Real Languages Are Second Order

Note: this is a carrier class conceptual identification. What I'll write might superficially sound like postmodernist blathering. I assure you it is not, though I realize that there is no way to tell the difference... unless you already understand what I'm trying to say in this post. There is nothing I can do but try to say it anyway.

A musician wants you to appreciate their melodies. But their real pride is the emotions they are putting into the music.

A designer of a bridge wants you to appreciate how pretty it is and how well it works. But their real pride is in the skill and sense of aesthetics that they poured into the project.

The AI Alignment Problem Has Already Been Solved(?) Once

Hat tip: Owen posted about trying to one-man the AI control problem in 1 hour. What the heck, why not? In the worst case, it's a good exercise. But I might actually have come across something useful.

第一

I will try to sell you on an idea that might prima facie appear to be quirky and maybe not that interesting. However, if you keep staring at it, you might find that it reaches into the structure of the world quite deeply. Then the idea will seem obvious, and gain potential to take your thoughts in new exciting directions.

Make Your Observations Pay Rent

第一

Elon Musk said during the panel at the Asilomar conference ("Beneficial AI 2017 Conference"):

[...] Everyone is already superhuman. And a cyborg. The limitation is one of bandwidth. We're bandwidth constrained, particularly on output. Our input is much better, but our output is extremely slow. If you want to be generous, you could say maybe it's a few hundred bits per second, or a kilobyte, something like that, output. The way we output is, we have our little meat-sticks, that we move very slowly and push buttons, or tap a little screen.

Effects of carbon dioxide on health and cognition

Summary

• Really high concentrations of CO₂ (30,000 - 40,000 ppm) produce obvious and terribly bad physiological effects.

• CO₂ levels even in poorly ventilated buildings rarely exceed 3,000 - 5,000 ppm.

• The evidence about those levels of CO₂ directly affecting cognition remains inconclusive.

• However, CO₂ levels are roughly indicative of overall air quality, which seems to affect both health and perceived comfort.

Prediction Calibration - Doing It Right

第一

To improve your skill at predicting the future, you work on two things - accuracy and calibration. There are well established and mathematically pretty ways to score accuracy. However, scoring calibration tends to be a mixture of eyeballing histograms and calculating fractions of failed predictions for arbitrary fixed ranges of confidence. This is not ideal.
First, let's talk about the current ("traditional") method, and what is wrong with it.

Applied Rationality Exercises

I was just about to run an introductory workshop around applied rationality, mindfulness, effective communication etc. in Warsaw, Poland when I got the flu, which forced me to stay in bed for a few days. A friend agreed to replace me at the event, and I wrote up the following notes for him.

The notes are not comprehensive, and do not include any background information or explanations. However, the availability of this kind of materials seems to be low, so there is a chance someone will at least take some inspiration from this.

On Risk of Viral Infections from Chlorella

第一

In November 2014, a certain study caused a great deal of panic. The study reported detecting traces of a Chlorella virus (ATCV-1) in samples from human throats, and finding a decrease of cognitive capacity in those infected with it. The authors of the study report that they had further verified their result by infecting mice with the same virus, and finding that they had lower performance on solving some puzzles versus mice in the control group.