Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 2,084
That doesn’t seem right—to solve it via pure rotation, you would need to do up to 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 rotations, looking at each pair once, not 6!. Not at all unrealistic.
If you’re a good programmer and you interview well (i.e. you think fast and sound sharp) you will likely have little difficulty, so don’t sweat the details. There’s a huge volume of “how to get hired as a programmer” prescriptive advice, and it’s mostly aimed at newbies who have median or below-median skill, because those are the majority of people looking for jobs. If you know yourself to be in the top percentiles of this stuff, it doesn’t apply. The fundamental truth of this labor market is that demand greatly exceeds supply.
I suggest doing a couple practice interviews with someone in your network. You can try https://interviewing.io/ if you don’t have anyone handy, although I am sure a bunch of people reading this post would be willing to practice interview you for free. I would do it. The environment of a typical real-time interview is very different from the “I am doing Leetcode problems on my computer” environment, so I think it’s much better practice.
The most common problem I observe with interviewees is that they are very nervous, so figure out whatever will make you not very nervous and do that.
I recommend hitting up your network to find companies that you think you would enjoy working at. This also means you will probably have someone who can help you get past the screening stage, so your resume will matter even less. If you don’t have any good candidate companies in your pocket, I would consult the recent Hacker News “who’s hiring” threads; since you are a good writer with credible merits, corresponding directly with the poster there might similarly bypass any kind of “bozo recruiter screening out illegible resumes” filter.
We should require a high bar before we’re willing to not-post potentially-world-destroying information to LW, because LW has a strong commitment to epistemic rationality’ seems like an obviously terrible argument to me.
I think that argument is good if you expand out its reasoning. The reason we have a strong commitment to epistemic rationality is because learning and teaching true things is almost always very good. You need to establish a fair chunk of probable bad to outweigh it.
This makes it sound like if I am a good programmer and I want to help people out (and not get paid market rate, and not get job security), I should find lots of unusually good opportunities within academia. Do you think that’s the case? If so, do you have any suggestions for how to find them? I have zero experience with any university ever.
I would point out that the benefits of “multiclassing” don’t only arise when you have, like, the equivalent of two different college majors. They arise if you can both, for example, do your work and also write well. Or do your work and also think one level up about the purpose of your work. Or do your work in a way that takes into account the specific details of the work of your direct colleagues.
Most people like being specialized. They like the feeling of knowing what’s expected of them, feeling that they know how to do that well, and then knowing that they are done. If you just become a little more general than that, you will be super useful, because you will delete the coordination costs that would have been present if multiple people were required to do the things that you can take care of by yourself.
If you’re a selfless altruist who eliminated video games from your life so that you can spend more time on altruism, then hats off to you and genuine thanks for your service. But don’t act like you’re confused that someone else would not do it. You can be a rationalist and care about AI safety without being a selfless altruist devoting every minute to it.
I wonder if this process would work better if there were a Kickstarter-like mechanism for people to pay the Department for specific work that they wanted done that wasn’t getting done.
I think a single vote already conveys a bunch of information about agreement. Very very few people upvote things they disagree with, even on LW, and most of the time they do, they leave a disambiguating comment (I’ve seen Rob and philh and Daystar do this, for instance)...So making the second vote “agree/disagree” feels like adding a redundant feature; the single vote was already highly correlated with agree/disagree. (Claim.)
I am not very knowledgeable about a lot of things people post about on LW, so my median upvote is on a post or comment which is thought-provoking but which I don’t have a strong opinion about. I don’t know if I am typical, but I bet there are at least many people like me.
I’m not sure I make the connection between what you described and meta-honesty norms. The flakiness and unresponsiveness you described is unfortunately endemic to company recruiters. I attribute it to the fact that corresponding with lots of job applicants is a lot of work which is not fun, and bad incentive structures that don’t appropriately reward/punish doing a good/bad job with hiring. It’s too bad that MIRI hasn’t managed to outperform that status quo, but I guess they didn’t.
Very well written, thanks for the linkpost! I should also listen to the Tyler Cowen podcast you referenced.
I skipped college and became a programmer. About 15 years later, I have yet to ever see one single piece of evidence that any employer or recruiter has, at any point, ever had the thought, “I would think better of this candidate if they had a degree.” I have had offers from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (none of which I accepted, so they don’t show up on my resume), and recruiters spam me constantly, so this isn’t just a tiny eccentric startup thing. Maybe IBM cares. Do you specifically want to work for IBM that bad?
Presuming you can do the usual other stuff to demonstrate your competence and find jobs, which I think is likely if you are hanging out posting dialogues on LW (e.g. you are really good at programming, sharp sounding, publicly visible work, charismatic, willing to approach people) I think you should assume the degree is a totally worthless piece of paper and work from there.
(Obvious caveats: Maybe this doesn’t work outside of Silicon Valley culture, or maybe it doesn’t work well until you have one job on your resume, or maybe it doesn’t work if you don’t look like a stereotypical hacker type, or something. I can mostly only speak to my own experience.)
Scenario 3 bothers me. Did you really have to do the thing where you generalize about the whole social group?
Compare:
We try to have a culture around here where there is no vetted-by-the-group answer to this; we instead try to encourage forming your own inside-view model of how AI risk might work, what paths through to a good future might be possible, etc...
with
I don’t think I have any specific best answer for this in general. My best suggestion would be to encourage forming your own inside-view model of how AI risk might work, what paths through to a good future might be possible, etc...
