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by Quinn
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[-]Quinn270

august 2024 guaranteed safe ai newsletter

in case i forgot last month, here's a link to july

A wager you say

One proof of concept for the GSAI stack would be a well-understood mechanical engineering domain automated to the next level and certified to boot. How about locks? Needs a model of basic physics, terms in some logic for all the parts and how they compose, and some test harnesses that simulate an adversary. Can you design and manufacture a provably unpickable lock? 

Zac Hatfield-Dodds (of hypothesis/pytest and Anthropic, was offered and declined authorship on the GSAI position paper) challenged Ben Goldhaber to a bet after Ben coauthored a post with Steve Omohundro. It seems to resolve in 2026 or 2027, the comment thread should get cleared up once Ben gets back from Burning Man. The arbiter is Raemon from LessWrong.

Zac says you can’t get a provably unpickable lock on this timeline. Zac gave (up to) 10:1 odds, so recall that the bet can be a positive expected value for Ben even if he thinks the event is most likely not going to happen.

For funsies, let’s map out one path of what has to happen for Zac to pay Ben $10k. This is not the canonical path, but it is a path:

  1. Physics to
... (read more)
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2habryka
Oh, I liked this one. Mind if I copy it into your shortform (or at least like the first few paragraphs so people can get a taste?)
1Quinn
By all means. Happy for that
[-]Quinn110

Good arguments - notes on Craft of Research chapter 7

Arguments take place in 5 parts.

  1. Claim: What do you want me to believe?
  2. Reasons: Why should I agree?
  3. Evidence: How do you know? Can you back it up?
  4. Acknowledgment and Response: But what about ... ?
  5. Warrant: How does that follow?

This can be modeled as a conversation with readers, where the reader prompts the writer to taking the next step on the list.

Claim ought to be supported with reasons. Reasons ought to be based on evidence. Arguments are recursive: a part of an argument is an acknowledgment of an anticipated response, and another argument addresses that response. Finally, when the distance between a claim and a reason grows large, we draw connections with something called warrants.

The logic of warrants proceeds in generalities and instances. A general circumstance predictably leads to a general consequence, and if you have an instance of the circumstance you can infer an instance of the consequence.

Arguing in real life papers is complexified from the 5 steps, because

  • Claims should be supported by two or more reasons
  • A writer can anticipate and address numerous responses. As I mentioned, arguments are recursive, especi
... (read more)
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[-]Quinn100

Thinking about a top-level post on FOMO and research taste

  • Fear of missing out defined as inability to execute on a project cuz there's a cooler project if you pivot
  • but it also gestures at more of a strict negative, where you think your project sucks before you finish it, so you never execute
  • was discussing this with a friend: "yeah I mean lesswrong is pretty egregious cuz it sorta promotes this idea of research taste as the ability to tear things down, which can be done armchair"
  • I've developed strategies to beat this FOMO and gain more depth and detail with projects (too recent to see returns yet, but getting there) but I also suspect it was nutritious of me to develop discernment about what projects are valuable or not valuable for various threat models and theories of change (in such a way that being a phd student off of lesswrong wouldn't have been as good in crucial ways, tho way better in other ways).
    • but I think the point is you have to turn off this discernment sometimes, unless you want to specialize in telling people why their plans won't work, which I'm more dubious on the value of than I used to be

Idk maybe this shortform is most of the value of the top level post

Reply1
[-]Quinn100

A trans woman told me

I get to have all these talkative blowhard traits and no one will punish me for it cuz I'm a girl. This is one major reason detrans would make my life worse. Society is so cruel to men, it sucks so much for them

And another trans woman had told me almost the exact same thing a couple months ago.

My take is that roles have upsides and downsides, and that you'll do a bad job if you try to say one role is better or worse than another on net or say that a role is more downside than upside. Also, there are versions of "women talk too much" as a stereotype in many subcultures, but I don't have a good inside view about it.

