how suitable is the research engineering job for people with no background in ml, but who are otherwise strong engineers and mathematicians?
will these jobs be long-term remote? if not, on what timeframe will they be remote?
Lambda
Karma: 167
Is gain-of-function research “very harmful”? I feel like it’s not appropriate to nickel-and-dime this.
And also, yes, I do think it’s harmful directly, in addition to eventually in expectation. It’s a substantial derogation of a norm that should exist. To explain this concept further:
In addition to risking pandemics, participating in gain-of-function research also sullies and debases the research community, and makes it less the shape it needs to be culturally to do epidemiology. Refusing to take massive risks with minor upsides, even if they’re cool, is also a virtue cultivation practice.
When a politician talks openly about how he wants to rig elections, exchange military aid for domestic political assistance, etc., he causes direct harm now even if the “plans” do not amount to anything later. This is because the speech acts disrupt the equilibria that make similar things less likely in general.
My comments here are intended as an explicit, loud signal of condemnation. This research is misconduct. Frankly, I am frustrated I have to be the one to say this, when it duly falls to community leaders to do so.
Also, Harry’s dark side is “very good at lying.” Remember Azkaban? Pretty much every proposition he uttered aloud there was a lie, straight up, and told to pursue a greater goal. If Harry can convincingly pretend, for Bellatrix, to be someone other than who he believes himself to be, convincingly feign innocence and fear when discovered by the auror, and convincingly lie to Minerva about his location, then I think he’d have no problem with this particular deception.
On the other hand, choosing the ring in particular as his hiding target strikes me as somewhat foolish and would require highly conjunctive scenario to be successful. If he has to remain in regular contact with the transfiguration target, though, this may be his best option.
Meetup : Yale: Initial Meetup
Mmhmm… Borges time!
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”
Trump
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, friend.
I found, when I tried to do this over a year ago, that no matter how much effort I put into “pruning” the home screen, YouTube would always devote ~10-20% of it to stuff I didn’t want to see. Either it was epsilon-exploration, or stuff that tested well with the general population, or a bunch of “mandatory modules” like popular music or “news,” but whatever it was, I couldn’t get rid of all of it, and some of it managed to attract my clicks despite my best efforts. These extra items filled me with a sense of violation whenever I scrolled through.
So, I wound up using a CSS editor to block the main content of the youtube index page, as well as that column of recommended videos that gets shown next to the player. Here’s my custom stylesheet:
.branded-page-v2-secondary-col > * { display: none; } ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] { display: none; } ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer { display: none; }Now when I visit youtube.com, I get a blank page, and have to click on “subscriptions” in the left column to get the user experience I want, plus I get recommended videos only when I FINISH a video. This is a far more pleasant experience, and I am able to use YouTube for pretty much only classical music, cooking tutorials, and the occasional education video, without ever getting pulled into things I don’t want.
Speaking of the recommendation algo, btw, it’s also super awesome. It has somehow consistently surfaced new classical music composers to me, and has played a major role in the development of my tastes and interests over the past few years. Without it, I doubt I would have been exposed to Schnittke or Bruckner, for example. Way better than spotify, and I haven’t found anything to replace it, sadly.
See
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/ [to Homer, the sea is “wine-dark” and the sky is “bronze” because he literally does not have the “blue” concept, and instead agglomerates those colors into other catagories]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms [natural languages appear to gain color distinctions in the same order; the distinction between green and blue is one of the last]
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_language#Two_words_for_%22red%22 [which is even stranger (animate vs inanimate red??)]
I often get this confused, but isn’t it supposed to be the Pioneer probe?
Because of the Curry-Howard correspondence, as well as for other reasons, it does not seem that the distance between solving math problems and writing AIs is large. I mean, actually, according to the correspondence, the distance is zero, but perhaps we may grant that programming an AI is a different kind of math problem from the Olympiad fare. Does this make you feel safe?
Also, it seems that the core difficulty in alignment is more in producing definitions and statements of theorems, than in proving theorems. What should the math even look like or be about? A proof assistant is not helpful here.
I think this kind of research is very harmful and should stop.
I think it’s important to repeat this even if it’s common knowledge in many of our circles, because it’s not in broader circles, and we should not give up on reminding people not to conduct research that leads to net increased risk of destroying the world, even if its really cool, gets you promoted, or makes you a lot of money.
Again, OpenAI people, if you’re reading this, please stop.
What’s the boundary between early and late, and why is late bad?
Have you re-released “Transhumanists Don’t Need Special Dispositions”? If not, can I give you a nudge to do so? It’s one of my favorites.
I’ve been lurking here for a while, but I’d like to get more actively involved.
By the way, are there any other Yale students here? If so, I’d be interested in founding a rationalist group / LW meetup on campus.
But what about Dumbledore? If there were anyone in such a Soul Sect, I’m pretty sure Dumbledore would be one of them. Wouldn’t you agree?
But as “Pretending to be Wise” suggests, and as Dumbledore’s room of broken wands makes clear, Dumbledore does not, in fact, behave as if souls are real. Now “perhaps” this is all an elaborate ruse on the part of Dumbledore, and he is just pretending to behave-as-if souls are not real. Regardless of how twisty and deceptive Dumbledore is, this particular deception seems wildly out of character for him.
(Actually, it would be more accurate to say that Dumbledore does not behave as if the afterlife is real. It’s quite possible to have souls without an afterlife; perhaps they just get garbage-collected if not attached to the world in some matter (whether it’s a person’s body, or a horcrux, etc.). In fact, I regard this as a likely enough scenario to be worth thinking about (p = 0.6, say?).)
Stylebot for chrome. Perhaps there’s better now — the ui can be a bit wonky — but I’ve used it for almost a decade, so
Meetup : Yale rationality group meeting.
At Yale, the situation is similar. I took a course on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and earned a humanities credit from it. The course was taught by the philosophy department and also included a segment on the equivalence of various notions of computability. Coolest humanities class ever!
I shudder to think of what politics were involved to classify it as such, though.
I’m not sure that’s possible. If Harry is defeated, it must be in such a way that “only a remnant of him remains,” by prophesy. Crushing Harry now would not leave a remnant (even if “remnant” means “legacy,” I would argue); therefore, it is not worth trying.
You’ve posted the preface of the New Organon (i.e. “volume 2” of The Great Renewal), but did you know that the whole work also has a preface? To me, this preface contains some of the most compelling material. Here are some selections from the Cambridge edition (ed. Jardine and Silverthorne; try libgen):