I really dislike the phrase "human values". I think it's confusing because: * It obscures a distinction between human preferences and normative values, i.e. what the author thinks is good in a moral sense * Insofar as the author thinks that fulfilling human preferences is good, they often leave this...
Some months ago I read the book "Talent" by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. Published in 2022, it discusses how to spot talent using one's individual judgment (e.g. assessing a founder as VC). Importantly, it's not a book about how to create a standardized hiring process at a big company...
Some months ago I read the classic management book High Output Management and made a note of quotes that rang particularly true to me. I normally dislike this genre (management books), and disagree with some popular ones (I sympathize with this review of Scaling People, for example), but found High...
Excerpt from Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Andrej Karpathy that I think is valuable for LessWrong-ers to read. I think he's basically correct. Emphasis in bold is mine. > Andrej Karpathy 00:29:53 > > I guess I built the repository over a period of a bit more than a month. I...
Newcomb’s problem is a famous paradox in decision theory. The simple version is as follows: > Two boxes are designated A and B. The player is given a choice between taking only box B or taking both boxes A and B. The player knows the following: > > * Box...
AI risk arguments often gesture at smarter AIs being "more rational"/"closer to a perfect utility maximizer" (and hence being more dangerous) but what does this mean, concretely? Almost anything can be modeled as a maximizer of some utility function. The only way I can see to salvage this line of...
A few days before “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” came out I wrote a review of Scott’s review of the book. Now I’ve actually read the book and can review it for real. I won’t go into the authors’ stylistic choices like their decision to start every chapter with...