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3Elizabeth
This may be true, but it might be that she's incurring a bunch of social penalities she isn't aware of. Women are less likely to overtly punish, so if she's spending more time with women that could already explain it. No one yells at you to STFU, but you miss out on party invite you would have gotten if you shared the conversation better.  I suspect men are also more willing to tell other men to STFU than they are to say it to women, but will let someone else speak to that question. 
2Viliam
The fact that both roles have advantages and disadvantage doesn't necessarily prove that neither is better on net. Then again, "better" by what preferences? Lucky are the people whose preferences match the role they were assigned. To me it seems that women have a greater freedom of self-expression, as long as they are not competitive. Men are treated instrumentally: they are socially allowed to work and to compete against each other, anything else is a waste of energy. For example, it is okay for a man to talk a lot, if he is a politician, manager, salesman, professor, priest... simply, if it is a part of his job. And when he is seducing a woman. Otherwise, he should be silent. Women are expected to chit-chat all the time, but they should never contradict men, or say anything controversial.
3Quinn
one may be net better than the other, I just think the expected error washes out all of one's reasoning so individuals shouldn't be confident they're right.
[-]Quinn100

thoughts on chapter 9 of Craft of Research

Getting the easy things right shows respect for your readers and is the best training for dealing with the hard things.

If they don't believe the evidence, they'll reject the reasons and, with them, your claim.

We saw previously that claims ought to be supported with reasons, and reasons ought to be based on evidence. Now we will look closer at reasons and evidence.

Reasons must be in a clear, logical order. Atomically, readers need to buy each of your reasons, but compositionally they need to buy your logic. Storyboarding is a useful technique for arranging reasons into a logical order: physical arrangements of index cards, or some DAG-like syntax. Here, you can list evidence you have for each reason or, if you're speculating, list the kind of evidence you would need.

When storyboarding, you want to read out the top level reasons as a composite entity without looking at the details (evidence), because you want to make sure the high-level logic makes sense.

Readers will not accept a reason until they see it anchored in what they consider to be a bedrock of established fact. ... To count as evidence, a statement must report something tha

... (read more)
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[-]Quinn100

Sources - notes on Craft of Research chapters 5 and 6

Primary, secondary, and tertiary sources

Primary sources provide you with the "raw data" or evidence you will use to develop, test, and ultimately justify your hypothesis or claim. Secondary sources are books, articles, or reports that are based on primary sources and are intended for scholarly or professional audiences. Tertiary sources are books and articles that synthesize and report on secondary sources for general readers, such as textbooks, articles in encyclopedias, and articles in mass-circulation publications.

The distinction between primary and secondary sources comes from 19th century historians, and the idea of tertiary sources came later. The boundaries can be fuzzy, and are certainly dependent on the task at hand.

I want to reason about what these distinctions look like in the alignment community, and whether or not they're important.

The rest of chapter five is about how to use libraries and information technologies, and evaluating sources for relevance and reliability.

Chapter 6 starts off with the kind of thing you should be looking for while you read

Look for creative agreement

  • Offer additional support. You can
... (read more)
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[-]Quinn90

Yesterday I quit my job for direct work on epistemic public goods! Day one of direct work trial offer is April 4th, and it'll take 6 weeks after that to know if I'm a fulltime hire.

I'm turning down

  • raise to 200k/yr usd
  • building lots of skills and career capital that would give me immense job security in worlds where investment into one particular blockchain doesn't go entirely to zero
  • having fun on the technical challenges

for

  • confluence of my skillset and a theory of change that could pay huge dividends in the epistemic public goods space
  • 0.35x paycut
... (read more)
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[-]Quinn80

did anyone draw up an estimate of how much the proportion of code written by LLMs will increase? or even what the proportion is today

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[-]Quinn80

How are people mistreated by bellcurves?

I think this is a crucial part of a lot of psychological maladaption and social dysfunction, very salient to EAs. If you're way more trait xyz than anyone you know for most of your life, your behavior and mindset will be massively effected, and depending on when in life / how much inertia you've accumulated by the time you end up in a different room where suddenly you're average on xyz, you might lose out on a ton of opportunities for growth.