To me, the new version sounds more personal, equally helpful, and is not misleading or attempting to do “narrative syncing.” (Maybe I just don’t understand what’s going on, because the first scenario sounded pretty reasonable to me, and seems to contain basically the same content as the third scenario, so I would not have predicted vastly different reactions. The first scenario is phrased a little more negatively, I guess?)
Aren’t you kind of preaching to the choir? Who involved in AI alignment is actually giving advice like this?
Wouldn’t the median respondent tell A and B something like “go start participating at the state of the art by reading and publishing on the Alignment Forum and by reading, reproducing, and publishing AI/ML papers, and maybe go apply for jobs at alignment research labs?”
If I correctly understand the argument in “But how does shitposting lead to the pursuit of truth”, I see three somewhat independent lines of reasoning:
There are several important topics today that are nearly impossible to discuss directly for both individual and social reasons. The best way to approach them is with “shitposting” that expresses a real opinion but doesn’t immediately bind the writer to a legible object-level position that could be attacked.
I’m not sure I agree that this is preventing the pursuit of truth, because topics like feminism and QAnon and collective insanity aren’t impossible to discuss with other people who are interested in pursuing truth. They are only impossible to discuss with people playing status games. But it didn’t benefit your understanding very much to discuss them with those people anyway.
I could write this essay on my blog, and 750 people would read it. But 75,000 chuckled at my tweet and hopefully more than 1% of them went hmmm afterward and asked themselves why this is funny and what it means.
I think one crux is—is it really true that if 75k people read that tweet, 1% of them go “hmmm” and ask themselves why it’s funny and what it means? I think that’s incredibly overoptimistic. I would expect a handful at best to end up anywhere near the reasoning that you typed out. You ought to know better than me, since you use Twitter, and I don’t, but 1% seems unbelievable. I barely seriously reflect on 1% of LW comments I read.
This is related to the point above. I get why “shitposting” (is “shitposting” different than “comedy”?) might get more people to read what you wrote, since you made it shorter and funnier. But I don’t get why it would make people have a more open mind about their preconceptions, or think harder, or think in a useful different direction. Maybe it can “raise the sanity waterline” a tiny bit by putting a very simplistic good idea in a lot of people’s heads, although I am skeptical that your example tweet would accomplish that.
I think Twitter is a great compliment to LessWrong for anyone pursuing the art of rationality. It trains you to play with ideas, to improv, read between the lines, make the shadow visible. It allows you to make friends with people who know deep and important things and will never communicate those things to you in a LessWrong-legible way. It teaches you to express yourself outside the constraints of epistemic statuses and acceptable topics of discussion. It teaches you to filter truth from bullshit in the real memetic jungle, real-life rationality under fire.
Those sound like good fun things to do which are not really about the art of rationality, except insofar as going out and doing anything at all can teach you something. They sound like basically the same things that would happen if you hung out talking to people at a random bar, or on a random Discord server, or at work.
Basically, my experience went like this:
I didn’t know anyone trans or think about it at all.
I moved to California and hung out with some rationalists and met some trans people IRL and online. I understood that it was polite to try to use whatever pronouns they preferred, decoupled from their physical appearance, so I did my best to do so, and other than that I continued to not think about it at all.
After observing that it’s hard to reliably remember to use pronouns that conflict with people’s surface appearance to me, I adopted a “default to ‘they’, especially in case of ambiguous appearance” strategy that seemed to typically be doable by me, and satisfactory to most people I met.
Somehow last year I was talking to another cis person about whether different strategies for remembering to use the right pronouns were easier or harder, and this idea of “actually reconsider their gender” came up.
I agree with these criticisms, I don’t understand what Eliezer was doing with his conclusion. (How did the word “simplest” get in there?)
I just wanted to mention that regarding this quote:
a lot of cis people use ‘learning someone’s pronoun’ as a copout from doing the important internal work of actually reconsidering their impression of the person’s gender
As a cis person who has interacted occasionally with trans people for the past ten years, it literally never occurred to me until last year that what trans people were asking me to do was actually reconsider my impression of their gender! I sincerely thought they were just asking me to memorize a different word to call them. I will at least try out a “reconsidering” process the next time I regularly interact with a trans person IRL and see whether it works. (I have also never read about what kind of “reconsidering” processes work for people, but I have some guesses for how I could approach it.)
It seems bad that the huge focus on pronouns completely obscured the actual request! I wonder if a lot of other people also don’t know this.
When I say this I’m expressing that I see no practical reason to distinguish between 1 in a trillion and 1 in a googol because the rest of my behavior will be the same anyway. I think this is totally reasonable because quantifying probabilities is a lot of work.
“Stop after win” is very interesting advice. I think of myself as good at learning, and I am great at drilling down and fixing specific details, but I didn’t know this advice. I will try to apply it. Thanks for the post.
This seems related to Zvi’s binary of “okay mode” vs. “not okay mode” that he wrote about here.
Your model matches up to my read of how the laypeople I talk to speak about COVID risks. I’m not sure it’s the right explanation of the initially strange-looking set of interventions that people perform. For example, some public places have Plexiglass separators to simulate social distancing, and others don’t. I think that few would claim that the Plexiglass is necessary to attain safety, but it is still popular. I also don’t think this explanation accounts for the dramatic variation in interventions applied in different countries.
I was referred by 80k Hours to talk to a manager on the OpenAI safety team who argued exactly this to me. I didn’t join, so no idea to what extent it makes sense vs. just being a nice-sounding idea.