lincolnquirk

• lincolnquirk 5 Apr 2024 20:34 UTC

  8 points

  2

  on: The Best Tacit Knowl­edge Videos on Every Subject

  For home cooking I would like to recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (https://​​www.youtube.com/​​@JKenjiLopezAlt/​​videos). He’s a well-loved professional chef who writes science-y cooking books, and his youtube channel is a joy because it’s mostly just low production values: him in his home kitchen, making delicious food from simple ingredients, just a few cuts to speed things up.

• lincolnquirk 12 Sep 2023 3:41 UTC

  38 points

  19

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  I’m sorry you feel that way. I will push back a little, and claim you are over-indexing on this: I’d predict that most (~75%) of the larger (>1000-employee) YC-backed companies have similar templates for severance, so finding this out about a given company shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

  I did a bit of research to check my intuitions + it does seem like non-disparagement is at least widely advised (for severance specifically and not general employment), e.g., found two separate posts on the YC internal forums regarding non-disparagement within severance agreements:

  “For the major silicon valley law firms (Cooley, Fenwick, OMM, etc) non disparagement is not in the confidentiality and invention assignment agreement [employment agreement], and usually is in the separation and release [severance] template.”

  (^ this person also noted that it would be a red flag to find non-disparagement in the employment agreement.)

  “One thing I’ve learned—even when someone has been terminated with cause, a separation agreement [which includes non-disparagement] w a severance can go a long way.”

• lincolnquirk 11 Sep 2023 23:24 UTC

  74 points

  9

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear

  Jeff is talking about Wave. We use a standard form of non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses in our severance agreements: when we fire or lay someone off, getting severance money is gated on not saying bad things about the company. We tend to be fairly generous with our severance, so people in this situation usually prefer to sign and agree. I think this has successfully prevented (unfair) bad things from being said about us in a few cases, but I am reading this thread and it does make me think about whether some changes should be made.

  I also would re-emphasize something Jeff said—that these things are quite common—if you just google for severance package standard terms, you’ll find non-disparagement clauses in them. As far as I am aware, we don’t ask current employees or employees who are quitting without severance to not talk about their experience at Wave.

  What links here?

  • Is the Wave non-dis­par­age­ment thingy okay? by Ruby (14 Oct 2023 5:31 UTC; 29 points)
  • jefftk's comment on Shar­ing In­for­ma­tion About Nonlinear by Ben Pace (12 Sep 2023 0:02 UTC; 4 points)

• lincolnquirk 30 Aug 2023 14:05 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: moyamo’s comment on: The Eco­nomics of the As­teroid Deflec­tion Prob­lem (Dom­i­nant As­surance Con­tracts)

  In my view you have two plausible routes to overcoming the product problem, neither of which is solved (primarily) by writing code.

  Route A would be social proof: find a trusted influencer who wants to do a project with DACs. Start by brainstorming various types of projects that would most benefit from DACs, aiming to find an idea which an (ideally) narrow group of people would be really excited about, that demonstrates the value of such contracts, led by a person with a lot of ‘star power’. Most likely this would be someone who would be likely to raise quite a lot of money through a traditional donation/​kickstarter-type drive, but instead they decide to demo the DAC (and in doing so make a good case for it).

  Route B is to focus on comms. Iterate on the message. Start by explaining it to non-economist friends, then graduate to focus groups. It’s crucial to try to figure out how to most simply explain the idea in a sentence or two, such that people understand and don’t get confused by it.

  I’m guessing you’ll need to follow both these routes, but you can follow them simultaneously and hopefully learn cross-useful things while doing so.

• lincolnquirk 29 Aug 2023 22:05 UTC

  4 points

  1

  on: The Eco­nomics of the As­teroid Deflec­tion Prob­lem (Dom­i­nant As­surance Con­tracts)

  I like the idea of getting more people to contribute to such contracts. Not thrilled about the execution. I think there is a massive product problem with the idea—people don’t understand it, think it is a scam, etc. If your efforts were more directed at the problem of getting people to understand and be excited about crowdfunding contracts like this, I would be a lot more excited.

• lincolnquirk 19 Jul 2023 0:23 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Lichdar’s comment on: Why was the AI Align­ment com­mu­nity so un­pre­pared for this mo­ment?

  Mild disagree: I do think x-risk is a major concern, but seems like people around DC tend to put 0.5-10% probability mass on extinction rather than the 30%+ that I see around LW. This lower probability causes them to put a lot more weight on actions that have good outcomes in the non extinction case. The EY+LW frame has a lot more stated+implied assumptions about uselessness of various types of actions because of such high probability on extinction.