In other words, the concept of "big fish small pond" is deeply insightful a... (read more)

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5Viliam
So, being a "big fish in a small pond" teaches you habits that become harmful when you later move to a larger pond. But if you don't move, you can't grow further. I think the specific examples are more known that the generalization. For example: Many people in Mensa are damaged this way. They learned to be the smartest ones, which they signal by solving pointless puzzles, or by talking about "smart topics" (relativity, quantum, etc.) despite the fact that they know almost nothing about these topics. Why did they learn these bad habits? Because this is how you most efficiently signal intelligence to people who are not themselves intelligent. But it fails to impress the intelligent people used to meeting other intelligent people, because they see the puzzles as pointless, they see the smart talk as bullshit if they ever read an introductory textbook on the topic, and will ask you about your work and achievements instead. The useful thing would instead be to learn how to cooperate with other intelligent people on reaching worthy goals. People who are too smart or too popular at elementary school (or high school) may be quite shocked when they move to a high school (or university) and suddenly their relative superpowers are gone. If they learned to rely on them too much, they may have a problem adapting to normal hard work or normal friendships. Staying at the same job for too long might have a similar effect. You feel like an expert because you are familiar with all systems in the company. Then at some moment fate makes you change jobs, and suddenly you realize that you know nothing, that the processes and technologies used in your former company were maybe obsolete. But the more you delay changing jobs, the harder it becomes. I remember reading in a book by László Polgár, father of the famous female chess players, how he wanted his girls to play in the "men's" chess league since the beginning, because that's what he wanted them to win. He was afraid that playing
4Elizabeth
I think this wasn't true at the time, at least in Hungary. The oldest sister and their father spent a lot of time fighting this, so it was ~true by the time the youngest sister got really competitive. This might prove the larger point, since the youngest sister also went the farthest.
2Viliam
Uh, good catch! Then I am surprised that they actually succeeded to win this. It would be too easy and possibly very tempting to just say "you broke the rules, disqualified!" Or at least, I would expect a debate to last for a decade, and then it would be too late for the Polgár sisters.
3Quinn
yeah IQ ish things or athletics are the most well-known examples, but I only generalized in the shortform cuz I was looking around at my friends and thinking about more Big Five oriented examples. Certainly "conscientiousness seems good but I'm exposed to the mistake class of unhelpful navelgazing, so maybe I should be less conscientious" is so much harder to take seriously if you're in a pond that tends to struggle with low conscientiousness. Or being so low on neuroticism that your redteam/pentest muscles atrophy.
2Viliam
That sounds intriguing. I would like to read an article with many specific (even if fictional) examples.
[-]Quinn80

nonprosaic ai will not be on short timelines

I think a property of my theory of change is that academic and commercial speed is a bottleneck. I recently realized that my mass assignment for timelines synchronized with my mass assignment for the prosaic/nonprosaic axis. The basic idea is that let's say a radical new paper that blows up and supplants the entire optimization literature gets pushed to the arxiv tomorrow, signaling the start of some paradigm that we would call nonprosaic. The lag time for academics and industry to figure out what's going on, fi... (read more)

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2ChristianKl
The reasoning assumes that ideas are first generated in academia and don't arise inside of companies. With DeepMind outperforming the academic protein folding community when protein folding isn't even the main focus of DeepMind I consider it plausible that new approaches arise within a company and get only released publically when they are strong enough to have an effect. Even if there's a paper most radical new papers get ignored by most people and it might be that in the beginning only one company takes the idea seriously and doesn't talk about it publically to keep a competive edge.
1Quinn
That's totally fair, but I have a wild guess that the pipeline from google brain to google products is pretty nontrivial to traverse, and not wholly unlike the pipeline from arxiv to product.
2Steven Byrnes
How short is "short" for you? Like, AlexNet was 2012, DeepMind patented deep Q learning in 2014, the first TensorFlow release was 2015, the first PyTorch release was 2016, the first TPU was 2016, and by 2019 we had billion-parameter GPT-2 … So if you say "Short is ≤2 years", then yeah, I agree. If you say "Short is ≤8 years", I think I'd disagree, I think 8 years might be plenty for a non-prosaic approach. (I think there are a lot of people for whom AGI in 15-20 years still counts as "short timelines". Depends on who you're talking to, I guess.)
1Quinn
I should've mentioned in OP but I was lowkey thinking upper bound on "short" would be 10 years. I think developer ecosystems are incredibly slow (longer than ten years for a new PL to gain penetration, for instance). I guess under a singleton "one company drives TAI on its own" scenario this doesn't matter, because tooling tailored for a few teams internal to the same company is enough which can move faster than a proper developer ecosystem. But under a CAIS-like scenario there would need to be a mature developer ecosystem, so that there could be competition.
[-]Steven Byrnes100

