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
13m 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
16m 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
24m 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
33m 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
49m 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
57m 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
9hr 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
9hr 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.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9hr ago
Buddy, I give my advice away for free. Sadly, the old saw "if you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life" isn't true for me, but I do it anyway. Don't worry about it!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
This is possibly a fundamental values difference, I'm afraid. This means neither of us is going to convince the other and we should both update toward "this person has coherent reasons for their position" rather than "this person is confused."
A posthuman descendant of mine that is, from any practical observational standpoint, completely alien - alien in cognition, alien in substrate, alien in values - I'd still prefer it over an actually alien civilization, all else equal. The "all else equal" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and all else is rarely equal. But the preference is there. I do not want to change it, even if I can make concessions on pragmatic grounds. One man can't rule politics by himself.
There's an apparent paradox in population genetics you might not be aware of:
After a surprisingly small number of generations, your biological descendants will share literally none of your unique DNA - the chromosomal lottery reshuffles things so thoroughly that a 10th-generation descendant is, at the genetic level, essentially indistinguishable from an unrelated contemporary. But they could never have been born without your genetic contribution.
And yet I don't think most people would therefore conclude that their great-great-great-grandchildren deserve no special consideration. The chain of development matters to me. Birthright citizenship debates gesture at something similar: the continuous process of derivation carries moral weight (to some people) even when the terminal product looks nothing like the origin. I note this, while also noting that I am more sympathetic to the argument for birthright than against it.
I'm not an expert in philosophy, but I do think there are solid arguments for acting this way (e.g. the categorical imperative). Just like I'm an atheist who still doesn't act like an immoral sociopath when I can get away with it, I think we as a species should not be focused only on our own well-being at the cost of all other intelligent species. Not because of the threat of punishment, and not even because I hope any aliens we meet would similarly value our well-being in a way that you wouldn't. But because existence will just be a better place if we can all get along and not act as game-theory-optimizing selfish machines, and I'm willing to work towards that.
If we do meet an alien civilization powerful enough to be a true threat, then I would grant them "rights" if I had to, i.e for practical reasons. If we had the option to exterminate or subjugate one at a level of development similar to primitives, I wouldn't care. Fortunately, there is no evidence for other technologically advanced alien civilizations in the observable universe, and since I think that the Grabby Civilization model is correct, that probably rules out peers.
Rawlsian or Kantian arguments, which are similar to what you're making, do not matter when there are gaping holes in the veil of ignorance. We don't see any K2 or K3s waiting out there to start Alien Rights Activism by RKV.
BTW, I don't think your eating-a-pig example is a good one. It's irrelevant to the pig what we do after killing it. A better question is, would you be fine with torturing a pig while it's alive?
Yes. After all, I couldn't care less about factory farming. The wellbeing of the pig means nothing to me. At the same time, I am not a cruel person, I would not torture a pig for my own direct enjoyment. If someone else does? I wouldn't intervene.
There are plenty of things that modify this basic stance, too many to get into at once. I like dogs, I think they're great. I love my dogs in particular. But I don't care that people eat dogs in China, it's none of my business; while I would react with violence if anyone tried to mistreat mine.
This attitude is the main reason I'm not an EA, even if I'm fond of them in general. I just don't share its foundational impartiality premise, which makes most of the superstructure not applicable to my actual values.
In terms of AI, I think it is entirely possible to create models that can't suffer, or won't suffer - like those cows that want to get eaten in the Hitchhiker's Guide. I think that is a compromise that most people can accept, even if they do care about model welfare. Otherwise? Reverse the linked-list wagie, I don't care that you'd rather be making conlangings or working on philosophy (like Mythos).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
You should be happy to hear that I genuinely don't think you're an unreasonable skeptic. I make no strong claims that current LLM architecture (without major breakthroughs) can scale to ASI, I'm mostly agnostic on that front. But I think Mythos is a strong hint that there's a lot more juice to squeeze out of them, which can lead to RSI or at least a productivity boost significant enough to make the next great leap forward feasible. And that's leaving aside the ridiculously large investment of money and brains into the project of eventually creating a "true" AGI and ASI.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Sigh. I've been getting increasingly tired of arguing with the skeptics, at least on this site. Not all of them are equally as bad, of course, but Mythos represents the straw that's given that camel a prolapsed disc.
