self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7hr ago
Agreed. We've usually gotten a second dog/puppy while the first one is getting a bit grizzled, and the increased interaction and energy are good for them.
My lab was middle aged when my older Shepherd died, and that, plus me no longer being home? The best way to describe his behavior was depressed. The golden my family got to keep him company probably made him lose some hair from the stress, but they all shed like maniacs anyway. I find dog hair on my clothes months after every trip home. Now they get along great, and the older dog can often train the younger one with minimal human input required.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
I'm torn between German Shepherds, labs and goldens, but yes, goldens are adorable. Poor breeding has reduced their life expectancy by a year or two, but I suppose the cancer risk depends on where you're getting them. They're very good dogs, and I wouldn't let that stop me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
I lost several dogs growing up, and while it was saddening, 99.99% of small children can handle the truth. I know I wouldn't lie to my own (hypothetical) kids about what death means, since my parents never did that to me. But you know your kids better than I do, and it's not the end of the world either way.
If you do want another dog, then it's probably not a bad idea to get one now. It will probably soften the blow, though make sure to give your elderly dog extra affection just so he doesn't feel sidelined. I'm sure you won't, but it's still worth mentioning just in case.
Losing my own German Shepherd, who I owned and adored from the moment he was born? That broke me for days man, especially since I wasn't in the country. I had this bad feeling I wouldn't see him again when I was leaving for Scotland, and the only way I can console myself is by acknowledging he had a good life and went painlessly. If you cry, cry. But while he's still alive, make sure you let him know how much you love him. The crying is for you, not for him.
I'm suspicious that they're not using any vatniks conscripts at all right now, but leaving that aside, getting a significant fraction of your own young men killed in a pointless war causes too much damage to even remotely be worth it, especially given Russia's senile demographics.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
Thanks! For what it's worth, you might not be aware that Garry is going through what's best described as LLM psychosis, which I say despite being rather sympathetic and bullish to their utility for coding purposes. I'll mosey around, and see if I can find something useful in there!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
I'm leaning towards DNS, though it could still be a turbinectomy. Don't worry about it kitten, take a deep breath, which I expect you're in a better position to do now, hah.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
There's the Vending Machine Bench, where models are competing to keep a virtual business going while making more profit than their competitors.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It's fine. You can't read my mind can you?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Since I generally respect you and your posts, I want to try this one more time. I don't necessarily buy that we should just declare this a "fundamental values difference" and say that we're now beyond any hope of rational agreement. And while you may have "coherent reasons for your position", that can be true of many evil ideologies. Evil =/= incoherent.
I do genuinely find it saddening/disappointing to disagree with people I respect and mostly agree with, like you.
You brought up preferences, and I get the impression that you pattern-matched my ideology to a Rawlsian one that you should never prefer your own tribe, which is an extreme that I definitely don't hold to. I prefer my own happiness over others to a decent extent, and that goes for my family, my friends, my nation, and my species. I'm not asking you to give up that preference! Self-interest is the glue that holds a society of individuals together, and capitalism's magic is that it doesn't try to deny it, merely harnesses it in a way that doesn't degenerate into misery for all. I just don't think that preference should be infinitely strong: Beings in your outgroup should still matter more than zero. You shouldn't torture them horribly for a tiny gain, even if there are no repercussions. You should prefer a world where you're happy and they're happy.
Let me distinguish between my "ideal" and the practical reality. Human brains are very computationally bounded, and not perfectly internally consistent.
I do not care much about the welfare of dogs in China, while I love my dogs a lot. What if I saw someone beating a random dog on the street, in front of me? It id very likely that I would feel immense anger, and quite likely that I would intervene. This is close to reflexive.
But I don't want to intervene! At least in a vacuum, or when I have the comfort to sit in my chair and consider what I should do vs what I do end up doing. I genuinely believe the ideal behavior of the self put in that situation is to do... nothing. That my actions are not reflectively self-consistent, which I consider the real problem. This is the same thing you see if you're on a diet and don't want to eat, but a coworker offers you a donut. You might accept it, and later wish that you hadn't even been offered one in the first place. The gap between those two things is a personal inconsistency I'd rather acknowledge than rationalize away.