I feel like 7 years from AlexNet to the world of PyTorch, TPUs, tons of ML MOOCs, billion-parameter models, etc. is strong evidence against what you're saying, right? Or were deep neural nets already a big and hot and active ecosystem even before AlexNet, more than I realize? (I wasn't paying attention at the time.)

Moreover, even if not all the infrastructure of deep neural nets transfers to a new family of ML algorithms, much of it will. For example, the building up of people and money in ML, the building up of GPU / ASIC servers and the tools to use them, the normalization of the idea that it’s reasonable to invest millions of dollars to train one model and to fab ASICs tailored to a particular ML algorithm, the proliferation of expertise related to parallelization and hardware-acceleration, etc. So if it took 7 years from AlexNet to smooth turnkey industrial-scale deep neural nets and billion-parameter models and zillions of people trained to use them, then I think we can guess <7 years to get from a different family of learning algorithms to the analogous situation. Right? Or where do you disagree?

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4Quinn
No you're right. I think I'm updating toward thinking there's a region of nonprosaic short-timelines universes. Overall it still seems like that region is relatively much smaller than prosaic short-timelines and nonprosaic long-timelines, though.
[-]Quinn70

Cope isn't a very useful concept.

For every person who has a bad reason that they catch because you say "sounds like cope", there are 10x as many people who find their reason actually compelling. Saying "if that was my reason it would be a sign I was in denial of how hard I was coping" or "I don't think that reason is compelling" isn't really relevant to the person you're ostensibly talking to, who's trying to make the best decisions for the best reasons. Just say you don't understand why the reason is compelling.

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2Dagon
I'm not sure I have experienced a "sounds like cope" reasoning, or at least it doesn't match to discussions I've noted.  Is this similar to "people under stress are bad at updating"?  Why would you expect them to be better at communicating than they are at reasoning?
[-]Quinn60

Excellence and adequacy

I asked a friend whether I should TA for a codeschool called ${{codeschool}}.

You shouldn't hang around ${{codeschool}}. People at ${{codeschool}} are not pursuing excellence.

A hidden claim there that I would soak up the pursuit of non-excellence by proximity or osmosis isn't what's interesting (though I could see that turning out either way). What's interesting is the value of non-excellence, which I'll call adequacy.

${{codeschool}} in this case is effective and impactful at putting butts in seats at companies, and is thereby re... (read more)

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2Viliam
Seems to me that on the market there are very few jobs for the SICP types. The more meta something is, the less of that is needed. If you can design an interactive website, there are thousands of job opportunities for you, because thousands of companies want an interactive website, and somehow they are willing to pay for reinventing the wheel. If you can design a new programming language and write a compiler for it... well, it seems that world already has too many different programming languages, but sure there is a place for maybe a dozen more. The probability of success is very small even if you are a genius. The best opportunity for developers who think too meta is probably to design a new library for an already popular programming language, and hope it becomes popular. The question is how exactly you plan to get paid for that. Probably another problem is that it requires intelligence to recognize intelligence, and it requires expertise to recognize expertise. The SICP type developer seems to most potential employers and most potential colleagues as... just another developer. The company does not see individual output, only team output; it does not matter that your part of code does not contain bugs, if the project as a whole does. You cannot use solutions that are too abstract for your colleagues, or for your managers. Companies value replaceability, because it is less fragile and helps to keep developer salaries lower than they might be otherwise. (In theory, you could have a team full of SICP type developers, which would allow them to work smarter, and yet the company would feel safe. In practice, companies can't recognize this type and don't appreciate it, so this is not going to happen.) Again, probably the best position for a SICP type developer in a company would be to develop some library that the rest of the company would use. That is, a subproject of a limited size that the developer can do alone, so they are not limited in the techniques they use,
[-]Quinn50

I used to think "community builder" was a personality trait I couldn't switch off, but once I moved to the bay I realized that I was just desperate for serendipity and knew how to take it from 0% to 1%. Since the bay is constantly humming at 70-90% serendipity, I simply lost the urge to contribute.

