= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
The recommended order for the papers seems really useful.
Thanks! :-D Let me know if you want any tips/advice if and when you start on another read-through.
The old course list mentioned many more courses ... Is this change mainly due to the different aims of the guides, or does it reflect an opinion in MIRI that those areas are not more likely to be useful than what a potential researcher would have studied otherwise?
Mostly different aims of the guides. I think Louie's criterion was "subjects that seem useful or somewhat relevant to FAI research," and was developed before MIRI pivoted towards examining the technical questions.
My criterion is "prerequisites that are directly necessary to learning and understanding our active technical research," which is a narrower target.
(esp. there is no AI book mentioned)
This is representative of the difference --- it's quite nice to know what modern AI can do, but that doesn't have too much relevance to the current open technical FAI problems, which are more geared towards things like putting foundations under fields where it seems possible to get "good enough to run but not good enough to be safe" heuristics. Knowing how MDPs work is useful, but it isn't really necessary to understand our active research.
I also notice that within the subfields of Logic, Model Theory seems to be replaced by Type Theory.
Not really. Rather, that particular Model Theory textbook was rather brutal, and you only need the first two or so chapters to understand our Tiling Agents research, and it's much easier to pick up that knowledge using an "intro to logic" textbook. The "model theory" section is still quite important, though!
if you're interested in Type Theory in the foundational sense the Homotopy Type Theory book is probably more exciting
It may be more exciting, but the HoTT book has a bad habit of sending people down the homotopy rabbit hole. People with CS backgrounds will probably find it easier to pick up other type theories. (In fact, Church's "simple type theory" paper may be enough instead of an entire textbook... maybe I'll update the suggestions.)
But yeah, HoTT certainly is pretty exciting these days, and the HoTT book is a fine substitute for the one in the guide :-)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Perhaps this is silly of me, but the single word in the article that made me indignantly exclaim "What!?" was when he called CFAR "overhygienic."
I mean... you can call us nerdy, weird in some ways, obsessed with productivity, with some justification! But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
[Edit: The author has clarified above that "overhygienic" was meant to refer to epistemic hygiene, not literal hygiene.]
This is not something that would cross my mind if I was organizing such a retreat. Making sure people who handled food washed their hands with soap, yes, but not hand sanitizer. Perhaps this is a cultural difference between (parts of) US and Europe.