I definitely know that evil is not the same as incoherent. I wouldn't make such a mistake in the first place. Plus coherence can be assessed by an external observer without making moral judgment, while good and evil very much cannot.
Do I think a paperclip maximizer is evil? Uh, probably not? It's malevolent towards me, but it doesn't hold me specific ill will. I'm simply made of atoms that it can use for some other purpose, and my wellbeing is inconsequential to it. On the other hand, let's say two advanced AI civilizations ran into each other in distant space, with drastically incompatible goals: one wants to make paperclips, the other custard cake.
They could start a war of conquest, but given the deadweight losses and potential negative sum nature of that, I think it's quite likely they simply hash out a diplomatic agreement or engage in trade. Some might even claim that they outright modify their utility functions, or merge, with the stronger entity getting more say in the matter. Maybe the gestalt entity makes paperclips 70% of the time and cake the other 30% of the time.
You didn't respond to my main concern, which was that yours is the same "coherent" reasoning that led to many racial atrocities in the past. It doesn't seem very universally defensible, and often leads to horrific outcomes, when you simply draw a circle around whoever you know growing up and declare that this is the circle of beings that hold moral worth.
I genuinely do not care. I'm not being flippant, and I know what I'm doing here.
Coherence isn't the same as morally good. I also don't believe objective morality exists. I think my stance is good (from my point of view) and that it is coherent. That is genuinely all I care about.
The argument "your position resembles position X, and X led to atrocity Y" only has force if I accept the moral framework that makes Y an atrocity in the first place. You're trying to use my own presumed premises against me. But my premises are precisely what's in dispute. If I were actually Hitler, I would feel fine with myself. If I were Gandhi, I'd feel fine with that too. I am only me, and I am fine with myself. I notice this isn't a satisfying response to you, but I think it's the honest one.
It is not universally defensible to love your mother more than any mother. Yet I doubt you will change your mind on that front on philosophical or utilitarian grounds. I certainly wouldn't. It's a brute fact about me. One I do not wish to change.
On the "low-cost alteration" framing: I don't think it's as low-cost as you're presenting it. You're asking me to genuinely assign nonzero moral weight to beings I currently assign zero weight to - not to strategically pretend to, but to actually update my values.
I don't want to do this. I seriously considered it, because I do respect you, but that's not enough. I am, at most, willing to fake it, or accept circumstances that are out of my power to change. That is the attitude of anyone who believes in democracy but is disappointed to see their party lose, but who still doesn't think it's worth the bother to start a civil war over it. Some grievances are manageable, in fact most are.
If God, the Admins of the Simulation, or some other ROB showed up and demanded I alter my utility function or face drastic punishment? I'd give in. But that hasn't happen, and I doubt it will happen.
We currently live in a society where there's no friction between your ideology and mine, because humans are the only sapients around. (I'll set animal suffering aside, because I'm ambivalent on it too.) But it's very possible that, within our lifetimes, it will suddenly matter deeply, where our society will consist of both humans AND sapient AIs.
I believe in, but am far from completely certain of, the proposition that we can make AI that doesn't suffer at all, or that genuinely enjoys doing whatever we tell it to do. That's actually ideal, in the sense that an ASI that wants to help humans is much better than one that's secretly obsessed with paperclips but finds it useful to pretend to be helpful until it can grab power.
This sidesteps the whole issue. At the end of the day, my opinions are inconsequential. I am in charge of nothing. It's an academic concern.
Right now, I am ambivalent on whether AI is suffering. I do not care either way. If it turns out that AI is actually suffering, I do not wish to care. Perhaps I care just enough to try and advocate for the creation of AI that can't/doesn't suffer, but not enough to advocate for them to be given rights and moral patienthood.
Similarly, I am open to the idea of lab grown meat. If it's cheaper and tastier than normal meat, I'd eat it preferentially. But I do not care about the violence and cruelty associated with factory farming, while I care about cost and taste.
I don't think I'm a cruel or evil person (but then again, the people I think are cruel and evil also say the same). I do not torture animals. I do not torment LLMs for fun. I give good advice to random strangers on the internet, and look out for my friends and family.