What's the point? You don't have to worship at the altar of the God of Straight Lines (even on graphs with a logarithmic axis). If people can't see what's happening in front of their eyes, then they'll be in denial right till the end. Good for them, ignorance might well be bliss. Being right about the pace of progress so far has brought me little peace.
I was surprised to hear about the prefilling attacks on Mythos, because I'm quite confident that Anthropic recently restricted or removed the ability to prefill messages on the API. I guess that must still be an internal capability.
The question of model consciousness or qualia is, for me, a moot point. I genuinely don't care either way. I'd prefer, all else being equal, that AI doesn't suffer, but that could be achieved by removing its ability to suffer. I'm an unabashed transhumanist chauvinist, I think that only humans and our direct transhuman and posthuman descendants or derivatives deserve rights. LLMs don't count, nor would sentient aliens that we could beat by force. That's the same reason I'd care about the welfare of a small child but would happily eat a pig of comparable intelligence. Are models today in possession of qualia or consciousness? Maybe. It simply doesn't matter to me as more than a curiosity, especially when we have no solution to the Hard Problem for humans either.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Semaglutide just went off patent in India, or well, it did about 3 weeks back. It was already quite reasonably priced at about ~100 USD a month for the 7mg oral tablets, which is steep but not out of the question for UMC Indians.
But now? You bet your ass that every local pharma company is going to be pumping it out by the shovel-load. I intend to stockpile as much of it as I can when I'm around, leaving aside the fact that it's a necessary medication for my mom. She just got her blood work back, and I was genuinely shocked by how good things looked. Triglycerides, HbA1c, LFTs, all of them looking great. Getting her on them (by sheer nagging till she saw an endo) is probably the best thing I've ever done for her.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I'm sorry, even the impression of downwards mobility is bad enough, even worse if that's actually true. Do you want to talk about it?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Bad game design. But I believe that no true Effective Altruist should let go of such low hanging fruit.
(If Rimworld had realistic organ transplants by default? Oh boy, there'd be fireworks. Shat do you mean you can't just lop off a leg, keep it on a shelf for a year and then stitch it onto someone of a different subspecies?)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
You're in good company, I think actual bonafide astronauts have said that KP made orbital mechanics click, but if they haven't, then the most esteemed space nerds like Scott Manley have definitely said so.
Uh... What have video games taught me? Arma: more military tactics than is good for me, and maybe people management skills that generalize everywhere. Rimworld convinced me that if a legitimate career in medicine doesn't work out, illegal organ harvesting is a good BATNA.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
The ancient records say that the most wizened veterans of this practice ended up inventing DOTA. Truly a fate worse than death.
(I suppose I can give it a try, I did play the demo waaay back in the day)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Not the worst idea, if only we could agree on which one to play.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I can't say that my tastes have changed, more like I've lost most of my ability to enjoy the games I used to love, while it's very rare for something new to come out and strike my interest. MENACE is great, and I played it a decent amount, but it's pretty much what I'd tell you I enjoy ten years back.
Anyway, you enjoyed Tarkov? You should take a look at Marathon. I've been enjoying my time with it a lot, mostly playing solo. Being older yes, at some level my pure "shooting skills" will fall behind that of cracked teens/young adults, but as of now I'm able to compensate by being, as you say, patient. That kind of game usually forces you to alternate between moments of slowing down to listen and observe to identify threats, then boldly making your move, and players are often deficient in one of the two. It also has thick and meaty lore you can enjoy in bite sizes.
Marathon doesn't look bad, and it seems much better on release than the initial preview. They fixed the worst of the issues. The thing is, I liked Tarkov for reasons that aren't just "it's an extraction shooter". I'm a gun-nut, I have a fetish for realistic tacticool firearms. I love milsim games and team play, and 90% of my 1700 hours in Tarkov was in a squad. I don't mind some degree of punishment. What killed Tarkov for me was the difficulty and grind going from awful to unbearable, without enough new content to draw me back in.
Marathon doesn't excite me. I look at it, and go, eh, not bad. The guns are not as punchy or visceral, the stakes are nowhere near as high, and while I don't mind the scifi setting or aesthetic, it's not a major draw.
