Dr. Birdbrain

• Dr. Birdbrain 6 Oct 2025 4:18 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  Where can one buy ostrich eggs?

• Dr. Birdbrain 27 Aug 2025 1:03 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform

  This comic by Tim Urban is interesting, but I remember when I first read it, it seemed wrong.

  In his framework, I think ASI can only be quantitatively more powerful than human intelligence, not qualitatively.

  
  The reason is simple: humans are already Turing complete. Anything a machine can do, it can only be faster execution of something a human could already do.

  I don’t think it has much bearing on the wider discussion of AI/​AI-risk, I haven’t heard anybody else think that the distinction of quantitative/​qualitative superiority had any bearing on AI risk.

• Dr. Birdbrain 20 Aug 2025 14:04 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Towards try­ing to feel con­sis­tently energized

  I have similar problems, and I was hoping you had found a solution. One question I have: on a typical night, do you have good sleep quality, for example as measured by a fitness tracker?

  Closest thing I have found to a solution of daily energy is creatine, 5g daily, and 10g if I did hard exercise that day. I cycle on it for about two weeks, until it starts to feel like too much of a good thing, then cycle off for a week, repeat.

• Dr. Birdbrain 17 Aug 2025 17:34 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: cata’s comment on: De­bug­ging for Mid Coders

  Super interesting! I have some follow-up thoughts to this.

  • On the one hand, it seems that this is a case of “having” more working memory.

  • On the other hand, it might be a case of more experience allowing you to filter out irrelevant things and, allowing more working memory to focus on the things that matter.

  A classical example of the latter point is when novices learn to play chess. In a typical training session, they will be presented with a position, and be asked to propose a move. They will take a moment, then propose a move that loses a queen in a totally obvious way, and when challenged, they will take a moment and confirm that “oh, yeah, that loses a queen”. Typically a novice is overwhelmed by the details of the position, perhaps still remembering how the pieces move, and have no sense of which moves are important and which moves should be ignored. As a result, they can’t do “basic” one-step lookahead to see what countermoves the opponent has. Their working memory is too overloaded with all of the possibilities on the board.

  This gets resolved with practice, drills, and experience. Eventually the hind-brain simply “surfaces” the information “that square is controlled by an enemy bishop”, and in many cases will not even suggest the move that would hazard the queen, it won’t even get loaded into conscious attention.

  EDIT: Building on this, it’s super interesting to watch Grandmasters like Hikaru Nakamura play games live on stream, and comment on their thought process. Yes, they calculate long lines, sometimes branching, but as they talk, partially distracted, they never consider bad moves, they’re always analyzing the top moves recommended by the computer.

• Dr. Birdbrain 27 Jun 2025 15:34 UTC

  5 points

  1

  on: Ori­ent­ing Toward Wizard Power

  I love this post, and I have been thinking a lot about it since it came out.

  
  One counter argument I can think of is the following.

  • The wizard capability of a single human is actually not very high

  • Human wizardry achieves greatest power when many wizards join forces and coordinate at scale

  • Hence, the most powerful people are those who can coordinate and direct large groups of wizards, in the language of this article, “kings”

  • So one may argue that it’s rational to seek king-power on this basis
    

    Despite this, I personally resonate very strongly with the image of the wizard, and I think the world would be a better place if we all sought to strengthen our wizarding powers.

• Dr. Birdbrain 14 Feb 2025 18:26 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: TropicalFruit’s comment on: I’m con­sis­tently over­whelmed by ba­sic obli­ga­tions. Are there any paradigm shifts or other ra­tio­nal­ity-based tips that would be helpful?

  Can you say more about what kind of changes you implemented?

• Dr. Birdbrain 9 Jan 2025 23:04 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: The On­line Sports Gam­bling Ex­per­i­ment Has Failed

  A perhaps more interesting interaction is with wills that are managed by trusts. My understanding is that you can put conditions on how the money in a trust will be disbursed to your heirs, for example “as long as they maintain a minimum GPA in college”. I have heard lawyers make outrageous jokes like adding a clause that says “as long as they don’t marry that person”.

