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There are lots of different things, all of which are called regret. I treat them differently, so I need different names for the different classes of regret. Agentic regret. The sort of regret that you feel when you made a choice that was wrong and you knew it was the...
Play structures are so easy that even children can figure out how to use them correctly. There is a wheel. Spin it! There is a slide. Go down it! There is a staircase. Climb it! There is a tunnel. Crawl through it! And a tic-tactile-toe board. This can be good...
In much the same way that we need to prompt engineer language models to get them to handle our questions correctly, we know that humans respond differently to "This intervention will save 200 lives" and "This intervention will result in 400 deaths" when talking about a population of 600 people....
I was prompted to write this book review after reading Paul Christiano’s post on the evolution of sex and George’s response to Paul Christiano’s post on the evolution of sex. Those two posts are quite interesting! Paul Christiano points out that “sex slightly lowers the average [fitness] but increases the...
About a year ago, I realized that packing all my bathroom stuff was one of the more difficult and annoying and error-prone parts of packing for travel. So, without planning on going anywhere, I packed my travel bathroom bag. This bag had all the things I was previously likely to...
It took me three years to realize I should be ordering the special rolls when I got all-you-can-eat sushi. At first, I reasoned that the other sushi was free, and paying infinity times as much for a slightly better piece of sushi couldn’t be worth it. In a sense, this...
I recently read this post that discusses the author’s experience leading military decision-making trainings for ROTC cadets during the pandemic. I’m going to briefly discuss what those decision-making trainings looked like, and how the principles could be adapted to teach software engineering effectively. To quote from that article, a Tactical...