Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" paints a gloomy picture of the world being inevitably consumed by destructive forces of competition and optimization. But Zvi argues this isn't actually how the world works - we've managed to resist and overcome these forces throughout history.
is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos—aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I’ll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, Tyler Cowen, George Hotz, and others.
Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows:
...Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create
Any chance you could unpin this comment? Seems like the idea of people suggesting videos based on it didn't work, and having the updates be the first pinned comment would probably provide more value to people looking at the post.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
Whenever I send an LLM some query I expect to be able to answer myself (instead of requesting a primer on some unknown-to-me subject), I usually try to figure out how to solve it myself, either before reading the response, or before sending the query at all. I. e., I treat the LLM's take as a second opinion.
This isn't a strategy against brain atrophy, though: it's because (1) I often expect to be disappointed by the LLM's answer, meaning I'll end up needing to solve the problem myself anyway, so might as well get started on that, (2) I'm wary of the LLM co...
Don't judge a principle by its professors—look to its practitioners.[1]
"Professor" is an interesting word. At one point in my professional life, I had the opportunity to teach college classes. I often corrected students who called me "Professor Eggs," telling them I was just "Mr. Eggs." "Professor" was a title and a high status I hadn’t earned. But at the same time, the root "profess" often carries the opposite implication. To profess means to declare, sometimes loudly, sometimes without credibility. A profess-er, in this light, sounds less like a scholar and more like a huckster.
An intriguing contrast might be the word "practitioner." Connotatively, it sounds humble, even lowly, the opposite of the high-minded professor. But denotatively, it's closer to the true opposite of a profess-er: someone who applies...
Issue with judging the practitioners is that practicing it may be correlated with other things that are much more harmful. Like all the talk about how single parenthood is supposedly bad for you, but then it doesn't hold up to more careful scrutiny afaik.
refers to the tendency that when someone sets a performance metric for a goal, the metric itself becomes a target of optimization, often at the expense of the goal it's supposed to measure. Some metrics are subject to imperfectly-aligned incentives in ways that are easy to identify, such as when students optimize for getting high grades rather than understanding the course material. But in other scenarios, metrics fail in less obvious ways. For example, someone might limit himself to one drink per night, but still end up drinking too much because he drinks every night and overestimates how much alcohol counts as "one drink." There's no custom-made giant wineglass staring you in the face, but the metric is still failing to fulfill its intended purpose.
The...
Over the past 6-8 months, I have been involved in drafting AI policy recommendations and official statements directed at governments and institutions across the Global Majority: Chile, Lesotho, Malaysia, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), Israel, and others. At first glance, this may appear to be a less impactful use of time compared to influencing more powerful jurisdictions like the United States or the European Union. But I argue that engaging with the Global Majority is essential, neglected, and potentially pivotal in shaping a globally safe AI future. Below, I outline four core reasons.
As global alignment becomes harder, we need decentralized, national-level safety nets. Some things to keep in mind:
A colleague points out this paper showing that some unlearning methods can be broken by quantizing the unlearned model.
The insane attempted AI moratorium has been stripped from the BBB. That doesn’t mean they won’t try again, but we are good for now. We should use this victory as an opportunity to learn. Here’s what happened.
Senator Ted Cruz and others attempted to push hard for a 10-year moratorium on enforcement of all AI-specific regulations at the state and local level, and attempted to ram this into the giant BBB despite it being obviously not about the budget.
This was an extremely aggressive move, which most did not expect to survive the Byrd amendment, likely as a form of reconnaissance-in-force for a future attempt.
It looked for a while like it might work and get passed outright, with it even surviving the Byrd amendment, but opposition steadily grew.
We’d...
Did this case update you to think "If you’re trying to pass a good bill, you need to state and emphasize the good reasons you want to pass that bill, and what actually matters". If so, why? The lesson I think one would naively take from this story is an update in the direction of: "if you want to pass a good bill, you should try to throw in a bunch of stuff you don't actually care about but that others do and build a giant coalition, or make disingenuous but politically expedient arguments for your good stuff, or try to make out people who oppose the bill ...
When a claim is shown to be incorrect, defenders may say that the author was just being “sloppy” and actually meant something else entirely. I argue that this move is not harmless, charitable, or healthy. At best, this attempt at charity reduces an author’s incentive to express themselves clearly – they can clarify later![1] – while burdening the reader with finding the “right” interpretation of the author’s words. At worst, this move is a dishonest defensive tactic which shields the author with the unfalsifiable question of what the author “really” meant.
...⚠️ Preemptive clarification
The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads. In that context, communication is a partnership. A reader has a responsibility to engage in good faith, and an author
I think this is an important point, especially when experts are talking to other experts about their respective fields. I once had a client call this "thinking in webs." If you have a conclusion that you reached via a bunch of weak pieces of evidence collected over a bunch of projects and conversations and things you've read all spread out over years, it might or might not be epistemically correct to add those up to a strong opinion. But, there may be literally no verbally compelling way to express the source of that certainty. If you try, you'll have forg...
This is a follow-up to my earlier post about designing a Winter Solstice gathering that combined Rationalist Solstice traditions with local Māori Matariki practices. Here's what I learned from actually running the event.
TL;DR: People wanted structured conversation more than curated performance. Starting with collective acknowledgment of loss made subsequent vulnerability feel natural. Social coordination mechanics are harder than they look, but small-scale practice matters for larger coordination challenges.
Growing up in a religious family, I personally wasn't getting the meaningful aspects of seasonal gatherings which I fondly remember from my childhood. Living in New Zealand, I wanted to create something that honored both Rationalist Solstice traditions and local Matariki practices without falling into either cultural appropriation or forcing cringy fake rituals on people.
My...
