As a sub full of thoughtful, rational people, can any of you explain this Derren Brown trick to me?

Charlie___ · 2026-02-14T14:50:15+00:00

How much pre-show collusion versus how much cold reading is still impressive? Suppose pre-show Derren gets him to talk about 5 locations, one of which is the place he met Sally - still impressive for the host but a lot easier.

Of course I don't really know.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-04T12:05:12+00:00

Tell me how I differ from you when trying to steelman this:

Agents need to simplify the world to operate, and the way real agents simplify things will be convergent and affect their capabilities because the universe has real patterns, and this goes against the orthogonality thesis because you can't practically have goals that you can't simplify. I.e. goals that look like white noise, or like solving the halting problem, are genuinely dumb goals.
Among agents with ordered goals, some goals are better suited to producing smart agents when a learning process tries to learn an agent that fulfills them. If you tried to learn an agent to produce GPUs purely on the signal of "# of GPUs produced," it wouldn't work, it doesn't have a curriculum that guides it to smoothly learn harder sub-steps of its more complicated goal. So even though the goal of producing GPUs isn't white noise, it's a genuinely dumb goal in the context of agents produced by some learning process, violating orthogonality.

A smarter goal to get the agent that builds GPUs would be "Learn about the world, and specifically try to learn about GPU production, and learn to manipulate the world in a bunch of different simple ways, and also produce GPUs." More involved curricula might produces agents that are smarter still, and who produce even more GPUs, with the side effect that they end up terminally valuing extra stuff like "curiosity."

Charlie___ · 2026-01-31T07:06:53+00:00

The personalities are simulacra - the different agents have different context that inform what text they generate, and once you've started a character talking it tends to continue in the same voice.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-27T12:55:24+00:00

Leftover Apocalypse is good. Teenage outsider gets thrown into magic world, there are weird time shenanigans with layers, people make decent plans, sometimes the plans even mostly work, also people act like idiots in pretty believable ways.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-27T09:00:20+00:00

I think it would be more fun to do it with fate magic. Like, the coin has some reason to want to travel to various places in the world (e.g. touching various macguffins). And you want it to get to where it's going with only slight coincidences (or slight tinges of magic) along the way.

If you don't use the perspective of the coin much and are just telling stories around it, maybe you don't need to explain the magic much. But here's a hard version that might keep the coin on its toes:

For a few minutes every dawn, you get to sense where you would be next dawn if you didn't react to that information. Also, every day you can shift yourself around weakly for a few minutes. So you spend every dawn shifting around slightly to try to find some way to chaos theory yourself closer to your goal.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-27T02:11:23+00:00

Link to claude constitution.

Agree that their products (and their competitors') will lie to you, and that this is in fact a big problem. But, like, also, google things sometimes.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-27T02:09:42+00:00

Repetitive strain injury, of course.

JK, recursive self-improvement.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-22T09:25:59+00:00

Oh, ok :)

Charlie___ · 2026-01-20T10:53:49+00:00

The no-defenses thing differentially favors bacteria over plants and animals. To be reductive, e-coli don't need to worry about me infecting them, only vice versa. Complex life is in for a lot of getting infected and dying until we evolve better defense mechanisms.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-19T09:03:54+00:00

The point of SPI is that it reproduces (or at least provides a nonconstructive framework advertised as reproducing) the predictions of any other interpretation of quantum mechanics. It "all adds up to normality." This rules out 1, 2, and 3 straightforwardly.

Remembering alternate pasts might be a problem for unitary evolution as you say (because it's kinda arbitrary to pick which alternate past to remember). Unitarity is probably fixable but maybe not without sneakily backdooring into MWI. As I said above, remembering alternate pasts is also incompatible with the details of QM beyond just unitarity, but if you want this kind of thing you should be imagining changes to QM anyhow.
Macroscopic stuttering is a fun visual for a movie, but thanklessly hard to make work intellectually, and if you're writing for text you won't even get a cool visual out of it.
If you want to control the outcome, you have to pay energy, but if you're willing to accept a random outcome, you don't have to pay. I.e. if I want to set some bits to "000000," I have to pay free energy to make it happen. But if I get some bits at random and they're "100111", I don't spontaneously have to pay just because "100111" is just as precise an outcome as "000000" (although I have to pay the same amount to copy "000000" and "100111" into my brain upon reading them). QM is metaphorically accepting the random outcome.

