All of Felix Karg's Comments + Replies

Hey Elias, good questions!

What we need a lot of help with can, for the most part, be separated in three different time frames: before, during, and after the event. This means, specifically:

  • Before the event: Buildup. e.g. Building the reception/welcome desk, preparing workshop rooms, hanging up signs where the workshop rooms are, building the cuddle fort, prepare snack tables, ...
    • Buildup will begin Friday at 9am at the location (official begin is around 6h later, so you'll probably need to sleep over in Berlin the day before
  • During the event: Ops. e.g. Prima
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Oh yeah. This reminds me about a 'habit-building-trick' I've read somewhere else, basically: “You don't just want to do it, you want to become a person who does it, and then you can focus on something else”.

 

So yeah, rapidly adapting your identity might be a superpower after all. With all the downsides it entails.

Achievement unlocked: more Up votes than original post.

Answer by Felix Karg40

Intuitively, everything with something resembling a lifecycle comes to mind: humans, companies, countries - heck, even star systems. What I haven't seen before: estimates on politician turnover, friendships/relationships and ... chairs. Let's do it.

  • Politicians: from small parties, most simply 'dabble' a bit on the side, and stop after a few years/voting cycles when they have no success, or stay for 20+ years with success. So I'd guess average would be about 5 years, as I'd expect the distribution to be heavily skewed. Estimate is for Europe/Germany, par
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In Germany (as has most of Europe), we still have several mask-requirements, even for those fully vaccinated (e.g. for within shopping centers/supermarkets, most public buildings, ...). Honestly, I'm quite happy with that and don't think it'll change anytime soon.

Also, there are preventive measures known and correlated with incidence, though it's currently in discussion to couple it to hospital bed availability as well. So should cases go up, everyone already knows what is bound to happen, and when.

I'm quite happy with the current situation, and apart from a few exceptions it seems mostly stable, with delta being dominant for a few weeks now. Vaccination is progressing steadily as well (61% first shot, ~50% second).

2ChristianKl
r = 1.2-1.3 is not stable.  I'm happy to be at the point where in Berlin the U-Bahn now tells people to open windows and put stickers on the windows to direct people to open them, the S-Bahn however still doesn't and there are unnecessary many closed windows. An S-Bahn with open windows has felt airflow, so it's likely similar to being outdoors. 

First: I'm also thinking of 'getting paid for a job' as a trade, fundamentally it's 'generating value' for money. It's similar with most investment opportunities: they either provide (immediate) value or have the capability to generate value. This will stay at least until no one needs that anymore, maybe because everyone is being administered by an AGI and robots, so no one has to work.

Second: Sharing fruits of labor/economies of scale. Basically the physicalized version of 'expertise sharing', e.g. I'm going to build your house while you're out working, b... (read more)

[APPRENTICE] for character development / lessons for life. Not sure what exactly I expect, but I want to create workshops about these things eventually, as my contribution to raising the sanity waterline. I still have a lot of learning to do first, so I'm asking for an opportunity to do so.

What do I mean exactly: Basic useful skills like public speaking, charisma, communication (speech & text), financial intelligence, self-, and project management, teamwork-skills, leadership, and whatever else a 'master' would have at least a basic understanding and capability of. I'd be thrilled if you can just take on a single one I mentioned, or anything else I didn't.

[APPRENTICE] for anything biology-related. Bonus for working in bioinformatics or simulating (metabolic) pathways. Also interested in joining some startup doing work in this area.

I'm doing a computer science master’s degree and visiting introductory biology lectures on the side, I'd love to build up on those. Additionally, I'm getting deeper in ML and simulation, and would be interested in applying it to biological data. I am currently reading a number of biology papers for creating a presentation which is to be held next month.

The fish-weight example was intuitive for me, but the temperature one wasn't. Slightly reformulating the thoughts in my head:

  1. of course temperature measurement is local
  2. that's what temperature is, I don't care about the many possible distributions, only about the current local sample. That's what's affecting things around me, not some hypothetical distribution that isn't instantiated right now.

Maybe you wanted to make a different point here, and I didn't get it?

3johnswentworth
One thing I didn't explicitly mention in the post is that the average energy of the sample is a sufficient statistic for the temperature - it summarizes all the information from the sample relevant to the temperature. So in that sense, it is all we care about, and your intuition isn't wrong. However, just like sample mean is not distribution mean, sample average energy is not temperature. If we actually look at the math, the two are different. Sample average energy summarizes all the relevant information about temperature, but is not itself the temperature. Of course, if we had perfect information about all the low-level particles, we might not have any need to use temperature to model the system. (In the same way, if we had perfect knowledge of all fish weights, we might not need to explicitly use a distribution to model them, depending on our use-case.)

Sample-mean is not distribution-mean.

This is my key-takeaway from this post, thank you for writing it.

Awesome! Thanks for keeping us up-to-date!

From here, the plan is for Aysajan to spend the next few months working on the sorts of projects I worked on before focusing on alignment full time - the sorts of projects which I expect to build skills for solving problems-we-don’t-understand.

What kind of projects/problems are you thinking about? This might become a very valuable community resource, even for those of us without your guidance.

