lifelonglearner

• lifelonglearner 14 Mar 2019 17:06 UTC

  9 points

  on: AI Safety Pr­ereq­ui­sites Course: Ba­sic ab­stract rep­re­sen­ta­tions of computation

  I’ve looked a lit­tle bit at the RAISE web­site, and I’ve looked at the overview of cur­ricu­lum top­ics, and I’m find­ing it a lit­tle...sparse, maybe? (I haven’t ac­tu­ally looked at the class ma­te­ri­als on gras­ple though, so maybe there’s more stuff there.) I’m won­der­ing how re­al­is­tic it would be for some­one to start en­gag­ing with MIRI-es­que top­ics af­ter learn­ing just the courses RAISE has out­lined.

  At least for the pre­req­ui­sites course, these are all top­ics cov­ered through­out the first two years of a typ­i­cal un­der­grad­u­ate com­puter sci­ence de­gree. And that doesn’t seem like quite enough.

  EX: TurnTrout’s se­quence of es­says on their jour­ney to be­come able to con­tribute to­wards MIRI-es­que top­ics seems to span a much greater gamut of top­ics (lin­ear alge­bra, anal­y­sis, etc.) at greater depth, closer to what one might cover in grad­u­ate school.

  I guess, to op­er­a­tional­ize, I’m cu­ri­ous about:

  1. What tar­get au­di­ence RAISE has in mind (tech­ni­cal peo­ple look­ing for a re­fresher, peo­ple who have had zero real ex­po­sure to tech­ni­cal sub­jects be­fore, etc. etc.) for their ma­te­ri­als.

  2. What de­gree of com­pe­tence RAISE ex­pects peo­ple to come out of the cur­ricu­lum with, ei­ther best-case or av­er­age-case.

  3. In the best case, how many units of ma­te­rial do you think RAISE can product? In other words, is it enough for stu­dents to study RAISE’s ma­te­rial for a 6-month long cur­ricu­lum? 1 year long?

  ****

  (Of course, it’s also much eas­ier from my po­si­tion to be en­gag­ing/​cri­tiquing ex­ist­ing works, than to ac­tu­ally put in the effort to make all of this hap­pen. I don’t mean any of the above as an in­dict­ment. It’s ad­mirable and im­pres­sive that y’all have co­or­di­nated to make this hap­pen at all!)

Ped­a­gogy as Struggle

Do­ing De­spite Dis­lik­ing: Self‐reg­u­la­tory Strate­gies in Every­day Aver­sive Activities

mindlevelup 3 Year Review

• lifelonglearner 1 Jan 2019 22:17 UTC

  15 points

  on: What ex­er­cises go best with 3 blue 1 brown’s Lin­ear Alge­bra videos?

  If you want a proof-based ap­proach, Lin­ear Alge­bra Done Right is the typ­i­cal go-to that’s also on the MIRI page. I went through maybe the first 3/​4ths of it, and I thought it was pretty good, in terms of num­ber of ex­er­cises and helping you think about ma­nipu­lat­ing vec­tor spaces, etc. in a more ab­stract sense.

  Other­wise, I’ve heard good things about Gilbert Strang’s MIT OCW course here: https://​​ocw.mit.edu/​​courses/​​math­e­mat­ics/​​18-06-lin­ear-alge­bra-spring-2010/​​.

  In gen­eral, I think that 3B1B’s videos are re­ally good for build­ing in­tu­ition about a con­cept, but try­ing to do ex­er­cises off of the ped­a­gogy in his videos alone can be quite challeng­ing, es­pe­cially as he of­ten as­sumes some mas­tery with the sub­ject already. (EX: In the eigen-stuffs video, he doesn’t ac­tu­ally ex­plain how to find the eigen­val­ues of a ma­trix.)

  Thus, I think it makes more sense to stick to a tra­di­tional text­book /​ course for learn­ing lin­ear alge­bra and us­ing 3B1B as sup­ple­men­tary stuff for when you want a vi­sual /​ differ­ent way of look­ing at a con­cept.

  Also, it might be worth check­ing in to see what you want to learn lin­ear alge­bra for. I sus­pect there are more do­main spe­cific re­sources if, for ex­am­ple, you cared about just the use­ful parts of lin­ear alge­bra used in ma­chine learn­ing (di­men­sion­al­ity re­duc­tion, etc.).

• lifelonglearner 1 Jan 2019 17:20 UTC

  8 points

  on: How can I most effec­tively im­prove my writ­ing abil­ities?

  I think the over­ar­ch­ing thing to do is to sim­ply write more. To that end, there are a lot of ways to make this hap­pen. For ex­am­ple: par­ti­ci­pat­ing in NaNoWriMo, com­mit­ting to writ­ing a se­quence of ar­ti­cles about topic X, en­gag­ing in dis­course on­line, sum­ma­riz­ing re­search pa­pers for a larger au­di­ence, writ­ing guest ar­ti­cles for a blog, or jour­nal­ing.

  As for im­prov­ing your ac­tual work­flow, I think that the Typ­i­cal Writ­ing Class you take in school largely gets it right. For ex­am­ple, writ­ing out­lines /​ sum­maries be­fore start­ing the ac­tual writ­ing, ask­ing peo­ple to proofread, have sev­eral drafts /​ edit, and try to imag­ine read­ing it from the reader’s per­spec­tive w/​o the ex­tra con­text you have as a writer.

