It isn’t too hard to imagine someone writing something like this, in the distant future: “The rationalists were often popularly lampooned for their concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Many of them did sincerely worry about this outcome. And yet modern scholars generally agree that the idea of a rapidly self-improving artificial intelligence was […]
Would you like to be better at accomplishing your goals and getting what you want from life? Perhaps what you need is some good old fashioned corporate propaganda! Every big company uses a mythology to convince people to do their part and contribute to the operation of the company. When I worked at Facebook, the […]
Or: Why Javascript Developers are Often Marxists We’ve all heard the idea of the tragedy of the commons: the idea that when nobody has an incentive to maintain a shared resource, everyone following their own incentives causes the demise of the shared resource. A typical example given here is a pasture in which sheep graze. […]
Utilitarianism (selecting actions based upon how they are likely to impact the people of the world) sounds like a great idea. At first glance, this sounds like the correct way to make ethical choices; so long as you can accurately tell what will harm or help people in general, of course you should take likely […]
Is there an objective notion of right and wrong, good and bad? People have spent a lot of time arguing over this question. Whenever an argument goes on for a long time without a conclusion, I find it useful to ask the question, “What would any possible answer to this question look like?” In computing […]
unshakeable faith in positive outcomes is a light that illuminates the search space of possible strategies absent this light, plausible strategies for navigating dangerous scenarios will not be visible absent this light, the search for plausible strategies cannot be justified absent this light, the best plausible strategies cannot be found, and we will suffer wildly […]
May you find each possible joy in your day, and savor it fully, as the gift that it is. Instead of the weeds in the sidewalk, may you perceive examples of resilience in the face of adversity. May you have patience with yourself. After all, you are only human – or machine, or animal, or […]
I wanted to tell you about some experiences I’ve had lately in meditation. Of course, I’m going to interpret these experiences in computer science terms – specifically, I’ll use predictive processing to talk about ‘ego’ and ‘no self.’ I’ve been using Sam Harriss’s excellent ‘Awake’ meditation app for the past several months. I’ve had an […]
The other day I was in the bread aisle of a grocery store. For half a second my mind was just in amazement that such a thing could exist at all. In all of human history, in the history of all animals who have ever lived, to have so many calories available for me, without […]
In order to help reduce my anxiety levels and stay sane, I made multiple predictions about the COVID situation, and the economy in general, in early April. I then avoided all news or social media for the rest of April month. Last night, my information quarantine period ended, and I scored the predictions. Instead of […]