J Bostock

There is a particular sound which you will hear around a month into a genetics course. It’s kind of contagious, spreading from person to person in the class. It’s the sound of someone finally internalising why genes are named the way they are. Example: Fruit flies (it’s always fruit flies)...

Even small amounts of alcohol are somewhat bad for you. I personally don’t care, because I love making and drinking alcohol and at the end of the day you have to live a little. This is fine for me, because I’m not an olympic athlete. If I were an olympic...

There’s a cocktail called an old fashioned. It’s almost as simple as one can make a cocktail. Like anything there’s a million “recipes” but the one I’ll focus on today goes like this: * Put two sugar cubes in a glass * Douse them with a few drops of bitters...

A load-bearing concept in my mental language is texture-of-experience. This sits on an axis from rough to smooth. I'm writing this here as a handle to look back on. Here are some examples of rough/smooth pairs. Some are triples, ordered from roughest to smoothest. * Being driven somewhere in an...

This post was written as part of Doublehaven: ◆◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇ ◆◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇ Moral realism is roughly the belief in stance-independent reasons for doing something, that all minds might follow. It’s also roughly the belief that there is a true morality, which humans might converge on through reasoning. It’s also roughly the belief...

Note the date of this post. Inkhaven is a writers’ retreat, well, really it’s a bloggers’ retreat. In the Lighthaven campus, Berkeley, a couple dozen bloggers get together to complete an almost insurmountable challenge for us mere mortals. Post one blogpost every single day for a whole month. I say...

These views are my own and not necessarily representative of those of any colleagues with whom I have worked on AI control. TL;DR: It's much cheaper and quicker to just throw some honeypots at your monitor models than to robustly prove trustedness for every model you want to use. Therefore...