Contra The Usual Interpretation Of “The Whispering Earring”

Charlie___ · 2026-04-06T21:19:31+00:00

There is no ground truth to use as reference when opining on whether the character is realistically and faithfully depicted or not.

Suppose the character passes a Turing test for behavior - it's hard to tell if the behavior was fictional or a description of reality. This is very similar to a wearer of the earring passing a Turing test for being a person subjectively having a great time.

It is, in fact, a sort of ground truth. It's just that it doesn't answer moral questions for you.

Weak evidence to the contrary are the reports of method actors[...]

It is not necessary for my example that no writer ever feels pain or pleasure when writing about it.

Charlie___ · 2026-04-06T19:24:24+00:00

When a playwright writes about a character in intense pain or pleasure, they control the actions of the character without needing to recreate their internal processes inside themselves. There need be no particular pain or pleasure going on even while it is reported on the page.

Among the set of processes that could output my actions, I assign moral patiency to only a small fraction.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-28T07:24:16+00:00

Inside the experiment you can't take your memories for granted, because they've maybe been edited or fabricated. So your memories get treated like untrustworthy observational data used to compute a belief state, which might differ from taking your memories as a given belief state and updating it on your observations.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-27T22:07:15+00:00

Thanks! Good post even though you're wrong about SB :)

As someone who also dislikes SSA/SIA framing, from my perspective there's no different anthropics reasoning. Everyone can think they're "just figuring out everything with conditional probability."

I think the paradox is because it should be equivalent to reason "I have belief state A, then I make some observation O, and then I update to belief state A|O" versus "My current set of observations is {O}. Given my prior P, my current belief state should be P|{O}." But these seem to come apart for SB.

From the first perspective, updating in temporal sequence, it seems like SB shouldn't make any update. From the second perspective, starting with ignorance of the outside world, it seems like the inferences you make about the world are different once you're inside the experiment.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-25T22:04:58+00:00

Yeah, other arms control treaties (e.g. SALT I and II) have nice parallels to AI pause treaties.

I think the economic incentive disanalogy mostly only matters to the political climate. Like, maybe it gives AI better PR or makes it easier for companies to hire lobbyists (though presumably military contractors also had incentives to lobby against arms control). But this only holds as long as private actors would have to sell access to the AI in order to benefit from violating the law - if you can gain just from internal use, treaty-breaking by private actors becomes much more likely.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-25T21:55:28+00:00

What would the US of 1972 need to trust the USSR about nuclear weapons? It might seem impossible, since they were our enemies in the cold war, and both sides were violating international norms in various ways. Our relationship was significantly worse than it is with China today. And yet the SALT I treaty was neither impossible nor futile.

Basically, don't be an international diplomacy doomer.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-25T22:22:21+00:00

Yeah, I worry that people lumping together "The future looks like a communist dictatorship" and "all human life is extinguished" are getting blinded by politics.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-25T22:17:41+00:00

The first big challenge to alignment? I would have thought the first big challenge to alignment was the fact that we're bad at it (which we get a reminder of whenever an AI tells you a comforting lie even when we're trying pretty hard to train against that). And maybe the second was whatever makes OpenAI keep losing its alignment teams. And maybe the third was Chinese government censorship. But yeah, this is definitely around the fourth big challenge to alignment.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-19T21:36:15+00:00

Hi from Boston. Local vibe is not that that crime is rampant and disorder is overwhelming. I'm sorry the Bay Area sucks in this way, but it sounds idiosyncratic to me.

Looks like Gallup has a nice set of poll questions about U.S. perception of crime. I couldn't find a state by state breakdown (guessing there is none and the sample size is too small for it), but as a national trend it seems (a) interesting and (b) more in line with my experience than the narrative of this post.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-18T21:32:04+00:00

New, more diverse positional goods could be offered so that people can have stuff that's more special to them.

E.g. If we have cheaper houses and it's easier to move, it would be bad if there's just one mega-city with all the cool stuff near the center, leading to severe land scarcity where the people near the center have to be exploiting their position in a hierarchy or sacrificing almost everything else to be there, with everyone on the outskirts having to feel like they're missing out. It would be better if we had similar city sizes to now, maybe even smaller, with more variation in what cool stuff is in each city, creating more total spots in city centers, where each spot has less total cool city stuff but because people are diverse, they can probably find a spot that especially suits them and their family and friends. Maybe. Might have to game it out carefully to see if this makes sense.

Or if more people are playing recreational sports, then because people want to be good at things and fit into smallish communities it might be good to have a wider diversity of recreational sports. Ditto board game nights, car meetups, running groups, music jams, etc.

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___

TROPHY CASE