All of Alexei's Comments + Replies

Wow…..

1. I think I might have this. Will test immediately.
2. This needs to be a top level post.

Strongly agree. Exact same experience in research, but in finance / quant trading.

If you would like to increase engagement with your posts, I’d highly recommend not posting all of them at once, especially because they’re long. Post the first one, see how people respond. Then adjust and post the second one next week.

It’s much easier for me not to say anything, but my model of Duncan would prefer for me to comment.

Overall strong upvote from me, but I’m not doing it because: what is up with the section about Zack Davis?? I’m not disputing the veracity here, because I don’t know. But it just doesn’t feel at all necessary or even useful to have it in this post. Just comes across as kind of petty. Kind if like writing The Inferno just so you can categorize and viscerally describe your enemies in hell.

I’d recommend Primer over this.

How do I opt into the LessWrong Watercolor Aesthetic?

Object for the stated reason.

I have a personal rule that I tell people when they start bringing this energy into my life: “I’m happy to listen to you for 5 minutes a day on this topic. After that I’m out.”

I’m interested! But I live in Portugal, so it would need to be remote.

The former. I think you can just explain the blinds without explaining the entire poker game.

I like the idea and would consider doing something like that in the future. Thanks! FWIW, I found the explanation of poker completely extraneous to the main point.

Vernor suggested a principle: The bad beings nearly always optimize for engagement, for pulling you ever deeper into their influence. They want to make themselves more firmly a part of your OODA loop. The good ones send you out, away from themselves in an open ended way, but better than before.

That is profound!

Oh, I should clarify that we won't be doing Circling. We'll just be talking.

Recently I watched "The Tangle." It's an indie movie written and directed by the main actor from Ink, if that means anything to you. (Ink is also an indie movie, but it's in my top 5 of all time.) Anyway, The Tangle is set in a world right after the singularity (of sorts), but where humans haven't fully gave up control. Don't want to spoil too much here, but I found a lot of the ideas there that were popular 5-10 years ago in the rationalist circles. Quite unexpected for an indie movie. I really enjoyed it and I think you would too.

I’d also post in the “welcome” thread.

Before building a whole website, just try this technique on some students. Whether with just paper or a quickly built web page for a few specific concepts.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5spBue2z2tw4JuDCx/steering-gpt-2-xl-by-adding-an-activation-vector

Interest in enrolling in CS, AI, and ML degrees goes up 5-10x from start to end of 2023.

I’m willing to bet it will be less than 2x.

I don't think I define it rigorously. Maybe someone with deeper technical understanding of these models could.

But if I had to come up with a hack somehow, you could look at the distribution of probabilities for various words as ChatGPT is predicting the next token. Presumably you'll noticed a certain kind of probability distribution when it's in the "Luigi" mode and another when it's in "Waluigi" mode. Then prodding it in the right direction might be weighing more the tokens that are a lot more frequent in the Luigi mode than Waluigi.

We have no idea how to have a program detect AI-written text in a useful way.

This approach seems very doable: 

I suppose you can call me lucky, but my wife and I had about two years of doing “quality of time spent” very well. And then we switched to building a family and that’s going well too. I guess you can have it all. 😊

Yup, I like it! Describes where I am pretty well.

I’ve been in the rationalist community since 2011. I too am focused on the “long path”. And I’d say my timelines are pretty short. But I have two young kids and I do not regret it. In fact we’ll probably have a third one.

Strongly agree with tangren. Try to start interviewing and see if:

1. Can you even get the interviews? If you can't all, then your resume is probably not good. Also maybe you need to work with a recruiter.
2. If you can get the interviews but not the offers, then it's probably your interviewing skills. You can study up. (For this reason it's recommended to first interview with companies you don't particularly want to join.)

I will caution that right now is probably a particularly difficult time to find an engineering job. There were a lot of layoffs in big tech companies and a lot of them have a hiring freeze.

Excellent! Maybe there’s a way to pitch this for a Black Mirror episode.