Benefactors are so over / beneficiaries are so back / etc.

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[-]Quinn50

Let FairBot be the player that sends an opponent to Cooperate (C) if it is provable that they cooperate with FairBot, and sends them to Defect (D) otherwise.

Let FairBot_k be the player that searches for proofs of length <= k that it's input cooperates with FairBot_k, and cooperates if it finds one, returning defect if all the proofs of length <= k are exhausted without one being valid.

Critch writes that "100%" of the time, mathematicians and computer scientists report believing that FairBot_k(FairBot_k) = D, owing to the basic vision of a stack overf... (read more)

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4JBlack
It is almost certainly true that setting k=1, Fairbot_1 defects against Fairbot_1 because there are no proofs of cooperation that are 1 bit in length. There can be exceptions: for instance, where Fairbot_1(Fairbot_1) = C is actually an axiom, and represented with a 1-bit string. It is definitely not true that Fairbot_k cooperates with Fairbot_k for all k and all implementations of Fairbot_k, with or without Löb's theorem. It is also definitely not true that Fairbot_k defects against Fairbot_k in general. Whether they cooperate or defect depends upon exactly what proof system and encoding they are using.
3Jalex Stark
I think that to get the type of the agent, you need to apply a fixpoint operator. This also happens inside the proof of Löb for constructing a certain self-referential sentence. (As a breadcrumb, I've heard that this is related to the Y combinator.)
[-]Quinn50

I find myself, just as a random guy, deeply impressed at the operational competence of airports and hospitals. Any good books about that sort of thing?

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1JBlack
It is pretty impressive that they function as well as they do, but seeing how the sausage is made (at least in hospitals) does detract from it quite substantially. You get to see not only how an enormous number of battle hardened processes prevent a lot of lethal screw-ups, but also how also how sometimes the very same processes cause serious and very occasionally lethal screw-ups. It doesn't help that hospitals seem to be universally run with about 90% of the resources they need to function reasonably effectively. This is possibly because there is relentless pressure to cut costs, but if you strip any more out of them then people start to die from obviously preventable failures. So it stabilizes at a point where everything is much more horrible than it could be, but not quite to an obviously lethal extent. As far as your direct question goes, I don't have any good books to recommend.
[-]Quinn50

Rats and EAs should help with the sanity levels in other communities

Consider politics. You should take your political preferences/aesthetics, go to the tribes that are based on them, and help them be more sane. In the politics example, everyone's favorite tribe has failure modes, and it is sort of the responsibility of the clearest-headed members of that tribe to make sure that those failure modes don't become the dominant force of that tribe.

Speaking for myself, having been deeply in an activist tribe before I was a rat/EA, I regret I wasn't there to hel... (read more)

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0Viliam
But what if that makes my tribe lose the political battle? I mean, if rationality actually helped win political fights, by the power of evolution we already would have been all born rational...
2Pattern
1. Evolution does not magically get from A to B instantly. 2. Evolution does not necessarily care about X for many values of X. This can include: winning political fights, whether or not nukes are built and many other things.
[-]Quinn50

Claims - thoughts on chapter eight of Craft of Research

Broadly, the two kinds of claims are conceptual and practical.

Conceptual claims ask readers not to ask, but to understand. The flavors of conceptual claim are as follows:

  • Claims of fact or existence
  • Claims of definition and classification
  • Claims of cause and consequence
  • Claims of evaluation or appraisal

There's essentially one flavor of practical claim

  • Claims of action or policy.

If you read between the lines, you might notice that a kind of claim of fact or cause/consequence is that a policy work... (read more)

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2Viliam
This may be context-dependent. Different countries probably have different cultural norms. Norms may differ for higher-status and lower-status speakers. Humble speech may impress some people, but others may perceive it as a sign of weakness. Also, is your audience fellow scientists or are you writing a popular science book? (More hedging for the former, less hedging for the latter.)
[-]Quinn50

notes (from a very jr researcher) on alignment training pipeline

Training for alignment research is one part competence (at math, cs, philosophy) and another part having an inside view / gears-level model of the actual problem. Competence can be outsourced to universities and independent study, but inside view / gears-level model of the actual problem requires community support.

