Kenneth Sun

37 followers · 39 following · 2265 views

on the atlas — 136

highlights — 165

人类不得不直面时代之问：当机器开始思考，人类如何与之相处？当算法参与决策，安全如何保障？当技术挑战伦理，治理如何跟上？当鸿沟不断拉大，普惠如何实现？
习近平在2026世界人工智能大会暨人工智能全球治理高级别会议开幕式上的主旨讲话（全文）-新华网
Years later, one of the first questions we ask a stranger is, "What do you do?" Occupation has become one of the primary ways we understand ourselves and one another. Therefore, work can often provide more than an income; it provide an identity.
what of us remains
everal participants suggested that, for most generalist roles, a competent senior professional can get to a working level of AIS context in weeks
AI safety is maturing. Is its generalist talent pipeline keeping up? — EA Forum
Seniority is a proxy for what is actually needed: diversity and outside-world fluency. What the field needs is people who have operated in environments outside AI safety and EA, who understand how businesses are run, how government institutions work, how professional norms function in other sectors and how to communicate credibly with people who do not share the field's cultural vocabulary.
AI safety is maturing. Is its generalist talent pipeline keeping up? — EA Forum
American automakers noticed the superiority of Japanese cars a long time ago, and tried to implement the andon cord: but it just didn’t work with how their companies were organized
Why Japanese companies do so many different things
You end up building a life, a career, maybe a marriage, a whole identity that looks fine from the outside. It might even look successful, but it was never actually designed around who you are. It was designed around who you thought you were supposed to be. You became a square peg and then you spent decades trying to force yourself into a round hole. And that’s where the real exhaustion comes from. Not from doing too much, though that’s part of it, but from the constant daily grind of trying to fit into a life that was never built for your actual shape.
I graduated from Effective Altruism - Kyle Bogosian
When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.
Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni
Apparently 57% of Gen Z would like to be social media stars, and that’s almost certainly because they haven’t unpacked what it would actually take to make it.
Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni
Every library unbuilt, every garden untended, every beautiful thing in the world unfunded. We are witnessing a thing that looks like discipline, but is actually the most extravagant waste of economic surplus in the history of our civilization. We are watching people who have more freedom than the Medicis use that freedom to pretend they have less freedom than the line worker in Shenzhen, and we applaud it.
On Grindslop - by Will Manidis - Minutes
“What are your hobbies?” I could sense he had an agenda; this was not genuine curiosity.
I got fired from my tech job - by Spencer Elliott
Starting to learn that the kind of gentle, sensitive engineers who I feel most comfortable collaborating with are quite rare.
I got fired from my tech job - by Spencer Elliott
I felt inadequate. I couldn’t meet his level of energy and self-assertiveness, and didn’t feel there was space for me to expand naturally. I felt myself compensating and projecting a false confidence in my answers.
I got fired from my tech job - by Spencer Elliott
I want diverse friends.
Why I don't persuade people to do AI safety
When hiring recruiters, usually the hiring pool is made up of many people who have a high degree of project management and operational skills. Candidates tend to be operationally focused and emphasize this part of their experience and background. But often candidates won’t have either the research/empirical skills to explore ideas to improve hiring or won’t be interested in this aspect of it
Recruitment is extremely important and impactful
I’ll typically spend 50-60 hours in a given hiring process for a direct report
Recruitment is extremely important and impactful
true strategic advantage lies not in locking talent behind walls, but in the trust that allows it to move freely, collaborate across oceans, and solve problems no single nation can face alone
Bridge or Border: Why Scientific Securitization Won't Make Nations Safe - The Wire China
It is much more terrifying to go it alone, against advice, as you will then be responsible for what seems to be unbounded downside. But we cull the possibility of ever developing a strong character if we constantly outsource our decision-making to others.
you will never realize yourself!!! - circe
Someone who wrote manifestos on the true meaning of Structure is automatically in the upper middle class; they get invited to cooler parties than somebody who just knows things about different types of stone. This was the Bauhaus’ offer to architects, and they leapt at the opportunity.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House - by Scott Alexander
It’s cute that architects can argue with each other about the nature of socialism in a unique language made entirely of housing projects, I just would also like to be able to go outside and see something other than concrete boxes.
Contra Everyone On Taste - by Scott Alexander
A lot of today’s literary fiction could be set on some twin earth where everything about history, science, philosophy, the universe, even what humans evolved to look like, could all be totally different. Yet the novel is so situated in the writer’s low-attack-surface manifest image of the world that the reader would never know.
Contra Everyone On Taste - by Scott Alexander
When people say “I think it’s really cool that this Impressionist painting was one of the first Impressionist paintings ever, and not just some modern version of an Impressionist painting that didn’t even participate in the original discussions around Impressionism”, I want to answer - okay, but do you like art?
Contra Everyone On Taste - by Scott Alexander
Trump has formally invited Xi to visit Washington on September 24, when more average voters will be paying attention to the midterm elections. Pushing for more agreements then and announcing them on our home turf is a much smarter strategy.
Watching the Super Bowl of US-China Nerds - by Kevin Xu
‘Cause I do now. I thought I did, but now I really feel it. It’s easy to work hard when you’re pretty sure things will be bad-by-default. It’s incredibly motivating.
MATS 9 Retrospective & Advice — LessWrong
