Progress links and tweets, 2023-04-12

[jasoncrawford]

Link post

Opportunities

• Nat Friedman wants a researcher/​journalist for a short AI/​rationalism/​x-risk project

• A new x-risk research lab is recruiting their first round of fellows (via @panickssery)

Links

• A “solutionist” third-way on AI safety from Leopold (or thread version)

• Jack Devanney on how “ALARA” makes nuclear energy expensive (via @s8mb). See also my review of Devanney’s book

• “Instead of a desk, I would like to have a very large lazy susan in my office” (see also my attempts to visualize a soluion)

Queries

• What’s the best sci-fi about AI to read at this moment in history?

• What explains the full history of Irish population?

• Why is the US an outlier in post-2000 suicide rate trends?

• Do uncertain statements about the future have truth values?

• Is any sigmoid an isomorphism between two groups over ℝ and (0,1)?

Quotes

• Evidence for the human capital theory of the Industrial Revolution

AI tweets & threads

• Good concise clarification of a key difference in thinking on AI x-risk

• Many AGI doomers & anti-doomers make terrible arguments

• “Confabulate” instead of “hallucinate” for LLMs?

• GPT-4 speaker intros

• Practical advice for coping with the feeling of “imminent doomsday”

Charts

• “One universal in the history of childhood stands above all others. The history of childhood is a history of death”

• The Counter-Reformation’s search for heresy was a negative shock to science

• As terrible as COVID was, we have progressed a lot in the last 200 years

• The survival curve inflates like a sail, but the far end of it doesn’t move much

[Waldvogel]

The “New York City’s Death Rate” chart is ambiguous to me. Is the red line at 2020 a graphical notation pointing to the current year, or is it a spike in the death rate?

[jasoncrawford]

It is a spike in the death rate, from covid.