2025-11-21 13:33:42
Published on November 21, 2025 5:33 AM GMT
Collisteru suggests that you should oppose things. I would not say I oppose this. Instead, I would like to gently suggest an alternative strategy. You should oppose about one thing. Everywhere else, talk less, smile more.
I spent the first decade of my career carefully and deliberately habituating to white collar corporate America.
White collar corporate America prizes the ability to work with anyone. Some people find it stifling, but the corporate culture appreciates being willing to put a mask over parts of you that would grate against other people. This is useful, because every piece of interpersonal friction risks jamming up the machine.
Consider your political opinions. Perhaps you're a staunch Republican. Perhaps you think the Democrats are correct about everything. Or your religious views; do you think God is real and connecting with Him is the most important source of meaning, or do you think churches are worshiping a made up old man in the sky?
Expressing those opinions is discouraged. Why? Imagine a coworker said they were Against Your Team. Do you feel any reluctance to work with them? If you say you're against Their Team, will they still want to work with you?
This is a case where the Litany of Gendlin is not true. As long as nobody talks about it, nobody has to be mad about it; you can all quietly pretend all the sensible, reasonable people around you don't hold any views you find abhorrent.
Maybe opposing all you thought was bad would be workable if there was just a single position that people could differ on. There's enough people on both sides of the atheist and theist divide that maybe you could make a company of all one side. But there is not just one position, there are dozens or hundreds, and Collisteru says:
I think it’s important to publicly reject things. You should be willing to expose a metaphysical point and criticize it. This is an important part of being a writer, and something that I’m a bit too scared of.
...
I want you not to fear controversy. At worst, you’re wrong. No problem: just admit your mistake and change your mind. But even this is a victory: you exercise your mind and purge a wrong belief from your understanding.
Collisteru is incorrect. If you reject the deeply held philosophical core at the heart of your coworker's life as entirely false, and you make this claim publicly and repeatedly, then the worst case is not that you're wrong. You can't just admit your mistake and change your mind, because you can't assume other people will immediately forgive and forget. The worst case is that in being willing to die on ten different hills you've managed to make everybody angry at you.
You have to be able to work with people you disagree with, and part of that is going to involve agreeing to let some irrelevant sleeping dogs lie.
My opposition to opposition doesn't apply to every situation.
The canonical example is anyone who makes their living from outrage and views. "It's bad on purpose to make you click" is a real thing. If this describes you, you probably know it already, and know what you're doing.
There are also safe containers, social spaces where we've mutually agreed to have disagreements. Late night after hours perhaps, we loosen the ties and loosen our lips a little. Authentic relating games will set these up for statements which would be rude otherwise. And of course, formal competitive debate, where you're judged more for how you argue than the position you took.
And when the disagreement is about the work we're trying to do together, then disagreement becomes useful and worthwhile. If I think your blueprint is shoddy or your delivery schedule is too aggressive, that's something the corporation can benefit from.
Also, like, most places let you do a lot of separation between your work life and the rest of your life? It's mostly fine to do whatever you want in your personal life, as long as you come to the office on time.
I'm not saying you shouldn't delineate in your own mind what you agree or disagree with. I'm saying there is a cost to saying all of those out loud. I'm also not saying you should lie if asked, though I'll admit I personally will get evasive on a few topics; part of the mutual peace treaty implied by white collar corporate norms is that asking someone else who they voted for or what their religion happens to be is gently dissuaded.
Some people decide to pay those costs and be up front and vocal about all the things they are against. I would like to propose if you think you've met one of those people, and you agree with all the things they're saying, you're either in a strong filter bubble or they're misleading you about at least some of their opinions.
When do you take a stand?
Cato the Elder reportedly ended every speech with "Carthago Delenda Est," or "Carthage must be destroyed." The man knew what he wanted to achieve and he kept at it.
I think each of us gets one Carthage. There's one drum we can beat, a target we can persist in working against. Even then we shouldn't make our every act about that argument; that would get us labeled as cranks and tuned out. But as long as you do other things too, you can wave your one flag, hold your ground on that one hill.
Collisteru argues:
The world is complicated: its detail is fractal everywhere and the complication never simplifies no matter how far we zoom in. However, I don’t think this means your morality should be complicated. Children have a simple morality, and religion recognizes them as saints.
Humans can’t fit the whole complexity of their physics engine into their mind, and when they try, they invariably fall into skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism is the epistemology of evil; cynicism is the ethics of evil. Believe in things. Be for and against things. You can acknowledge the world’s complexity without using that as an excuse to give up.
I have not researched every part of the the world's fractal. For each subject as it's presented to me I start to learn the edges and make inroads into understanding, and keep myself calibrated as to how confused I likely still am. The phrase "strong position lightly held" is a useful key to the rationalist community, itself aspiring to be the kind of space I talk about in part II.
Collisteru appears to me to be making far too strong a claim.
Consider "Skepticism is the epistemology of evil" for a moment. If you consider yourself a skeptic (a title many of you on LessWrong would claim - off the top of my head, Julia Galef of Scout Mindset fame ran the official podcast of the New York Skeptics, called "Rationally Speaking") Skepticism is the epistemology of a lot of smart, careful people. If you're reading this on LessWrong, it's likely your epistemology.