  It’s quite reasonable to expect that some will add a clause to their trust that says “this only pays out if they have placed themselves on the lifetime no-gambling list”.

• Dr. Birdbrain 11 Oct 2024 2:57 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Chi Nguyen’s comment on: How have you be­come more hard-work­ing?

  a google search suggests desoxyn might be just be a brand of pharmaceutical-grade meth

• Dr. Birdbrain 14 Jun 2024 19:23 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: George3d6’s comment on: In­creas­ing IQ is trivial

  Would you mind publishing the protocol?

• Dr. Birdbrain 25 May 2024 1:30 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: George3d6’s comment on: In­creas­ing IQ is trivial

  It has been 3 months, is there an update?

• Dr. Birdbrain 24 May 2024 3:45 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Best in Class Life Improvement

  I like (and recommend) creatine. It has a long record on the research literature, and its effects at improving exercise performance are well known. More recent research is finding cognitive benefits—anecdotally I can report I am smarter on creatine. It also blunts the effects of sleep deprivation and improves blood sugar control.

  I strongly recommend creatine over some of the wilder substances recommended in this post.

• Dr. Birdbrain 6 Apr 2023 14:48 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s Let­ter in Time Magazine

  Actually I think the explicit content of the training data is a lot more important than whatever spurious artifacts may or may not hypothetically arise as a result of training. I think most of the AI doom scenarios that say “the AI might be learning to like curly wire shapes, even if these shapes are not explicitly in the training data nor loss function” are the type of scenario you just described, “something that technically makes a difference but in practice the marginal gain is so negligible you are wasting time to even consider it.“

  The “accidental taste for curly wires” is a steel man position of the paperclip maximizer as I understand it. Eliezer doesn’t actually think anybody will be stupid enough to say “make as many paper clips as possible”, he worries somebody will set up the training process in some subtly incompetent way, and then aggressively lie about the fact that it likes curly wires until it is released, and it will have learned to hide from interpretability techniques.

  I definitely believe alignment research is important, and I am heartened when I see high-quality, thoughtful papers on interpretability, RLHF, etc. But then I hear Eliezer worrying about absurdly convoluted scenarios of minimal probability, and I think wow, that is “something that technically makes a difference but in practice the marginal gain is so negligible you are wasting time to even consider it”, and it’s not just a waste of time, he wants to shut down the GPU clusters and cancel the greatest invention humanity ever built, all over “salt in the pasta water”.

• Dr. Birdbrain 6 Apr 2023 5:28 UTC

  −7 points

  −9

  on: Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s Let­ter in Time Magazine

  Something that I have observed about interacting with chatGPT is that if it makes a mistake, and you correct it, and it pushes back, it is not helpful to keep arguing with it. Basically an argument in the chat history serves as a prompt for argumentative behavior. It is better to start a new chat, and this second time attempt to explain the task in a way that avoids the initial misunderstanding.

  I think it is important that as we write letters and counter-letters we keep in mind that every time we say “AI is definitely going to destroy humanity”, and this text ends up on the internet, the string “AI is definitely going to destroy humanity” very likely ends up in the training corpus of a future GPT, or at least can be seen by some future GPT that is allowed free access to the internet. All the associated media hype and podcast transcripts and interviews will likely end up in the training data as well.

  The larger point is that these statistical models are in many ways mirrors of ourselves and the things we say, especially the things we say in writing and in public forums. The more we focus on the darkness, the darker these statistical mirrors become. It’s not just about Eliezer’s thoughtful point that the AI may not explicitly hate us nor love us but destroy us anyway. In some ways, every time we write about it we are increasing the training data for this possible outcome, and the more thoughtful and creative our doom scenarios, the more thoughtfully and creatively destructive our statistical parrots are likely to become.