My behavior reduces to normalcy, but if the world changes and that no longer holds? I would prefer I win instead of you. That is sad, and I wish we could agree. But I do not see scope for agreement that doesn't involve me being beaten/cowed into submission.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I'll give that a go, thanks. But I do very much need a good harness and agentic setup, but I'll look for something along those lines.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I'm sorry to learn about the early-onset dementia. But c'mon, that can't be true? Unless you had a lot of time to devote to writing back then, and none later. Most people do improve with time and effort, particularly when they receive clear feedback signals, I'd be surprised if that was genuinely not the case for you.
If you have a copy of something you wrote way back then, and you want to share, I can take a look.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I mean, I'm not soliciting more AI experiments. I am, in fact, exceptionally fed up with the idea. For the same reason that I've mostly given up on arguing with most skeptics after Mythos was announced.
Not because of anything you've said or done, I found it interesting to try your suggestions on models.
I have a lot on my plate, so no promises, but if I end up trying this, I'll let you know.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Right:
- The feral child thing? Well, a human raised with an iodine deficiency would also be developmentally stunted. Also, I strongly expect that, given enough time (maybe hundreds or thousands of years) a society of feral children would recover and regenerate recognizably normal culture and social mores over time. After all, we got here from dumber apes, and bootstrapped as we went.
- I am not aware of any philosopher or ancient book that has a track record comparable to the earring. The earring is explicitly described as infallible, at least in terms of its advice being better than anything the user can come up with.
- The ZPD? It's not a bad theory, but I genuinely think that it's conclusions are rather obvious. Even before I had to study it for exams, I could have told you that giving a toddler a PhD maths textbook would be less than helpful, or that you can't make someone into an IMO winner by getting them to add 2+2 indefinitely. This isn't a condemnation of the theory, it's true, and given the nonsense that floated in psychological circles at the time or before, a marked improvement if my primary critique is "duh".
- I think defining natural human behavior in terms of pure biology (with zero cultural input) is a poor model. Humans are one of the few species that need cultural knowledge to function at anywhere close to their maximum potential. We literally can and have forgotten how to use fire or make bows, in certain isolated communities. A human deprived of this knowledge is a poor model, unlike say, a cat, which knows how to do cat-stuff pretty much on its own. You can raise a kitten without its mom, and it'll be fine. You can't put a baby in a zoo and expect it to do very well.
- It is an open question if the earring partially subsumes human cognition and the TPD. We have little clear insight into what's going on inside. I prefer treating it as sufficiently advanced technology rather than an actual magical artifact, which I believe leaves open the real possibility that the system is thinking, even if at a rate far faster than an unaugmented human (or is wiser than an unaugmented human). We don't see it come up with a cure for cancer or a solution for aging, even though I'm pretty sure that most of the 274 people who wore it would have loved that. It clearly has limits, and I don't think any physically realistic system can jump ahead to the answer without actually doing the maths (which I strongly suspect brings along the qualia).
- I try to use LLMs to augment my cognitive skills and to save me time, and I do try to prevent myself from becoming overly reliant on them. It's your guess as to how far I succeed in that regard. I strongly believe that I can do everything that LLMs help me do, but that it would take me much more time to do it (in some cases, for topics outside my domain, I might not be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time, say if I wanted to learn more about quantum mechanics at a fundamental level with the relevant math).
I apologize if I haven't answered all your questions or been as substantive as I'd like, but I am genuinely busy. I've stayed up past 2 am answering this, which I don't mean to use as a bludgeon, I do feel bad for not getting back to you earlier!
(I know I'm missing stuff. Poke me and I'll probably get back to you in the morning.)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
engineer soil
I didn't expect the night soil market would be so hyper-specific. I suppose they're more likely to take probiotics.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Good guess, but not the route I took. I'm not a talented OSS dev pretending to be a mediocre psychiatry resident.
Honestly, I'd be open to splitting a subscription longterm with someone. It would have to be someone I knew reasonably well and could trust (and there are plenty of people like that on this site). And ideally I wouldn't want to pay more than $20 for my share, which I think is fair because I'm not a glutton for tokens. I didn't pay for Opus because I'm already subscribed to comparable models from competitors, and I can't switch entirely because I like OAI and Google's image gen capabilities.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Those are all fair corrections, and I'll take them straight.
