I am not a wizard, merely a seasoned Ops director, and have handled budgets of up to 10 mil; not larger. I do believe budgeting is a skill, including the subtler skill of knowing what not to budget for, or what to lump together in a budget, and how much budget hand-waving is allowed. I am not in Berkeley (I may be in winter), but I would be down for a single 1h class to you in particular, and if we figure out a curriculum from there, amazing. (Note to non-JenniferRM readers—I am offering this because I have enjoyed JenniferRM’s readings over the last year or something, consciously, maybe longer, without attribution, and would like to give back. If you’d like classes, leave cool comments and posts :D)
DusanDNesic
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Thanks for replying!
I think if someone gave advice on weightlifting that included lifting 100kg deadlifts it is fare to note that this is bad advice for the average person, regardless of whether there exists a group of people that can do it. I am happy for you that you hold yourself to that standard, and so do I, but when you give advice that mostly only you can adhere to without a caveat of “btw, this requires a high level of epistemic hygiene” I feel the need to add the caveat.
I agree that there is a class of problems solved by actually updating. I also think epistemic learned helplessness is a valid strategy when in an adversarial environment, which is likely to try to sneak Trojan horse beliefs (or just bad beliefs!) all the time. I am curious to hear if you think this sentence is true:
“Under a repeated pressure of false information, you are better off hearing the information and choosing to reject it, than you are if you closed the channel”
I can understand the arguments for this being true, including practicing your skills at rejecting lies etc; but my felt sense is that most people who aren’t close-to-perfect reasoners are actually worse off following this principle as a rule of thumb because the exposure to untruth will make them worse off both in the short run and epistemically, making it harder for them to course-correct.
I also feel that if there was a recording saying untruths that I could play as background noise, I would be better off just not playing it—unless I am trying to understand the speaker or practice truth-detection or something, I am just better off not exposing my brain to a barrage of falsehoods lest one pass the scanner into my meat-brain unrejected. I can feel that when I spend a lot of time in an environment (e.g. nationalists), for some time after my brain autocompletes things more in their direction and I have to consciously fight it. Fighting it is good, but I change who I am based on what I think and keeping myself submersed in a hostile environment may end with me being someone I do not want to be on reflection.
I do want to say that I appreciate you picking a less defensible more provocative example, even though I do not agree with it; exactly because it allows us to look at the edge case from north sides. Choosing a more milquetoast example would have caused less thinking and would have been worse, so thanks for sticking your neck out.
My criticism would be something like:
Founding of the US was a land grab motivated by wanting resources much more than any ideal. That, as a happy coincidence, resulted in enough slack that other, actually good things (removal of slavery, universal suffrage, democracy-as-an-ideal, enough resources to spread these good things to elsewhere) happened. The lesson would then be: “allow for gross accumulation of resources as it’ll be a whale fall later in which goodness can strive” but that’s not a great lesson. On a micro scale, a better lesson is “use the whale fall that horrible people have already created and fight for goodness” (many revolutions and civil rights movements are essentially this, and world is worse off without them), but that feels like it skips an important part of the world. Like, the conquering of Napoleon, or Alexander the Great, or Ghingis Khan all were explained as Goodness Expanding at the time, and some did end up causing some reforms and improvements after they happened; but in the moment I do not see how they can be distinguished from Manifest Destiny. How can you tell that the thing that’s expanding is the good?
Maybe my advice would be “well, tough luck, it probably isn’t good that’s expanding” but we’re also about to hit some whale falls from AI (which include less genocide than usual) so focusing on actually turning them into civil rights victories and goodness is a priority.
I think this assumes an arbitrarily high level of epistemic hygiene which would be possible for a fully rational agent but less so for an actual human. Choosing to pass by bullies daily who yell insults seems like a bad idea because they’ll keep trying different strategies until they hit a nerve—I would chose to not walk next to them daily as a precaution, even though on a good day I can reason with myself that they are compromised agents with little information about me and data coming from them is not true etc etc… In some way, choosing between not updating on any information they give or not hearing any information that they give is just blocking the channel at different points, but I’d argue that not hearing is a much more solid defence, and saying “just don’t update on any information from them bro” is both unrealistic and slightly victim blame-y. So I agree with you in principle and with “spherical cows in vacuum” rules, but I think it’s just not reasonable to think like this.
Just to provide counter-data: we started the kid off at 2y3m in kindergarten with about 13 kids total. He’s been sick maybe 1 or 2 times in the past 6 months; similar to the rate he’d usually get sick, but we do take him to playgrounds and other places with other kids a lot anyway so maybe the difference is not that big. I’d assume that the kindergarten having air filters and very few kids (13 is not the size of his group, it’s the whole institution, and all the kids are together), makes this a much more reasonable trade-off between socializing and illness.
You need to discount the physicists who are less likely to be full beings (i.e. those far from working in AI safety), as they are likely just placeholders; so among real physicists (this time real meaning actually real), MWI is true is a supermajority position, and the authors here are dashing rogues going against the grain.