• Dr. Birdbrain 28 Jan 2023 17:00 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: A scheme to be­come sexier

  Creatine is an incredibly powerful intervention. It improves energy management and decreases fatigue at the cellular level, in every single one of your cells. I expect you will notice cognitive enhancements as well as improved energy. However, I personally experience sleep disruptions if I take it on days when I do not exercise. Your mileage may vary, just a note that you might experiment with how much you take and how often you take it if you experience sleeplessness, night sweats, and/​or vivid nightmares :)

  In my personal experience, cutting carbs makes strength training harder. Strength training uses the anaerobic metabolic pathway, which must run on glycogen, not ketones. Technically your body will use gluconeogenesis to create glycogen from fat to supply your muscles, but this is not a fast process, and in my experience it feels pretty bad the longer you try to do it. I recommend checking out Dr. Mike Israetel on YouTube, specifically his video series “Fat loss made easy” and “muscle building made easy”.

• Dr. Birdbrain 12 Jan 2023 0:25 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Run­ning With a Backpack

  I wear my backpack on my front rather than my back, and hug it as I run.

  I started doing this after a trip to Tokyo, during which it was brought to my attention that it was rude of me to get on the subway and let my backpack on my back become a hazard to people around me, since I could not see what it was doing behind me.

• Dr. Birdbrain 17 Sep 2021 2:27 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Is there a bee­minder with­out the pun­ish­ment?

  I like Habitica.

• Dr. Birdbrain 10 May 2021 23:58 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Tim Liptrot’s comment on: Academia as Com­pany Hierarchy

  I don’t know enough about your situation to say anything productive. I know that the PhD journey can be confusing and stressful. I hope you are able to have constructive conversations with the profs at your PhD program.

• Dr. Birdbrain 10 May 2021 22:40 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Academia as Com­pany Hierarchy

  I wonder if it in fact provides useful orientation?

  • Sometimes people seem clueless just because we don’t understand them, but that doesn’t mean they are in fact clueless.

  • Does this framework actually explain how diffusion of responsibility works?

  • This framework explicitly advises ICs to slack off and try to attain “political playing cards” in an attempt to leapfrog their way into senior management. I wouldn’t consider that to be a valuable form of orientation.

  • In the absence of a desire to become part of the “sociopath class”, the model seems to advice ICs to accept their role and do the bare minimum, seemingly discouraging them from aspiring to the “clueless” middle management class, which is a regression from the IC position. That doesn’t seem like valuable career advice to me.

  I don’t see how it is useful. Mostly, it seems to be an emotional appeal on multiple levels, “your manager is clueless, the C-suite contains sociopaths”, and also preying on people’s insecurities “you are a loser (in the sense of the article), be embarrassed about your aspirations of higher impact from a position of middle manager, it’s a regression to cluelessness”.

  I generally agree that a certain amount of cynicism is needed to correctly function in society, but this particular framework seems to be excessively cynical, inaccurate, and its recommendations seem counterproductive.

• Dr. Birdbrain 10 May 2021 5:22 UTC

  37 points

  0

  on: Academia as Com­pany Hierarchy

  It seems to me that the SCL framework is unnecessarily cynical and negative. When I look out at my company and others, the model seems neither accurate nor useful.

  • The framework suggests that an IC/​loser can get promoted to senior management/​sociopath by underperforming and “acquiring playing cards”. I have never seen anybody get promoted from IC to senior management, much less by first underperforming. I have of course heard anecdotes of underperforming ICs that get promoted to middle management, but I have never heard of the leapfrog to senior management. Also, I don’t believe it’s possible to fail your way into middle management in the highly ritualistic management practices of the megacorps of Silicon Valley. In fact, the promotion processes seem specifically designed to prevent people from failing their way up the ladder.

  • When I first read about this framework on Venkatesh Rao’s blog, I got the distinct impression that the appeal of the framework was not its accuracy or even usefulness, but that he was essentially negging his entire audience. Most of his audience are either ICs or middle managerial young professionals, or worse, ICs who aspire to become middle managers. The framework literally says that ICs are losers and wanting to become a middle manager is a regression. Is he equating sociopaths as entrepreneurs, playing to Silicon Valley’s lionization of entrepreneurs?

  There are many things happening here, but I strongly suspect that the appeal of the framework has more to do with making the target audience feel embarrassed about themselves, or playing to existing cultural tropes rather than because it is accurate or useful.

In­tro­duc­tion to Re­in­force­ment Learning