This is actually the central mistake I'm suggesting people avoid. It would not occur to me to write "____ is the ethics of evil" for basically any ____. I'd regard that as an unforced tactical error, and instead I aspire to try things like "I'm curious why people believe ____?" Even when I disagree strongly with people I try to leave them a line of retreat, and it would be too common for that particular construction to leave people thinking I was calling them evil.
I've read enough of Collisteru's writing and talked to them in person enough to realize that kind of rhetorical construction is kind of just how they speak, and has less actual force behind it than I thought when first encountering their writing.
I try to take fewer stands, to concentrate my force on a smaller number of subjects. Not only do I expect this means my areas of ire are taken more seriously than Collisteru's, but it I expect there's fewer people who I unintentionally pushed away.
Be against about one thing. If you are not driven to have a chosen target, save your opposition until it matters.
2025-11-21 12:57:46
Published on November 21, 2025 4:57 AM GMT
Abstract:[1]
Tarski's Undefinability Theorem showed (under some plausible assumptions) that no language can contain its own notion of truth. This deeply counterintuitive result launched several generations of research attempting to get around the theorem, by carefully discarding some of Tarski's assumptions.
In Hartry Field's Saving Truth from Paradox, he considers and discards a theory of truth based on Łukasiewicz logic, calling it the "most successful theory so far" (out of very very many considered by that point in the book) and enumerating its many virtues. The theory is discarded due to a negative result due to Greg Restall, which shows that a version of the theory with quantifiers must be -inconsistent.
We consider this abandonment too hasty. The success of Łukasiewicz logic lies in postulating "between values" of truth, starting at -valued sentences positioned precisely between true and false, and ending in the whole continuum of real values . Why stop there? We propose a variant of the theory based on nonstandard analysis, which avoids Greg Restall's paradox by introducing truth values between the real numbers, such as .
Tarski investigated the subject of truth predicates. The idea is to have a which is true if is a true sentence, and false otherwise. ( is a function that acts on numbers, and is the Gödel encoding of , a number which encodes the symbol string of .) This is formalized as Tarski's T-Schema. For each sentence , we add this axiom to the formal system:
Working in classical logic, Tarski shows that T-Schema is incompatible with a technical assumption called the diagonal lemma. The diagonal lemma says that for any predicate which is definable, we can construct a sentence such that the following holds:
That is: says precisely " is true of ". (This is equation is different from the previous schema, because it applies to any predicate instead of just , but only some special rather than all sentences).
This sort of self-referential sentence might sound illegal, but a major part of Gödel's contribution in the proofs of his incompleteness theorems was to show that it is actually quite difficult to rule out: the diagonal lemma can be proven for most axiomatic systems of interest.
If the diagonal lemma is true, and if a predicate is definable which satisfies the T-schema, then it follows that is definable (not-true). This means a sentence exists such that:
This sentence is called the Liar. Informally, it says of itself "This sentence is not true."
Making use of the T-schema and classical logic, we can derive a contradiction from the existence of : if it were true, then it must be false; if it were false, then it must be true. Thus, Tarski formalized the classic Liar paradox.
We've reached a contradiction. The assumptions we made are not compatible. Which should we throw out?
Tarski concludes that must not be definable in the language. This is fine: there is no unitary notion of "truth" but only truth-for-a-language. Tarski's theorem shows that no language can contain its own truth predicate; instead, languages form a hierarchy. To talk about the truth of statements in one language, you must ascend to a "higher" language. For example, to talk about the truth predicate for Peano Arithmetic, we can work in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.
Not everyone was satisfied with this solution. The complaint is that this doesn't fit very well with the way we use "true" in natural language. At least naively, in English, we can ask "Is it true?" for any English sentence. Tarski's theory says that we shouldn't do that; we're mistaken. The argument for the Liar paradox just works, so we need to abandon our naive theory of truth.
This set off a line of research attempting to save the naive theory of truth. Typically, the hope is to keep the T-schema and the diagonal lemma, by abandoning classical logic.
We will focus on one particular logic that has been proposed.
A common response to the Liar paradox is to add a third truth-value to the language, which for the sake of foreshadowing we will call . The Liar sentence, , is neither true (1) nor false (0), but instead gets the intermediate value, . Łukasiewicz logic is one way (of many) to add extra truth-values. is regular classical logic, whereas has a third value intermediate between true and false.
Unfortunately, although this resolves the Liar paradox, is subject to another paradox, in which we construct a sentence which says of itself that it is neither true nor half-true. Again we are stuck with no consistent option: if the sentence is true or half-true, then it is completely false; but if it were completely false, it would be true.
We can add a fourth value (e.g. ) to try and solve this problem, but again we can apply the same general strategy (make a sentence which claims it is neither true, nor half-true, nor quarter-true). In general, this strategy for producing paradoxes is called the Strengthened Liar. is subject to a Strengthened Liar paradox so long as is a natural number greater than 1.
Fortunately, we can solve all Strengthened Liars by adding infinitely many truth values between 0 and 1.
