flâneur

Jeremy Kintana

34 followers · 31 following · 537 views

on the atlas — 55

highlights — 60

  • Retreats connecting promising university students to professionals working in the AI safety space
    The case for AI safety capacity-building work
  • In 2023, 60% of respondents listed a capacity-building program or organization that our team was funding in their top four influences, with the most common being university groups (listed by 25% of respondents),
    The case for AI safety capacity-building work
  • The most compelling analogy: this is like expecting humans to be “just survival-and-reproduction machines” because survival and reproduction were the optimization criteria in our evolutionary history. There is, of course, some sense in which we are just survival-and-reproduction machines: we don’t have any faculties that can’t be explained through their effects on survival and reproduction. But this doesn’t mean we “don’t really think” or “don’t really understand” because we’re “really just trying to have sex” when we work on a math problem.
    Next-Token Predictor Is An AI's Job, Not Its Species
  • we do not have definite, specific policy proposals floating around that policymakers can pick from which advance AI Safety and societal well-being.
    Why We Should Talk Specifically Amid Uncertainty — Sam Baumohl
  • policymaking is neither ideal nor a science; it's an art, or if you like, engineering. Policies are inherently imperfect because they operate in a fundamentally imperfect world. They compromise, they bend, and, sometimes, they break.
    Why We Should Talk Specifically Amid Uncertainty — Sam Baumohl
  • Based on the increasing backlash towards AI in popular culture, due to rising utility costs, rising consumer hardware prices, environmental concerns, and intellectual property concerns, I expect a major political alignment at least within the United States sometime soon (O(~1.5 years)) that might primarily revolve around these issues.
    Why We Should Talk Specifically Amid Uncertainty — Sam Baumohl
  • The point of the exercise was not to catch the ball, but to not care about catching the ball. That’s surprisingly hard when you first play with it.
    Non-doing or non-forcing?
  • And every time Peter saw me caring (and believe me, it’s very obvious), he would say “this is the least important thing you’ve ever done in your life”.
    Non-doing or non-forcing?
  • Notice the sweet spot as a surprising experience of ease and a kind of elegance: the less you grip, the smoother and more precise the movement.
    The appropriate amount of effort is zero
  • Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. If you follow your feelings, you are guided back to that same old familiar where you’re trying too hard without even realising it.
    The appropriate amount of effort is zero
  • A resilient plan is built of “or” not “and.”
    Navigating the unpredictability of everything
  • A strategy is required, even when it’s wrong. A strategy gives you a direction. A direction creates something interesting. Something interesting might be used by zealous early fans, even if it ends up uncovering the answer rather than being the answer.
    Navigating the unpredictability of everything
  • Dispense with the idea that there is One True Solution to the puzzles, and that the way to get there is to gather enough information. While “iterate fast, learn fast” is good advice, it still doesn’t mean you’re iterating towards the One True Solution. It means you’re taking a path towards something, which will turn out to be an integration between your own creation and the swirling reality outside of you.
    Navigating the unpredictability of everything
  • A corollary: Making a decision and moving forward is often more effective than extended deliberation about the decision.
    Navigating the unpredictability of everything
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – Richard Rumelt
    A playbook for field strategy - by Dewi Erwan
  • It’s really important to remember two things: just how busy policymakers are, and depending again on the policymaker, how many topics they might need to cover and how many issues, including often just like truly urgent crises they need to handle. So if they don’t know something or misunderstand something, it doesn’t mean they’re stupid; it means that they’re busy doing something else. And I think another thing that people underestimate is how insular some of the conversations and some of the sets of ideas are. From the perspective of many people in DC, they’ve just never really encountered an …
    Helen Toner on the geopolitics of AI in China and the Middle East | 80,000 Hours
  • If a position calls for a leader of men, you often find a leader of men. If it instead requires super high levels of another skill, whether it’s coding, raising money, lifting weights, intricate chemistry or proving theorems, you’ll find that.
    Leaders of Men | Don't Worry About the Vase
  • This helps explain why people in unique positions are often uniquely terrible. They’re not replaceable. Some incompetence and shenanigans are acceptable, so long as they deliver the goods.
    Leaders of Men | Don't Worry About the Vase
  • It’s been more than twenty years since Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue, but chess has never been more popular. And this doesn’t seem some new-fangled twist of the internet age. I know of no human who quit the high-jump after the invention of mechanical flight. The Greeks sprinted in their Olympics, though they had, long before, domesticated the horse. Maybe we too will come to value the sport of understanding with our own brains.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • No humans would be among the great writers or sculptors of the day, but the fabulous works of art a superintelligence could make could help to fill our lives. Really, for almost any aesthetic value you now enjoy—sentimental or austere, minute or magnificent, meaningful or jocular—the bots would do it much better than we have ever done.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • Grief, you don’t need me to tell you, is a complicated beast. You can grieve for something even when you know that, on balance, it’s good that it’s gone.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someday, maybe pretty soon, everyone will lose their job.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • The young Karl Marx would have seen both Domin’s and Danaher’s utopias as a catastrophe for human life. In his notebooks from 1844, Marx describes an ornate and almost epic process, where, by meeting the needs of others through production, we come to recognize the other in ourselves, and through that recognition, come at last to self-consciousness, the full actualization of our human nature. The end of needed work, for the Marx of these notes, would be the impossibility of fully realizing our nature, the end, in a way, of humanity itself.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • But more often than not, inspiration refuses to show up until I assure it that I can be trusted to stick to my writing schedule.