• lincolnquirk 18 Jul 2023 22:29 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ras1513’s comment on: Why was the AI Align­ment com­mu­nity so un­pre­pared for this mo­ment?

  Your question is coming from within a frame (I’ll call it the “EY+LW frame”) that I believe most of the DC people do not heavily share, so it is kind of hard to answer directly. But yes, to attempt an answer, I’ve seen quite a lot of interest (and direct policy successes) in reducing AI chips’ availability and production in China (eg via both CHIPS act and export controls), which is a prerequisite for US to exert more regulatory oversight of AI production and usage. I think the DC folks seem fairly well positioned to give useful inputs into further AI regulation as well.

• lincolnquirk 18 Jul 2023 20:11 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ras1513’s comment on: Why was the AI Align­ment com­mu­nity so un­pre­pared for this mo­ment?

  I’ve been in DC for ~ the last 1.5y and I would say that DC AI policy has a good amount of momentum, I doubt it’s particularly visible on twitter but also it doesn’t seem like there are any hidden/​secret missions or powerful coordination groups (if there are, I don’t know about it yet). I know ~10-20 people decently well here who work on AI policy full time or their work is motivated primarily by wanting better AI policy, and maybe ~100 who I have met once or twice but don’t see regularly or often; most such folks have been working on this stuff since before 2022; they all have fairly normal-seeming thinktank- or government-type jobs.

  They don’t mostly spend time on LW (although certainly a few of them do). Many do spend time on Twitter, and they do read lots of AI related takes from LW-influenced folks. They have meetup groups related to AI policy. I guess it looks pretty much as I was expecting before I came here. Happy to answer further questions that don’t identify specific people, just because I don’t know how many of them want to be pointed-at on LW.

• lincolnquirk 5 Jun 2023 14:14 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Change my mind: Ve­ganism en­tails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes

  Not who you’re responding to, but I’ve just written up my vegan nutrition tips and tricks: http://​​www.lincolnquirk.com/​​2023/​​06/​​02/​​vegan_nutrition.html

• lincolnquirk 2 Jun 2023 15:10 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: df fd’s comment on: Change my mind: Ve­ganism en­tails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes

  If you have energy for this, I think it would be insanely helpful!

• lincolnquirk 2 Jun 2023 15:10 UTC

  4 points

  −3

  on: Change my mind: Ve­ganism en­tails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes

  Thanks for writing this. I think it’s all correct and appropriately nuanced, and as always I like your writing style. (To me this shouldn’t be hard to talk about, although I guess I’m a fairly recent vegan convert and haven’t been sucked into whatever bubble you’re responding to!)

• lincolnquirk 16 May 2023 19:49 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Les­sons learned from offer­ing in-office nu­tri­tional testing

  Thanks for doing this! These results may affect my supplementation strategy.

  My recent blood tests (unrelated to this blog post) -- if you have any thoughts on them let me know, I’d be curious what your threshold for low-but-not-clinical is.

  • Hemoglobin − 14.8 g/​dL

  • Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy − 32.7 ng/​mL

  • Vitamin B12 − 537 pg/​mL

  (I have other results I can send you privately if you want, from comp metabolic panel + cbc + lipid panel + D + B12; but didn’t think to ask for iron. Is it worth going back to ask for this? or might iron be under a name I don’t recognize?)

  I’m vegan and have been solidly for > 1 year. Generally feel good, no particular fatigue except sleepiness after I eat carbs for lunch. I supplement B12, omega-3 EPA+DHA algae oil, creatine and occasional D3 gummies.

• lincolnquirk 22 Feb 2023 15:05 UTC

  9 points

  3

  on: lin­coln­quirk’s Shortform

  Tim Urban’s new book, What’s Our Problem, is out as of yesterday. I’ve started reading it and it’s good so far, and very applicable to rationality training. waitbutwhy.com

• lincolnquirk 24 Nov 2022 13:58 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: LW Beta Fea­ture: Side-Comments

  Excited about this!

  Points of feedback:

  1. I don’t like to have to scroll my screen horizontally to read the comment. (I notice there’s a lot of perfectly good unused white space on the left side; comments would probably fit horizontally if you pushed everything to the left!)

  2. Sometimes when you mouse over the side-comment icon, it tries to scroll the page to make the comment readable. This is very surprising and makes me lose my place.