I will describe the semantics of by defining the connectives as real-valued functions. Here, is the truth-value of a sentence .
| formula for truth-value | definition in terms of previous | |
|
(falsehood) |
0 | - |
|
(implication) |
IE: bounded to |
- |
| (negation) | ||
|
(weak disjunction) |
||
|
(weak conjunction) |
(DeMorgan's law) | |
|
(strong disjunction) |
|
|
|
(strong conjunction) |
||
|
(universal quantification) |
- | |
|
(existential quantification) |
In case you're not familiar, "inf" takes the infimum of a set of values: the greatest value which is less than or equal to all the values in the set. Similarly, "sup" takes the supremum: the least value which is greater than all the values in the set. When working with the real numbers, infima and suprema are guaranteed to exist. (This is why it makes sense to use the real numbers here, rather than, say, the rational numbers.)
You'll notice that disjunction and conjunction have split into weak and strong versions. It turns out that Łukasiewicz logic is a special case of Linear Logic, if you're familiar with that. I recommend reading Affine Logic for Constructive Mathematics by Michael Schulman if you want to get some intuitions for what a logic like this might be useful for (aside from a theory of truth).
Łukasiewicz logic is also a fuzzy logic. Indeed, "fuzzy logic" just means that we take truth-values to be real numbers in the range and define the values of connectives through real-valued functions such as those above.
Fuzzy logic is typically applied in cases where statements have "degrees of truth", but in a way that is not readily interpreted as probability. You might be asking: but what does it mean for something to be partially true?? One natural interpretation is vague statements, such as "that box is small". In the context of , notice that is 1 if and only if . I imagine this as "Oh, if box A is small, box B is definitely small!". In other words, the standards of truth are vague, but (where Łukasiawicz logic applies well) those standards are always comparable. We might not be able to say whether a box is objectively small (given all the facts), but there is a fact of whether one box is smaller than another.
To all the operators above, we want to add a which obeys the T-schema. We define this very simply:
Does solve all paradoxes? That is: is it actually consistent with a self-referential truth-predicate obeying the T-schema?
We do get the following positive result. So long as we have a finite collection of sentences, we can apply Brouwer's fixed point theorem to find a consistent assignment of truth-values for those sentences. I'll illustrate the idea with some examples.
Here's the Liar paradox:
And a Strengthened Liar , which can be defined by "adding to itself" (strong disjunction) before negating:
No matter how you draw the blue line, so long as it is continuous, you can't escape intersecting with the red dotted line at some point. Thus, we can always find a consistent solution. A similar observation applies to finite sets of sentences.
However, it does turn out that we can run into some trouble when infinitely many sentences are involved.
We introduced Łukasiewicz logic to be able to assign a truth value of to the Liar sentence, and avoid paradox. As it turns out, Łukasiewicz logic plus the Peano axioms can contain Peano arithmetic without contradictions. Perhaps we can define a Truth predicate for Łukasiewicz logic?
Unfortunately, no. It turns out that adding a version of Tarski's T-schema to Łukasiewicz-Peano also results in a paradox, as Greg Restall showed in 1994.
Restall constructs an infinite sequence of sentences, , starting with defined as follows:
In words: says that there exists some that is false, for .
For the rest, we define . That is, the sentence is the strong-conjunction with itself, a total of times.
What is the truth value of ? We will show there is no value that is consistent with this construction, by contradiction.
Proof: We start by applying the recursive definition of the truth-value to the straightforward formula of , we get that . Now, we branch into two possible paths, and derive contradiction from each.
Suppose . Then because of the definition of strong conjunction, . This implies that the value of all the is , which means its infimum is also 1. In conjunction with the semantics from the previous paragraph, we get that , which shows that must be false and is different from the we started with!
Now assume the other branch, is not completely true, that is for some . Then . Applying this repeatedly we see that , and so the infimum over all the sentences is 0. Next we substitute this into . This is also different from !
Clearly, all branches lead to the truth-value being something different than which it started. Thus, even in a world of fuzzy logic, there cannot be a well-defined truth-value : the theory of -Peano arithmetic plus truth is inconsistent.[2]
In his book Saving Truth from Paradox, after an extensive review of many different theories of self-referential truth, Hartry Field suggests that the theory based on Łukasiewicz was the most successful considered:
In some ways the most successful theory we've considered so far is the Lukasiewicz continuum-valued logic for the quantifier-free fragment of the language (but with self-reference allowed by non-quantificational means). Like the Kripkean theory KFS in Kleene logic, but unlike all the broadly classical theories, it allows the full Intersubstitutivity Principle: is everywhere intersubstitutable with (and the analogous principle for 'true of' holds as well). But unlike KFS, it has a reasonable conditional; in particular, this allows it to contain all instances of the Tarski schema
(T)
(and the analogous schema for 'true of'). The logic comes with a pleasing model-theoretic semantics, in which all connectives including the '' are treated "value-functionally"—that is, sentences are assigned values merely on the basis of the values of their immediate components. always gets assigned the same value as , which explains why the two sentences are intersubstitutable. Also, the values are ordered, with a conditional getting value 1 if and only if the value of the antecedent is less than or equal to that of the consequent; this together with the fact that explains why all instances of Schema (T) hold. I've been speaking of 'true', but the point extends to 'true of' and related notions. In short, the naive theory of truth, truth-of, etc. in a sentential logic based on continuum-valued semantics would be a very nice theory, if only it could be generalized to apply to the full quantificational language without generating inconsistencies, or -inconsistencies, or non-conservativeness (in the same sense of conservativeness employed in Section 3.3), or anything similarly unpleasant.