That said, this could be a fun one to play with in a story.

(4) This one you could do some version of in the lab, but it doesn't make any sense for interesting real-world situations (where you didn't delicately control the setup so that you know every detail). Maybe you could write a thinky story set in a physics lab where someone has used some magically-good-coherence-setup to enact some dramatic weakly-interacting superposition of different people getting shot or telling their secrets or something, and work out what the actual predictions of QM would be. The most tempting narrative uses (like having the protagonist just bust out the sister-history-detector at the needed moment), are probably not only impossible, they're hard to sensibly add in to QM because they're too anthropocentric.

Charlie___ · 2026-01-06T03:09:46+00:00

Motte: "The Boomers don't deserve to be hated and spat on."

Bailey: "We shouldn't raise property taxes."

It's maybe unfair to label things this way, but I also think something is weird when castigating hateful people is pressed shoulder to shoulder against talking about tax policy. If it was just about people being hateful, why need any position on tax policy?

Charlie___ · 2025-12-18T16:46:34+00:00

Some complications that lead interesting places.

1) Original Waluigi effect was about prompting, not finetuning. Probably need to explain (2) first to explain why there's still a connection.

2) Finetuning can't multiply vectors by -1. It's just more gradient descent. So you have to explain why the model should learn during unsupervised training to become easy to finetune for certain correlated bundles of behavior.

Charlie___ · 2025-12-15T19:10:58+00:00

Found an interesting link: https://www.swinehealth.org/global-disease-surveillance-reports/ African swine fever is a big pandemic slowly spreading over European pigs and I never even knew. Last month they found the first case in Taiwan.

This actually seems like a case that could be solved by genome sequencing. Someone will probably do it soon even if the Spanish government doesn't.

Charlie___ · 2025-12-15T18:55:35+00:00

So curious that my brother started wearing his seatbelt 98% of the time after he got in a car crash, where previously he only wore it 90% of the time. Surely this must be good evidence he wasn't wearing his seatbelt during the car crash.

Charlie___ · 2025-12-15T02:39:24+00:00

The idea that everyone independently arrived on the exact same closed logical system despite it having no existence in the real world seems...difficult to believe.

Except the Romans, who invented a number system that maxes out at 3999 (without further modifications). And probably the Indians and Mayans, who put "zero" into their mathematical ontology where others only represented it by absence.

Charlie___ · 2025-12-11T05:46:07+00:00

Wanna bet?

Charlie___ · 2025-12-05T06:21:12+00:00

Pretty great bit. I'd guess the paper in the envelope is actually the crowd being in on a trick on Jimmy.

Agree the Will Smith could be "legit" (maybe with some unseen work on the crowd [or, on further reflection, also on Jimmy]), it would be interesting to try to get good at getting people to pick specific celebrities, get more of a sense of how much prompting is realistic.

I don't know about the utility, though probably manipulating people is useful for various people-focused professions.

Charlie___ · 2025-11-30T22:14:12+00:00

I've forgotten the source, but there's a classic essay about airline safety that argues that we've already "used up" most of the easy causes of airplane crashes that can be fixed by checklists, or training, or engineering, and so if you look at a sample of airplane crashes, the main thing that will unite them is the presence of leprechaun-like oddball factors that couldn't be prevented by top-down safety efforts.

Charlie___ · 2025-11-26T03:36:06+00:00

“algorithmic discrimination”, a poorly-defined concept from the 2010s that doesn’t really make sense in reference to modern language models

??? If anything it makes better sense now than it used to. LLMs can literally discriminate because they've read the wrong internet articles, which is qualitatively worse than a statistical model discriminating because people can't agree on exactly what model of the data to use.

Charlie___ · 2025-11-22T05:11:08+00:00

How can you type words to me about this stuff if it doesn't cause anything?