A background assumption I'm working with is that training as a longtermist is not always synchronized with legible-to-academia training. It might be the case that jr researchers oug... (read more)

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2ChristianKl
I don't think Critch's saying that the best way to get his attention is through cold emails backed up by credentials. The whole post is about him not using that as a filter to decide who's worth his time but that people should create good technical writing to get attention.
1philip_b
Critch's written somewhere that if you can get into UC Berkeley, he'll automatically allow you to become his student, because getting into UC Berkeley is a good enough filter.
2ChristianKl
Where did he say that? Given that he's working at UC Berkeley I would expect him to treat UC Berkeley students preferentially for reasons that aren't just about UC Berkeley being able to filter.  It's natural that you can sign up for one of the classes he teaches at UC Berkeley by being a student of UC Berkeley. Being enrolled into MIT might be just as hard as being enrolled into UC Berkeley but it doesn't give you the same access to courses taught at UC Berkeley by it's faculty. 
2philip_b
http://acritch.com/ai-berkeley/ and also
2ChristianKl
Okay, he does speak about using Berkeley as a filter but he doesn't speak about taking people as his student.  It seems about helping people in UC Berkeley to connect with other people in UC Berkeley. 
[-]Quinn30

I'm excited for language model interpretability to teach us about the difference between compilers and simulations of compilers. In the sense that chatgpt and I can both predict what a compiler of a suitably popular programming language will do on some input, what's going on there---- surely we're not reimplementing the compiler on our substrate, even in the limit of perfect prediction? Will be an opportunity for a programming language theorist in another year or two of interp progress

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[-]Quinn32

Proof cert memo

In the Safeguarded AI programme thesis[1], proof certificates or certifying algorithms are relied upon in the theory of change. Let's discuss!

From the thesis:

Proof certificates are a quite broad concept, introduced by[33] : a certifying algorithm is defined as one that produces enough metadata about its answer that the answer's correctness can be checked by an algorithm which is so simple that it is easy to understand and to formally verify by hand.

The abstract of citation 33 (McConnell et al)[2]

A certifying algorithm is an algorithm

... (read more)
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[-]Quinn30

any interest in a REMIX study group? in meatspace in berkeley, a few hours a week. https://github.com/redwoodresearch/remix_public/

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2Zack_M_Davis
Maybe! (I recently started following the ARENA curriculum, but there's probably a lot of overlap.)
[-]Quinn30

Any tips for getting out of a "rise to the occasion mindset" and into a "sink to your training" mindset?

I'm usually optimizing for getting the most out of my A-game bursts. I want to start optimizing for my baseline habits, instead. I should cover the B-, C-, and Z-game; the A-game will cover itself.

Mathaphorically, "rising to the occasion" is taking a max of a max, whereas "sinking to the level of your habits" looks like a greatest lower bound.

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[-]Quinn30

Yall, this is a rant. It will be sloppy.

I'm really tired of high functioning super smart "autism" like ok we all have madeup diagnoses--- anyone with a IQ slightly above 90 knows that they can learn the slogans to manipulate gatekeepers to get performance enhancement, and they decide not to if they think theyre performing well enough already. That doesn't mean "ADHD" describes something in the world. Similarly, there's this drift of "autism" getting more and more popular. It's obnoxious because labels and identities are obnoxious, but i only find it repuls... (read more)

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[-]Quinn30

For the record, to mods: I waited till after petrov day to answer the poll because my first guess upon receiving a message on petrov day asking me to click something is that I'm being socially engineered. Clicking the next day felt pretty safe.

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[-]Quinn30

"EV is measure times value" is a sufficiently load-bearing part of my worldview that if measure and value were correlated or at least one was a function of the other I would be very distressed.

Like in a sense, is John threatening to second-guess hundreds of years of consensus on is-ought?