It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML (ASML.AS), opens new tab who reverse-engineered the company's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines or EUVs, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
Exclusive: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips | Reuters
Looking at our examples, we see that GMs can be ‘housed’ in different types of organizations. Sometimes there’s an existing organization to fund and support the GM (i.e., factory farming is housed within Coefficient Giving, carbon removal within Stripe, smallpox within WHO),
There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems
I’m not suggesting that every nonprofit needs to be scoped to the whole thing (there are many different valuable shapes of nonprofits), but I am suggesting that scoping to solve the problem in its entirety—and clearly defining the desired outcome—is rarer than it should be.
There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems
The Sequences make certain implicit promises. There is an art of thinking better, and we’ve figured it out. If you learn it, you can solve all your problems, become brilliant and hardworking and successful and happy, and be one of the small elite shaping not only society but the entire future of humanity. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not true.
Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?—Asterisk
It will last a few sentences to a few paragraphs before they drift off. Don’t waste your first few paragraphs defining something everyone already knows the definition of,
Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
10: There are effortposts everywhere for those eyes to see
Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
the mountaintop would at least teach you to separate strategic deployment of your personality from a compulsive tic to insert yourself where you don’t belong. There’s usually no need to say “I think the evidence shows that snow is white”
Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
We know very little about the quality of most other AI biorisk evaluations: Evaluation methodologies and results are often very opaque
Do the biorisk evaluations of AI labs actually measure the risk of developing bioweapons? | Epoch AI
Writing, usually, is a small fraction of my work. When the research is done well, I find that the words come out effortlessly, almost as though it is not me doing the writing. If I am struggling to get words on the page, it is typically because I don’t understand my topic well enough.
How I Work - by Dean W. Ball - Hyperdimensional
Because of the rigidity of its form, the short book review—more so than the sprawling, idiosyncratic, and autobiographical review—is vulnerable to automation.
The 800-Word Book Review - Derek Neal’s Newsletter
...at this point, the sentence seems to want to continue, ‘I begin to despair’ (but this is the reality of a frozen semantics, not, in the end, of any feeling I might have
The 800-Word Book Review - Derek Neal’s Newsletter
You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
Being able to live in the “world as it is,” rather than getting permanently fixated on the “world as it should be,” is a superpower
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
If you always let people in in traffic, no one can cut you off.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
Happiness is a ghost, but one we’ve chased to the top of the mountain.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
You can go through a lot of relationships and experience a lot of flavors of admiration and obsession and limerence — in other words, lots of things that kind of feel like love — without experiencing real love. (This is either terrifying or reassuring, depending on your perspective.)
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
At the same time, the point of engaging with all that stuff has to be to become more functional, not to develop an identity as a victim, or to constantly be peeling your skin off.
50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
The Japanese authorities did not intend or even desire dense urban centers, but they did not prevent them, rather like nineteenth-century governments in the West.
The secrets of the shinkansen
My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments currently slumbering in their bulbs and buds, unknown to man and woman.
Letter from Utopia
Have principles Have hard rules of what you're not willing to do - don't kill innocent people, don't steal, don't defraud, respect people's personal freedom - and have a very high bar for considering any exceptions.
Galaxy brain resistance
But a more realistic approach is to notice that, in the real world, arguments like the above are almost always not reasoning - they are rationalization.
Galaxy brain resistance
The world is becoming less cooperative. Many powerful actors that before seemed to at least sometimes act on high-minded principles (cosmopolitanism, freedom, common humanity... the list goes on) are now more openly, and aggressively, pursuing personal or tribal self-interest.
d/acc: one year later
To me, this approach seems risky, and could combine the flaws of multipolar races and centralization. If we have to limit people, it seems better to limit everyone on an equal footing, and do the hard work of actually trying to cooperate to organize that instead of one party seeking to dominate everyone else.
d/acc: one year later
The goal is to build a world where we preserve human agency, achieving both the negative freedom of avoiding active interference (whether from other people acting as private citizens, or from governments, or from superintelligent bots) with our ability to shape our own destinies, and the positive freedom of ensuring that we have the knowledge and resources to. This echoes a centuries-long classical liberal tradition, which also includes Stewart Brand's focus on "access to tools" and John Stuart Mill's emphasis on education alongside liberty as key components of human progress - and perhaps, on…
d/acc: one year later
it is unclear, for instance, whether a direct democracy would actually do a better job of satisfying citizen preferences in the long term because, for example, it would leave the state more vulnerable to cultural misalignment. A key part of the challenge is clarifying what it even means for large, complex systems to serve the interests of individuals who are accustomed to thinking on smaller scales.
Gradual Disempowerment