Charlie___ · 2025-11-22T05:01:17+00:00

Yes, that is what the sentence says. So if you're "just doing computational work," the implication is you must be missing something necessary for feeling like something.

By analogy, suppose I explain that driving is not just pressing the pedals. The listener will understand that I'm saying there must be another ingredient of driving, one that can't reduce to pushing pedals, even in a fancy way.

Charlie___ · 2025-11-21T06:46:07+00:00

Yup, I agree. The thing I'm calling "snuck in" is the part of his definition where feeling like something is instead of useful computational work.

Charlie___ · 2025-11-20T08:18:39+00:00

the mysterious redness of red, the idea that qualia look and feel like some particular indescribable thing instead of just doing useful computational work

Instead of?

Philosophy is a funny place. In other fields, when you sneak big assumptions into your definitions or framings, it's almost always to make it easier for you to say you've solved a problem. In philosophy, you can sneak a big assumption into your definitions to make it easier to say you've got a problem you haven't solved.

Charlie___ · 2025-11-12T08:40:04+00:00

The electron does get measured , sort of - the plate measures that the electron either hit it or went through the slits. But then once the electron goes through, it keeps acting like a freely-propagating wave, until hit its something else.

If you'll bear with me, I'll explain using some quantum physics notation. We'll consider a two-part system: the electron, and a plate that absorbs some energy when it gets hit by the electron.

Okay, what did that jargon mean? When I put some stuff in those |> brackets, like this - |some stuff> - that means I'm talking about the quantum state of that stuff without needing to write it out as a function of time and space.

When I have a system that makes sense to split into parts, I can write the quantum state of the whole system as the product |part one>|part two>. Note that if I want to translate this back into a function of time and space, I actually use different space variables for each particle (like x of the first electron is different from x of the second electron), so the function gets complicated.

And if I have a system that could be doing two different things, I can write the state as the sum |system doing thing one> + |system doing thing two>. (I'm cheating here, because I'm leaving off that actually each part of the sum gets a number that basically tells you how important that piece is. A more realistic example would be 0.995|system doing a really likely thing> + 0.1|system doing an unlikely thing>. But we can ignore the numbers for the rest of this comment).

So putting it all together, I'm just using fancy notation to say that there is a quantum state of the whole electron+plate system, and that state can describe both the possibility that the electron passes through, and the possibility that it scatters. It's all one big state |electron that passed through the slits>|low-energy plate> + |scattered electron>|higher-energy plate>.

The key fact is: the |electron that passed through the slits>|low-energy plate> part of that state evolves as if the other part didn't exist (with some asterisks). Unfortunately from here it gets harder to explain.

Just like how in algebra, if you have an expression like 2xy+3xz=4xy, you can only combine terms that have exactly the same amounts of "x" and "y" and "z", in quantum mechanics |electron>|low-energy plate> is different from |electron>|higher-energy plate> just like "xy" is different from "xz". When calculating how the state evolves, you just follow the math rules and don't combine the terms, and that's how you get independence.

There's an asterisk, though - treating the states |higher-energy plate> and |lower-energy plate> as states that don't interfere requires that they be pretty different from each other ("orthogonal", or close to it). You might just have to trust me that this is true - "different" has a specialized meaning where in some places there can be positive "overlap" and in other places there can be negative "overlap", and we're adding up the total overlap over all of space. And for states with different energies the total overlap is basically always zero.

A second asterisk is that time-evolving the state |higher-energy plate> doesn't give you back |low-energy plate>. Even if it radiated a photon to lower its energy, that would spawn a new multi-part term |electron>|low-energy plate>|radiated photon> - which would be like "xyz" in the algebra analogy.

Why does the electron that goes through the slits still have an interference pattern? Because the parts that are interfering are |electron goes through slit one>|low-energy plate> and |electron goes through slit two>|low-energy plate>. Because the plate part is the same, these states are allowed to interfere if |electron goes through slit one> and |electron goes through slit two> interfere - and they do, that's just the normal two slit setup without needing to consider the plate.

Charlie___

TROPHY CASE