The history of science has tons of examples of the same thing being discovered multiple time independently; wikipedia has a whole list of examples here. If your goal in studying the history of science is to extract the predictable/overdetermined component of humanity's trajectory, then it makes sense to focus on such examples.

But if your goal is to achieve high counterfactual impact in your own research, then you should probably draw inspiration from the opposite: "singular" discoveries, i.e. discoveries which nobody else was anywhere close to figuring out. After all, if someone else would have figured it out shortly after anyways, then the discovery probably wasn't very counterfactually impactful.

Alas, nobody seems to have made a list of highly counterfactual scientific discoveries, to complement wikipedia's list of multiple discoveries.

To...

I took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test test today. I got 27/36. Jessica Livingstone got 36/36.

Reading expressions almost mind reading. Practicing reading expressions should be easy with the right software. All you need is software that shows a random photo from a large database, asks the user to guess what it is, and then informs the user what the correct answer is. I felt myself getting noticeably better just the 36 images on the test.

Short standardized tests exist to test this skill, but is there good software for training it? It needs to have lots of examples, so the user learns to recognize expressions instead of overfitting on specific pictures.

Paul Ekman has a product, but I don't know how good it is.

A lot of the time, I'm not very motivated to work, at least on particular projects. Sometimes, I feel very inspired and motivated to work on a particular project that I usually don't feel (as) motivated to work on. Sometimes, this happens in the late evening or at night. And hence I face the question: To sleep or to work until morning?

I think many people here have this problem at least sometimes. I'm curious how you handle it. I expect what the right call is to be very different from person to person and, for some people, from situation to situation. Nevertheless, I'd love to get a feel for whether people generally find one or the other more successful! Especially if it turns out that a large...

People talk about unconditional love and conditional love. Maybe I’m out of the loop regarding the great loves going on around me, but my guess is that love is extremely rarely unconditional. Or at least if it is, then it is either very broadly applied or somewhat confused or strange: if you love me unconditionally, presumably you love everything else as well, since it is only conditions that separate me from the worms.

I do have sympathy for this resolution—loving someone so unconditionally that you’re just crazy about all the worms as well—but since that’s not a way I know of anyone acting for any extended period, the ‘conditional vs. unconditional’ dichotomy here seems a bit miscalibrated for being informative.

Even if we instead assume that by ‘unconditional’, people...

This post is a follow-up to Safety Standards: a framework for AI regulation. In the previous post, I claimed that competent red-teaming organizations will be essential for effective regulation. In this post, I describe promising research directions for AI red-teaming organizations to pursue. If you are mostly interested in the research directions, I recommend skipping to the end.

Background: goals of AI red teaming

Red teaming is a term used across industries to refer to the process of assessing the security, resilience, and effectiveness of systems by soliciting adversarial attacks to identify problems with them. The term "red team" originates from military exercises, where an independent group (the red team) would challenge an organization's existing defense strategies by adopting the perspective and tactics of potential adversaries.

In the context of...

You want to get to your sandwich:

Well, that’s easy. Apparently we are in some kind of grid world, which is presented to us in the form of a lattice graph, where each vertex represents a specific world state, and the edges tell us how we can traverse the world states. We just do BFS to go from $S$ (where we are) to $T$ (where the sandwich is):

Ok that works, and it’s also fast. It’s $O(|V|+|E|)$, where $|V|$ is the number of vertices and $|E|$ is the number of edges... well at least for small graphs it’s fast. What about this graph:

Or what about this graph:

In fact, what about a 100-dimensional lattice graph with a side length of only 10 vertices? We will have ${10}^{100}$ vertices in this graph. 

With...

The American school system, grades K-12, leaves much to be desired.

While its flaws are legion, this post isn’t about that. It’s easy to complain.

This post is about how we could do better.

To be clear, I’m talking about redesigning public education, so “just use the X model” where X is “charter” or “Montessori” or “home school” or “private school” isn’t sufficient. This merits actual thought and discussion.

Breaking It Down

One of the biggest problems facing public schools is that they’re asked to do several very different kinds of tasks.

On the one hand, the primary purpose of school is to educate children.

On whatever hand happens to be the case in real life, school is often more a source of social services for children and parents alike, providing food and safety...