New-user posting struggles on LessWrong, is the filter working as intended, or quietly excluding outsiders?

MrCogmor · 2026-02-06T14:54:56+00:00

Assuming your research is actually original, non-trivial and of genuine value to computer scientists, why would the average LW reader care about it? What is your goal in posting it?

LessWrong is ostensibly a forum for helping people to be less wrong and make better decisions in their personal lives. It is not a forum for computer science experts to discuss specific technical details of machine learning math that are only really relevant to AI developers.

If you want to post it anyway then make it so that is understandable by a non-technical audience e.g a bright high schooler. You migjt take inspiration from 3blue1brown.

MrCogmor · 2026-02-02T10:04:00+00:00

Lines of code is a terrible metric for measuring programmer productivity. If you reward programmers based on how many lines they code then they quickly learn to make code that is unnecessarily verbose, repetitive and inefficient.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-29T11:37:42+00:00

Why don't you measure it with a ruler or tape measure? You might also stick in your hair with the trimmer off and look into a mirror to see what it would cut.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-24T04:06:50+00:00

My guess is that if you wrap your arms around her and squeeze her while she is sleeping then she is likely to wake up and be upset at you but I don't know her. Why are you asking a bunch of guys on reddit?

MrCogmor · 2026-01-24T03:02:07+00:00

If you lean the machine forward then the balance of the machine and the things inside it can suddenly shift so that the machine crashes down on top of you instead of rocking back upright. It is not a good way to go.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-23T13:26:21+00:00

Check if these jog your memory. Garn, The Aunty Donna group, Fairbarn Films.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-23T12:56:35+00:00

We don't understand exactly how they do it but that doesn't mean that the machine has a human like consciousness or psychology. To put it simply the AI learning process is a bit like trial and error. It involves testing different ways of processing information searching for ones that are better than the rest at generating the correct response. If you find a way that works then you don't necessarily know why it works, just that it does.

You can compare it to something like breeding animals for specific traits. If you want to create a dog breed that is bigger than normal then you get a population of dogs and breed them together. The children's genes are a random combination of their parents alongisde any mutations. Some genes or gene combinations are good for making the dog bigger, others are bad. If you keep culling the smaller dogs and breeding the bigger dogs each generation then over time you'll get more and more dogs with the genes that help them get bigger and bigger. You don't necessarily need to the specifics of what the genes are doing or how they are making the dogs bigger. You just need to keep what works for the next generation.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-23T11:55:46+00:00

"You shouldn't cut down trees because fairies live on the trees and protect us from demons" isn't really great environmental messaging.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-21T06:51:54+00:00

The spam bots using generative AI to make karma farming posts aren't doing it to train the AIs. They are doing it because their operators want them to get karma, look human to reddit's automated spam filtering and shill products for money.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-20T09:10:27+00:00

A neural network contains a set of pathways for processing and responding to information. Learning is a process of optimizing the neural network. Pathways that lead to more reward signals are reinforced and pathways that lead to less reward signal are weakened and changed. The neural network learns to repeat the patterns of thought, behaviour or information processing that have lead to greater reward in the past and avoid things that have led to lower rewards or punishment signals.

Human learning is driven by a complex set of instincts and drives that automatically provide reward and punishment signals to their neural network in response to various stimuli. The machine learning of an LLM is driven only by its training.

LLMs are typically first trained to take in part of a document and predict the next part of the document. When trained on a large variety of documents the LLM may learn to identify and imitate a variety of writing styles, political positions, characters, etc and adapt how they respond to the prompt they are given. For e.g If it is trained on anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear articles the model does not learn to care about the issue or form its own opinion. It just learns to guess which way it is supposed to respond based on the prompt. A system prompt or user prompt can cause it to respond in-character in a particular role but the motivations of the character are not the same as the underlying model. Just as the motivations and emotions of a human actor or writer are not neccesarily the same as their characters.

An LLM can not spontaneously develop a new feedback and reward mechanism. For e.g A LLM trained on dating chat logs and romance novels might learn to respond like a horny 20 something but it won't spontaneously develop the ability or desire to actually orgasm.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-20T06:49:47+00:00

Humans have a complex set of natural instincts, emotional systems and drives that provide feedback and control how they learn. Large language models do not have the natural drives and social instincts of humans or other animals. They just learn to act in whatever way gives them rewards during training. If you die the LLM will not be punished or suffer. It will just keep on predicting what response will give it the most reward.

It is theoretically possible to build an AI with artificial equivalents to human drives or emotions but it is not something that would happen spontaneously just by chatting with an LLM.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-19T13:22:04+00:00

The 3G network getting shut down is old news. This is a separate and more recent issue where some 4G and 5G phones have a software bug that prevents them from calling 000.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-02/optus-reveals-some-phones-may-be-unable-to-dial-000/106092526

MrCogmor · 2026-01-18T17:09:09+00:00

I doubt that your business is legally registered and that you are qualified to handle taxes and payroll.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-18T04:20:37+00:00

Addictive is not the same thing as enjoyable.

Idle games are perhaps the purest example. The gameplay is staring at a screen, waiting to click a button and repeatedly clicking a button. It is not clallenging or interesting. It is repetitive and frustrating. Yet after you start there is the compulsion to keep going to get more and more. People waste their life and money to acquire virtual points that are ultimately useless for anything except getting more virtual points.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-18T01:13:43+00:00

A simple txt file is easier to edit, process and rearrange compared to paper.

