flâneur

Rey Tang

2 followers · 2 following · 857 views

on the atlas — 24

highlights — 65

  • remember that the difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute
    Making a New Year's Resolution? Don't Go to War With Yourself. - The Atlantic
  • one of the pitfalls of New Year’s–resolution culture is that it encourages us all to buy into the idea that you need to make some big change in order to be a minimally acceptable, worthwhile person. And that doesn’t leave any room for the thought that maybe you’re more okay than you thought. Maybe you don’t need to change in some particular way. Maybe reconciling yourself to certain ways that you are is a more powerful thing.
    Making a New Year's Resolution? Don't Go to War With Yourself. - The Atlantic
  • Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe we should push to drop prices across the economy through the application of technology until as many prices are effectively zero as possible, driving income levels and quality of life into the stratosphere.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe the Constrained Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise – means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • Orlando is a broken person in the film, but it’s not because he is unable to achieve happiness. It’s that he incorrectly seeks happiness as a goal. Whereas Chalice – at least in the end – seeks growth, what I’ve been phrasing as “integration.” And integration is a more satisfying and meaningful organizing principle for life. Orlando exists in the story for Chalice as an image of what not to be, a tempting path that leads to existential failure.
    Empathy Is an Open Circuit: An Interview with Ian Cheng
  • Parents quite literally program children, and have an unavoidable influence on their entire life script, their anxiety or their comfort, their sense of trust and mistrust toward the world.
    Empathy Is an Open Circuit: An Interview with Ian Cheng
  • existential health – how can a person find a path for themselves amidst technological change and a divisive culture.
    Empathy Is an Open Circuit: An Interview with Ian Cheng
  • What’s the point of therapy? How would you sum it up? And he said to integrate all parts of yourself, including the dark parts, the addictive parts, the parts you don’t like. I think this is true of culture too, and the parental responsibility toward children.
    Empathy Is an Open Circuit: An Interview with Ian Cheng
  • The world needs to make sure that everyone—and not just people who are well-off—benefits from artificial intelligence. Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it.
    The Age of AI has begun | Bill Gates
  • The choice betwe en transparency and secrecy in excl u sion, pricing, and organization can have indirect effects on norms. On the one hand, transparency enhances legitimacy, providing community support for moderation, while secrecy raises fears of censorship and oppression
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • The tradeoff between cost and quality is characteristic of the choice between human and automated moderation. More human attention genera l ly means better but costlier
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • The tradeoff between cost and quality is characteristic of the choice between human and automated moderation. More human attention genera l ly means better but costlier
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • Moderation’s biggest challenge and most important mission is to create strong shared norms among partic i pants. Norms can target every form of strategic behavior .
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • As taxes on particip ation, prices have two basic purposes. One is to raise re v enue for the community’s use , typically by charging authors and readers to compensate owners (for su p- plying infrastructure) and professional moderators (for their work). The other is Pigouvian — to ma ke members internalize some of the costs of their b e havior. 70 Pricing is naturally well - suited to account for congestion
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • America needs to calibrate its stance: reassure Mr Xi that his red lines remain intact, but convince him that aggression carries unacceptable risks. The goal should not be to solve the Taiwan question, but to defer it.
    How to avoid war over Taiwan
  • So, the question is then, can you make clear to it all the other things it’s not supposed to do in order to do this one thing?
    Robin Hanson Says You're Going to Live
  • Pretty much all the actual useful computer systems out there are not general agents with sort of general goals about their whole future and all the actions they can take in their world. They tend to be specialized tools for specialized purposes, and they’re focused on doing those specialized things. So, that seems to be a reasonable path forward to the future, to the extent you’re worried about AI as having goals. But the example of firms says we can also have agents with goals, and superintelligent agents with goals exist and seem to be reasonably well aligned with this in our world.
    Robin Hanson Says You're Going to Live
  • it has to be we suddenly find some much easier way of doing something really important
    Robin Hanson Says You're Going to Live
  • We have already met the basic definitions: a community of members who use s hared i n- frastructure to exchange content . The me m bers have roles: as owners of infr a structure, as authors and readers of content, and as moderators . These are the n oun s in the grammar of moder a- tion
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • Both conge s tion and cacophony are problems of prioritization: bad content crowds out good, to the private benefit of the content’s promo t- ers but at an overall cost to the commun i ty.
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • E ach partic i- pant ’ s contribution of content makes demands both on the i n- frastructure and on other participants
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • I described the I nternet as a semico m- mons — a resource that is owned and managed as private pro p- erty at one l evel but as a commons at a n other, and in which “both common and private uses are important and impact si g- nificantly on each other.” 42 The semicommons concept captures both the costs that authors and readers can impose on ow n ers through overuse and the ways that owners can inhibit content - sharing u s es by leveraging control of the infrastructure. 43 It also directs attention to moderation techniques that allow pr o- ductive coexistence. 44
