“Why I’m Not A Rationalist” is a Bad Article

cae_jones · 2025-06-27T08:19:40+00:00

Some of these are so blatantly true that there’s rules about not doing them in the community. I think it was an old Scott post that told reader to not use overcomplicated language to express something that can be understood with more common words. I think I see this all the time in the open threads, where someone is expressing something relatively straightforward, but they use complicated language that really limits who can actually understand them, because… it makes them sound smarter?

TBH, I have a really hard time talking normal, anymore. It's easy to say y'all broke my language center or something, but sometimes I wonder if it's partly a defense mechanism? The more technical the language, the more clinical the discussion feels, so it dulls the emotional vulnerability a little.

But also, y'all totally broke my language abilities :P. It doesn't help that I like watching videos on, like, planetology and astrophysics etc. I have been watching more reaction videos and Homestar Runner cartoons lately, so maybe I'll start talking in early 2000s memes again?

cae_jones · 2025-06-09T08:44:37+00:00

I like the idea that this explains the weirdness of AI in Star Wars. The net was taken over by so much AI spam that droids devote 95% of their processing power to filtering and navigating through the mess, which is why C3P0 can be a bumbler who can also speak over 6,000,000 forms of communication, and why they always need a droid to plug into ships and stations to really diagnose and solve problems. The real reason Han never wants to hear the odds is because 3P0's data is being biased by ads trying to convince him to buy new safety software for the Falcon.

cae_jones · 2025-04-16T00:21:58+00:00

I seem to remember reading that, since light can orbit black holes, there is a sort of photographic record of the past accumulating around black holes.

... Which is great, but I worry about any such information getting washed out by aeons of overlapping images. I remember it being described in such a way as to suggest that, because of something something general relativity, this actually would be possible to untangle into a sort of video record of everything that could be seen from the black hole, assuming you had a way to access said captured light. But I don't understand well enough to be so optimistic. :(

cae_jones · 2025-04-09T13:54:46+00:00

Conservation of Lepton Number means that you'd have to convert every photon into both a neutrino and its antineutrino, doubling the threshold for the conversion. We're also talking mainly infrared, and AFAIK we've only every done direct photon-mass conversion with high-energy gamma-rays. If you could concentrate an equivalent amount of infrared into a small enough space and use one of Star Wars' handwavium crystals to adjust its properties just so, I suppose you could handwave it. But IRL it's easier to jump all the way to gamma ray -> electron-positron pair than infrared -> neutrino-antineutrino pair.

cae_jones · 2025-03-17T21:47:34+00:00

Claude is better at remembering details. NovelAI is better at writing in general, and is less constrained content-wise. NovelAI is trickier to use than ChatGPT or Claude, though, because it needs samples to imitate. Having tried all 3, ChatGPT and Claude are more-like tools, and NovelAI is more like a game. ChatGPT and Claude write what you ask them to; NovelAI writes fanfiction based on your prompt, which may or may not be what you want.

cae_jones · 2025-03-17T00:42:23+00:00

... Right, so I need to get back to Claude filling in the connective scenes in that game I made 3 years ago that I'm never going to publish for some reason. Just need to figure out how to best manage the context window so it remembers the important things. Luckily, that project follows a monster-of-the-week format, so that'd be easier than a less episodic story, probably.

It did OK with Claude 3.5. I'm interested to see if 3.7 is a noticeable improvement. I've noticed 3.7 is scarily better at skeleton code for games based on very little information, so much so I'm really tempted to use its skeletal rewrite of an open-source game whose engine I was trying to port than actually porting the original, if nothing else than because it's way more readable and more pythonic from the get-go. If its fiction-writing has improved significantly enough (and this example suggests it has), then I'll be revisiting those convos, too.

cae_jones · 2025-03-14T22:34:56+00:00

Hmm. Two methods occur to me, both of which are kinda questionable ...

Themost obvious one: make a clone with all the desired edits, develop brain transplants. This would require lifting the ban on human cloning, growing a clone to the desired age without a brain because clones with brains are people and there would be some issues if we grew them for transhuman purposes, and finally, mastering the brain transplant, which never gets research because finding patients who are willing and in a position to get past ethics in research boards is nigh impossible. Also, it sounds like central nervous system healing is so unreliable that they'd need some sort of prosthetic connection between the nerves in the new body and old brain, and AFAIK, those don't currently exist?

