Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.)
Domain experts consistently underestimate how quickly AI can master their field and surpass them, because they mistake human difficulties for universal difficulty.
So many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
the reason why RL environments today are much better than they were in like you know 2024 is not that much because um we have hired way more human experts to make RL environments and is instead much more because we better know what how RL like what RL environments we even want to make and and like how we should structure them and also we're using huge amounts of AI labor to build RL environments.
The simple answer is what the study showed was that 10,000 hours was the average amount of time that an expert violinist had spent practicing by the time they reached 20 years old. That's what the study showed. They weren't even experts by that point.
Yeah, so they excel at breadth and humans excel at depth. Um like human experts at least. Yeah, so um I think they're very complementary. Um but our current uh way of doing math and science is focused on depth because that that's where the human uh expertise cuz humans can't do breadth.
And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. And it’s because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.
I don’t think this is very productive (expert users of a piece of software are notoriously bad at being able to tell if an explanation will be clear to non-experts), so I needed to find a way to identify problems with the man pages that was a little more evidence-based.
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is a mind-bending psychological thriller about a secret agency tasked with fighting dangerous "antimemes"—ideas that refuse to be remembered. Plenty of stories start with a clever high-concept premise and just let it play out. This one pushes its premise to extremes I never imagined possible, ratcheting up an astonishing amount of tension along the way.
Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein: Certain parts of this book really stuck with me and changed how I think, like the chapter on the psychological effects of restriction.
But when you pursue efficiency generally you start looking at numerical or mechanical factors and of course in the process you disregard psychological factors where the greater gains may be found and so you focus too heavily on cost reduction and too little on value creation.
do not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors because you might be able to solve your problem very very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology not by changing the technology
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole
society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you
are going to crash society.
But they can't do everything that megapapers do, such as conveying intellectual heft and legitimacy, and they are not yet a replacement for real, diverse experts.
And maybe also make the system available to a few hundred of the world's top experts, the Terence Taos of each subject area and give them a month or two and see if they can find an obvious flaw in the system. And if they can't, then I think you can be pretty confident we have a fully general system.
Dismissing discussion of AGI, human-level AI, transformative AI, superintelligence, etc. as “science fiction” should be seen as a sign of total unseriousness.
I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.
So, she thought of herself as rational. She thought of rationality as what she was doing, but she was actually doing a kind of mythopoetic psychological work as well.
Actually by condemning those alternative point of view, archaeologists make it much more likely that the general public will accept those alternative point of view, because there is a great distrust of experts in our society today.
This fits with some of the studies of chess experts and so forth that it’s not so much that you learn the patterns passively. You learn what to look for. You learn what’s important and what’s not.
Based on public commercial data that tells a lot about the military potential of these dual-use robotic spacecraft, we have shown that China can manufacture and deploy 200 such spacecraft as early as 2026, enough to cripple critical US satellites in geosynchronous, highly elliptical, and other orbits, and thus severely degrading space support to wartime operations.
Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.
So, experts are highly aware of mistakes. But people who are journeymen, many of them stay as journeymen because they they want to move on and forget about their mistakes.
in 1985, um my colleagues and I came up with a description of how people actually make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and certainty. And we called it the recognition prime decision model. And it's a blend of intuition plus analysis. And we found we studied firefighters. We found that most fire that accounted for almost 90% of the tough decisions firefighters made.
The trouble is that human beings can't really function, let alone thrive, when their primary psychological identification is with things like "the news cycle" or "history" or "the course of world events."
I feel like Ben Orlin solved what was previously an unsolved problem with this book: Teach calculus in a way that is as enjoyable to those unfamiliar with the topic as it is to experts who use it every day. I, for one, was laughing from page 1.
Phenomenal book on how our fear of death is the core of our psychological disturbances, and our motivation for life. It will make you think about why we do things and behave in certain ways in an entirely new fashion, and the language within it is delicious.
If the people can decide, even if they come up with the same, identical solution as the expert people or machines, they will trust them, implement them, and abide with them.
I prefer melamine whiteboards because they're lighter and cheaper than porcelain or glass ones, and I use Avery Marks-A-Lot brand dry-erase markers on them.
It was probably the first book in English to bring serious academic scrutiny to Chinese food culture, and to use the scholarly techniques applied to other subjects to food, offering the views of different experts on different periods of Chinese history.
It is time to realize, then, addiction is neither a choice nor an inherited disease, but a psychological and physiological response to painful life experiences.
Podcast (Part 2). A modern, approachable guide to Stoicism — a philosophy of life whose goal is to maximize the experience of tranquility. This is a seriously useful bag of psychological tricks.
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