I recently have been searching for jobs, and the process seems extremely annoying and inefficient. Students have a separate, long interviewing process for each company, in which over half the time is spent on things that aren’t company-specific. (And I suspect most interviews are terrible screens anyways). Companies impose short deadlines in order to gain leverage, despite the fact that everyone graduates in seasons. Negotiation has a huge amount of social friction. Because things happen asynchronously, the resulting matching isn’t necessarily even any good.
I went to the Singularity Summit this year, primarily to meet interesting/smart people. I also attended about half of the talks, and the videos are finally up. Here are my thoughts on the ones I liked most:
- Jaan Tallin’s talk is super interesting, well-illustrated, and, considering the topic, audience-friendly. Unfortunately, the video online doesn’t show all of his slides and animation, which were delightful. The motivation for his talk is that we should be surprised that we appear to be on the verge of a singularity (supposing we believe that we are). He proposes an anthropic explanation for this: super-intelligences tend to simulate pre-singularity moments often (using a DFS-like algorithm), in order to see what other singularities look like (perhaps to find an intelligence to converse with). I don’t find his argument that compelling, for a couple of reasons, but the talk is nevertheless fascinating and aesthetically pleasing.
- Robin Hanson’s talk is also extremely interesting. He describes a particular era of a future with emulations – the very early stage, before there is self modification, super-organisms, etc. and things get much harder to analyze. Trying to reason carefully in this world is an admirable goal and he does a great job, but I think the era he describes would be extremely brief (and not really exist as he describes it). I also disagree with some aspects of his analysis – mainly the social/cultural things, like leisure (music, art) and relationships.
- Julia Galef on the rationality movement and Linda Avey on personalized genomics and medicine. Pretty good talks about less interesting/far-out topics, but both things which I think are really important. Julia gives a sort of hodge-podge of examples of how rationality is helpful (describing it sort of as breaking free from the chains of our genes), and briefly argues for CFAR’s cause of building a community around these ideas. Very familiar stuff, if you’ve already thought about these sorts of things. Linda has a Q&A, where she talks about her new company, which will hope to really leverage data about health and medicine, and a bunch of related topics. Interesting to me throughout, since I didn’t know much about this sort of thing.
I claim three things:
- Many people who profess some degree of altruism are not being very effective, despite their good intentions.
- Regardless of how ineffective their past decisions were, they can still make a huge difference, by joining the “effective altruism” movement and spreading the message.
- Even for those who are only slightly altruistic, it seems good to spend a small amount of time to help spread the word.
Another round of links, because the internet generates interesting content much faster than I do:
- Take this short auditory test!
- Robin Hanson vs. Eliezer Yudkowsky: Would an AI “foom” be local? I have updated in Robin Hanson’s direction, generally.
- Consider using this to generate passwords. See a good discussion of this here.
- Hilarious twitter account
- Vinod Khosla saying some things that should be said
- I recently stumbled upon skeptics.stackexchange.com, which seems like a pretty good community. I’m glad this site exists, though many questions aren’t very interesting, and I’m still skeptical about the content in many of the answers… I like this as a quick way of getting reasonable answers to health questions. Here is an interesting question about college costs. A breakdown by major would be more interesting, and an adjustment for natural ability, somehow, as well.
I often feel like I’m much wiser than the me from a year ago. This could be because I’ve always been arrogant, or misjudge my past self, or particularly notice the things currently on my mind. But optimistically (or, arrogantly), it’s because I’ve learned a lot from my experiences or from more careful thought. If you don’t feel like this, you might want to consider why. Is it because you refuse to update? Or are you really that good at induction?
This also makes me sympathetic to people who seem to think silly things. You should too, I reckon. Things always seem far more obvious after you’ve thought of them. Of course, it could be simply that you’re smarter than them. But you should at least think of your past self as silly, also.
In particular, I suspect I’ll often find my old posts somewhat silly. Indeed, my opinions on some of the posted topics have already changed. But hopefully, that won’t happen for this one. (If so, forgive me, future self, for being so silly!)
- Interesting debate. Not sure who I agree with (or to what extents I agree with which person). Or maybe that just means I agree a little bit with both of them…
- Organism’s entire life cycle simulated by software. Sounds like potentially big news, though I’m not sure exactly what it means. At any rate, my timelines for this sort of thing have decreased slightly now…
- Great post on overreacting to rare risks, after the fact. Reminds me of when people lose a loved one to a rare disease, and decide then that it’s cure is a very important cause to support. Of course, this sort of behavior does lead to many people supporting common diseases, which is good. But when we have the data, we should evaluate based on whether things are likely to happen, not whether they did happen. Everyone should care about the most common/impactful diseases in the first place, not only those who witnessed its impact, and everyone shouldn’t care much about rare diseases, even those who witnessed its impact.
- This question was mentioned to me in my college interview for MIT. It’s intuitive that it’s good to go at the speed of the wind, when the wind goes in the right direction, and I mentioned this back then. I remember being unsure for when it was going in the wrong direction (even just for the 2D case), or falling straight down. Sounds like the other cases aren’t that easy, and depend on the parameters more. Anyways, I hate getting wet, and I don’t mind running, so I think I’ll run quickly in situations like this. (I’d guess I’m not sufficiently thin to make that non-optimal, in most situations.)
- How secure is your password? Dumb but amusing site, mainly for seeing the number of years grow. I’m guessing it simply checks whether the password is common, and otherwise uses its length. Perhaps don’t actually enter in your password…
I haven’t actually watched the Olympics except in passing, but here are some thoughts.
Solutions (due to discussions with my MIT friends, especially Paul Christiano) proposed to the question in the previous post:
What is the most number of points, in a solo Dominion game with infinite access to all cards, one can obtain on turn n, asymptotically?
This post will only be accessible to those who play Dominion, and those with some background in asymptotics.
We study the following question. What is the most number of points, in a solo Dominion game with infinite access to all cards, one can obtain on turn n, asymptotically?
Solutions given in my next post.
Read more…
- New York City life expectancies go up fast. Interesting. Obviously is not directly related to Bloomberg’s ban, although I’m very curious what the real reason is (and will probably never get an answer). To me, the ban seems a bit over-protective, but I might be underestimating its effect.
- Do people drink to lower standards? I believe it, but only to a small extent. It certainly seems true that drinking often lets people lower standards for attractiveness, and for humor. But people obviously drink primarily for other reasons. Pretty interesting, still. And is lowering standards bad? Is it bad to eat chocolate if it lowers your happiness standards?
- A post I really like about people and having different values. I have thought many of the same things and tried to adopt a similar philosophy. Even then, the ideas are well-written in this post, and it was worth my time to read.
- Games are a nice simple setting for studying markets. Hilarious things can happen, though. I guess things like this happen in the real economy too, but I don’t understand as well.
- Amusing video about uploads. Not sure how much I agree with all their points, but still a very interesting video.
Glob of Thoughts 