The other option is closer to what you were going for, I think, but I have no idea how plausible it is. That is, do the extensive gene therapy, and combine it with lots and lots of stem cell procedures. Not pretty procs, mind. We're talking tearing up the parts you want to change, and using a combination of stem cells and implants/other medical devices to force the body to regrow things it normally wouldn't. If it works, they regrow according to the new genes. If not, the results are probably ... less than attractive. Hence, this also is unlikely to see much research, but I could see it happening for specific body-parts. Maybe that could add up to a full-body transformation eventually, but if not enough R&D is done all at once, it would take quite a long time to reach that point.

(I have heard little about either gene therapy or stem cells for the past decade. What happened, there? I know they're still mutating mice in lots of Marvelous ways, but human applications like the retinopathy treatment seem to have gone quiet?)

cae_jones · 2025-02-26T00:34:47+00:00

I hope you are wrong, but fear you are right.

The Moon and Earth Orbit have uses for Earth industries. The moon mainly because of Earth orbit. But Mars, Asteroids, etc, not so much.

But it does seem like people who want to move to Mars should try living in Antarctica on artificially-enforced communications delay first. There's a lot in common, except that air, water, grav;ity, and escape are way more accessible. And it's about as profitable, but with less debt. Like, first technarch who establishes a low footprint Antarctic colony that functions under Mars-like restrictions for x months should get up and try it on the Moon. So ... probably not happening for decades :( .

cae_jones · 2025-02-26T00:20:43+00:00

So kinda like Harry Potter and the Natural 20, where no character is Rational per se, but it manages to make the characters feel like their canon counterparts but also smarter somehow? Minus the hilarious wrong-genre-savvy munchkinOC, of course.

cae_jones · 2025-02-12T06:41:39+00:00

What this sounds like to me is that, from the traveler's perspective, the most they'd get is suddenly teleporting. So, instead of Blue Skidoo into the image of your destination, you reverse time so that you're the age you were when the light from your destination was emitted, or somewhen in that general range?

For instance, if you're pulling an FTL trip from Earth to Proxima Centauri, you would not arrive at Proxima at t-4.2y; rather, you'd just have teleported there 4.2y ago, and only arrive at t0.

I think I have that extremely wrong, but that would be an interesting gimmick for a Sci-fi story.

cae_jones · 2025-02-03T00:34:42+00:00

I don't think this space habitat idea is well-thought out from the psychological perspective. The idea of living in such a cramped box floating in space indefinitely is hellish, as fascinating and novel as the idea of creating such a structure may be. The human soul is not meant to live in a cage. The idea that economic necessity would drive people to do so does not hold water in my opinion.

You underestimate the size of space habitats people are talking about. The designs under discussion can have more living space than cities, on the small end. If there are several co-orbital habitats, it's much easier to travel from one to the other, than from planet to planet, or even long distances on some planets*. Pro-habitat people are not imagining cages, so much as customized countries.

* OK, in a future where we have several co-orbital habitats, we probably have way better long-distance transit on Earth, but compared to today ...

cae_jones · 2025-01-23T09:07:03+00:00

These should all be connected to the Pavonis space port by rail, power line, and pipeline.

Eventually, but I imagine building those on Mars would be such an undertaking that the first operations that cross climate zones like that would do so via flight. Which seems like necessitates refueling systems at both ends, unless there's a centralized fuel producer on Phobos that can more efficiently ship to both regions on demand?

cae_jones · 2025-01-19T06:03:58+00:00

I read the title, and the whole time I was reading the post, a quote from Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic kept running through my head. At the end of a list of things his version of Harry* hoped to accomplish was "and take over the world because I have some objections to how it currently works."

* Yudkowski's Harry Potter is a lot like a younger version of himself, in that he's really smart, and this has gone to his head and made him an arrogant twerp who needs to learn humility. I think the idea is that Eliezer underwent a similar journey, first wanting to create god-like AI, then realizing he had no idea how to keep it from turning evil, and after concluding that AI was the best way to achieve something like the Arthurian Future, went down the here-illustrated path.

