Podcast Episodes
Back to Search"Yes, It's Subjective, But Why All The Crabs?" by johnswentworth
Some early biologist, equipped with knowledge of evolution but not much else, might see all these crabs and expect a common ancestral lineage. That’s…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Self-driving car bets" by paulfchristiano
This month I lost a bunch of bets.
Back in early 2016 I bet at even odds that self-driving ride sharing would be available in 10 US cities by July 202…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born" by Henrik Karlsson
In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders woul…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Rationality !== Winning" by Raemon
I think "Rationality is winning" is a bit of a trap.
(The original phrase is notably "rationality is systematized winning", which is better, but it t…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Brain Efficiency Cannell Prize Contest Award Ceremony" by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
Previously Jacob Cannell wrote the post "Brain Efficiency" which makes several radical claims: that the brain is at the pareto frontier of speed, ene…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Grant applications and grand narratives" by Elizabeth
The Lightspeed application asks: “What impact will [your project] have on the world? What is your project’s goal, how will you know if you’ve achiev…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Cryonics and Regret" by MvB
This post is not about arguments in favor of or against cryonics. I would just like to share a particular emotional response of mine as the topic bec…
2 years, 10 months ago
"Unifying Bargaining Notions (2/2)" by Diffractor
Alright, time for the payoff, unifying everything discussed in the previous post. This post is a lot more mathematically dense, you might want to dig…
2 years, 11 months ago
"The ants and the grasshopper" by Richard Ngo
Inspired by Aesop, Soren Kierkegaard, Robin Hanson, sadoeuphemist and Ben Hoffman.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony o…
2 years, 11 months ago
"Steering GPT-2-XL by adding an activation vector" by TurnTrout et al.
Summary: We demonstrate a new scalable way of interacting with language models: adding certain activation vectors into forward passes. Essentially, w…
3 years ago