Hartry Field proceeds to construct his own theory, inspired by the virtues of Łukasiewicz logic, but unfortunately much more complex. Our contention in this essay is that Field gave up too soon. The go-to strategy, when it comes to Łukasiewicz logic, should be to respond to paradoxes by adding even more truth values!
In particular, we have in mind adding an infinitesimal value , so that Restall's paradoxical sentence can get the value . This seems promising: perhaps can be small enough that the sequence is never less than 1 by a positive real number, even though is always smaller than .
The most direct route hits some difficulties. Infimum and supremum are not well-defined once we add infinitesimals. For example, consider the sequence What is the infimum of this sequence? Within the reals, the infimum would have been 0, as it is the largest number that lower-bounds the sequence. But the infinitesimal is greater than 0 and less than all the numbers in the sequence, so it has a better claim. This doesn't work either, however: is even greater, and still less than all the listed numbers. We can keep going higher forever without exceeding any number in the sequence, so there's no infimum.
To resolve this problem, we will utilize the notion of infinitesimal from nonstandard analysis.
Newton and Leibniz originally formulated calculus with infinitesimals. Modern calculus textbooks instead reformulate everything by building up from the concept of limits. Nonstandard analysis resurrects infinitesimals using model theory.
The standard model of the real numbers can only be pinned down with second-order logic. However (due to Gödel's incompleteness results!) there is no complete and consistent inference system for second-order logic. Any axiom system we use to reason about real numbers is equivalent to a first-order axiom system (which has a complete inference system, but which does not uniquely pin down the standard model of the real numbers).
Nonstandard analysis exploits this fact to treat infinitesimals as nonstandard reals, which satisfy all the first-order facts about real numbers, while being simultaneously above zero and less than all positive (standard) reals. This yields the hyperreal numbers.
Nonstandard analysis also takes advantage of nonstandard natural numbers called hyperfinite numbers. For example, we don't define an integral in the usual way as a limit of finer and finer sums:
Instead, an integral is defined directly as a sum:
Here, is a hyperfinite number: a nonstandard number which is larger than all the standard natural numbers, but obeys all the first-order properties of natural numbers.
This provides the inspiration for our approach to quantifiers.
As we argued earlier, if we are going to use hyperreal numbers, we can't keep our definition of quantification as inf and sup because those operations aren't well-defined for hyperreals.
For this reason, we need to redefine and as minimum and maximum over a transfinite number of sentences. That's not much of a restriction compared to previously: is larger than all the natural numbers, so we can have an unbounded number of sentences, we just cannot have infinitely many of them.
With a transfinite number of sentences , the previous attempt at proof no longer ends in a contradiction. The truth value of used to be , but with the new definition of , it is .
Consider now the second branch of the proof, where we guess that for some , and let's take an infinitesimal . Recall that , so the minimum truth value of the is obtained for . Plugging this into the value for we obtain that . Solving for gives us the infinitesimal . So the truth value of is infinitesimally close to, but distinct from 1!
We have shown that the previous way of proving the inconsistency of a Truth predicate with Peano Arithmetic, does not go through in nonstandard-valued Łukasiewicz logic. On the surface, it looks like we have provided an example of a theory that can contain a Truth predicate without contradictions!
This might well be the case. But it could also be the case that we have just provided a recipe for an ordered infinite set of Ł-PA theories, each of which can only express the truth predicate of those smaller than itself–but not itself.
This is not a proof or a rigorous argument, we're just gesturing at the problem. The problem is that, in this new theory, quantifiers are over a transfinite number of elements only. This would limit the number of entities in the theory (i.e., the number of numbers) to at most . Or, it could be provable that there at most numbers, in which case the theories would shrink.
Consider the two axioms of PA which are essential to defining addition, from Restall's paper:
Because we have just restricted statements to be over transfinite amounts of elements, for example at most , this means that the sum can be defined for at most total numbers. The resulting theory is therefore different than Peano Arithmetic, it has fewer numbers. In Peano Arithmetic, there can be infinitely many number lines of "nonstandard numbers", all larger than the standard numbers which start at 0; but now there can be at most , because the 'forall' statement that defines numbers can only be over at most elements.
Even if this is true, it would still be the case that the theory can express the number of elements that can be in its 'forall' statements. However, it is possible that something about how numbers are derived makes it so that there are at most (or fewer) numbers. In that case, the number to express the maximum amount of entities that can be inside a quantifier does not even exist in the theory itself, which is ironic.
Why care about formal theories of truth?
This article is mostly for fun, but I (Abram) do see a potential application for AI safety. One sub-problem of AI safety is interpretability: figuring out what an AI is thinking about. In order to thoroughly address this question, it may be necessary to adopt a theory of meaning/semantics/referentiality: how do we reason in general about what something is "about"?
The concern is that attempts to formulate a theory of semantics robust enough to inform interpretability efforts could run head-first into Tarski's Undefinability Theorem, which shows (under some assumptions) that it is impossible for any theory of semantics to work for itself. Naively, what this suggests is that humans can only interpret what an AI is thinking about if the AI is (in a semantic sense) less capable than the humans.
