All of Sam F. Brown's Comments + Replies

This is a great question, and one that I think everyone should be asking themselves and each other. It would be very easy for these things to devolve into an aimless free-for-all, which wouldn't be great.

I think you're probably the best judge about whether you'd get value from coming. But, to give you a personal example, at the Global retreat a) I realised why I ran a meetup at all, b) my goals became much more ambitious, and c) I've doubled down on putting effort into making my group succeed. I've since started a regular applied-rationality dojo, which ma... (read more)

Good question :) Honestly, it's so that we can get an early low-committment expression of interest to give an idea of size, for venue search and to take to potential funders. Without a deadline, I don't know how to get people to actually apply to things like this. Don't tell anyone, but I expect that some people who apply after the deadline will be accepted to join the retreat.

There's another question, which is "why are you planning this so far in advance?" And the answer there is "visas can take a really long time to process, especially when Africa is involved".

Thanks, cross-posted: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6xX96ZqFtH5n7mchW/my-emotional-reaction-to-the-current-funding-situation

The multiple buildings made it feel like a complex to me, but I've changed the wording to simply "hotel".

Yes, I'm now questioning my memory, but the rack-rate was on the inside of the RGI room I was staying in. I forget the room number, but feel free to DM me if you'd like a description of which one it was.

4habryka
Cool, yeah, I believe you. That is, as I said, kind of hilarious given the current state of the property (and the more recent room prices it managed to fetch).

The book, in case anyone is wondering, is The Art of Community by Charles H. Vogl, and is very good. I'm grateful to the CEA.

I actually think that catering of high enough quality that people don't leave the permises for meals is a very efficient use of money. And there's a good argument to be made that the most efficient use of money isn't the most effective one.

But also, thanks :)

Thanks for being open about your response, I appreciate it and I expect many people share your reaction.

I've edited the section about the hotel room price/purchase, where people have pointed out I may have been incorrect or misleading,

This definitely wasn't meant to be a hit piece, or misleading "EA bad" rhetoric.

On the point of "What does a prospective AI x-safety researcher think when they get referred to this site and see this post above several alignment research posts?" - I think this is a large segment of my intended audience. I would like people to ... (read more)

I appreciate the encouragement, and I do still agree with my decision to attempt a 6 month exploration to see whether I can do meaningful alignment work.

I don't really know what the point is either. I think I'm just trying to share how I feel.

5M. Y. Zuo
It does come across as trying to make a point, especially since you ended on the anecdote about the book lending system being indicative of wealth and not necessarily high trust. Most reasonable folks would at least draw the conclusion that you were trying to express disappointment that the culture wasn’t as high trust as you had imagined, that there are organizational inefficiencies, etc.

Thanks @habryka - I've edited the post to make it clearer that it's hearsay and that the purchase is not complete. If you think "hotel complex" is a misleading description for the RGI I'd happily consider an alternative term.

Thanks @lincolnquirk - It's almost certainly a price that no one pays, and I've edited the post to make that clearer, but it did still shock me.

6habryka
Oh, I think the Rose Garden Inn is just a hotel, and I wouldn't think of it as a "hotel complex" (it does have multiple buildings, but they are just part of the same hotel). I think hotel complex makes people think of 100+ rooms, whereas the Rose Garden has like 40 rooms, which is on the smaller side of being a hotel. I am also confused. Was the rack rate of $500 written on the inside of a Rose Garden Inn room? If so, that would be kind of hilarious. The place is/was super run down and as I said, normal nightly rates went for as low as $70 during the pandemic as one of the cheapest hotels in Berkeley.

I'm happy for it to be cross-posted there, but I'm not sure how to do that myself. If anyone else wants to, feel free. (Edit: I'm confused by the downvote. Is this advising against cross-posting? Or suggesting that I should work out how to and then do it myself?)

3ChristianKl
Cross posting essentially means just copy pasting.

Here's an example of someone prompting with a walkthrough of a similar token-aware approach to successfully guide GPT-3:

https://twitter.com/npew/status/1525900849888866307

2Stuart_Armstrong
I tried to use that approach to teach GPT-3 to solve the problem at the top of this post. As you can see, it kinda worked; GPT-3 grasps that some things need to be reversed, but it then goes a bit off the rails (adding a random "this is a great" to the end of my prompt, with the whole phrase reversed rather than each word; then it starts out reversing the individual words of the sentence, but ends up just completing the sentence instead, using the other common completion - "falls" rather than "stays". Then when it tries to reverse each individual word, it fails completely, and just reorders/reworks the words a bit).
2Stuart_Armstrong
Fascinating. Thanks!
2gwern
This approach is a little surprising. I would have thought that adding on numbers to my space-separating approach, and then merging space-separated letters into a final solid word, would have tripped up GPT-3 and inevitably led to errors. But, at least with InstructGPT, it works.

This might be unwelcome nit-picking, but I find it kind of jarring to read "meta is Greek for above, mesa is Greek for below." That's not quite right, μετα is more like 'after' in "turn right after the bridge" and μεσα is more like 'within' (μεσο is like 'middle', as in 'mesoscale'). Above/below could be something like άνω/κάτω (like anode/cathode).

I think the meta/mesa has nice symmetry, and the name is now well-known, but maybe this particular sentence could be made less wrong :p

Also the bibliography link #7 for "What is the opposite of meta?" seems broken for me.

5evhub
Sure—I just edited it to be maybe a bit less jarring for those who know Greek.

Hi there,

I ran this event a while ago, and would like to claim it for Oxford Rationalish https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/wQA8BE5e8mETeWb8A, rather than the (inactive) university society.

Current schedule just dropped!

 

Start TimeTitleOrganiser
10:00Tea & HelloSam Brown
10:30Speed FriendingSam Brown & Patrick Wilson
11:2010-min break
 
11:30Double-Crux: collaborative disagreementSam Brown
12:2010-min break
 
12:30Alexander Technique and AwarenessLulie Tanett
13:30LunchChris Ardarne
14:30Acoustic Sing-alongPatrick Wilson
15:00Heroes, Role models, and ImaginationDavid Leon
15:5010-min break
 
16:00Hamming QuestionsSam Brown
16:2010-min break
 
16:30Hamming CirclesSam Brown
17:5010-min break
 
18:00FocusingDamon Sasi
19:00Dinne
... (read more)

This group seems to be inactive. There's another group, Oxford Rationalish, which is currently active (Jan 2022), we aim to have at-least-monthly pub meetups, Circling, and occasional Applied-Rationality workshops.

https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/wQA8BE5e8mETeWb8A
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1221768638031684/