700

(This is a blog post adaptation of a talk I gave at !!Con West 2019!)

It all started at my old dayjob, where some of my coworkers had an office chess game going. I wanted to participate and be part of the team, but I didn't want to invest the …

Group Theory for Wellness I

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 18 May 2019 15:07:00 -0700

(Part of Math and Wellness Month.)

Groups! A group is a set with an associative binary operation such that there exists an identity element and inverse elements! And my favorite thing about groups is that all the time that you spend thinking about groups, is time that you're not thinking …

Forgive or Forget ("Or", Not "And"): A Trade-Off in Wellness Engineering

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 11 May 2019 18:03:00 -0700

Forgiveness is an important input into Wellness, but contrary to popular belief, Forgiveness is incompatible with Forgetting. You can't just Forgive in general, you have to Forgive some specific sin in particular—but a vague description of a particular sin still corresponds to a vast space of possible sins matching …

The Typical Set

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 05 May 2019 16:57:00 -0700

(Part of Math and Wellness Month.)

Say you have a biased coin that comes up Heads 80% of the time. (I like to imagine that the Heads side has a portrait of Bernoulli.) Flip it 100 times. The naïve way to report the outcome—just report the sequences of Headses …

May Is Math and Wellness Month

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 01 May 2019 02:56:00 -0700

(Previously, previously.)

Do you ever spend five months in constant emotional pain waging a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful behind-the-scenes email campaign with the aim of securing a public clarification of a trivial philosophy-of-language issue because you're terrified that your robot cult's inability to correct politically-motivated philosophy errors implies that you've …

Where to Draw the Boundaries?

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 14:34:00 -0700

(originally published at Less Wrong)

Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundary?

Figuring where to cut reality in order to carve along the joints—figuring which things are similar to each other, which things are clustered together: this is the problem worthy of a rationalist. It is what people should …

Another Desperate, Fervent Wish for Star Trek: Discovery

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 17 Nov 2018 15:57:00 -0800

(Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.)

future-timeskip episode in which the AI from TOS S2E24 "The Ultimate Computer" starts taking over the galaxy, until being countered by an upload superorganism composed of copies of Lt. Cmdr. Sylvia Tilly

Concerning Loyalty and Revenge

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 05:00:00 -0700

Retarget loyalty intuitions onto specific humans (never ideologies or collective identities). Retarget revenge intuitions onto patterns of incentives (never specific humans).

The Right to Life, Conjugated

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 05:00:00 -0700

She's a ward of the state; you have an inalienable right to live; I'm literally more useful alive rather than dead with respect to the values of powerful coalitions.

Concerning Motives for Cooperation

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 05:00:00 -0700

Always be peaceful and tell the truth to your friends because you love and trust them. Always be peaceful and tell the truth to cops, schoolteachers, psychiatrists, CPS agents, &c. because you're outgunned and bad at lying. Don't be confused about your reasons for doing things, even if you always …

Concerning Frame Control Via Salient Scenarios

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 05:00:00 -0700

"We need to institutionalize people in order to prevent them from hurting themselves" has the same memetic-superweapon structure as "We need to torture terrorists to get them to tell us where they've hidden the suitcase nuke." The scenario as stated obviously has consequentialist merit (death is worse than prison, megadeaths …

Tit for Half-Tat

Zack M. Davis — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 05:00:00 -0700

"—but I am not a vengeful man."

"..."

"I mean, I'm proportionately vengeful, within the bounds of the moral law."

Object vs. Meta Golden Rule

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 07 Jul 2018 17:55:00 -0700

"I know it might seem like a lot to ask, but I wouldn't hesitate to do the same for you if our positions were reversed."

"I don't doubt that. But I can't help but notice that it would be easier for you to say it if the fact that they …

Patches Welcome

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 22 May 2018 21:07:00 -0700

"You look happy. Good day at work?"

"Yes, the open-source library we're depending on didn't have the functionality we need."

"That sounds like a bad thing."

"No, I mean, it didn't."

April Is Separability Month

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 05:00:00 -0700

It is now April! Did you know that April is one of the months in which every compact metric space is separable?

Proof. Let it be April, and let M be a compact metric space. Because M is compact, it is totally bounded, so for all n∈ℕ, we can …

Best Alternative to a Negotiated Ontology

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 18:23:00 -0800

"I can't stand being apart any longer. You win. Whatever your demands are, I'll meet them."

"I want you to stop thinking of everything as a negotiation and relate to me as a human being."

"Okay, maybe not that one."

Binge-Purge

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 21:42:00 -0800

$ history | grep freeciv
  605  freeciv
  606  sudo apt-get install freeciv
  607  sudo apt-get remove freeciv
  652  rm -rf ~/.freeciv/
  706  sudo apt-get install freeciv
  722  sudo apt-get remove freeciv
  735  rm -rf ~/.freeciv/
  752  sudo apt-get install freeciv
  754  sudo apt-get remove freeciv
  768  rm -rf ~/.freeciv/
  785  history | grep …

Some Shuffling Required

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 19:37:00 -0800

"I'm going to need about 600 bits of entropy for this. Can you go the store and pick up some playing cards for me? Let's see, six hundred divided by log-base-two fifty-two-factorial—yes, three packs should be enough."

(Later, opening them ...)

"What the—!?"

"Give Anything"

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 01:02:00 -0800

As a freshman on my high school's cross country team, our captain told me that to be a good runner, you needed to love pain.

I objected: a great runner could love to race, I said, and endure the pain only for the sake of competing and winning.