Tarski's Undefinability Theorem launched a literature on trying to get around the theorem, which is what we are engaging with here. A successful theory of this sort could be relevant to a theory of interpretability which applies to AI systems which are as capable as humans. (We don't claim that the current proposal is necessarily the right one for such an application, although we do think it has some nice features.)
Restall's paper proves -inconsistency, which is a weaker flaw. However, -inconsistency contradicts the semantics we gave for quantifiers, based on infimum and supremum. So, we can accurately say that the assumptions we've made are inconsistent.
These theories are typically developed within the domain of arithmetic, which means that in order to talk about sentences, we need to choose a way to encode sentences as numbers. This is now standard practice in computer science (where everything is encoded as binary numbers), but Gödel introduced the idea in this context, so we call the practice Gödel encoding. The current essay uses regular quotes to represent this, for familiarity. Hence, here represents the Gödel code for sentence .
Though slightly weaker systems that prove their own consistency exist: self-verifying theories. These might still have a lot of the theorems that we know and love.
2025-11-21 11:07:23
Published on November 21, 2025 3:07 AM GMT
Let's put aside the many, many philosophical confusions about what "preferences" even are. There's a very basic sense that preferences are confusing even in practice. It's that for most things that you could have preferences about, you probably don't know what your preferences about those things are, and you don't have any reliable way of introspecting upon yourself to figure them out.
Let's take a very basic example: food. Even more narrowly, let's consider only your reflexive (system 1) taste-sensation-preferences about food. For the sake of this hypothetical, let's use "streamed broccoli"[1]. For that food item, when you put it into your mouth, is your immediate, instinctual reaction "good" or "bad"? (Let's call this a fast-preference, moving forward.)
I claim that knowing the answer to the previous question is a way in which you do know what at least one of your preferences are.
Now let's consider a food item that you haven't had before. I will use the example of fresh durian, since I only tried it for the first time a couple weeks ago[2]. (I recommend picking one that is reputed to share as little in common with foods that you're familiar with as possible.)
I claim that you don't "know" what your fast-preference for that food item will be. You certainly have some priors, established from eating many different foods in the past, so you might be reasonably well-calibrated if you make a prediction, but for a food item that's novel in the relevant sensory dimensions, I think you will have a hard time doing much better than a naive baseline of "what percentage of foods have I liked in the past", purely by introspection[3].
Now consider that understanding your own fast-preferences about foods is playing on easy mode in a bunch of ways:
Most kinds of preferences you have over most other salient features of your life are way harder to understand than your fast-preferences about food.
Now let's consider the referent[6] preference people are pointing at when they ask if you "like" doing your job or not:
And now you're telling me that I'm supposed to figure out what kinds of people I like? Seems rough.
If you've never had steamed broccoli before, substitute any food that you're familiar with.
As above, you may have to pick your own food item here.
You might be able to do better by asking other people with preferences similar to yours, of course.
Your preference for a specific food item might change over time, but at any given moment when you're eating that food item, I think you're unlikely to be in a state of substantial uncertainty about whether you like it or not.
Some people I know claim that such considerations feed directly into a visceral disgust response when eating a food. Putting aside the fact that this is contingent on them knowing a specific fact while eating the food, I think that there is not much of a relationship for the overwhelming majority of people.
Let's also pretend that all of these people are, in fact, pointing at the same thing... hah.
2025-11-21 09:53:05
Published on November 21, 2025 1:39 AM GMT
To be clear, I'm not talking about the sort of "suicide prevention" that involves raising awareness about mental health and providing resources to those seeking help. The vast majority of us will agree that increasing human happiness is desirable, and I am no contrarian. When I refer to suicide prevention, I am referencing processes which actively prevent an individual from committing suicide, particularly involuntary commitment.
As the title implies, this post will discuss suicide and mental illness, so if you are especially sensitive to or offended by such material, I would advise against reading further.
When a loved one expresses a desire or a plan to commit suicide, it is natural to feel scared, upset, angry, betrayed, helpless, or disturbed. Most of you will offer a helping hand and a shoulder to cry on, suggest accessible mental health resources, or remind them of the beauty of life and all the people who love them. For many of you, such superficial countermeasures are simply not enough. Platitudes, positive thinking, and promises of happy futures certainly won't hurt, but mindfulness isn't going to reverse such a severe deficit in the will to live. Your loved one, this person who you love so dearly, is profoundly ill, their desire a perversion of the human psyche; as they are so obviously incapable of reason, mere words cannot ensure their continued presence to your satisfaction. You may be so afraid, so distraught, so desperate, that you will do whatever it takes to give them a chance at life.
You will do whatever it takes to stop them.
Such a response is understandable, socially respectable, a clear display of your loyalty and passion, and, above all, selfish.
The vast majority of us will agree that torture for the sake of torture is unacceptable. Sure, our theoretical sadistic perpetrator finds it incredibly gratifying, but his urges and pleasures do not give him the right to inflict suffering upon non-consenting victims. Even if multiple perpetrators act as a group, even if this group claims their moral philosophy or personal values or religion permits them to torment outsiders, we still maintain the victim's individual rights and condemn the perpetrators. Many of you would not allow an animal to be treated in this manner. The fact remains that no amount of emotional gratification or distress permits you to inflict suffering upon or violate the bodily autonomy of another conscious being.