I recently heard that it's possible that long-covid cough cause is actually neurological. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8041436/ (Abstract below)

Has anyone heard about this? Anecdotally, the friend that told me about this took the required medicine and it cured his cough (which lasted 7 weeks up to that point) in half a day.  This happened once he reached the right dose, which for him was 300 mg of gabapentin 2-3 times a day.

Quoting the abstract here:

Cough is one of the most common presenting symptoms of COVID-19, along with fev

This seems like a really good thing to do! I wish I could contribute more to the prize pool.

Wow, excellent advice all around. I’ve gone insane in exactly that way a few times, but later I learned that I have bipolar that gets triggered by stress and/or psychedelics. During the manic phase the mind runs away with whatever it’s thinking / obsessing about. Maybe that could potentially explain some of the other people too.

Thank you! Very clean and solid analysis.

Great post, I really enjoyed reading it. But there are a lot of small misspellings and grammatical errors. I think LW offers some kind of proofreading service. (Or maybe you can find a friend / volunteer.)

Fwiw my dentist told me to floss as well. I tried and noticed obvious improvements on the next appt (so about 3 months). I did it for a year and it was good. Then I stopped and sure enough next appt the gums were sore and bleeding during the test. I didn’t floss for a year. As soon as I started again, the improvement came back. I guess now for me this is one of those things that has been so thoroughly proven and validated by my own experience that it’s easy to do. Oh and also I hate all floss devices except this: Listerine UltraClean Access Flosser WITH Re... (read more)

Thanks for sharing. My wife and I have “dreamed” about a shared housing scenario as well, raising our kids side by side with friends. But yeah, it seems super difficult to arrange and (I imagine) to maintain.

Part of my model is that spiritual students tend to be a lot more prone to wanting to connect in a physical way. Sometimes to the point of almost literally throwing themselves at the teacher.

A reply that came to mind for me: “oh yeah. I guess I’m bored. I didn’t realize until you just pointed it out.”

That’s correct.

I like this a lot! I wish, as they say, that I could give this more than one (strong) upvote! I think if you continue writing, you could definitely make something at least as good at Friendship is Optimal. And if you continue past that, quite possibly even HPMOR.

Let me try to say a bit more about why I liked this so much. 1) As I was reading it, I was connecting the story / seeing parallels with my life. That's always a plus in my book. The story helps me get a different handle on my reality. 2) I could empathize with all of the characters. Even though the... (read more)

Thanks for the summary. Just a quick note: I found that multiple headers & jumping between different "lenses" made it much harder to me to read the post. I guess I'd wish that those blocks would be larger, possibly all the way separated.

I gotta say the more I read this sequence the more interesting and helpful I find it. Thank you!

Would you recommend it? What’s the website?

Congrats on the new born!

My cryptocurrency quant hedge fund is looking to hire engineers. If you're curious, PM me. :)

Well, I already tried recruiting you for our hedge fund, so not really. :D Although it's possible with covid there's a larger pool of remote jobs available.

But yeah, given all those constraints, it's quite possible you're in a relatively optimal position.

First off, kudos for putting your view up for criticism.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the opportunity cost. Putting the question of whether or not ads are good or bad aside, do you think you can find a job that creates more good in the world and pays about the same?

Very cool, this sounds a lot like my own story too. Welcome to the club!

I like this format a lot: here’s what I wanted to learn, here’s what I did, here’s my proposed better method. I. A world where we learn things via an amalgamation of blog posts and videos, this seems like an efficient way of helping others learn.

I think there should be a tag for this method!

Thank you, this looks extremely useful. It’s been on my todo list to learn about transformers for a while. And this looks like a great path to follow. I commit to respond with how my learning went once I follow this guide. (Will probably be later this year.)

What are your thoughts / advice on working as an individual vs joining an existing team / company when it comes to safety research? (For yourself and for others)

Thank you for looking into this and posting about it. This question has been on my mind a lot.