  3. Hovering over the icon makes the comment appear briefly. If I then want to scroll in order to read the comment, there seems to be no way to ‘stay hovered’—I have to click and toggle it, to make the comment stick around so I can actually read it. (This plus being forced to scroll the screen makes the hover feature kind of useless.)

  Overall, feeling optimistic though, and will probably use this.

• lincolnquirk 11 Oct 2022 13:15 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: cveres’s comment on: Don’t ex­pect AGI any­time soon

  I think your argument is wrong, but interestingly so. I think DL is probably doing symbolic reasoning of a sort, and it sounds like you think it is not (because it makes errors?)

  Do you think humans do symbolic reasoning? If so, why do humans make errors? Why do you think a DL system won’t be able to eventually correct its errors in the same way humans do?

  My hypothesis is that DL systems are doing a sort of fuzzy finite-depth symbolic reasoning—it has capacity to understand the productions at a surface level and can apply them (subject to contextual clues, in an error-prone way) step by step, but once you ask for sufficient depth it will get confused and fail. Unlike humans, feedforward neural nets can’t think for longer and churn step by step yet; but if someone were to figure out a way to build a looping option into the architecture then I won’t be surprised to see DL systems which can go a lot further on symbolic reasoning than they currently do.

• lincolnquirk 4 Oct 2022 19:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Will you let your kid play foot­ball?

  What is Pop Warner in this context? I have googled it and it sounds like he was one of the founders of modern American football, but I don’t understand what it is in contrast to. Is there some other (presumably safer) ruleset?

• lincolnquirk 10 Sep 2022 1:07 UTC

  37 points

  17

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: My emo­tional re­ac­tion to the cur­rent fund­ing situation

  (Inside-of-door-posted hotel room prices are called “rack rates” and nobody actually pays those. This is definitely a miscommunication.)

• lincolnquirk 19 Aug 2022 0:39 UTC

  8 points

  7

  on: What does moral progress con­sist of?

  I am guilty of being a zero-to-one, rather than one-to-many, type person. It seems far easier and more interesting to me, to create new forms of progress of any sort, rather than convincing people to adopt better ideas.

  I guess the project of convincing people seems hard? Like, if I come up with something awesome that’s new, it seems easier to get it into people’s hands, rather than taking an existing thing which people have already rejected and telling them “hey this is actually cool, let’s look again”.

  All that said, I do find this idea-space intriguing partly thanks to this post—it makes me want to think of ways of doing more one-to-many type stuff. I’ve been recently drawn into living in DC and I think the DC effective altruism folks are much more on the one-to-many side of the world.

• lincolnquirk 9 Aug 2022 21:00 UTC

  12 points

  4

  on: Pro­posal: Con­sider not us­ing dis­tance-di­rec­tion-di­men­sion words in ab­stract discussions

  Upvoted for raising something to conscious attention, that I have never previously considered might be worth paying attention to.

  (Slightly grumpy that I’m now going to have a new form of cognitive overhead probably 10+ times per day… these are the risks we take reading LW :P)

• lincolnquirk 26 Jul 2022 2:33 UTC

  5 points

  2

  on: How Promis­ing is The­o­ret­i­cal Re­search on Ra­tion­al­ity? Seek­ing Ca­reer Advice

  Look, I don’t know you at all. So please do ignore me if what I’m saying doesn’t seem right, or just if you want to, or whatever.

  I’m a bit worried that you’re seeking approval, not advice? If this is so, know that I for one approve of your chosen path. You are allowed to spend a few years focusing on things that you are passionate about, which (if it works out) may result in you being happy and productive and possibly making the world better.

  If you are in fact seeking advice, you should explain what your goal is. If your goal is to make the maximum impact possible — it’s worth at least hundreds of hours trying to see if you can learn more & motivate yourself along a path which seems like it combines high impact with personal resonance. I wouldn’t discount philosophy along this angle, but (for example) it sounds like you may not know that much about the potential of policy careers; there are plenty that do not require particularly strong mathematical skills (… or even any particularly difficult skills beyond some basic extraversion, resistance to boredom and willingness to spend literal decades grinding away within bureaucracies).

  If your goal is to be happy, I think you will be happy doing philosophy, and I think you have a potential to make a huge impact that way. Certainly there are a decent number of full-time philosophers within effective altruism who I have huge respect for (Macaskill, Ord, Bostrom, Greaves, and Trammell jump to mind). Plus, you can save a few hundred hours, which seems pretty important if you might already know the outcome of your experimentation!