So, why is encouraged, even mandatory, to force an individual who is suffering, who seeks to end their suffering, to continue to live? Why is it encouraged, even mandatory, to detain them, to forcefully imprison them and drug them until they repeat the correct platitudes and complete the correct actions and convince you, really persuade you, that they think the right way? When you forcefully extend the life of a suicidal individual, you inflict suffering upon them because it feels good, no different than our theoretical sadistic except in social palatability. Your noble intentions, your emotional gratification and alleviation of all that unpleasant fear and helplessness and distress, does not give you any right to infringe upon your loved one's rights.
There are numerous objections to permitting suicide; I will list some of the most common below.
The fourth objection is not difficult to refute; your moral philosophy, personal values, and religion do not give you the right to infringe upon the freedoms of others. Even if you personally disagree, aligning yourself with theocratic regimes that subjugate women and our theoretical cult of sadistic tormentors, the laws of the United States (and most other democratic nations) do not. To the three religious members of LessWrong, I am a practicing Christian myself, and accordingly do not aim to promote sin or offend the religious, though I am happy to debate the permissibility of suicide in the comments. The third objection is similarly trivial; one's emotional gratification and dependence upon an individual does not entitle them to infringe upon the freedoms of that individual. Even if you personally disagree, aligning yourself with regimes that permit slavery for economic gain or enforce "socially harmonious" behavior at the expense of individual expression, the laws of the United States (and most other democratic nations) do not.
The second objection may be rejected on the basis that suicidal individuals are not incompetent nor beyond reason. While a few individuals may impulsively decide to commit suicide, the decision is a calculated and well-planned for many others; besides, intense emotions do not exclude those who experience them from autonomy and responsibility. The notion that perverse or unnatural desires are proof of incompetence and therefore justification for protective custody is not legally recognized; homosexuals, for instance, are not regarded as incompetent by the laws of the United States (or most other democratic nations), and are free to do as they please.
The first objection relies upon the notion that suicide is an irreversible decision which many come to regret, as evidenced by suicide attempt survivors who do not reattempt. Unfortunately, this argument suffers from the most literal form of survivorship bias; those who are less committed to dying, and thus more likely to regret a suicide attempt, will use less lethal methods, while those who are more committed to dying, and thus less likely to regret a suicide attempt, will use more lethal methods. Accordingly, surveys, which are obviously limited to those who survived suicide attempts, will record a much higher proportion of those who would regret a suicide attempt. Further, the regretfulness of suicide attempt survivors is largely irrelevant to the legality of suicide prevention; the role of the government is to protect individual rights and act within the interests of its citizens, not to force citizens to follow a certain ideal, no matter how well-intentioned. At the time of the attempt, the suicidal individual is fully understanding and accepting of the consequences of their actions, and preventing a process they have consented to infringes upon their personal freedoms.
My central argument, as implied by the title, is that suicide prevention ought to be illegal. It is not difficult or costly to execute; simply reduce the criteria for involuntary commitment and mandatory reporting to "immediate risk of danger to others", and enforce the law accordingly. The majority of the following section will focus upon specific cases.
Medically Assisted Intentional Death
MAID is a process in which a mentally competent and terminally ill patient seeks a medically-induced death. In some jurisdictions, the eligibility of MAID is expanded to those with grievous and incurable medical conditions. Introducing the assistance of a physician or the presence of a painful or fatal medical condition does not negate the arguments above; motivation and method do not negate the autonomy of the individual who chooses to end their life.
Coercion
When an individual is pressured to commit suicide, particularly by those in a position of authority, they have not made the decision to end their life autonomously. In such cases, the victim should not be punished; rather, the perpetrator and their influence ought to be separated from the victim, by force if necessary. Precedent for prosecuting suicide coercion has already been established; following the death of Conrad Roy, in which Roy's girlfriend Michelle Carter coerced Roy into committing suicide, Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
Minors and the Legally Incompetent
The largest gray area exists around minors and the legally incompetent; while it is obvious that such individuals cannot consent to MAID or other forms of assisted suicide, whether they ought to be actively confined when attempting suicide is more difficult to answer, as such individuals lack complete autonomy but retain some personal freedoms. In this particular situation, their legal guardian's obligations to protect their well-being override any such freedoms, so suicide prevention ought to be permitted.
When you are suicidal, it is natural to be hesitant to tell your loved ones. You know they will feel scared, upset, angry, betrayed, helpless, or disturbed, and you would never cause them such distress unless you trusted them dearly and believed they could change your situation. You hope they will offer a helping hand and a shoulder to cry on, suggest accessible mental health resources, or remind you of the beauty of life and all the people who love you; at the end of the day, you don't want to die, just to escape. Unfortunately, for many of your loved ones, providing the support you desperately need is simply not enough. They will not understand the pain you are in, will not listen to the reasons you have decided to end your life. Your loved one, this person who you love so dearly, will simply think you profoundly ill, your desire a perversion of the human psyche; as they so obviously consider you incapable of reason, nothing you could ever say will matter more than the continued presence of the image of you they have constructed. They will be so afraid, so distraught, so desperate, that they will do whatever it takes to keep you alive, even at the expense of you and your community.
