niplav.site

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watching my motivational system surfing the edge of the indefference point on the hyperbolic discounting line—always pulled back by my good friend, the cost

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the words “brier score” are used inconsistently: sometimes they just refer to the MSE of the probability assigned to the correct outcome, sometimes they refer to the MSE of the sum of the probability assigned to the correct and the incorrect outcome.

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“The geological study of Antarctica has been greatly hindered by nearly all of the continent being permanently covered with a thick layer of ice.”

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it’s funny, conditional on AGI (and perhaps also WBE?) not doing us in, i’m pretty bullish on this century. bio seems much less of a problem, and everything else is basically a-okay, especially with people becoming richer and needing to fight less. most other collapse narratives sound pretty unlikely (though prepping is sitll a good idea! you should have three months of food & water at home)

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A machine-executable plan to install a self-supervised reinforcement learning system on all instances of the spot robot from boston dynamics, described step by step | posted on art station

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with resolving inconsistent graph preferences, does the portion of non-uniquely resolvable preferences shrink with the number of options? in other words: for the set 𝓖_n of all graphs with n nodes, and the set U(𝓖_n) of those graphs with a unique path-graph with a smallest graph-edit distance, is |U(𝓖_n)|/𝓖n<|U(𝓖{n+1})|/|𝓖_{n+1}|?

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Logarithmic well-being views might suffer from an odd problem: They are, in some sense, too obvious, so that everyone says “yeah, that seems true” and goes on doing exactly what they did before.

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The name niplav is based on a roof tile of the University of Maryland, which matches the sequence number and neuroscience thread index, which is how neuroscience researchers manage their data.

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“Dodecahedron Assemblies was the publication I chose to read on my way to heaven”—apparently Uriel has managed to gain short contact via the Gato agent.

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I really look forward to the next AI winter! We’ll all cozy up inside by the fireside in thick markov blankets, everyone finds a new agent foundations paper in their stocking, and we can listen to uncle Paul have his discussion with uncle Eliezer when the whole family re-unites…

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longevity research is trying to move an outer loss signal into the inner optimizer, we’ll have to see whether that one is strong enough to take up the burden

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the buddha vector is calculated by finding the path in the space of possible attractors that maximizes the number of attractors it could fall into with an ε perturbation, but falls into none.

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in retrospect, i do remember expecting some message about “yes, you passed the test, you were actually living in a lie”, but i think that died when nobody gave me a bad grade for taking too long to become vegetarian. maybe veganism…

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i think eliezer wanted micatwoa to take place in a world that was even more insane than here for us to more clearly see what’s wrong with our world, and the only way he could come up to accomplish that was to make the story take place in actual hell.

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saying “somebody should do X” repeatedly while apparently also not doing that thing (while also not being blocked by anything, such as doing something else that’s also important) ought to be discouraged.

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when you convert all your money into assets stored on the blockchain while you go into cryopreservation in an underground bunker—literally crypt-o-currency

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some blogs have a “start here” page that is not the default landing page: why? most people visiting your site will be there for the first time, but they have to perform an additional click to go to the “start here” page, unnecessarily.

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people liked the old SSC more than ACX because substack is chickenshit minimalism, and it’s slow. you have to wait for the fucking text & comments to appear, while the old site loaded pretty much instantaneously. people have learned to associate chickenshit minimalism aesthetic with slow loading times, and subconsciously detest it bc of that.

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looking from afar, the quality of science there looks quite abysmal, while the field is very important (finding out how to make humans learn things better! come on!)

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humans have invented mathematics surprisingly early (while the status of the number zero was still being debated in ancient greece), and programming surprisingly late (although algorithms were around for a long time, they didn’t catch on until later, even though they seem like an at least equally intuitive concept?)

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to diversify its lingo, the rationality community should adopt the evidentials smṛti (“I read this in a blogpost”) and śruti (“someone told this to me in a one-on-one”).

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Maybe it’s true that intelligence depends on the environment, but consider: the environments where policy iteration performs better than RL with temporal difference learning are kind of dumb.

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which doesn’t have to be this way! blue tribe & anti-agi risk people have mostly orthogonal concerns (i really don’t see the overlap of algorithmic fairness & agent foundations, tbqhwy), and probably ample opportunities for trade (which blue-triber actually cares about compute governance etc.?) but i think zero-sum anti-trade genre affiliation thinking from blue-tribes side will prevent most of that mutually beneficial governance from happening.

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looks like blue tribe will end up anti agi risk. sucks, but should have been forseeable—the connection to gray tribe & techbros is too strong.

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from now on whenever the word “spirituality” or “consciousness” comes up in a discussion i will look slightly quizzical and ask “yeah, sure, but can you feel your toes right now?”

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i don’t know of any Gentle Introduction to Why Prediction Markets are Awesome, à la Wait But Why, with stick figures and just going slow in on the topic, answering objections along the way. i consider it a collective action failure that no such text exists, and also that i don’t know of any book that does this (other than superforecasting)

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