This concept is still alive in present-day Japan, where cherry blossoms are viewed with the bittersweet knowledge that their beauty lasts only for a short while.
I'd rather celebrate people updating their priors than dunking on them for being late. Make it cool to change your mind when you realize the facts have changed!
The catch is that the future world that has been warmed by greenhouse gases and a present-day world that has been temporarily warmed by El Niño can have the same global-average temperature while having significant differences in the impacts of this warming.
Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. In essence, this is a book about an industry that refuses to learn. That was true 25 years ago when this book was published, and it's probably twice as true today. (Just think about all the AI adoption metrics being rolled out — back to productivity mistaken for lines of code produced, only more elaborate. And expensive). What I like about this book is that Glass doesn't present anything new. Quite the opposite, actually. Rather, it's about research lessons that we all should know, but tend to forget. Ever had to do an estimate, or plan according to a requirements spec? Or maybe you thought that enough eyeballs make all bugs shallow? Then this book is for you. A great work by a fantastic author.
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
And if they're completely failing, that's probably a good sign. If they're kind of able to do some of it but not very well, that's maybe not a great sign because that's a probably a a sign that the capability is starting to be present in those models and with more training data or larger scale models or or whatever it's likely to get better. So um you know look for something where the model succeeds 0% or 1% of the time not not 20%.
essentially every cultural attribute that we celebrate – from human rights, to logic, to progress, to the very notion of an independent self – are conceptual children born from the mind-shaping power of the written word.
However, in our non-ideal biophysical reality, present levels of urbanism are unlikely to be sustainable without cheap fossil fuels, and the human cost of that could be horrific unless we address it urgently.
And so you kind of end up in this this bad equilibrium where everybody kind of knows that it's a bad equilibrium, but like nobody wants to break out. And I I felt like, okay, well, if I just hopefully come out and say like, look guys, let's all recognize that we're in a bad equilibrium and let's move to this different equilibrium where we're we're plotting things with an X-axis
Europe, along with China and the United States, is an economic superpower. And, at this point in time, it is arguably the world’s only democratic superpower.
if you want to manage something like as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.
Underneath anger is sadness over all your cumulative experiences in life of not being responded to, past and present. The sadness around powerlessness. Unresolved grief.
And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there. And they’re so important or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.
One is at every moment of this exponential, the extent to which the world outside it didn't understand it. This is This is a bias that's often present in history where anything that actually happened looks inevitable in retrospect.
Over thirteen lessons, you’ll learn about the past, present, and future of meat, from the ways animals and humans are treated in meat processing plants to emerging meat alternatives.
the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And so what you find is that a lot of things that typically get categorized as a bad habit, eating too many donuts or smoking a cigarette or something like that feels good in the moment, but it creates some kind of cost or consequence in the future.
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
It's our choice whether we should say oh they are our offspring and we should be proud of them and we should celebrate their achievements or we should we could say oh no they're not us and we should be horrified.
A lot of it has to do with just how you feel about change. Um, and if you think the current situation is really really good, then you're uh more likely to be suspicious of change and averse to change than if you think um it's imperfect. And I think it's imperfect. In fact, I think it's pretty bad.
But the difference in value between the world today and that common-sense utopia might be very small compared to the difference between that common-sense utopia and the best futures we could feasibly achieve.
As much as possible, try to not predict what the future may hold, but just wait as long as possible for that future to become the present and show you what it actually needs.
It’s just this idea that people have about the past can be very useful if it brings you happiness in the present, but if it narrows your worldview in the present, you’re not aware of those biases that you have, it can be toxic either at a personal level or at a collective level.
The problem with these grand ambitions—saving humanity from extinction and enabling our species to reach its full potential millions of years from now—is that they ostensibly justify any cost in the present.
Despite having read a few bookshelves worth of academic psychology texts, I enjoyed Yale professor Paul Bloom's survey of the field. Because understanding psychology cannot be divorced from understanding its history, I enjoyed Bloom's birds-eye view of the field from the past to the present day.
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.
And I think the ability to be immersed and feel present with the people around you or the people who you care about is, from my perspective, clearly the next frontier. It just so happens that it's incredibly technologically difficult.
Most of our fears begin to subside when we just allow ourselves to be in this moment, as anxiety and worry stem from a preoccupation with an anticipated or envisioned future.
What what I find generally is if I don't understand something, I I try to read backwards and and and kind of the further back back I read, the more universal things I find. And the more things that I think are kind of remarkable and unique to our era actually turn out to be quite universal.
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