angmoh

Thanks for the article - very clear and informative. I'll share my own experience, which was partially inspired by your post. For history I have probably been between 15-25 bf% my whole adult life, oscillating over the years depending on motivation.

I have been on a diet for 2 months conventionally, and began taking retatrutide the last 2 weeks to dodge the negatives of being hungry all the time. I can report;

• Dosage: 1mg 2x week.
• Interest in food immediately and completely cratering. This lead to similar concerns with eating too little. My caloric intake has

If your opponent makes bad assumptions or bad decisions, your decisions won't be rewarded properly, and it can take you a very long time indeed to figure out from first principles that that is happening. If you are playing with a player who thinks that "all reds" is a strong hand, it can take you many, many hands to figure out that they're overestimating their hands instead of just getting anomalously lucky with their hidden cards while everyone else folds!

(Is someone who knows more about poker than I do going to tell me that this specific example is wrong

You're right but I like the chef example anyway. Even if cherry picked, it does get at a core truth - this kind of intuition evolves in every field. I love the stories of old hands intuitively seeing things a mile away.

Sutskever's response to Dwarkesh in their interview was a convincing refutation of this argument for me:

Dwarkesh Patel
So you could argue that next-token prediction can only help us match human performance and maybe not surpass it? What would it take to surpass human performance?

Ilya Sutskever
I challenge the claim that next-token prediction cannot surpass human performance. On the surface, it looks like it cannot. It looks like if you just learn to imitate, to predict what people do, it means that you can only copy people. But here is a counter argument f... (read more)

"Dwarkesh chose excellent questions throughout, displaying an excellent sense of when to follow up and how, and when to pivot."

This is the basic essence of why Dwarkesh does such good interviews. He does the groundwork to be able to ask relevant and interesting questions, ie. actually reading their books/works, and seems to consistently have put actual thought into analysing the worldview of his subjects.

The unambitiousness of modern geoengineering in general is dismaying.

For my Australian perspective: in the early 1900s there were people discussing how make use of the massive tracts of desert wasteland than make up most of the outback (ie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradfield_Scheme). None of this stuff could be considered today - one tree getting chopped down is liable to make the news: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54700074

Hard to escape the conclusion that we should all go lie in a ditch so as to guarantee that no impact to anything occurs ever.

This seems about right. Sam is a bit of a cowboy and probably doesn't bother involving the board more than he absolutely has to.

Stefánsson's "The Fat of the Land" is not really worth reading for any scientific insight today, but it's entertaining early 1900s anthropology. 

I don't have much of an opinion on any specific diet approach, but I can tell you my own experience with weight loss: I've always been between 15-25% bodyfat, yoyoing around. This routine isn't ideal, so I too am a 'victim' of the weight gain phenomenon. 

I have no satisfying answers for "why are we getting fatter" or "what makes caloric deficits so hard to maintain". I appreciate the diet blogging community that tries to tackle these questions with citizen science.

I assume you're familiar with Vilhjálmur Stefánsson's work if you are interested in low protein carnivore diets, but I was really was surprised to see how similar the 'ex150' sounds compared to the classic ~80:20 fat:protein experiments. These aren't really new ideas - although I'm sure there's a lot more information available on the details.

Anyway, dieting seems like something where while people on average fail, you do see some individual successes, so it's worth poking around the edges and giving things a go. It's always nice to see results from the coal... (read more)

Good post. 

For Westerners looking to get a palatable foothold on the priorities and viewpoints of the CCP (and Xi), I endorse "The Avoidable War" written last year by Kevin Rudd (former Prime Minister of Australia, speaks mandarin, has worked in China, loads of diplomatic experience - imo about as good of a person that exists to interpret Chinese grand strategy and explain it from a Western viewpoint). The book is (imo, for a politician), impressively objective in its analysis.

Some good stuff in there explaining the nature of Chinese cynicism about foreign motivations that echoes some of what is written in this post, but with a bit more historical background and strategic context. 

Yeah - it's odd, but TC is a self-professed contrarian after all.

I think the question here is: why doesn't he actually address the fundamentals of the AGI doom case? The "it's unlikely / unknown" position is really quite a weak argument which I doubt he would make if he actually understood EY's position. 

