flâneur

Saul Munn

20 followers · 12 following · 1205 views

on the atlas — 48

highlights — 62

  • Rapid software progress would quickly make computing-power-centric metrics outdated for the leading AI developers. Tracking AI capabilities in an SIE would require ongoing monitoring of companies’ R&D progress and evaluation of their most powerful internally deployed systems.
    Will AI R&D Automation Cause a Software Intelligence Explosion?
  • Putting this all together: $37B – $100B of new philanthropic funding, which would be a 6-17% increase in annual philanthropic spending relative to today’s $600B/year in the US.
    The third wave of American philanthropy - by Nan Ransohoff
  • There are many paths to God.
    i was half myself without you, now i feel so complete
  • Humans weren’t built to be this intentional about everything
    i was half myself without you, now i feel so complete
  • for disciplined people, the ability to do hard things and crawl through shit often translates into achieving goals that are not their own.
    quant
  • There are a lot of rules written not to be followed but enforced if needed.
    Zen and The Art of Semiconductor Manufacturing
  • There is greatness in moving carefully and building things.
    Taste in Math - Colossus
  • it is less effort to build such a wondrous machine than to simply paint a doll’s eyebrows in their right places.
    A Child's Plaything — Toby Ord
  • Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.
    Losing my sense of taste | Rohan's Rambles
  • there are certain things that your attention and body contract around, and you spend time and energy towards making sure they "go right" (whatever that means for you). If you really hate being late or losing your belongings, you will spend a lot of time "holding" time, social conventions, and locations of objects in your head. This comes at the cost of other things, because that's how prioritization works. If you're running late, you'll now spend the whole car ride checking the time and thinking about how late you are instead of enjoying the sunny weather or the radio.
    Carmen on X: "Collecting open secrets I think people are endlessly fascinating. Sometimes you meet a person and they have such an interesting or strange life that you wonder how it could be possible. But then you spend more time with them and then you figure out exactly why things are the way" / X
  • You shouldn’t aim to “try as hard as you can” or “do the cold, calculated action”, you should aim to do whatever action best achieves your goals.
    Mini Blog Post 9: What it means to optimise — Neel Nanda
  • Manifold was probably better when it was forecasting nerds talking about market mechanisms, rather than a bunch of randos who clicked through cheap CPM banner ads to bet on One Piece
    Barriers to entry might be good
  • nobody studied for the final. No joke. As one girl said, "I tried studying because I thought I should, but I gave up after a half-hour because I already knew it all."
    Random Observations: Teaching linear algebra
  • I’m not sure what I think of this conclusion, but my main response to his article is oh my gosh he gets the thing, where “the thing” is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours.
    What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing? | Slate Star Codex
  • Some people experience worlds of basically-good people who treat them nicely. Other people experience worlds of awful hypocritical backstabbers. This can be true even if they live in the same area as each other, work the same job as each other, et cetera.
    Different Worlds | Slate Star Codex
  • there’s nothing so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all.
    When to Learn with Anki - Control-Alt-Backspace
  • It sucks that gadflies are protected and doers are punished in EA.
    Criticism is sanctified in EA, but, like any intervention, criticism needs to pay rent — EA Forum
  • America’s current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices, then send all the bills to an illiterate reindeer-herder named Yagmuk, who burns them for warmth.
    Semaglutidonomics - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
  • America’s current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices, then send all the bills to an illiterate reindeer-herder named Yagmuk, who burns them for warmth.
    Semaglutidonomics - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
  • who you are is not the point. Being a good person is not the point.54 The point is the thing that a good person is looking at: the friend in need, the child dying, the beauty and the pain, the great song of the world.55
    On sincerity - Joe Carlsmith
  • We’re not married to the format, we’re married to what works
    The Basics
  • first, decide what you actually want to do. Then, seek out people who will socially reward you for doing that, and set yourself up to get social rewards.
    "Cheat to Win": Engineering Positive Social Feedback - LessWrong
  • when you operate under many constraints: you neuter your ability to shape the world.
    Why are we not harder, better, faster, stronger?
  • if you stare into the abyss, the abyss then later stares at others through your eyes, and people don't like that.
    Thoughts on EA Epistemics Projects — EA Forum
  • nobody takes responsibility for EA the way a leader would take responsibility for a thing they lead
    Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism
  • in the presence of anthropic effects, you can still reason and receive evidence about the latent variables and mechanistic factors which affect those anthropic effects.
    Updating in the face of anthropic effects is possible
  • The point of democracies is that coups are built into the system.
    The real reason Futarchists are doomed — LessWrong
  • I don’t view it as my job to solve other people’s problems
    ldeming - Posthaven
  • People's rationality is much more defined by their ability to maneuver themselves into environments in which their external incentives align with their goals, than by their ability to have correct opinions while being subject to incentives they don't endorse.
    Habryka's Shortform Feed — LessWrong
  • you can cease clinging in relation to something, without ceasing to care about that thing
