I’d like to express my gratitude and excitement (and not just to you, Rob, though your work is included in this):
Deep thanks to everyone involved for having the discussion, writing up and formatting, and posting it on LW. I think this is some of the more interesting and potentially impactful stuff I’ve seen relating to AI alignment in a long while.
(My only thought is… why hasn’t a discussion like this occurred sooner? Or has it, and it just hasn’t made it to LW?)
I met an awesome girl who was single that I really liked, and followed the classic steps (1- be attractive; 2- don’t be unattractive) correctly, and she liked me too!
I realize this sounds kind of trivial (especially since I’ve dated several attractive people in the past), but the reason it seems like an accomplishment worth bragging about was that I have never previously had a self-conception as an attractive person. I could always explain why others chose to date/sleep with me without needing to believe that I was actually attractive. But I have worked for several years on increasing my attractiveness (gym, social confidence, body language, posture, conversation skills, haircuts) and I am now starting to believe it, a little bit. Also I’m older, that probably helps too.
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.”
(Inside-of-door-posted hotel room prices are called “rack rates” and nobody actually pays those. This is definitely a miscommunication.)
I think a lot of these questions are answered in the radvac paper. I sent a copy of it to a biologist I know, and asked if he thought it was crazy to do this, and he read it and said “geez this looks safer than doing drugs”. I don’t have enough expertise to add anything beyond that.
My startup recently closed an incredibly important deal, and had amazing growth in July, and important people are interested in investing. Proud to have gotten this far. Excited to see what’s next. A bit overworked but it feels kinda good.
Idea: train the skill “ask for examples” instead, which seems easier to train, and bootstraps you into being more specific. I am not usually confused about my own thoughts, but I am often confused when others are trying to explain their ideas.
Example: explaining a startup idea to my friend today, I said ”...and the viral strategy for this payments app could be loaning money to people”. He was confused and asked for an example, so I said “let’s say we are at a coffee shop. I have no cash, you have the payment app, and I want to borrow money for coffee. You tell me to download the app, so you can loan me the money. Then I can get my coffee, but to pay you back, I have to complete the signup process.”—here, I was incorrectly assuming my friend had all the same context I did with respect to viral strategies.
Exercise: after explaining the virtues of asking for examples, start to move onto another topic. A confederate in the audience yells “can you give an example?” Everyone giggles, the instructor says “I’m glad you asked!” and the exercise is explained: Students pair off and start telling stories to each other, intentionally leaving out details. The other person’s job is to try to figure out where the details are being elided and say “example?” at the right time.
For the rest of the session, the instructor intentionally leaves out details, awarding points for the first student who notices missing details and asks for example.
Intentionally set the atmosphere of jumping in / cutting in on an explanation, since it is much more valuable right then as opposed to later.
Ok, I’ll bite. Why should CFAR exist? Rationality training is not so obviously useful that an entire org needs to exist to support it; especially now that you’ve iterated so heavily on the curriculum, why not dissolve CFAR and merge back into (e.g.) MIRI and just reuse the work to train new MIRI staff?
even more true if CFAR is effective recruitment for MIRI, but merging back in would allow you to separately optimize for that.
Oh hello, this is mine. Thanks for submitting it.
FWIW, the “Future Plans” list seems to me somewhat understating the value of a donation. I realize it’s fairly accurate in that it represents the activities of SI. Yet it seems like it could be presented better.
For example, the first item is “hold the Summit”. But I happen to know that the Summit generally breaks even or makes a little money, so my marginal dollar will not make or break the Summit. Similarly, a website redesign, while probably important, isn’t exciting enough to be listed as the second item. The third item, publish the open problems document, is a good one, though you should make it seem more exciting.
I think the donation drive page should thoroughly make the case that SI is the best use of someone’s charity dollars—that it’s got a great team, great leadership, and is executing a plan with the highest probability of working at every step. That page should probably exist on its own, assuming the reader hasn’t read any of the rest of the site, with arguments for why working explicitly on rationality is worthwhile; why transparency matters; why outreach to other researchers matters; what the researchers are currently spending time on and why those are the correct things for them to be working on; and so on. It can be long: long-form copy is known to work, and this seems like a correct application for it.
In fact, since you probably have other things to do, I’ll do a little bit of copywriting myself to try to discover if this is really a good idea. I’ll post some stuff here tomorrow after I’ve worked on it a bit.
evolution would love superintelligences whose utility function simply counts their instantiations! so of course evolution did not lack the motivation to keep going down the slide. it just got stuck there (for at least ten thousand human generations, possibly and counterfactually for much-much longer). moreover, non evolutionary AI’s also getting stuck on the slide (for years if not decades; median group folks would argue centuries) provides independent evidence that the slide is not too steep (though, like i said, there are many confounders in this model and little to no guarantees).
Evolution got stuck on the slide with humans because cultural evolution outcompeted biological evolution, because of cultural evolution’s ability to make immediate direct impacts on small tribes in hunter-gatherer environment within a few short generations (from the first chapter of Secret Of Our Success) and the high-order bit in biological evolution suddenly became “how efficient is cultural evolution”.
(Non evolutionary AIs don’t seem stuck on the slide at all to me.)
With a smartphone, I can:
Find restaurants and bars while out, of a much higher quality as compared to walking into random places
Discover what my friends are up to, without having to rely on them texting/calling me—Foursquare, Find My Friends, Facebook, Twitter.
Not write down addresses or directions
Not be bored while waiting for things
Not forget appointments
Never worry about getting lost
Read news / articles I wouldn’t otherwise read (e.g., while on the toilet)
Take photos I wouldn’t otherwise take (which create social experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have) and get geotags/dates with those photos
Show off my photos to people while I’m out
Write things down when I don’t have a notebook (and get geotags/dates with those notes using Evernote)
Take voice memos (and get geotags/dates with those memos)
Read urgent emails I would have missed until I got back to my desk
Listen to music at the gym
Pay with Square (an awesome experience. if you have an iPhone and live in San Francisco, go to Sightglass and do it once. It feels like the future.)
Reference Wikipedia and do Google searches in social contexts
Get alerted when people mention me or my business on Twitter
Check the stock market
Reserve a Zipcar at a moment’s notice while out
Track my workouts at the gym (Fitocracy)
When I see a nice house in Palo Alto, look it up on Zillow to see the exorbitant price people are paying. (Also creates fun social experiences.)
Order and pay for food delivery (Seamless)
Order and pay for a taxi (Uber)
Reference subway maps (Embark)
Dropbox in my pocket. Awesome.
A level. That’s right. I can level my wall hangings without needing to purchase an actual level.
I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff. But all these things have improved my life, some in small ways, others in rather significant ways.
FWIW, I’ve heard many people give your justification for not having a smartphone. Of those who eventually caved, every one (4 or 5 people) said something like “holy shit, why didn’t I get this a long time ago?”
See also Ben Kuhn: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux/ and me: http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2019/11/26/lumenator.html (both of these are from about a year ago)
My update since my blog post is that I have a Yuji “high bay” luminaire, which I had linked to from my blog post but not tried last year. Now I can confirm that it is pretty bright, good color spectrum and easy to use—I place it on top of a bookshelf facing towards the corner. https://store.yujiintl.com/products/high-cri-95-high-bay-ufo-led-light-pack-1pcs
I really enjoyed this post. The analogy of capital vs. labor really hit home in particular, I realized that’s exactly how I’ve been implicitly treating dating, so I think this post is likely to change my behavior in the future. Thanks for writing it.
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.