It's only …

Some Excuse for 2017 Year in Reverse

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 20:28:00 -0800

(Previously, previously, previously, previously.)

Did you know that 2017 is prime?? This blog saw 33 posts and 27 comments last year (down a lot from the year before because of reasons). Here are some posts I liked perhaps somewhat more than the others: 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 …

A Desperate, Fervent Wish for Star Trek: Discovery

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 05:00:00 -0800

(Previously, previously, previously, previously on Star Trek: An Algorithmic Lucidity.)

Sylvia Tilly/Reg Barclay time-travel romance

make it happen, CBS

Courtship Gift

Zack M. Davis — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 05:00:00 -0800

"Plastic flowers? Seriously?"

"They'll last forever! Much like my love for you."

Happy Armistice Day from An Algorithmic Lucidity

Zack M. Davis — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 12:19:00 -0800

Today, we celebrate the end of the first of no more than three world wars.

Cranberry Bliss!

Zack M. Davis — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 20:51:00 -0800

(Previously.)

It's the tenth day of the third November of my life (that I am willing to admit to), and I am determined to wring some sort of high-sounding interpretation out of the cool air and damp sidewalks: perhaps a contrast, something about the events that directly prompt fundamental life …

Lipschitz

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:20:00 -0700

—and the moment or more than a moment when the dam breaks, when the damned break and the void inside their skulls is filled (the atmosphere rushing in quickly, but not so quickly that one couldn't sense its motion) with the terror that is knowledge of the specter of continuity …

Some Excuse for a RustConf 2017 Travelogue

Zack M. Davis — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 23:12:00 -0700

(Previously, previously on An Algorithmic Lucidity.)

Wow, has it already been a year since last RustConf?—give or take the exact date of the event sliding a bit between years—and give a month-and-a-half of procrastination before being truly struck by the mounting realization that my opportunity to blog something …

At a Party

Zack M. Davis — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 05:00:00 -0700

At a party! A party with the empirical cluster in personspace! I used to treasure these nights, which seemed then to sparkle with the promise of another world, back during the golden age. The atmosphere feels different now. The same scene, with much of the same people and operating at …

Trade Secret

Zack M. Davis — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 05:00:00 -0700

"The key to retail success is low prices."

"And you make up for that by selling a lot more stuff?"

"Oh, wow, I hadn't thought of that," she said, with seemingly genuine surprise. "Actually, we make up for it by low wages." She patted his arm. "But your idea might …

An Algorithmic Lucidity

Contra Pace on When to Apologize

Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing

Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude's Constitution

Prologue to Terrified Comments on Claude's Constitution

What Even Is This Timeline

Hazards of Selection Effects on Approved Information

Disagreement Comes From the Dark World

College Was Not That Terrible Now That I'm Not That Crazy

The Best Lack All Conviction: A Confusing Day in the AI Village

"Yes, and—" Requires the Possibility of "No, Because—"

The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps

Just Make a New Rule!

Comment on “Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation”

Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant

The Value of a Comment Is Determined by Its Text, Not Its Authorship

Discontinuous Linear Functions?!

The End of the Movie: SF State's 2024 Putnam Competition Team, A Retrospective

Recruitment Advertisements for the 2024 Putnam Competition at San Francisco State University

Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”

The Standard Analogy

Should I Finish My Bachelor's Degree?

Ironing Out the Squiggles

Adversarial Examples: A Problem

The Evolution of Humans Was Net-Negative for Human Values

"Deep Learning" Is Function Approximation

A Surprising Development in the Study of Multi-layer Parameterized Graphical Function Approximators

And All the Shoggoths Merely Players

On the Contrary, Steelmanning Is Normal; ITT-Passing Is Niche

Alignment Implications of LLM Successes: a Debate in One Act

Assume Bad Faith

“Is There Anything That’s Worth More”

Lack of Social Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue

“Justice, Cherryl.”

I.

Bayesian Networks Aren’t Necessarily Causal

“You’ll Never Persuade People Like That”

“Rationalist Discourse” Is Like “Physicist Motors”

Conflict Theory of Bounded Distrust

Aiming for Convergence Is Like Discouraging Betting

Summary

Comment on “Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society”

Plea Bargaining

Comment on “Deception as Cooperation”

Feature Selection

Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬

Reply to Nate Soares on Dolphins

Beauty Is Truthiness, Truthiness Beauty?

Communication Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs

January Is Math and Wellness Month

Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception

And You Take Me the Way I Am

Scoring 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Predictions

Mathematical Sidebar

Message Length

Msg Len

Maybe Lying Can’t Exist?!

Coffee Is for Coders

The Parable of the Scorpion and the Fox

Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle

Optimized Propaganda with Bayesian Networks: Comment on “Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models”

Philosophy in the Darkest Timeline: Basics of the Evolution of Meaning

Comment on “Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization”

Zoom Technologies, Inc. vs. the Efficient Markets Hypothesis

Relationship Outcomes Are Not Particularly Sensitive to Small Variations in Verbal Ability

Don’t Double-Crux With Suicide Rock

Stupidity and Dishonesty Explain Each Other Away

Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think

Relevance Norms; Or, Gricean Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary

Algorithms of Deception!

Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist

Hobbyhorse Apology

Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists

Feature Reduction

Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests

Lock Contention

Being Wrong Doesn't Mean You're Stupid and Bad (Probably)

Inconsiderate

The Univariate Fallacy

“But It Doesn’t Matter”