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • First, a well - moderated commun ity will be productive : it will generate and distribute valuable information goods. Some of these i n formation goods are valuable in themselves ( Welcome to Night Vale fan fic tion ), others because they facilitate tran s- actions (Freecycle lis t ings), and others because they are part of socially important systems (political discussions
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • An important aspect of ope n ness is democracy — participation in moderation and in setting moderation policy.
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • well - moderated online communities catalyze human cooperation. Studying them can provide insights into the management of common - pool resources and the creation of information goods, two pro b lems moderation must solve simultaneously
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • The difference is moderation : the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate coope r- ation and prevent abuse. Town meetings have moderator s, and so do online communities. A community’s moderators can pr o- mote posts or hide them, honor pos t ers or shame them, recruit users or ban them. Their decisions influence what is seen, what is valued, what is said. They create the conditions under which c ooperation is po s sible
    The Virtues of Moderation
  • it becomes practical to democratize ranking, allowing individuals and groups to decide what kind of content they want to rank high in their feeds
    GPT is Rather Good at Feed Ranking
  • it’s practical to use a big expensive model like GPT to generate labels that can be used to train a small cheap model.
    GPT is Rather Good at Feed Ranking
  • It’s so easy that it makes it possible to imagine a world where individual users or groups could create their own custom rankings by just using human language to say what kind of content they want to rank high or low.
    GPT is Rather Good at Feed Ranking
  • What’s notable about this is not how well it works (better classifiers exist), but how quickly I was able to put this together by using GPT
    GPT is Rather Good at Feed Ranking
  • What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of time. Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. To combat this terror, we need a very different temporal politics.
    Philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Information Without Narrative Disrupts Democracy
  • Today, however, philosophy has completely lost this world-changing power. It is no longer capable of producing a novel narrative. Philosophy degenerates into an academic, specialist discipline. It is not turned toward the world and the present.
    Philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Information Without Narrative Disrupts Democracy
  • So fake news is just another piece of information, and before any process of verification can begin, it has already done its work. It rushes past truth, and truth cannot catch up. Fake news is truth-proof.
    Philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Information Without Narrative Disrupts Democracy
  • I’ll note also that misdirection is often at the heart of education, especially the parts that may to the student seem the most pointless.
    The Smith-Rogers Error
  • It took me years to understand that, in demanding my friends and I quiet down, these students were implying that their comfort superseded our joy. And in acquiescing, I accepted that.
    Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? - The Atlantic
  • For an hour I pretended to be a meek, muted version of myself. No one had told me to do this. I instinctively understood that, in this unfamiliar environment, the proper way to express my gratitude was to hush myself.
    Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? - The Atlantic
  • In the United States, the in-kind subsidy we provide our people is the option to keep their world from changing.
    The Build-Nothing Country
  • This is such an important point that it bears repeating. Money is not physical stuff. Just because you earmark $5 billion for a subway or $2 billion for a solar farm in some Excel spreadsheet somewhere doesn’t mean a physical train or power plant has actually been created.
    The Build-Nothing Country
  • Specifically, what’s frustrating me is America’s seeming inability to build the things it needs to build in order to prosper and flourish in the 21st century. From housing to transit to solar power to transmission lines to semiconductor fabs, the U.S. has little trouble marshalling the financial and physical capital to create what it needs, but ends up stymied by entrenched local interests who exploit a thicket of veto points to preserve the built environment of the 1970s.
    The Build-Nothing Country
  • It now takes roughly four years, on average, for developers to get approval, double the time it took a decade ago.
    The Build-Nothing Country
  • A gradual transition gives people, policymakers, and institutions time to understand what’s happening, personally experience the benefits and downsides of these systems, adapt our economy, and to put regulation in place. It also allows for society and AI to co-evolve, and for people collectively to figure out what they want while the stakes are relatively low.
    Planning for AGI and beyond
  • We believe we have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of the technology in order to minimize “one shot to get it right” scenarios.
    Planning for AGI and beyond
  • We want AGI to empower humanity to maximally flourish in the universe
    Planning for AGI and beyond
  • If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.
    Planning for AGI and beyond
  • The whole point of the shoggoth analogy is that GPT is supposed to be very different from humans. But however different the details, there are deep structural similarities. We’re both prediction engines fine-tuned with RLHF. And when I start thinking along these lines, I notice that psychologists since at least Freud, and spiritual traditions since at least the Buddha, have accused us of simulating a character. Some people call it the ego. Other people call it the self.
    Janus' Simulators
  • Janus dubs it a simulator. Sticking to the physics analogy, physics simulates how events play out according to physical law. GPT simulates how texts play out according to the rules and genres of language.
    Janus' Simulators
  • ChatGPT was a GPT instance simulating a character called the Helpful, Harmless, and Honest Assistant.
    Janus' Simulators
  • ChatGPT is no more advanced than its predecessors; instead, it more effectively covers up the alien nature of their shared architecture.
    Janus' Simulators