2ChristianKl
johnswentworth published a lot of post about individual projects like for example human longevity. Just look into his post history.
3johnswentworth
Some of this I've written about before: * Specializing in Problems We Don't Understand largely talks about what-and-how-to-study, and the "formal study" parts of the apprenticeship should generally follow that. Aysajan's recent post is an example of that: it's taking chapter 2 of Jaynes' Logic of Science and applying it in other contexts. * Comprehensive Information Gathering exercises. Aysajan's first non-formal-study project is to read through lists of unsolved problems on wikipedia, as well as all of the course descriptions in a course catalogue from either MIT or Caltech. Those definitely don't cover all of it, though. So far, other than those, we've mostly been kicking around smaller problems. For instance, the last couple days we were talking about general approaches for gearsy modelling in the context of a research problem Aysajan's been working on (specifically, modelling a change in India's farm subsidy policy). We also spent a few days on writing exercises - approximately everyone benefits from more practice in that department. We've also done a few exercises to come up with Hard Problems to focus on. ("What sci-fi technologies or magic powers would you like to have?" was a particularly good one, and the lists of unsolved problems are also intended to generate ideas.) Once Aysajan has settled on ~10-20 Hard Problems to focus on (initially), those will drive the projects. You should see posts on whatever he's working on fairly frequently.

I used to read a newspaper daily for half an hour during breakfast. At some point I read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DSzpr8Y9299jdDLc9/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers and haven't touched a newspaper for more than reading specific recommended articles since.

Related: Zvi had some notes on the general FDA approval process in his last COVID-Situation-update-post, regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/rencyawwfr4rfwt5C/p/PQACEuWpkSyRgHC4p#Waiting_on_AstraZeneca 

I appreciate your fast meta-takes and responses on the current situation.

Speed premium, will hopefully flesh out more carefully in future

I would love to see a carefully fleshed out version, since it seems to have insights, applications and implications significantly beyond their immediately discussed content.

Ah, I see — the devil is in the detail. We are not really disagreeing about most things. I see it as a policy question where I think that network effects are more important, while your focus is (correct me if I got that wrong) on the importance of individual motivations.

that glamour/parties/fun are not the primary attractive feature of work for the people who are making the world move forward.

You are right, but their secondary effects are potentially more important: attracting more people who can work on moving the world forward. I can see why having a sig... (read more)

Destroy the camaraderie, and the less talented/dedicated people, those who are most attracted to the sheer camaraderie, will quit.

In my experience, camaraderie is one of the attracting forces especially for more talented and dedicated people, since they already have/or can easily get 'everything else'.

2DirectedEvolution
I'm sure it is, and that's actually why I think it might be good that it's lessened/dampened. Because there are other attracting forces for talented and dedicated people beyond money. One is altruism or a belief in the importance of the work, another is intrinsic satisfaction of the job, and a third is a sense that the workplace is well-organized and has a minimum of red tape and hoops to jump through. Get rid of the parties, glamour, and pressure, and these other virtues become even more important. Basically, I'm positing that some people were until recently trading valuable/important/satisfying work for glamour and parties and fun times hanging out with their coworkers. That doesn't seem like a good trade to me. The real danger, to my mind, is that losing the glamour/parties/fun might be so important to some of these very successful people that they just quit entirely, and do nothing at all. That would be a real loss. My guess is that while this will happen to some extent, that glamour/parties/fun are not the primary attractive feature of work for the people who are making the world move forward.

Good catch, I didn't consider this possibility

Thank you for writing this, it was very helpful to me. I will read up on a number of links you provided in the post itself and other comments.

I'm starting to dabble in Biology since last Semester (Computer Science Bachelors, currently doing Master’s degree) as a minor, some of my current interests are:

  • Epigenetics
    Especially related with newly available computational methods and experiments doable with CRISPR-modifications. What are the active areas of research?
  • Simulation
    Particularly of biological pathways or other relevant parts. What is commonly simulated?
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Answer by Felix Karg110

While I am quite the fan of current 'idea'-LessWrong, I would love to see a collection of actionable rationality exercises, especially about core concepts such as those from the sequences.

Explanations should be mainly for non-rationalists. This could be a go-to to forward to people roughly interested in the topic, but without the time to read through the 'theoretical' posts. Think Hammertime but formulated specifically for non-'formal'-rationalists. Doing them should be entertaining and result in an intuitive understanding of the same concepts, and deeper ... (read more)

Thank you, this post has been quite insightful. I still have this lingering feeling, maybe you can help me with that: what if the creation of unaligned AGI just so happens to not have any (noticeable) effect on GWP at all? Nanobot creation (and other projects) might just happen to not, or only minimally involve monetary transfers — I can think of many reasons why this might be preferable (traceability!), and how it might be doable (e.g. manipulate human agents without paying them).

3Daniel Kokotajlo
Thanks! Yeah, I totally agree that nanobot swarms etc. might not involve monetary transfers and thus might not show up in GDP metrics. In fact, now that you mention it, there's a whole category of arguments like this that I could have made but didn't: How GDP as a metric is not a perfect proxy for economic vitality, how economic vitality of a nation is not a perfect proxy for economic vitality of an industry, etc.

Someone should start a collection of good translator-resources between different thinking styles. I might end up working on something similar in the far future ...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that recombination is not a thing for RNA-based lifeforms? That, and it would require at least some form of 'pollination', I believe?

2avturchin
I have seem claims that origin of coronavirus could be explained via recombination, but I would like to learn more about it.

Thank you for asking, I was wondering about exactly this myself earlier today - how much effort would it require creating something vaccine-like myself?

Thank you for writing that down. I would go so far as to argue that these are good rules for interacting with other people, not just children. How well someone does as a parent has a big influence on the children, but even everyday interactions tend to have an influence on other people (and yourself, for that matter).

5taryneast
I've learned a lot about interacting with adults by reading parenting books :D