Thanks to Rebecca Gorman for discussions that lead to these insights.

How can you get a superintelligent AI aligned with human values? There are two pathways that I often hear discussed. The first sees a general alignment problem - how to get a powerful AI to safely do anything - which, once we've solved, we can point towards human values. The second perspective is that we can only get alignment by targeting human values - these values must be aimed at, from the start of the process.

I'm of the second perspective, but I think it's very important to sort this out. So I'll lay out some of the arguments in its favour, to see what others think of it, and so we can best figure out the approach...

(Cross posted on my personal blog.)

I was working on creating a projects page for my personal website, https://adamzerner.bearblog.dev/. It hit me how many of my projects have been failures, and that I should reflect on them to see what I can learn. Perhaps I'll reflect on other ones in a future blog post, but here I want to reflect on a project that I am declaring a failure today: Connect Developers.

Here is how Connect Developers works. It's for programmers/developers. Developers fill out a fun survey, answering questions like "Performant code is important" vs "It's the root of all evil". Answering 1 would mean you feel very strongly that it is important. Answering 10 would mean you feel very strongly that it is the root of all evil.

Then...

Having not apparently the energy to write this longly, I write it shortly instead, that it be written at all.

People sometimes go about saying now, in this community, that there is collectively enough money that we could potentially go do more things with it, if there were things worth doing.

If that's true, I'd like to see us planting seed grains now for replacing the now-defunct state capacity of the USA and Earth, with respect to biodefense and ultra-high-leverage med R&D.

As a poster child of a previous intervention I backed here, Seasonal Affective Disorder affects 0.5%-3% of the population and higher in countries at extreme latitudes.  Call it a hundred million people at a guess.  Standard lightboxes don't work very well for treating it.  The Sun works great...

As part of my ongoing effort to improve my cost/benefit ratio on social media, I’m nudging myself away from intellectual mosh pit platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and towards blog posts, articles, videos essays, etc. Really longform consumption (e.g. books) remains about the same, my limitations on that are mostly my insistence on fact-checking nonfiction and very narrow tastes in fiction, this post is about changing what I reach for when I’m bored in a line. Towards that goal I have made a few changes, which I list here roughly in ascending order of how much effort they were:

• Put all of my screens in greyscale. If you only try one thing on this list, make it this one. It takes five seconds to test once you have

You Should Start a Blog Right Now!

Or should you? You can find some blog posts about the benefits of blogging but I can't think of many that explore the potential harms. I can think of some reasons why blogging — especially under your real identity — could waste your time, make you a worse thinker, and limit your social and professional opportunities.

1. Blogging will give society more influence over your thinking.

Imagine if any stranger off the street could come and visit your home. How would that change your behavior? Probably you would make sure there is nothing offensive or too personal around, and you'd spend more time making your home look neat and presentable, with your shelves lined with books you feel give a good impression of...

Assume that you know with a high degree of confidence that Russia will invade the Ukrainian region of Donbas in February 2022. 

Also assume that you have an investment portfolio invested 100% in VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market Index).

You think that if Russia invades Ukraine, this will affect your portfolio in a negative way. 

Aside from doing a direct hedge (Buying buts on VTI), in what other ways would you attempt to hedge your portfolio?

Epistemic Status: The views expressed are mine alone. They are various degrees of strong and weak, and are various degrees of weakly or strongly held. Due to time constraints, I’m not confident I was careful to mark every claim here with the proper ‘I think that’ style caveats. If something seems to you like it has a huge ‘citation needed’ sign on it, I’m probably not claiming to have proven anything.

I was one of the recommenders for the most recent round of grants for the Survival and Flourishing Fund. In accordance with our recommendations, $9.6 million dollars was allocated for distribution to various charities. The process involved four hours-long meetings where we discussed various questions, several additional discussions with other recommenders individually, many hours spent reading applications,...

Important note on testing that I’m including at top of both posts today.

From various sources, I have become convinced that rapid tests taken from nose swabs are likely to often be several days slower at detecting infections than rapid tests that use throat swabs.

Here’s Washington Post on that, this quote should tell you what you need to know.

On one side are well-regardedexperts who argue that swabbing your throat in addition to your nose may increase the chances that a home test can detect omicron. On the other side are similarly well-regarded experts, including those at the Food and Drug Administration, who urge Americans to avoid experimenting with kits that were developed and tested using only nasal swabs.

This ‘disagreement’ over ‘experimentation’ made me that much more confident in...