Understanding Policy Gradients

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There are three stances one can take when dealing with a mathematical subject.

The first one is the engineering/practical/below math stance:

• what works, works
• mistakes can be avoided by doing empirical tests
• math is difficult and scary

A Fearsome Rationality Technique

"I'm not weird. I'm just optimized."

This is a rare chance to learn some little-known rationality lore. Proceed cautiously, according to the instructions below.

Before you start, please remember -- never question a technique until you have mastered it. Your weak, human mind is certain to raise objections as you make progress on this path -- but this weakness will be overcome with time. Eventually, the technique will become your second nature, and you will hardly even remember what your life was like before.

The Unyoga Manifesto

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Yoga, as commonly taught, in a multitude of versions descended from the Indian tradition, gets some crucial things right. At the same time, it gets some other things terribly wrong.

One obvious thing it gets wrong is attaching metaphysical or religious meaning to all the teachings. But annoying as it can be, I do not consider it a deal breaker for anyone who has half-decent epistemic habits. It is fairly trivial to filter out the wordy noise and benefit from generations upon generations of accumulated and slowly refined practical knowledge.

Philosophical Parenthood

Note: In this post, I lay out a strong philosophical argument for rational and intelligent people to have children. Even if you are not interested in the topic itself, you might find some of the (tentative) mental models presented here useful.

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Why would anyone ever use philosophical arguments to settle questions about parenthood? Well, to answer that, we'll need a good philosophical argument for acting on philosophical arguments.

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.

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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

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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.