A while back, LessWrong poster Aysajan put up a post asking to be someone’s apprentice. He talked about it with johnswentworth, who I recently confirmed via meeting him in person is awesome and does reliably interesting work, and an apprentice experiment was born. 

As John says, you gotta admire the chutzpah. Asking for what one wants is a known to be successful but highly underused strategy, I presume mostly because of the permanent global chutzpah shortage and the associated danger that it might result in mild social awkwardness. 

In addition to the highly successful use of chutzpah, this also points out that apprenticeships are also a known to be successful but highly underused strategy. My feelings about so-called ‘schools’ are well known, but education is great, and apprenticeship is...

In Inadequate Equilibria Eliezer mentions that multivitamins may cause harm via excess manganese

Well, because I looked up previous ketogenic Soylent recipes, and they used standard multivitamin powders containing, e.g., way too much manganese and the wrong form of selenium. (You get all the manganese you need from ordinary drinking water, if it hasn’t been distilled or bottled. Excess amounts may be neurotoxic. One of the leading hypotheses for why multivitamins aren’t found to produce net health improvement, despite having many individual components found to be helpful, is that multivitamins contain 100% of the US RDA of manganese. Similarly, if a multivitamin includes sodium selenite instead of, e.g., se-methyl-selenocysteine, it’s the equivalent of handing you a lump of charcoal and saying, “You’re a carbon-based lifeform; this has carbon

The post is written in January 23, 2019 about 10 Deadly Viruses created in labs:

6 SARS 2.0

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a lethal virus. More than 700 people were killed during a SARS epidemic that infected 8,000 people in 29 countries between 2002 and 2003. Now, scientists have made it deadlier.

The new mutant SARS virus was created by a group of researchers led by Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. They call it SARS 2.0. The researchers developed the virus by adding some protein to the naturally occurring SARS. SARS 2.0 is immune to vaccines and treatments used to cure the naturally occurring SARS virus.^[5]

The team said that the research was necessary because the natural SARS virus could mutate and become immune to

Here's a tool for visualizing some 5 dimensional things. Poetically, the idea is to fold multiple "time dimensions" into the one actual time dimension using a sort of lexicographic ordering. More literally, we play a short 3d movie (each instant is a 3d scene) over and over, varying something about it across each playthrough; each short playthrough traverses the fourth dimension once, and the variation across playthroughs is the traversal in the fifth dimension.

Warmup: visualizing a 3-sphere

(If the following paragraph is too hard, it might help to start with fewer dimensions. A sphere S² can be seen as bunch of cross-section circles stacked on top of each other; or, we can play a 2d movie: blank screen -> point -> rapidly expanding circle -> circle gradually reaching...

Painscience.com and Hargrove's "A Guide To Better Movement" are pretty good for a model of predictive processing and the roll of the nervous system in chronic pain and movement. I still don't feel like I have a good model of bone and joint health in general, however. Eg, I'm currently nursing a flare up of patelo-femoral pain in my left knee. I've done a number of things over the past few months to deal with it, with some success, including buying and reading Painscience's book length patelo-femoral tutorial. Recently I've had a bit of pain in my foot, possibly in the tibiocalcaneal or tibionavicular tendons. I find that even though I now know a fair amount about PFS and the way the nervous system processes pain, these...

While I wasn't at 80% of a lab leak when Eliezer asseted it a month ago, I'm now at 90%. It will take a while till it filters through society but I feel like we can already look at what we ourselves got wrong.  

In 2014, in the LessWrong survey more people considered bioengineered pandemics a global catastrophic risk then AI. At the time there was a public debate about gain of function research. On editoral described the risks of gain of function research as:

Insurers and risk analysts define risk as the product of probability times consequence. Data on the probability of a laboratory-associated infection in U.S. BSL3 labs using select agents show that 4 infections have been observed over <2,044 laboratory-years of observation, indicating at least

This is the edited transcript of a talk introducing finite factored sets. For most readers, it will probably be the best starting point for learning about factored sets.

Video: 

 (Lightly edited) slides: https://intelligence.org/files/Factored-Set-Slides.pdf

1. Short Combinatorics Talk

1m. $\text{Some Context}$

Scott: So I want to start with some context. For people who are not already familiar with my work:

• My main motivation is to reduce existential risk.
• I try to do this by trying to figure out how to align advanced artificial intelligence.
• I try to do this by trying to become less confused about intelligence and optimization and agency and various things in that cluster.
• My main strategy here is to develop a theory of agents that are embedded in the environment that they're optimizing. I think there are a lot of open hard problems around

This is the introduction to a sequence on signing up for cryonics. In the coming posts I will lay out what you need to do, concretely and in detail. This sequence is intended for people who already think signing up for cryonics is a good idea but are putting it off because they're not sure what they actually need to do next. I am not going to address the question of how likely cryonics is to work – that's been covered extensively elsewhere. 

If you have no idea what cryonics is, or if you want a thorough refresher, I recommend WaitButWhy's Why Cryonics Makes Sense. 

Biases

This sequence is US-focused, since I went through the process in the US. It's also somewhat Alcor-biased, since I chose Alcor quite early on...

"Your fingers are all wrong. So is your posture. And how you hold it," said Myrtle.

Tracey tried again. Her fingers hurt.

"Still wrong. Sit like this," Myrtle demonstrated.

Tracey mirrored Myrtle.

"No. Sit literally right here where I'm sitting," said Myrtle.

Tracey reached into Myrtle. It felt like ice water. Myrtle sat still. Tracey gritted her teeth, took a deep breath and superimposed herself. Tracey's skin rippled grey where bits of Myrtle protruded.

"You feel cold," said Tracey.

"Ghosts can't feel temperature. We can't smell. We can't taste. We see in shades of grey. But we can hear," said Myrtle.

Myrtle moved her hands into position. Tracey followed.

Nearly Headless Nick's deathday anniversary was October 31st. All the Hogwarts ghosts had attended. Many wore formal white sheets.

Myrtle was already on stage. Tracey had transfigured herself...