A Ray

Here I give a possible phenomenon of steganography in chain of thought reasoning, where a system doing multi-stage reasoning with natural language encodes hidden information in its outputs that is not observable by humans, but can be used to boost its performance on some task. I think this could happen...

Epistemic Signpost: I'm not an expert in policy research, but I think most of the points here are straightforward. 1. Regulations are ineffective at preventing bad behaviors Here's a question/thought experiment: Can you think of any large, possibly technology related, company who has broken a regulation. What happened as a...

tl;dr - 4 steps 1. Give yourself permission to take the future seriously 2. Be willing to imagine successful or ambitious outcomes 3. Give yourself the gift of focused time and space 4. Write draw sketch diagram or whatever you need to empty your mind Intro (Feel free to skip...

I'm slowly working through a bunch of philosophical criticisms of consequentialism and utilitarianism, kicked off by this book: https://www.routledge.com/Risk-Philosophical-Perspectives/Lewens/p/book/9780415422840 (which I don't think is good enough to actually recommend) One common thread is complaints about utilitarianism and consequentialism giving incorrect answers in specific cases. One is the topic of this...

Recently I was watching a livestream of a poker professional. I was surprised and interested in how it wasn’t purely-gut calls, and also wasn’t purely technical decisions, but a blend of both (with some other stochasticity thrown in). I’ve been thinking about how to get more good scientists, especially scientists...

This should probably be 3 posts instead of one, but for now I’m going to go through three connected but separate ideas. Also it’s not really been edited. Sorry. Progress Studies and Young Scientists I spent a bit of the last year exploring some topics and questions in Progress Studies,...

I often see discussion here of Anki or other Spaced Repetition Systems for learning. To me, these are great for "higher levels" of knowledge -- things more closely associated with System 2 than System 1. Are there similar advantages to be had (and systems that exist for) "lower levels" of...