LESSWRONG
LW

Modularity

Dec 02, 2021 by Raemon

The second book is about modularity. Well designed or evolved structures are often not just made of parts, but made of parts with simple interfaces. These interfaces allow the parts to be reused in alternative contexts, and thus recombined in different ways.

One of the most important benefits is inspection and debugging. Modular systems are easier to understand, because their components are self-contained. However, this can also be a curse; when components have boundaries that are simple relative to their internals, they cannot share all of their information with the other components, which can lead to communication and coordination failures.

The essays in this collection have been split into four clusters, to make them easier to and and remember. This book contains essays related to modularity, both as a thing that we engineer, and as a thing that we discover in the world.

This book will explore modularized systems through topics such as biology, machine learning, companies, human emotion, and more.

234Book Review: Design Principles of Biological Circuits
johnswentworth
6y
24
122Reframing Superintelligence: Comprehensive AI Services as General Intelligence
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Rohin Shah
6y
Ω
77
291Building up to an Internal Family Systems model
Kaj_Sotala
6y
86
477Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
johnswentworth
6y
61
166The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag"
Raemon
6y
52
106Literature Review: Distributed Teams
Elizabeth
6y
37
177Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments
johnswentworth
6y
29
190Evolution of Modularity
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johnswentworth
6y
Ω
13
253You Get About Five Words
Raemon
6y
81
155Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities
Eliezer Yudkowsky
6y
83
284Alignment Research Field Guide
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abramdemski
6y
Ω
11
153Forum participation as a research strategy
Wei Dai
6y
45
105The Credit Assignment Problem
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abramdemski
6y
Ω
40
175Selection vs Control
Ω
abramdemski
6y
Ω
26