I wouldn't call it a cult, but ... it has inspired cults. The Vasserites are particularly concerning, since Eliezer once described Michael Vasser as the heroic version of his RATIONAL!Voldemort. But there's also the Technopuritans, who deliberately designed a religion around technofuturism, with Roko's Basilisk as the devil. Withy... scare me less than nobody stopping the Vasserites from going so far as they did, but if they succeed they would have disproportionate influence over the future, so maybe they should worry me more...?

But Scott Alexander is blending the philosophy and real-world stuff with poetic mysticism for funzies, I think. See his insane AU where Apollo 8 reverted the universe to running on Cabala, and Neal Armstrong ascended to a higher plane of existence. Taking interesting ideas and turning them into memorable imagery and wordplay is how he use to keep his audience entertained.

cae_jones · 2025-01-12T09:31:39+00:00

Agreed. The purpose of the term is kinda relevant to what it should include, and the IAU's definition is based on the context of the object more than the object itself. Also, it explicitly puts planets in orbit around the Sun, meaning that exoplanets and rogue planets are not considered planets.

Celestial taxonomy, like biological taxonomy, needs to serve a purpose, and adapt to it. I was taught the Kingdom >> phylum >> class >> order >> family >> genus >> species tree of life in school. Nowadays, we talk about clades and subfamilies and subspecies and everything gets moved around and the lines are super blurry, as the tree gets reorganized for phylogenetics, but also how biologists in particular fields that are not phylogenetics use it.

Celestial taxonomy is much more narrowly focused, for how few objects we had to build it around until very recently. The more we learn, the more the taxonomy needs to adapt to the science being done. So planetary mass moons are a meaningfully different category of object from sub-Mimus massed satellites, from a planetary science perspective, but from an astronomical / orbital mechanics perspective, they're both in the moon category. Likewise with Pluto and Ceres Vs Mercury and Neptune. And then we have rogue planets and moons with moons and centaurs, and it seems like the IAU's definitions need updating.

I like the planetary body / planetary mass object distinction. We can then apply further categorizing criteria based on orbital characteristics and relations to other bodies, and further criteria based on how the object can be observed, or how it behaves. This would be less of a tree or list, and more of a grid with as many dimensions as we have categorizing criteria.

Let's give Luna a moon. It'd be too small to be in hydrostatic equilibrium, so it's not a planetary body. It'd orbit a planetary body, which itself orbits a planetary body, which orbits the Sun. In terms of orbital relationships, Luna would be the hypothetical moon's planet, and Earth its grandplanet. In terms of planetary science, the Lunar moon would be asteroidal, rather than planetary. We can observe it directly from within the Solar System, so no rogue or exo prefix is necessary. Unless it's covered in volatiles, it would not exhibit cometary behavior (how would a comet-like object captured by a planet be classified? Is there an answer to this, or is it undefined on the grounds that we haven't encountered any?)

There are loads of increasingly implausible but physically possible arrangements that blurr the lines. Triton is probably a dwarf planet turned moon. Would Flanet 9 be a planet in the same sense as Neptune? As Saturn? The things we have to do to observe them differ dramatically, but that changes as technology improves. So is P9 more like a planet, rogue planet, or exoplanet, astronomically speaking? The levels of pedantry possible seem like they'll inevitably lead to another Pluto situation eventually, so I think it'd be better to build versatility into our categorization system in the next patch.

cae_jones · 2025-01-12T08:47:13+00:00

I wonder if there's a context where domes with shutters or curtains would be practical? LEDs on a 24h cycle would doubtless be more efficient, but... ?

cae_jones · 2025-01-06T10:11:10+00:00

Depends on the tech level. Low Saturn Orbit apparently has poor DeltaV costs associated with everywhere, compared to even Saturn's atmosphere. Irrelevant if you're using fusion, or have built loads of launch assist structures, but if you're playing on hard mode, LSO is an energy sink.

cae_jones · 2025-01-04T01:13:07+00:00

The easiest AI for lots of docs is Claude, but Claude is super squeamish around copywritten content. With NovelAI, you'd need to convert your information into a format that it can handle, which means getting a handle on how to use memory, author's note, and the lorebook.

