Defeating Moloch, one optimisation at a time | MSc student in AI, currently working on generative modelling for bioinformatics | Machine learning, game theory, personalised medicine | Co-host of Bit of a Tangent podcast and Narrator of Replacing Guilt audiobook | gianlucatruda.com
gianlucatruda
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I don’t feel like it’s the kind of polished thing I’d put on LW. But here it is on my blog: gianlucatruda.com/blog/2021/07/08/wisdom.html
My Wisdom List: gianlucatruda.com/blog/2021/07/08/wisdom.html
One decent way of engineering an authentic 1-1 conversation is to go through a bunch of personal and vulnerability-inducing questions together, a la 36 Questions that Lead in Love (after cutting the ⅔ of questions that I found dull). So I made a list of questions I considered interesting, which I expected to lead to authentic and vulnerable conversations.
This is a fascinating strategy and I’m surprised it worked so well. The linked article for the list of questions is paywalled (and NYT).
After a bit of digging, this seems to be the original study for which the questions were formulated: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0146167297234003 . The various questions sets are listed in the Appendix that starts on page 12.
And this site seems to be an open-access, interactive mirror of the 36 questions from the NYT article: http://36questionsinlove.com/
Announcing the Replacing Guilt audiobook
The full audiobook is now available at https://anchor.fm/guilt/episodes/Replacing-Guilt-full-audiobook-e13ct4d/a-a5vrdtu
I’ll DM you :)
Okay, I absolutely love this post! In fact, if you were to break it down into three posts, I would probably have been a serious fan of all of them individually.
Firstly, the expected utility formulation of lateness is excellent and explains a lot of my personal behaviour. I’m aggressively early for important events like client meetings and interviews, but consistently tardy when meeting for coffee or arriving for a lecture. Whilst your methodology focussed on unobservable shifts to the time axis, I suspect there are also interesting gains to be made in reshaping the utility curve — for instance, by always carrying reading material, like korin43 mentions in another comment.
Secondly, your approach to self-blinding is fantastic. I do a lot of Quantified-Self research and self-blinding is one of the most challenging and essential components of interventional QS studies. I really like how your protocol builds from the theoretical formulation you created and acts as a convolution on the utility function. I had a little nerdgasm when reading that part!
Thirdly, the fact that you collected and visualised data to evaluate the methodology is outdone only by how pretty your plot is.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to comment on your excellent use of humour. I chuckled multiple times whilst reading. Expertly balanced and timed to resonate with the tone of the technical content.
Was about to comment the same thing. Saving it to my Wisdom List.
UPDATE: I’ve published the list here: https://gianlucatruda.com/blog/2021/07/08/wisdom.html
Most rationalists are heavily invested into AGI in non-monetary ways — career paths, free time, hopes for longevity/coordination breakthroughs. As other commenters have pointed out, if humanity achieves aligned AGI in the future, financial returns will feasibly be far less important. Given that, maybe the best investments are to bet against AGI as a hedge for humanity not achieving it.
There are 3 futures: If we achieve aligned AGI, we win the game and nothing else matters*. If we achieve misaligned AGI, we die and nothing else matters. If we fail to achieve AGI at all, then we’ve wasted a lot of our time, careers, and hopes. In that case, we want investments to fall back on.
In that 3rd future, what commodities and equities are most successful? Can we buy those now?
*subject to accepting the singularity-like premise.
which might happen in 1-2 years and tank crypto-mining completely.
Good point. But that would be a much better time to buy in for long-term value.
One approach that feels a bit more direct is investing in semiconductor stocks.
I agree with this and the above points.
One way to potentially overcome the issues with TSMC might be to supplement the investment by buying into commodities like silicon and coltan. This is still not guaranteed to capture most of the value, but might be a method of diversification. But there are many ethical considerations (particularly with coltan).
Yes! Even many websites and web apps implement some Vim standards. Particularly
\for search.
This is a superb overview! I’ve used Vim for about 2 years now, but I still learned a bunch of things from this post that I didn’t pick up from other cheatsheets or articles.
My 2-cents: Vim itself is powerful as an editor, but I always missed some IDE features. What I’ve come to realise is that the real power of Vim is not the editor, but the keybindings. I installed the Vim extension in VSCode some time ago and have loved the hybrid workflow. Since then, I’ve been gradually incorporating Vim keybindings into all the tools I use for text — like Overleaf for writing papers in LaTeX and Zettlr for writing notes in Markdown. I still use Vim itself for small scripts and quickly editing files. It’s so powerful being able to go between applications and never have to think about what your fingers are doing to transform ideas into output.
One thing I still haven’t quite figured out is in-browser text entry. So far, I haven’t liked the solutions I’ve found, but it’s something I’m looking into for the future. Writing this comment without my usual keybindings is… slow.
There will be a Sequences Discussion Club event to talk about this post. Join us on Clubhouse tonight for a ~1h discussion. https://www.joinclubhouse.com/event/PQRv1RoA
If you listen from 31:54 (linked here) to 46:00, Lex articulates very nicely what’s unique and interesting about Clubhouse and they discuss how it compares to Skinner-box social media. It’s a nice summary of the underlying value and definitely echoes some of my experiences so far.
Try joining communities/clubs on topics you’re interested in. Then any rooms started by their members should pop up in your lobby. Also, I’ve heard that following people you’re interested in helps improve the suggestions.
I’d love to do that sometime (timezones permitting). I’m @gianlucatruda on Clubhouse.
Great summary! For those reading the comments, there is a growing Rationalist-oriented community on Clubhouse. Join here: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/rationality-live
Update: I tried searching again now and it pops up when I search “rationality” now. Seems it just took a while to update.
I present to you VQGANCLIP’s take on a Bob Ross painting of Bob Ross painting Bob Ross paintings ὠ2 This surpassed my wildest expectations!