Seeing the state of the discourse on AGI risk just makes it more and more clear that the AGI risk awareness movement has failed to express its arguments in terms that non-rationalists can understand. 

People like TC should the first type of public intellectual to grok it, because EY's doom case is is highly analogous to market dynamics. And yet.

For example, a major point of disagreement between me and Eliezer is that Eliezer often dismisses plans as “too complicated to work in practice,” but that dismissal seems divorced from experience with getting things to work in practice (e.g. some of the ideas that Eliezer dismisses are not much more complex than RLHF with AI assistants helping human raters). In fact I think that you can implement complex things by taking small steps—almost all of these implementation difficulties do improve with empirical feedback.

EY's counter to this?

@Gerald Monroe On the question of Japan's unique lack of variation, I think it's unlikely to be decisive here. The 'monoculture' argument may have some merit, but even a genetically 'homogenous' population has plenty of variation - especially one 125m strong like the Japanese. 

Fertility related traits are just so fundamental to genetic fitness that selection is guaranteed to wring out the higher fertility alleles where the environment allows.

Imo Japan is one of the more illuminating examples on this topic:

• Japan had a TFR of 5 in the 1930s. It's been only 3 generations since Japan's TFR began to fall, and France took 5 to stablise around the current level (1830s-1980s). I agree that the trend since 2005 is too short term to be sure, but it's interesting to note! The above modelling suggests that a faster fertility transition should result in a faster bounceback - the lower the TFR the more adaptive high-TFR genes + cultures will be relatively.
• The fertility transition hit East Asia harder and fa

There's good reason to believe the fertility transition as a general phenomenon is subject to negative feedback, thus almost certain to be self correcting. Selection self-evidently favours high fertility culture and genes.

See this study for an attempt to model the effects:

Correlations in fertility across generations: can low fertility persist?
Martin Kolk, Daniel Cownden and Magnus Enquist
Published:22 March 2014

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.2561#d3e788,

"... Our models suggest a mechanism in which the recent fertility decline... (read more)

Agree - Gell-Mann amnesia sums up my experience with trying to get ChatGPT to be useful for a professional context so far. It is weak on accuracy and details.

My questions:

• Is this something that can be overcome through skilful prompting?
• Is there something about LLMs that makes these issues difficult to overcome?
• ChatGPT is very conservative with providing factual information even when it's possible to tease out the relevant information (i.e. topics like law or commercial activities), is this purposeful throttling?

The speed issue is the #1 factor stopping me from trying audiobooks. A book might take me 4-8 hours to read but the internet tells me audio is 2-3x slower. I have a lot of other prejudices against audiobooks (flipping / skimming less easy, less focus on the task etc) but that's the main one.

Seconded - I'd like to see more of this angle of analysis too. I assume the reason why the 'soft take-off' is underdiscussed is that tech people a) pay more attention to the news on AI, and b) see the future of this stuff viscerally and the endgame is what looms. I think that's not wrong, because the endgame is indeed transformative. But how we get there and how quickly it happens is a completely open question.

I work in the AEC industry (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) - 90%+ of people have zero idea about recent advances in AI. But on the other h... (read more)

I can anecdotally report that when I started consistently getting up immediately upon my alarm going off the subjective feeling of the first 5-10 minutes was far superior and I didn't feel much tiredness even with a relatively short night of sleep. I started doing this through setting my alarm to the maximum latest time possible and still allow me to get to work on time, and then noticed how much better I felt while doing this (previously I was a chronic snooze-button masher and felt pretty groggy waking up).

I have noticed in the WFH/office phases of the p... (read more)

So I looked into this, and the 'refine win condition' seems to be an actual technique that some of the best 3pt shooters do employ! I looked up some interviews with some of the best basketball shooters (Steph Curry and Ray Allen) and they mention playing little games with themselves while practice. They will do things such a define win condition as a swish instead of just making the shot, or employing some particular type of rhythm or footwork, or slightly altering the angle of their shot.

But on the other hand, they also mention plenty of repetitive drilli... (read more)