    On clinging - Joe Carlsmith
  • All you have to do is find the action that best brings about the stuff you care about, and then do it.
    Think on Purpose – Figuring Figuring
  • to think you’ve triumphed over something is an especially easy way to fall victim.
    On sincerity - Joe Carlsmith
  • A mid cameraman finds the sheer magnitude of angles, scenes, props, and lighting decisions impossibly complex, and necessarily conveys camerawork through such a lens. The very best, on the other hand, finds it all very natural, and indeed is able to convey camerawork as such to intelligent inquirers.
    Really knowing things - Tanner Hoke
  • kids who had the agency burned out of them
    Cultivating And Destroying Agency
  • I can’t help but feel crushed by the weight of what I owe to my community, certain I’m going to hurt the people I’ve fooled into loving me, convinced that I’m doing them a favour by icing them out until I get myself together. I am too loud, too self-involved, too insensitive, never caring enough or attentive enough or possessing enough natural kindness. I have made people I love feel alone when they needed me; I have been cruel to people I never wanted to hurt. Like many — dare I say, most — people in their early 20s, I find it hard to shake the feeling that my life is a pinball machine of rel…
    no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess
  • Tournaments create a very stark monistic type of accountability in which one thing and only one thing matters, and that is accuracy. You get no points for being an ideological cheerleader and pumping up the probabilities of things that your team wants to be true or downplaying the probabilities of the things your team doesn’t want to be true. You take a reputational hit. So the incentives are very unusually tightly aligned to favor accuracy. That’s extremely unusual in the social world. Most forms of accountability occur in organizational settings in which there are lots of distortions at work…
    Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox (Ep. 93) | Conversations with Tyler
  • we look to forecasters for ideological reassurance, we look to forecasters for entertainment, and we look to forecasters for minimizing regret functions of various sorts.
    Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox (Ep. 93) | Conversations with Tyler
  • before each of my remarks I’ll think about you and what I know about you and what I think I can say and then I’ll triage your likely responses, and my responses to your responses, and so on, and make my conversational moves in light of this projected snap-analysis of where I think our talk might take us.
    The shape of a listener « the jsomers.net blog
  • The power of reason lies in its ability to generate highly detailed maps. Where direct experience gives us rough sketches (“things fall”, “sun is bright”), reason gives us mathematical precision. Reason showed us the path to advanced medicine and computing. Reason has mapped entire worlds that were previously hidden behind tiny points of light painted on the night sky. But on reason’s map, there are also huge swaths of territory labeled: “here be dragons”.
    You Don't Always Have to be Rational - by Max Goodbird
  • What works for me and my smart friends is not to try and generate willpower but to use lucid moments to design plans that take a lack of willpower into account. Other approaches work for other people.
    Is Rationalist Self-Improvement Real? – PUTANUMONIT
  • successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach
    Co-Founding Considered Harmful
  • Once you start thinking like a forecaster, it’s hard not to think about things in a probabilistic way. Lots of areas of life require implicit forecasts, and it’s incredibly useful to think like a forecaster when you’re deciding whether to take a new job, move countries, or start a new relationship, all of which I have done in the last few years. You need to think about whether the chance of some outcome is above X%, and get a rough sense of the impact of each outcome, and make your expected value calculation. That’s not always easy to do, though: confronting uncomfortable possibilities can mak…
    Five Questions For... Michael Story - by Sam Atis
  • If you find yourself contorting yourself into a version of yourself you don’t love, into a version that feels untrue, then it probably means it’s just not a fit. It’s as simple as that. E.g., if your nervous system is always stressed around a friend, or you’re constantly despairing if your romantic interest actually likes your or not, or if you wake up absolutely dreading what your days consist of. That’s no real way to live: without conviction or faith or hope.
    on compatibility - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • In short, there is always an in-group, and in the Valley, the climb to the in-group is steep.
    On proving yourself | thesephist.com
  • When I’ve listened the most effectively to people, it’s because I was intensely curious—I was trying to build a detailed, precise understanding of what was going on in their head.
    To listen well, get curious
  • A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere in the work’s middle, and hardens toward the end. The earlier version remains lumpishly on the left; the work’s beginning greets the reader with the wrong hand. In those early pages and chapters anyone may find bold leaps to nowhere, read the brave beginnings of dropped themes, hear a tone since abandon…
    The Writing Life
  • The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all…
    The Writing Life
  • Trusting yourself is both the hardest and most rewarding thing in the world because it’s the only relationship you can’t walk away from.
    keeping promises to myself - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • building self trust is a product of keeping your promises to yourself.
    keeping promises to myself - by Nix 🕊 - starting from nix
  • I was inventing waiting when there was no waiting necessary: in class, at dinner, during a movie — the experience was there, unlonged for, available for my attention, no waiting necessary, but instead of paying attention I would wait for it to be over.
    When it Rains in Colorado - by Dawson Eliasen