Hey everyone,
For our monthly workshop, Glenn will interactively teach us how to understand better why we mentally suffer and heal ourselves by thinking about emotional work in a new way:
Capacity up to 40 people, first come, first served. Please RSVP on the EA Forum! (no account needed)
How could AI existential risk play out? Choose one of five roles, play through a plausible scenario with other attendees, and discuss it afterward. This was a popular session at the EAGxBerlin conference with ~70 participants over two sessions and positive feedback, so we're doing it again for EA Berlin.
Everyone is welcome, also if you’re new to AI safety! People underrepresented in the AI safety field are especially welcome. If you're very new to the field, we recommend you read/skim an introductory text such as this 80,000 Hours article or the Most Important Century series... (read 498 more words →)
- In case people want to get to know each other better outside the meetup, you might want to mention reciprocity.io, the rationalist friend-finder/dating site.
Unfortunately that requires Facebook =/ and most of my friends avoid / don't have Facebook for privacy reasons.
Alternatives:
Technology Connections viewers already know this somewhat related bit: Consider switching to loose powder instead of tabs, or having both. The dishwasher runs three cleaning cycles (pre-wash, main, rinse), and the tab only goes in for the second phase. The first phase tries to get all the food and grease off using just water… which isn't ideal. Adding like 1/2 a teaspoon of the loose powder directly onto the door / into the tub at the bottom will greatly support the pre-wash phase and should deal with most things.
Since I started doing that, I don't bother scraping at all (obviously? still discarding loose food remains in the bin first) and basically never get stuck bits. (Every couple of months stuff like strongly baked-on cheese from e.g. a gratin may stick to the dish, but that's it.)
The way I approach situations like that is to write code in Lua and only push stuff that really has to be fast down to C. (Even C+liblua / using a Lua state just as a calling convention is IMHO often nicer than "plain" C. I can't claim the same for Python...) End result is that most of the code is readable, and usually (i.e. unless I stopped keeping them in sync) the "fast" functions still have a Lua version that permits differential testing.
Fundamentally agree with the C not C++/Rust/... theme though, C is great for this because it doesn't have tons of checks. (And that's coming from someone who's using Coq... (read more)
Sabine Hossenfelder's assessment (quickly) summarized (and possibly somewhat distorted by that):
This seems to be another case of "reverse advice" for me. I seem to be too formal instead of too lax with these spatial metaphors. I immediately read the birds example as talking about the relative positions and distances along branches of the Phylogenetic tree, your orthogonality description as referring to actual logical independence / verifiable orthogonality, and it's my job to notice hidden interaction and stuff like weird machines and so I'm usually also very aware of that, just by habits kicking in.
Your post made me realize that instead of people's models being hard to understand, there simply may not be a model that would admit talking in distances or directions,... (read more)
Main constraint you're not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost.
That's why I'm saying it probably won't need that for the footers. There's ~10mm between running footer and text block, if that's reduced to ~8 or 9mm and those 1-2mm go below the footer instead, that's still plenty of space to clearly separate the two, while greatly reducing the "falling off the page" feeling. (And the colored bars that mark chapters are fine, no need to touch those.)
Design feedback: Alignment is hard, even when it's just printing. Consider bumping up the running footer by 1-2mm next time, it ended up uncomfortably close to the bottom edge at times. (Also the chapter end note / references pages were a mess.) More details:
variance: For reference, in the books that I have, the width of the colored bars along the page edge at each chapter (they're easy to measure) varies between ~4.25mm and ~0.75mm, and sometimes there's a ~2mm width difference between top and bottom. (No complaints here. The thin / rotated ones look a bit awkward if you really look at them, but you'll likely be distracted by the nice art... (read 514 more words →)
Sounds great so far, some questions:
And (different category)
Re solanine poisoning, just based on what's written in Wikipedia:
... (read more)Solanine Poisoning / Symptoms
[...] One study suggests that doses of 2 to 5 mg/kg of body weight can cause toxic symptoms, and doses of 3 to 6 mg/kg of body weight can be fatal.[5][...]
Safety / Suggested limits on consumption of solanine
The average consumption of potatoes in the U.S. is estimated to be about 167 g of potatoes per day per person.[11] There is variation in glycoalkaloid levels in different types of potatoes, but potato farmers aim to keep solanine levels below 0.2 mg/g.[18] Signs of solanine poisoning have been linked to eating potatoes with solanine concentrations of between 0.1 and 0.4 mg per
My gut feeling (no pun intended) says the mythical "super-donor" is a very good excuse to keep looking / trying without having to present better results, and may never be found. Doing the search directly in the "microbiome composition space" instead of doing it on people (thereby indirectly sampling the space) feels way more efficient, assuming it is tractable at all.
If some people are already looking into synthesis, is there anything happening in the direction of "extrapolating" towards better samples? (I.e. take several good-but-not-great donors that fall short in different ways, look at what's same / different between their microbiome, then experiment with compositions that ought to be better according the current understanding, and repeat.)
Observation: It should generally be safe to forbid non-termination when searching for programs/algorithms.
In practice, all useful algorithms terminate: If you know that you're dealing with a semi-decidable thing and doing serious work, you'll either (a) add a hard cutoff, or (b) structure the algorithm into a bounded step function and a controller that decides whether or not to run for another step. That transformation is not adding significant overhead size-wise, so you're bound to find a terminating algorithm "near" a non-terminating one!
Sure, that slightly changes the interface – it's now allowed to abort with "don't know", but that's a transformation that you likely would have applied anyway. Even if you consider that