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“How often papers do something” shows convenience rather than reliability or capability—it’s cheaper and more consistent to use an LLM judge, but it may be strictly inferior to a human and it’d still be used.
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I agree, but posts by @Jan_Kulveit for example (despite being cyborg written) have ~always given me great value, and I do not notice newer ones giving me less value—I do notice them being more frequent and equally useful, despite LLM smell being present in some sentences. So writing like that is an example where it is actually a net positive and would be hard (or somewhat unfair!) to label everything in a box as heavily LLM made and ignore it.
Thanks for a great comment! I had a sense something like this may be true, but never looked up the research.
On your second point, we have evidence that LLMs can think without speaking, i.e., they can do planning or reflection in the forward pass, and that’s current models and LLMs. It’s possible that in the future that will be even more common.
Great work! The slight pushback is on the chickpeas though! Be genuine, even if it can come off as quirky. I’m sure the staffer remembers the chickpea guy much more than 20 other meetings that week, and with some charisma that is now your hook (if you have chickpeas because you’re vegan and most places don’t offer it, that’s a great conversation that shows you have strong values and are compassionate, positive traits which give you an aura you will benefit from when presenting what you came for).
I think suit and no chickpeas can easily end up with looking like everyone else! Add your touch to that—my suits often have colorful pocket squares, or are paired with ties or colorful socks that tell a story from my past. That gets more doors open than just the off-the-shelf kind of look! A stain on it from my toddler will make it better still if I play my cards right and am not sitting across from a robot!
Important note though is that the signals must be real and come from a place of confidence! If you’re not vegan, the can of chickpeas will come off flimsy. Intentional discrete stain to talk about your kid will be disingenuous. A colorful suit that you can’t explain is worse than off the shelf one. It took quite some time for me to get to know what stories I want to tell with my look and quirks and come to terms with it myself.
I overall agree with the “People are doing gymnastics when just the straightforward thing works” and the “people, if given the facts reasonably, don’t need to be persuaded that AI extinction risk is bad, they conclude that easily” frames. I give Bayes points for making the bet that it’ll work and having reasonable results come from the bet—good work!
My disagreement comes with the “thus everything others are doing is cope/avoidance” framing. I think a good physicist entering the field should most likely go into interp work, a good economist is likely best suited to thinking through TAI impacts and figuring out what we should prepare for, and people with good people/oratory skills and situational awareness/understanding of the problem should talk to politicians. I think that if the field has not done what it has done, you would find it a lot harder to talk to politicians! AI frontier labs could say “well, there’s a lot we didn’t try yet, we don’t know if it’s dangerous” and you can instead counteract that with “look at all the stuff we tried, look at all the danger we found, look at how things fail” and feel confident in your claims. You can point to economist work (since recently, and increasingly) and say “these are models of what happens if the companies continue their work” and make a case for a pause/stop much better than without them, when accelerationist demagoguery can claim business as usual. Spectre is one failure mode, but myopia to ones preferred work is another. The problem is wicked, and affects many areas, and experts should do their expertise in different fields if we want to have a good shot to make it out.
The entrepreneur has a home-field advantage: he understands locals and has friends and a community. PE firms are at a disadvantage, and possibly the economy will shrink so it’s a bad time to buy. They took would need to find managers, if that was easy, the original owner could have found a successor among family of friends (if not his own), or sold his business to a local competitor. But all labor is short, all consumption is falling, buying a company is a fool’s game.
Well, we don’t have good ways to track “changing preferences,” so instead we ban the result—adults are not allowed to have relationships with minors. This stops people from trying to change the preferences of children (e.g., person X seducing children is changing their preferences to include the person X), but also other types of abuse. Having a policy focused solely on “preference changing” would be too narrow, but it is effectively included in the current law.
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For safety I would go for a car made for the European market, as the testing is stricter and actually considers the damage your car can do to pedestrians and so increases overall safety, not just your own.
I would be somewhat surprised if Tesla is really the safest car around, but it’s possible. Is it about having a battery instead of a gas tank + other features? I also assume you don’t mean cybertruck but some of the car models?
My car is 13 years old, but I’ve seen newer ones still without touch screens. EU (I think) passed a law on phasing out smart screens in cars for things related to car operation so hopefully car manufacturers start making newer cars without the screens. I think the market is there. It’s a question of who’ll capitalize on it.
Besides smart features in cars where I agree with John, I have the sense that fruits and vegetables while no longer seasonal and cheaper and more abundant are of lower quality and producers tell me the same (I’m in an agricultural country with farmers as friends of friends). The need to produce more and lower costs means each individual tomato gets less nutrients, less time, etc, to produce more of them. The quote also mentions raspberries, and since my country was top global exporter before China took over and since I love them dearly I can promise that the best tasting ones are now almost impossible to find (although it’s possible that whatever you’re eating in the US has gotten better!).
It’s tricky with this topic (like with cost of living!) that data cannot capture immesurables and people miss them. Great job pointing them out, and I want to say that one that you missed is that some food was better tasting before commercial pressures (not most of it etc etc)
Literally a plot point (with ants!) in the Wandering Inn