FYI, just talked to Critch. According to him, when he was six years old he learned to read by reading an entire encyclopedia, the first actual “book” he read was A Brief History of Time, which had a big impact on him. He was doing things like checking his understanding of reality at multiple layers of abstraction (i.e. couch is made out of leather which is made out of dead skin which is made out of cells, etc) and making sure the models were harmonious with each other sometime soon after.
When he was 4 he had clear memories of being 2 (and still does). In early teens he set out to become an idealized agent.
He says he thinks having the math-thing was necessary but probably not sufficient.
I think in his particular case, there was definitely a lot of unusual stuff going on. (i.e. he needed some amount of nurture in order for the stuff to take root, i.e. parents who bought him an encyclopedia, helped him learn math, but you clearly don’t get the same outcome by giving those same inputs to an arbitrary child)
Eliezer’s written up a lot of his early childhood stuff and AFAICT has a sort of similar thing going on (in his case the nurture stuff seems a bit more relevant, but again, lots of kids seem to get fairly similar nurture and not turn out the same)
What this all means depends a lot on “are you trying to find the best model-builders in the world” vs “are you trying to teach arbitrary pretty smart people how to model build.”
I think the math thing is most likely quite important for learning how to model build, but it’s not obvious in advance to me which sorts of people would be worth investing the effort for it.
So, as a contrast, I claim I also have the ability I’m describing, and I was unusually good at math as a kid (increasingly more so as I got older) and just very smart overall but that was about it. I was in a gifted program in elementary school and a different gifted program in middle school; they did a good job developing my ability to think but I didn’t really use it on anything except math and schoolwork. The thing that unlocked me was my first CFAR workshop, which is when it first occurred to me that I could enjoy using the parts of my brain I’d developed to think about math to think about anything at all.
FYI, just talked to Critch. According to him, when he was six years old he learned to read by reading an entire encyclopedia, the first actual “book” he read was A Brief History of Time, which had a big impact on him. He was doing things like checking his understanding of reality at multiple layers of abstraction (i.e. couch is made out of leather which is made out of dead skin which is made out of cells, etc) and making sure the models were harmonious with each other sometime soon after.
When he was 4 he had clear memories of being 2 (and still does). In early teens he set out to become an idealized agent.
He says he thinks having the math-thing was necessary but probably not sufficient.
I think in his particular case, there was definitely a lot of unusual stuff going on. (i.e. he needed some amount of nurture in order for the stuff to take root, i.e. parents who bought him an encyclopedia, helped him learn math, but you clearly don’t get the same outcome by giving those same inputs to an arbitrary child)
Eliezer’s written up a lot of his early childhood stuff and AFAICT has a sort of similar thing going on (in his case the nurture stuff seems a bit more relevant, but again, lots of kids seem to get fairly similar nurture and not turn out the same)
What this all means depends a lot on “are you trying to find the best model-builders in the world” vs “are you trying to teach arbitrary pretty smart people how to model build.”
I think the math thing is most likely quite important for learning how to model build, but it’s not obvious in advance to me which sorts of people would be worth investing the effort for it.
Thanks for writing this up!
So, as a contrast, I claim I also have the ability I’m describing, and I was unusually good at math as a kid (increasingly more so as I got older) and just very smart overall but that was about it. I was in a gifted program in elementary school and a different gifted program in middle school; they did a good job developing my ability to think but I didn’t really use it on anything except math and schoolwork. The thing that unlocked me was my first CFAR workshop, which is when it first occurred to me that I could enjoy using the parts of my brain I’d developed to think about math to think about anything at all.