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1Quinn
oh dear
1Noosphere89
I'm not sure what measure is referring to here.
1Quinn
probability density
[-]Quinn30

messy, jotting down notes:

  • I saw this thread https://twitter.com/alexschbrt/status/1666114027305725953 which my housemate had been warning me about for years.
  • failure mode can be understood as trying to aristotle the problem, lack of experimentation
  • thinking about the nanotech ASI threat model, where it solves nanotech overnight and deploys adversarial proteins in all the bloodstreams of all the lifeforms.
  • These are sometimes justified by Drexler's inside view of boundary conditions and physical limits.
  • But to dodge the aristotle problem, there would have
... (read more)
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[-]Quinn30

Methods, famously, includes the line "I am a descendant of the line of Bacon", tracing empiricism to either Roger (13th century) or Francis (16th century) (unclear which).

Though a cursory wikiing shows an 11th century figure providing precedents for empiricism! Alhazen or Ibn al-Haytham worked mostly optics apparently but had some meta-level writings about the scientific method itself. I found this shockingly excellent quote

The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of a

... (read more)
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[-]Quinn30

New discord server dedicated to multi-multi delegation research

DM me for invite if you're at all interested in multipolar scenarios, cooperative AI, ARCHES, social applications & governance, computational social choice, heterogeneous takeoff, etc.

(side note I'm also working on figuring out what unipolar worlds and/or homogeneous takeoff worlds imply for MMD research).

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[-]Quinn30

Questions and Problems - thoughts on chapter 4 of Craft of Doing Research

Last time we discussed the difference between information and a question or a problem, and I suggested that the novelty-satisfied mode of information presentation isn't as good as addressing actual questions or problems. In chapter 3 which I have not typed up thoughts about, A three step procedure is introduced

  1. Topic: "I am studying ..."
  2. Question: "... because I want to find out what/why/how ..."
  3. Significance: "... to help my reader understand ..." As we elaborate on the different k
... (read more)
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[-]Quinn20

what's the best essay on asking for advice?

Going over etiquette and the social contract, perhaps if it's software specific it talks about minimal reproducers, whatever else the author thinks is involved.

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2Quinn
A sketch I'm thinking of: asking people to consume information (a question, in this case) is asking them to do you a favor, so you should do your best to ease this burden, however, also don't be paralyzed so budget some leeway to be less than maximally considerate in this way when you really need to.
[-]Quinn20

Guaranteed Safe AI paper club meets again this thursday

Event for the paper club: https://calendar.app.google/2a11YNXUFwzHbT3TA

blurb about the paper in last month's newsletter:

... If you’re wondering why you just read all that, here’s the juice: often in GSAI position papers there’ll be some reference to expectations that capture “harm” or “safety”. Preexpectations and postexpectations with respect to particular pairs of programs could be a great way to cash this out, cuz we could look at programs as interventions and simulate RCTs (labeling one program

... (read more)
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[-]Quinn20

Yoshua Bengio is giving a talk online tomorrow https://lu.ma/4ylbvs75

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[-]Quinn20

GSAI paper club is tomorrow (gcal ticket), summary (by me) and discussion of this paper

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[-]Quinn20

i'm getting back into composing and arranging. send me rat poems to set to music!

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[-]Quinn20

Does anyone use vim / mouse-minimal browser? I like Tridactyl better than the other one I tried, but it's not great when there's a vim mode in a browser window everything starts to step on eachother (like in jupyter, colab, leetcode, codesignal)

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1Morpheus
Trydactyl is amazing. You can disable the mode on specific websites by running the blacklistadd command. If you have configured that already, these settings can also be saved in your config file. Here's my config (though careful before copying my config. It has fixamo_quiet enabled, a command that got Tridactyl almost removed when it was enabled by default. You should read what it does before you enable it.) Here are my ignore settings: autocmd DocStart https://youtube.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart https://todoist.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart mail.google.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart calendar.google.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart keyma.sh mode ignore autocmd DocStart monkeytype.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart https://www.youtube.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart https://ilias.studium.kit.edu/ mode ignore autocmd DocStart localhost:888 mode ignore autocmd DocStart getguestimate.com mode ignore autocmd DocStart localhost:8888 mode ignore