Mental health professionals are no better; breathe the word "suicide" in their presence and you'll be whisked away to some institution, where you'll be closely monitored and likely drugged for an indefinite period of time. Such a scenario would burden your loved ones and tarnish any reputation of yours that remained. Your loved ones deserve better.
You decide not to tell anyone and get it over with.
By prohibiting suicide prevention, the stigma surrounding suicide ideation is reduced. The afflicted can speak to their loved ones and be honest with mental health professionals without risk of imprisonment, and are empowered to seek treatment on their own terms. Further, should an individual decide to end their life, they may seek the least painful and most effective means without fear of discovery. Suicide prevention infringes upon individual rights and incentivises those who suffer from suicidal ideation to hide their condition until it is too late. Do not allow emotional gratification to override your loved one's well-being; give them the autonomy to make the correct decision for themselves, and provide your support for them regardless of their choice.
2025-11-21 09:06:11
Published on November 21, 2025 1:06 AM GMT
Human thinking has multiple layers of abstraction. Just as walking can be analyzed at the levels of "walk from A to B", "angles at which which knee, hip, and ankle joints bend", "individual muscle contractions", and "signaling to muscle fibres", so does thinking decompose from high-level questions like "what should I have for lunch?" into smaller mental operations like thinking of options ("tuna", "pasta", "takeout") and considerations ("healthy", "tasty", "economical").
As with walking, the lower levels aren't something we consciously think about, or can think about. When's the last time you thought about the angle you're bending your knees at when walking?
These realities mean that human thinking both has many degrees of freedom to vary, at many levels, and that we fail to notice just how varied human thinking could be. The lack of conscious awareness within ourselves of all the parts of our thinking compounds with the invisibility of other people's thinking. In the third post of this series, I argued we likely underestimate our differences from others when those differences are private.
In the second post, I asserted that major differences between people arise not just from what mental motions they can theoretically execute, but from the patterns and habits of thoughts they've learned.
The point of this post is to explore why people end up learning some different ways of thinking.
Plausibly, we might reason, people think differently because we actually have different brains. Just genetically, people are different. Maybe this could have been true; I don't think it is. One intuition pump here is that people vary in size, muscle mass, body-part length ratios, etc., and yet people mostly walk the same. Trained people can do gait analysis, but apart from the occasional person with swagger, I don't think we notice much difference in how people walk. There's just like an approximately optimal way, and we all do that.
So if thinking followed the same pattern, while some people would be better at it, the way some people walk faster and more capably, we'd be doing the same thing.
This isn't a knockdown argument: brain phenotypes might differ more than body phenotypes relevant to walking. Still, I don't think it's all that's going on.
You might think that walking is something that evolution could figure out and completely encode in the genome for the brain. But it doesn't. Even animals that are able to walk very soon after birth do so with some stumbling around and practice, and improve in the following days and weeks. Certainly, for humans, each of us individually learn walking via trial and error, iteration hones the neural pathways for motor control until it is learned, automatic, and subconscious.
It's essential here that it is learning from feedback. The infant has a clear target of crossing the floor bipedally and an anti-target of falling on the floor. They try repeatedly, and they learn.
I don't think we have any reason to think that thinking is any different. It's neither the case that we are born fully able to think (clearly not) nor the case that, as the brain matures, upon hitting certain milestones, new mental motions are suddenly unlocked. Rather, like walking, there's a gradual process of trying to accomplish certain goals and seeing which mental motions work. Ultimately, they end up learned: and very much automatic and subconscious except at the top-level (the way we still consciously intend to walk from here to there but don't think about foot placement).
Forgive me for repeating the following; it's important. Thinking is different in a couple of ways, though. (1) The reward signal is much more complicated than that for walking. Vastly more. There are all kinds of things our thinking can get us, such as approval from others, resources we like, experiences we like, inherently satisfying experiences like sating curiosity, and so on. (2) The range of mental motions is much wider than the range of leg motions.
The key thing is that little human minds come into the world not knowing which mental motions will work, but through trial and error, they find ones that work for them. Walking is maybe too simple. We could analogize to various sports. Playing tennis. One starts with crude motions, but over time, one masters a technique[1]. That technique may or may not be globally optimal. It may or may not generalize well from where it's learned. People do learn bad habits in sports. The same in thought.
Human children[2] have very similar needs to human adults. We want food, safety, entertainment, social acceptance, maybe even love and attention. Some of what works to get these rewards is dependent on environment, e.g., learning which plants and animals are safe to eat. A lot of what works to meet wants in need, especially in modern childhood, routes through the approval and favor of parents, teachers, and peers.
Environmental rewards and social rewards differ. I'll start from the obvious and move towards the less so.
My mother tells a story of her younger brother's friend who would come over to play. One time, my grandmother took him and my uncle down to the shops and left them in the car while she popped in to buy something. The friend burst into tears, distraught. He'd immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union, and he expected going to the shops to take hours.
Take children of any genes, and I think you can cause them to be more anxious, more food-focused, more scarcity-minded, if you place them in environments where those kinds of temperaments are beneficial.