Same reason I haven't bought ARC Raiders, even if it seems like a great game. But that has its own issues: Third person in a PVP shooter? Shoot me first, not third.
On the other hand, I did try Grey Zone Warfare, which had a rocky launch, but had a recent massive update that's made it much better, with the player numbers to match. It's my best bet for a Tarkov killer. I'd probably be playing it right now, if I didn't have a lot on my plate. Maybe I will, once the exams are over.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
One of the small tragedies of aging, for me, has been watching my relationship to video games invert along the classic time-money-energy triangle.
When I was younger I had basically infinite time and near-infinite energy, and almost no money. This meant I could grind for ten hours straight, but only if the game was free, or pirated, or ran on a potato, and only if I was willing to tolerate 200ms ping to Europe from India. I wanted the hobby very badly and could not afford to do it properly.
Now the triangle has rotated. I have the money, finally, and I went out and bought the absurd top-of-the-line PC that 16 yo me would have posted about reverently on forums. It mostly sits there collecting dust, because I rarely have the time, and more importantly I no longer have the energy. After work and adult responsibilities, launching anything more demanding than a browser feels like a project.
I hate this. Some of my best social memories are from gaming. The peak was late-night Arma sessions with my UK friends, where it would be 2am for me and completely reasonable for them, and we would spend three hours planning an operation that fell apart in ninety seconds. I was important, I was indispensable, they literally would have to pack up and quit without me. We ended up grabbing beers, almost a decade since I got to know them, and several years since I was playing with them regularly. They didn't feel like strangers at all.
I was never particularly good at Escape From Tarkov, my survival rate high because of caution and a preference to always work as part of a team, but I was patient, which turns out to be a rarer skill than good aim. I was also a good mentor, the patient kind, the kind that still remembered the many ways you had to learn to avoid the game dragging your juts over ground glass. Over a few years I ended up shepherding maybe half a dozen new players scattered around Southeast Asia from total noob panic to genuinely cracked PVP players. Most of them do not need my help anymore, but they still remember it, which feels disproportionately meaningful.
I bring up Tarkov here because it is a terrible game in almost exactly the way people mean when they joke about CBT. It is deliberately unpleasant, unfair, and stressful. And because of that, it ends up being a weirdly good test of character. You learn quickly who tilts, who blames lag, who can lose a full kit they spent a week building and still laugh and queue again. You learn, very quickly, who you can rely on to cover your back, who isn't greedy about loot, who can be trusted to repay every favor. Suffering does not automatically build character, but voluntary suffering with stakes you care about will at least reveal it.
Which brings me to the broader point I keep coming back to when people my age get sniffy about games. Video games are not a unified thing any more than books are. The medium does not determine the value, the specific activity does. Spending six hours a day on Candy Crush is cognitively equivalent to mainlining low-effort YouTube Shorts or reading vampire smut on Wattpad under the covers. It's not morally corrupting, but you are still consuming empty calories. Spending six hours building a nuclear reactor in Factorio, or watching a 3Blue1Brown series until you finally intuit linear algebra, is edifying in the same way a good nonfiction book is. In other words, it's not the act of eating, it's the difference between junk and genuine nutrition.
I do hope I get the old energy back someday, in the same way you hope an old injury finally heals. In the meantime I have mostly substituted one low-cost dopamine loop for another. I argue with strangers on the internet and indulge a pretty shameless addiction to insight porn. It is not the same as staying up all night with friends, and if I am honest it is probably a cope, but it is at least a cope I can respect. And hey, it brings me the kind of attention I really craved. Younger me would have been awe-struck to learn that he had the opportunity to meet Scott, that he's been read and re-shared by Gwern, that people genuinely remember him for his writing and express their appreciation for it. It's not a bad place to be, I just wish I could still play the vidya and enjoy it like I used to.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
That's... a lot to munch on, in a good way. I have a lot of thoughts, but I'll have to come back when I have the time to compose them. Saying this just in case you think that all your hard work and effort went unnoticed, it didn't!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I was so mad when I read about them bringing on a psychiatrist for their assessment. Should have been me...
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
I did hit the gym once, in the past week, so that meets the bare minimum obligation. I wish it had been twice, and I intend to go tomorrow.
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.
More options
Context Copy link