    Dostoevsky as lover - by Henrik Karlsson
  • The basic issue with Asian parenting in the West is that it tries to forcefeed a scarcity mindset into kids obviously living in a post-scarcity society
    YOU CAN GET WHAT YOU WANT OR YOU CAN JUST GET OLD
  • This type of reflection is closely related to what the philosopher John Rawls calls the method of reflective equilibrium, which goes something like this: You look at your intuitions in various situations and formulate principles that fit what you see. To see if your principles hold up, you look at more cases (in particular, counterexamples) and consider other perspectives. If your first principles do not fit the new cases, you adjust them to “better fit the data.” But, importantly, you do not adjust only your principles; you adjust your intuitions and emotions, too. Perhaps your intuitions wer…
    Authenticity as dialogue - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Our emotions and intuitions, first of all, do not come from within most of the time; they are implanted and controlled by forces outside of us.
    Authenticity as dialogue - by Henrik Karlsson
  • If I follow my gut and eat the pastry, I will be true to myself in the moment, while betraying other versions of me.
    Authenticity as dialogue - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Today I want to discuss the other part of the context, namely, you. And this is where it gets murky.
    Authenticity as dialogue - by Henrik Karlsson
  • So what we see is that self-actualization is a flywheel: you become self-actualized by seeing reality clearly so you can design a life that fits you, and you become better at seeing reality by engaging with it head-on.
    Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Following a curriculum, you build mental models by processing simple examples, and then those simple models filter reality so that you become blind to the subtleties of the more complex examples. This is sometimes called a knowledge shield.
    Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
  • But, and this is the important point: if the prediction error is small, your brain will filter it. When this happens—when reality seems predictable to you, like what you see is what you expected to see—what you perceive is mostly your predictive model, not reality.
    Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
  • It is the most powerful force in the world. It's lucky that very few people have the strength to use it, because very few people know what they want, or could live with it if they got it.
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • The very act of making money had altered the man himself beyond recognition.
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • "Will tying these shoes help me to make money today?"
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • giving up everything
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • I don't know whether I believe in it, but I've seen it work
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • I am simply pointing out that what people think they want is often only secondary to what they do want.
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • Positive Thinking, Spiritual Affluence, or Creative Visualization
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • I hate wearing neckties to the office. I'd do anything to get rid of having to wear them.
    Why Prayer Is Not Answered
  • This is not so strange—it’s the loveliness of a normal flow state, when the human system is trusting itself rather than monitoring itself.
    Last year my mind exploded and now I'm in spiritual puberty again
  • Thus, imagining it with a typically structured mind is like searching for darkness with a flashlight, to borrow a metaphor from Julian Jaynes.
    Last year my mind exploded and now I'm in spiritual puberty again
  • during the short breaks I’m only allowed non-distractive stuff, i.e. social media, email, most of reddit, slack are prohibited
    Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible - Alexey Guzey
  • But having access to their expertise and their past track record is pretty key to my alpha. I keep that list carefully guarded. Some people don't even know they're on it.
    🔮 #3 Top Forecaster: "Nothing Ever Happens"
  • People will do unbelievable mental gymnastics to convince themselves that doing an easy, enjoyable thing that is unrelated to their supposed goal somehow moves the needle more than doing a hard, unpleasant thing that is directly related to said goal.
    Advice on Upskilling - Justin Skycak
  • In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
    The Age of the Essay
  • In each case, the Wizards are excited to improve the human condition by ameliorating suffering, and the Prophets accuse them of having such an impoverished view of humanity that they would sacrifice something vital in the process.
    REVIEW: The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann
  • Postrel does describe five characteristics of “dynamist rules”: As an overview, dynamist rules: Allow individuals (including groups of individuals) to act on their own knowledge. Apply to simple, generic units and allow them to combine in many different ways. Permit credible, understandable, enduring, and enforceable commitments. Protect criticism, competition, and feedback. Establish a framework within which people can create nested, competing frameworks of more specific rules.
    In search of a dynamist vision for safe superhuman AI
  • Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people's joy.
    Taking ethics seriously, and enjoying the process — EA Forum
  • This is the difference between do-gooders and ordinary people: for do-gooders, it is always wartime. They always feel themselves responsible for strangers — they always feel that strangers, like compatriots in war, are their own people.
    Taking ethics seriously, and enjoying the process — EA Forum