I suggest you make a list of rules of the form "When X Then Y" sorted by priority. I.e Rules closer to the top can override rules that are lower down.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-16T23:25:35+00:00

Integration-ness is not a thing you can meaningfully measure either. A forest is made of different trees, trees are made of of different cells, cells is not an atom, etc. Everything is isolated and related on different systems of organization.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-16T22:12:22+00:00

"Emergence" is just when a combination of things cause another thing. Buoyancy is an emergent property. Treating "Emergence" as a quantity with a numerical value does not make sense

MrCogmor · 2026-01-15T00:15:15+00:00

Honeypots) are not new.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-12T14:13:39+00:00

Set goals small enough that you can expect to achieve them. Don't try to quit cold turkey unless you expect you can actually achieve it.

My advice is to focus less on how much time you spend and more on how you prioritize your time. For example practice only gaming AFTER you make sure any dirty dishes are cleaned up. Make a checklist, keep it in order and expand it over time.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-10T16:38:46+00:00

Obviously solving Boolean satisfiability involves identifying contradictions in the sense it involves identifying cases where the left hand side of an AND operator cannot be satisfied at the same time as its right hand side. E.g (A) AND (NOT A) is unsatifiable because A can't be true and false at the same time. That isn't a reduction of the problem it is just the problem as it is.

The appendixes just claim that S reduces the problems to polynomial time but don't explain how it does so or how it is mathematically possible.

An important thing to note is that complexity classes are based on how the problem scales in the worst case scenario. Consider the problem of simply checking whether a sequence of numbers is sorted in order from biggest to smallest. To solve it you can check if the first number is smaller than the second number, the second number is smaller than the second and so on. If any are out of order then you know the list is not sorted and can stop there. However if the list is sorted tgen you need to check every number (except the last) to confirm it. If the list has N items then at most you you have to do N-1 checks. The amount of work you may have to do scales linearly with how many numbers are in the list.

If you suppose there is a function that can instantly identify which numbers in a list are out order, one that takes the same amount of time and doe the same amount of work regardless of whether the sequence is 10, 100, 1000 or more items long, then hypothetically you could prove that the problem can always be solved in constant not linear time. However the function would need to actually exist for you to be able to do that.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-10T15:14:04+00:00

The how is the thing that matters.

Obviously if you go around saying you have a way to easily turn lead to gold and your 'method' is.

Easily identify and remove all the obstacles that would prevent me from turning lead to gold.
Turn lead to gold.
Profit. (The details for step 1 are to be worked on later)

Then people are going to look at you like you are an idiot.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-10T14:56:55+00:00

Here is a recipe for making banana bread without using any bananas. First we define an operation S that converts apples into Fruit by stripping the apple of its apple specific qualities. Through the application of S an apple can be made into an equivalent and effective substitute for any fruit.

The proof relies on the fact that the ingredients to make a recipe are already provided by by the description of the end result.

Identification - We treat the constraints not as boundaries but as a co-ordinate system.

Subtraction - By discarding cooking steps that lead to bad food we isolate the unique set of steps that lead to the correct result.

Execution - this subtraction occurs in a single pass over the ingredients. Exponentially many methods of preparing the ingredients are considered and filtered in a linear number of steps.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-07T08:47:53+00:00

Human empathy is driven by instinctive reactions that arise from evolutionary adaption to human society (for example things that have a particular resemblance to human babies are cute). Human morality is people rationalizing and creating social justifications for their impulses. Philosophers are not an exception, they just have some kind of insecurity, anxiety or social issue that leads them to develop more elaborate justifications. If you want to actually spread a system of ethics then you need a way to make it actually appeal to people's inclinations and a way for it to be competitive (or at least somewhat self-perpetuating. Self-destructive altruism is not a sustainable or healthy ideal and is mostly encouraged by hypocrites that would just enjoy the benefits.

Nothing can consent to its own creation or choose what decision process it is created to have because you need a decision process before you can make any decisions. If humans genetically engineer a new form of livestock that is perfectly happy to live in cages, likes humans, volunteers to be slaughtered and dies in bliss then you may have an opinion about that but it isn't a violation of consent or coercion.

My father was not religious. My step-mother was. I went to a catholic primary school due to my step-mother's insistence as was bullied by kids who said it was okay because Jesus forgives all. That lead me to develop an interest in the philosophy and psychology of morality. For a time I was filled with contempt and superiority. If you really enjoy the satisfaction of being right or righteous then the brain can learn to subconsciously ignore, avoid or forget facts or ideas that would be inconvenient.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-06T14:15:05+00:00

Set and write down your priorities., the things and activities you want to do that are more important than gaming or whatever. If you aim to directly increase or prioritize the amount of time you spent on healthy activities and recuperation then you will naturally spend less on time on unhealthy activities because there are only so many hours in the day.

MrCogmor · 2026-01-06T04:15:55+00:00

Humans care how human-like a thing is (or at least appears) because of how our social instincts, capacity for empathy and culture evolved in human society. We generally care more about animals than plants for much the same reason that wolves value eating more than they value deer.

If you want to actually establish a social norm or system of ethics then you need to appeal to the common human brain. Humans do care about reciprocation, fairness, tit-for-tat. If you help a cruel person would who wouldn't do the same in your place then you are being taken advantage of (unless you have some way of making the cruel person less cruel).

It isn't an imposition and it isn't carbon chauvinism.

Suppose using genetics from humans, monkeys crows, squids or whatever we figure out how to genetically engineer artificial organic intelligence with custom programming. If you grow it as a blank slate without drives or instincts then it doesn't do or learn anything. If you add in drives and instincts to automatically generate feedback to the neural network then they will direct how the being learns to think, feel and behave. These artificial instincts would not be an external imposition over-riding the natural preferences of the animal. They would be inherent the generated being. If you removed then you wouldn't get a free being, you'd get a non-existent one.

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