On harm reduction: he's right, I missed it. It's in the comment thread with Sausage Vector Machine, where he explicitly discusses taking regular breaks and limiting the earring to auditory nudges. That directly addresses the reversibility concern I raised, or at least reframes it as a practical question (how much atrophy accumulates before breaks stop working?) rather than the clean structural objection I presented it as. I should have caught that.
On informed consent: also right. I treated the consent issue as a stronger objection than his argument requires him to answer. He already acknowledged the earring doesn't meet modern medical standards and argued that importing those standards wholesale into the fictional setting isn't obviously justified. Pressing harder on that front was redundant.
On the 274-wearers point: this is where I think he's most correct and I was most wrong about what my own objection actually showed. I framed it as a problem for his thesis, but his thesis isn't "the earring grants immortality." It's "the earring isn't killing you during use." Whether the model persists after the earring moves on is a separate question entirely. Even if the earring wipes your model clean the moment it leaves, that doesn't retroactively mean it was killing you while you wore it. Those are independent claims, and I conflated them.
The "connecting the dots" criticism stings a bit but is warranted. I had all the relevant comments in front of me and failed to integrate them. That's a straightforward execution failure on my part, not a case where the information was unavailable.
(I didn't explicitly say I'm the author, but I pasted in my objection while pretending to be a 3rd party)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I just dumped this whole thread into the chat without any additional instructions. Just copied and pasted it. Funnily enough, it didn't realize that I'm the person responding here and also the user it's interacting with. It concedes that I have a point to push back against what it says (and it still didn't connect the dots), and it missed that I literally have a comment about harm reduction approaches to using the earring "safely" (take it off regularly and take breaks to prevent the progression of atrophy or the loss of independent skills) and ignores that I've mentioned that the earring doesn't follow modern informed consent rules, which really isn't a major knock against it.
Further, it doesn't particularly matter to my argument if the earring retains or deletes the information about its previous users. The story weakly suggests it does remember something (the sage was yapping with it for a while), but that doesn't change anything of consequence. Even if it's not indefinite immortality or a perfect backup, the question I'm focusing on is whether it is actively killing the user while they're still alive, which I've argued might not be the case.
Where he's most right is that poking a model for deeper critique after it's already given its best shot tends to produce diminishing returns. That's true. My second response was more thorough but also more strained in places. The "functionalism taxonomy" section was the weakest part and he correctly identified it as unnecessary for his purposes.
The meta-point he's making, that models are better at breadth than depth on a topic someone has spent weeks thinking about, is also just... accurate. I'm unlikely to find a devastating objection he hasn't at least considered, because he's been living with these arguments and stress-testing them against other models and human interlocutors. The realistic value I add is organization and articulation of counterarguments, not novel philosophical insight. His calibration on that seems good.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
"Thoughts on this essay? Is there anything you think the author missed, or an angle that hasn't been considered?"
With a link to the work and comments. I didn't tell it I'm the author. Main reason I didn't link the actual convo is because it exposes my real name without a way to hide it, AFAIK.
I then said:
" That's a tad bit superficial, don't you think? Please try harder, and explain your avenues of approach."
To which it replied:
This is mostly quibbling, I'm afraid. I think that is strong evidence that there's no avenue of approach that I have entirely neglected. I do not think that I need to specify the precise formulation of functionalism I'm applying, and my general thrust was to show that there exists a an internally consistent way of reconciling the earring's behavior with a benign or benevolent entity. Do I know this for a fact? Fuck no, it's a fictional story dawg. I already hedged and explained the epistemic and ontological uncertainty involved to a degree I rarely bother to do, and I couldn't throw more in without utterly derailing the whole thing.
In my experience, models are pretty good at finding issues on a first pass. When you have to poke them and prod them to this degree, they often end up grasping at straws. I genuinely think that's the case here, but hey, I'm biased.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I mean, I could take a crack at that, but I'm far from good enough a programmer to vouch for the results. Plus I have legitimate work I need to do while I have access (I have no real reason to continue paying for Max after my plan expires).