  (I think most of the dis­satis­fac­tion I had with the skills taught to me dur­ing class had a lot more to do with the con­text of “Oh man, I have to write this thing us­ing this tech­nique for school and not of my own vo­li­tion?” rather than the skills them­selves not be­ing very good.)

• lifelonglearner 27 Dec 2018 17:18 UTC

  2 points

  on: Card Col­lec­tion and Ownership

  Do you have any thoughts writ­ten up any­where on what a game you’d de­sign would look like? I’ve been fol­low­ing all of your MTG /​ digi­tal CCG ar­ti­cles with a lot of in­ter­est; I’d be re­ally cu­ri­ous which as­pects of game de­sign you’d like to in­cor­po­rate.

• lifelonglearner 21 Dec 2018 16:31 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: What self-help has helped you?

  I am won­der­ing if there are com­mon­al­ities be­tween what differ­ent self-help things are do­ing. For ex­am­ple, it seems that a lot of self-help is fo­cused on chang­ing our de­fault ac­tions, ala de­bi­as­ing, so there is a train of thought that starts with cog­ni­tive bi­ases and goes from there.

• lifelonglearner 21 Dec 2018 2:47 UTC

  4 points

  on: What self-help has helped you?

  A re­lated ques­tion I’m won­der­ing about, which seems re­lated to this is “Why does self-help work? What is it do­ing?”

  Not 100% re­lated to the ques­tion, but maybe the dis­cus­sion here in the com­ments could spark more (or an­other ques­tion).

• lifelonglearner 21 Nov 2018 17:17 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Let­ting Others Be Vulnerable

  Oh, right, yes, I didn’t think about that.

  That is a good ex­am­ple where the above ad­vice I listed, as well as the fol­low­ing mod­els, break.

• lifelonglearner 21 Nov 2018 4:44 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dagon's comment on: Let­ting Others Be Vulnerable

  Oh, right. I think an im­plicit thing here is “for peo­ple you want to be close to, this makes sense to do”.

  In other cases, as I sorta skimmed over, hav­ing sim­plified mod­els, rely­ing on norms/​roles, etc. etc. is usu­ally enough to get by.

Let­ting Others Be Vulnerable

• lifelonglearner 30 Oct 2018 2:48 UTC

  7 points

  on: Align­ment Newslet­ter #30

  The Learn­ing from Un­trusted Data pa­per was re­ally clear, and I found the re­sults sur­pris­ing. Thanks for shar­ing and for con­sis­tently putting this out week af­ter week. I re­ally like the com­bi­na­tion of the sum­mary + your per­sonal thoughts.

• lifelonglearner 24 Oct 2018 22:51 UTC

  4 points

  on: What will the long-term fu­ture of em­ploy­ment look like?

  Speci­fi­cally for the ex­am­ple of so­cial in­fluencers, I won­der if roles like this might be limited in ca­pac­ity be­cause, by virtue of their role, they re­quire a large fol­low­ing. Given the way pop­u­lar­ity and sta­tus tends to be non-uniformly dis­tributed across so­cial groups, it might not be a very large role for most peo­ple to fit into.

  But over­all, I think the un­der­ly­ing theme of hu­mans-as-valuable-be­cause-they-are-hu­man and the ex­am­ples to Etsy charg­ing a pre­mium on hu­man-made things hits the nail on the head as for where resi­d­ual value might lie in an au­to­mated fu­ture.

  I sup­pose one corol­lary, too, is that it will be hu­man de­sires which com­prise the de­mand for these goods. If it turns out that au­toma­tion also shifts the de­mand for cer­tain ser­vices, via ma­chines send­ing or­ders to ma­chines, then this might also limit fu­ture op­tions for hu­mans?

• lifelonglearner 2 Oct 2018 4:41 UTC

  4 points

  on: LW Up­date 2018-10-01 – Pri­vate Mes­sag­ing Works

  Bug re­port: I can no longer view old mes­sages.

  I clicked on my pro­file, went to pri­vate mes­sages, and then clicked on some­thing from the con­ver­sa­tions side­bar.

  Every mes­sage had the fol­low­ing red er­ror:

  “Er­ror: TypeEr­ror: Can­not read prop­erty ‘_id’ of null”

• lifelonglearner 27 Sep 2018 14:50 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: Thoughts on tack­ling blindspots

  You might already be aware, but there’s the Unoffi­cial CFAR Canon List which com­piles a lot of their ear­lier ma­te­rial (though some things have now changed) that some­one put to­gether a while back.

  If you’re look­ing for more deriva­tive con­tent writ­ten by peo­ple who have gone to CFAR work­shops:

  There’s also the Ham­mer­time se­quence alk­jash wrote and the In­stru­men­tal Ra­tion­al­ity se­quence I wrote.

• lifelonglearner 16 Sep 2018 4:27 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: evhub's comment on: Owen’s short-form blog

  Yup! I just set up one up here. I just grabbed an off-the-shelf Python pack­age so let me know if there are any is­sues.

Owen’s short-form blog

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion: A Sim­ple Multi-Stage Model

• lifelonglearner 25 Aug 2018 2:02 UTC

  3 points

  on: Chang­ing main con­tent font to Valkyrie?

  Note: I am on Win­dows and find the font fine. I am won­der­ing how many peo­ple on Win­dows find it hard to read?