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drgunn
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Communications consultant for AI safety and policy.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Running
drgunn18d32

It just takes time. Your diaphragm will eventually stop being so annoying.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Running
drgunn18d20

Not in my experience, which is substantial, but perhaps specific to me.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Running
drgunn18d*40

Good advice, but note that it doesn't apply to all running, but specifically to street or track running. Trail is different in a few notable ways.

Major differences:

  1. You want more of a forefoot strike. Your stride will be more like the motion of pedaling a bike, where your front foot is actually coming back in when it hits the ground. This is particularly important going downhill, as it reduces load on the knee & tendons. Likewise, if you leave a little room for your back foot to go back at the end of the stride, you can save yourself if you get snagged on a root or something.
  2. Get a low heel-toe drop trail shoe to facilitate this stride, improve traction, and facilitate better ground feel.
  3. Let your arms hang at your sides. It feels weird, but on longer runs (2 hrs+), your biceps will not like the bounce that comes with the bend.

Epistemic status: generally aligned with pro recommendations, injury free for 15 years, starting once I adopted these practices.

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Impact, agency, and taste
drgunn5mo10

I'm really glad to see taste enter the discourse! Taste is a meta-rational skill and meta-rationality - the art of relevant realization, how to not get stuck optimizing up to a local maximum that's not actually where you want to be - has very much been lacking in public conversation about how to get more of the good AI can bring while also doing common-sense things to manage risk.

Why have I been concerned about this? Optimizing up to a local maximum which isn't actually where you want to be is EXACTLY the problem that so many content platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Quora) have gotten themselves into and my impression has been that the people building AI products are drawn from the same population. So seeing taste get discussed is very welcome and, if this continues, will definitely prompt a positive update to my expectation of how things are going to turn out.

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Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
drgunn5mo10

A useful direction for further research would be to analyze fiction and non-fiction as separate corpora. Longer sentences may reflect a tendency towards hypotaxis, and they may also be a deliberate stylistic choice for fiction writers, perhaps setting a more languid and relaxed tone not appropriate for much non-fiction.

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How much fraud is there in academia?
drgunn2y21

Fanelli is a good, if dated reference for this. Another important point is that there are levels of misconduct in research, ranging from bad authorship practices to outright fabrication of results, with the less severe practices being relatively more common: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269469/

Aside from all that, there's irreproducibility, which doesn't arise from any kind of deliberate misconduct, but still pollutes the epistemic commons: https://www.cos.io/rpcb

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Vaniver's thoughts on Anthropic's RSP
drgunn2y40

As someone with experience in BSL-3 labs, BSL feels like a good metaphor to me. The big issue with the RSP proposal is that it's still just a set of voluntary commitments that could undermine progress on real risk management by giving policymakers a way to make it look like they've done something without really doing anything. It would be much better with input from risk management professionals.

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Berkeley, California, USA – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2023
drgunn2y10

I'm confused.The protest is now listed at 4. Have you coordinated with them?

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The Great Disembedding
drgunn2y30

I like it, but it feels like you could have worked snakes in there somehow: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness

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“X distracts from Y” as a thinly-disguised fight over group status / politics
drgunn2y17-2

X-risk discussions aren't immune from the "grab the mic" dynamics that affect every other cause advocacy community.

There will continue to be tactics such as "X distracts from Y" and "if you really cared about X you would ..." unless and until people who care about the cause for the cause's sake can identify and exclude those who care about the cause for the sake of the cultural and social capital that can be extracted. Inclusivity has such a positive affect halo around it that it's hard to do this, but it's really the only way.

Longer-form of the argument: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

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