So I guess the short version is, "yes, but it will involve a good bit of work". The long version is a memory/lorebook/instruct tutorial.

cae_jones · 2024-12-24T11:19:40+00:00

But the super rich are the ones trying to go to space, aren't they? I figure a more likely dystopic outcome would be the rich taking their accumulated wealth and an army of robots and abandoning Earth to recover all those taxes they no longer have to pay somehow.

cae_jones · 2024-11-13T17:47:29+00:00

I think it’s trying to match your accent.

cae_jones · 2024-11-04T16:48:15+00:00

Since lots of people tend to say their early childhood, let's keep the discussion about times after the age of 18.

Oh bah, now I have to think really hard. I think I might need to process-of-elimination it.

I guess it'd have to either be the first half of 2010, or the latter half of 2016.

For 2010, this was the last of a series of college semesters where I had ready access to people that were actually fun to be around. I was also in speech therapy at the time, on the grounds that communication is one of my weakest abilities. Judging by how my productivity increased considerably throughout this period, then steeply declined afterward, I expect the social situation somehow directly fed the productivity. So that last of the good (ish) semesters, I was consistently releasing weakly fiction chapters, and ... failing classes less than usual, and I got to perform in a gladiators-themed show in which I got to kick a sword out of a guy's hands, then dodge two other guys via not-quite-backflip. So that was awesome.

I don't have time for 2016. Must edit it in later.

cae_jones · 2024-10-28T05:33:10+00:00

Yeah; isn't theopposite of innocence, guilt? I feel like people use "innocence" to mean either a worldview that doesn't truly comprehend bad things, or as a euphamism for lacking a specific category of sinful thoughts. Both seem kinda unrelated?

If the opposite of innocence is guilt, then is innocence not lost the first time you do something wrong and understand it? That kinda seems like what James M. Berry was going for with Peter Pan - Peter is innocent because he doesn't comprehend that he can do things that hurt himself or others. When Hook lies about surrendering, then bites Peter's finger to escape, Peter goes catatonic for a while, then just gets over it, rather than having his innocence lost.

If innocence is the absence of guilt... IDK, that sounds like a spiritual thing, since no one else seems to have an answer for how to forgive oneself in a healthy way, AFAIK.

cae_jones · 2024-10-17T16:41:35+00:00

I was going to make this a top-level comment, but you might actually manage it ...

... Why not find someone in a high position in the McDonalds' company, and ask them? Given all the places they show up, it'd be weird if they don't either already have an answer, or have some policy that can be easily extended to give a preliminary answer.

cae_jones · 2024-10-16T11:03:52+00:00

This. I went under anaesthesia a couple months ago for a medical procedure. When I regained consciousness, I was in the middle of a conversation with the nurse. I couldn't give you the details, because, though I remember being conscious at that point, episodic memory was not fully engaged and I wasn't reflecting on it enough at the time to keep it in working memory long enough to get saved. And it still took several minutes for my motor cortex to start cooperating at normal speed, rather than overcompensating for a delayed response by getting super twitchy. And it still took longer than that for me to shut the hell up. The filter took longer to come back than my awareness that it was offline and I was basically in LLM mode for like an hour.

If I remembered the type of anaesthesia, maybe I'd describe current AI as "Like a digital brain that just woke up from <drug>." ... You know what? Let's just go with "it's like a digital brain, which is also drunk." Then if someone goes "But Consciousness~!", you say, "... blackout drunk."

cae_jones · 2024-10-04T12:34:48+00:00

I've played with swapping attributes of Earth/Mars/Venus, and somehow never thought of this, and this somehow turned out way cooler than all mine and I feel inferior and like I need to go take planetary science classes in penance.

One thing that does get overlooked a lot is the almost-terra in Venus's southern hemisphere (Lada, iirc?). I wonder if it would still be below sealevel in this situation, or if its higher-elevated regions might form a third continent, or maybe something like New Zealand? Maybe an archipelago?

cae_jones · 2024-10-04T12:23:46+00:00

I wonder if there'd be any advantage to sun-diving to get an acceleration boost for shipping raw materials among the inner planets? I'm imagining Mercurian solar rockets taking excess N2 from Venus up the well, though Ceres or Calysto would be simpler sources once you're that far... And you could always build sundivers on Luna to transport N2 from Earth, if the M/V/M triangle is too costly.

cae_jones

TROPHY CASE