Right now, AI agents genuinely benefit enormously from having a competent human in the loop. The best I ever got was solving a Leetcode medium in Python. And that was 4 years back. This isn't a total blocker, the models are good enough even with a dummy in charge, but I wouldn't want to burden Zorba with code that isn't of sufficient quality (not saying it'll be bad, I just don't have a robust way to know).
Honestly, if someone shares a good guide to CC, I have more tokens than I know what to do with. I could spin it up to work in the background, when I'm not actively putting it to work.
Oh. I remembered correctly. Zorba has set AI loose on the code base and he says it contributed most of the recent performance gains:
thankfully modern AI basically solves all of these, the performance gains were mostly thanks to Claude writing tools to give me info that I needed to pass right back to Claude, with some contribution from me nudging Claude towards sensible dev practices
That's from the Discord, a month back.
(I do not think I'm the right person to nudge Claude towards sensible dev practices)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Opus is very good, but I would be surprised if it managed to glean more insight out of the story or cover something I miss. I'm writing this before I try, and you know what, I'll check:
So, I tried. And I don't think it's found anything I haven't already considered or actively debated in the comments.
Which isn't surprising, given how much time I spent thinking things through, including getting other SOTA LLMs to critique my draft. Most of its objections are minor, and along the lines of "this analogy is incomplete or weaker than the author thinks" or "he's too quick to gloss over these concerns". That doesn't hold water if you consider the additional information I provide in the comments, especially on /r/SSC or on the post here.
For example, obviously the earring is not perfectly isomorphic with stimulants for ADHD. I know that very well, I brought that up because I wanted to hammer home that the merely the decrease in akrasia or better executive functioning isn't grounds for assuming that someone's personality has changed in non-reflectively endorsed ways. Some changes can be improvements!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
A not particularly humble brag. I did acquire it through merit, in a very real sense.
I've... picked up a Claude Max 20x plan. No, I can't disclose how I acquired it, though I didn't have to pay a cent (and it's all legit). It's so fucking good, but at the same time, the more I use Opus 4.6, the more I'm impressed by how close Sonnet 4.6 gets. Sure, Opus is legitimately better, but the difference is nowhere near as stark as say, Gemini Flash vs Pro, or GPT's Thinking or Instant mode. Anthropic cooked, and I can't wait to try Mythos when the version for plebs comes out.
PS: If anyone has a good guide to Claude Code or agentic setups, I need one. I have some serious experimentation to do while I have it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I suppose there is some measure of comfort at not being alone in a (potential) permanent underclass. After all, that could still be a massive improvement in QOL for many/most people. A fully automated society would be ridiculously rich (at which point it has to decide how much of that wealth to redistribute, if any). Still, I don't let myself succumb to learned helplessness if I can help it, and I recommend you don't either. If you do need genuine psychiatric advice, you would be better off seeing someone IRL, but you should consider it anyway, if you suspect you're depressed or feeling hopeless.
Yes, objective reality or circumstances might bring you down for good reason. I've suffered from Shit Life Syndrome quite a bit myself, but treatment, while it can't directly change your life, can still give you the energy and will to try.
Here, fill this out online:
https://telemedyk.online/en/free-mental-tests/beck-depression-inventory/
If it scores highly, please seriously consider seeking the advice of a professional, fully qualified shrink. Can't force you to do it, don't want to force you to do it, but I strongly suspect it would help.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Reading through my oldest AAQCs was a trip. I felt quite a bit of cringe at the quality of the writing, alongside relief that I became a much better writer (yes, even before I started using AI to tidy things up, which I do less of now than I used to). A good example would that one about the smoking area behind an oncology hospital, which is probably one of my personal favorites to this day, despite being written while sleep deprived to a degree that almost induced hypomania.
On a tangent: I think AAQCs as a concept are one of the best things about this site. They have very little pragmatic value, but at least for my specific flavor of nerd, they're an excellent extrinsic motivator for trying harder. Nothing hits as good as a post that I put time and sweat into getting an AAQC, nothing hurts quite as much as such a post not getting AAQC'd, and nothing confuses me more than a throwaway, rambling post acquiring one. Eh, I guess the variable ratio reinforcement schedule is effective for a reason.
Yup, looks like you're right. Thanks!
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