My thinking here is deeply downstream of Kevin Simler's excellent Personality: The Body in Society.
Though much of our final loadout is determined through development, we are born with certain dispositions: a natural talent for running, math, oration, or a naturally beautiful face. Notwithstanding, personality can't be packaged deterministically with other traits. Whether it's a good strategy (and personality is strategy[3]) to be aggressive and domineering is dependent not on your muscles, but on your muscles relative to everyone else's[4]. This is something one learns. Pick a few fights, profit and lose horribly, and tendencies will get reinforced.
This goes just as much for the kinds of cognition you have. You're funnier than everyone else? You'll learn to make jokes. Poetically gifted? You'll probably double down on that skill. And so on.
Even if you're not athletically gifted, if your parents and peers and all those around you venerate athletic accomplishment, there's a good chance you'll invest in it. The drive for social approval is enough to get people to do a lot of things. And not just to do them, but to absorb that they are good.
And what those around us reward is more than what they explicitly value. The angry, explosive parent will train unobtrusiveness. The parent who only pays attention to wrongdoing might be training wrongdoing.
There are many types of thinking. At a macro-level, there's solving puzzles of physical reality (how do I fix this broken thing? how do I build an X that Y's?), there's social skills (what is that person thinking? what would most please them?), and there's these parameters like risk-taking and anxiety levels.
Throughout life, especially in childhood, these are getting explored and trained. Undoubtedly, there are feedback loops: the child who feels elation at getting an A+ on math (all the more so if parents/peers/culture reinforce that it is goood) will invest effort into repeating that win. The child who didn't might develop an aversion and instead focus on where their relative strength lies.
To quote Eugene Wei's excellent Status as a Service (Staas):
Let's begin with two principles:
- People are status-seeking monkeys*
- People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital
I think the argument is broader than just social capital. In kind of a greedy, local(, myopic?) way, people are efficiently maximizing reward. For different people, the optimal path is different. And this includes patterns of thought.
I'd guess the full list of relevant traits here is a lot longer. And again, this list is at a high level of abstraction of mental traits because it's hard to make an ontology of lower mental operations, though I expect those to be varying significantly between people, too.
We can imagine putting each of these traits on a numerical scale. Let's say -1 to 1. And then position everyone on them. Make a vector in a high-dimensional space. Certainly, there will be correlations. But also a lot of variation across humanity.
I think this variation is there, and I think it's woefully underappreciated because when someone expresses an opinion on some issue, especially an issue where there are 2-3 mainstream options, you're not seeing all the weird and wacky ways their mind reached it.
You might imagine they're running a similar process to you with the truth value of a couple of premises flipped. You make your sandwiches with peanut butter and jelly, and you imagine they're getting a different result because they're using Nutella. Actually, they were making tikka masala. You just couldn't see, because mental behaviors are more private and weirder than shower behaviors.
And this has implications. You might think you'll get them to agree with you if you can convince them that PB&J is correct and Nutella is bad for you. But they're not even working with bread! The whole question of condiments is irrelevant. Only due to a real failure of intellectual empathy and poor translation do we think we're talking about the same things when we use the same words. You think the discussion is sandwiches, they think it's curry, and everyone is confused by how weird what the other is saying.
I'll elaborate more on this tomorrow.
Credit to Andrew Critch for this post and series. A chance conversation with him gave me the kernel of "people get RL'd into different kinds of thought" that I've been fleshing out.
We might say "mastering some skill" is equivalent to "establish really strong weights in ones brain for effective motions". (Weights in the ML/AI sense of model parameters.)
Not all learning happens in childhood but enough of it that I'm going to frame the learnins here as what happens in youth.
Thank you, Kevin Simler.
Or possible you learn that muscles aren't what matters because your society conducts all conflict via chess, and you're not very good at it.
I know, this is the stereotypical gender split. Perhaps so, I'd bet it's also attenuated or reinforced by learning.
2025-11-21 07:14:42
Published on November 20, 2025 11:14 PM GMT
If you have a chronic infection, consider getting your teeth checked. Teeth in poor health can serve as a kind of reservoir for pathogens, letting them lie dormant before they reactivate and wreak havoc on your health.
What does this look like? Chronic low-grade infections that flare up periodically, usually after the immune system is stressed (stress, insomnia, other illnesses, cold or wetness etc.), your teeth deteriorate, the pathogens enter new areas or grow.
How do they survive? Either in necrotized tissue, form biofilms in cavities, root canals, periodontal pockets or stick around in dental abscesses. Some of these are quite visually obvious, others aren't. Biofilms are a sort of slimy extracellular matrix with bacteria embedded within them, and are much more resistant to antibiotics.
How long do they last? If left untreated, months to years, though the affected teeth may not be painful for all, or even most, of the infections' duration.
Which teeth are affected? Any tooth, but teeth in poor health are likely to be affected. Severe cavities, broken teeth, gum disease and other injuries to the mouth, e.g. failed dental work or partially erupted wisdom teeth, can all cause openings for bacteria to enter. The damage need not be visible.
How are they treated? Typically through extraction or root canals. The bacteria may not clear out on their own, as the damaged tooth provides them a safe haven.