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I really need a short word for "complicatedly in favor of" Effective altruism, culture war, short stories, fun.
If you're a kid like me, most kids have probably never heard of contra
dancing before. You're probably wondering: contra dance -- what's
that? Contra dancing is in some ways similar to square dancing. It's
a group dance with a caller and a live band. When you think of
dancing you probably think of rock and roll or pop or something, but
no. It's folk music. If you are interested in learning more about
that, whether you're a grown up or a kid, you can try out contra
danci… You can now view the source file for any blog post on my site by replacing the trailing slash with .txt in the URL. For example, the source file for this post is available here. You can also replace the trailing slash with the original file extension of the source. Most of my blog posts are composed in Markdown, so the extension will usually be .md, but my setup also supports the occasional .ojs (for Observable notebooks) or .html post. But .txt will always work.
I really like the idea of source…
Now that I’m taking more photos again, I’ve resurrected my Flickr account to share them! I considered a number of options for sharing my photos:
I quickly decided to avoid the tech behemoths Meta and Google.¹
That avoidance notwithstanding, my existing Instagram account wouldn’t work anyway since I do share the occasional photo there, but it’s not the right place for sharing or perusing large albums, e.g., 171 photos from a week at camp.
A number of people made good suggestions to me on Ma… Over the spring and into the summer of this year, I took lots of photos with a Nikon D70. When I wrote about this in April I was trying to decide
if I could take better photos with the D70 than I could with my smartphone, and
if I was interested enough in photography to invest more deeply in it as a hobby.
Over the course of the spring and summer, my skill with the camera improved somewhat and I became more confident that, in favorable circumstances (outdoor light, scenarios where focusing wasn’t … Life for an American family in 1860s China
The post Two 19th-century missionary memoirs in China appeared first on Otherwise.
In favor of philosophical argumentation You’ve started a project or company. Great idea, great team, you’re cranking away. Build a prototype, work on acquiring the key partnerships, figure out launch planning, get a few initial users… simple enough right?
About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a word guessing game based on word clues, a teammate suggested that, based on the physical layout of the words that had been selected, most of the possibilities we were considering would result in patterns that were … Getting to "good enough"
The post Relaxing my standards on housekeeping appeared first on Otherwise.
Giving up control over choices that don't belong to me
The post Children’s appearance is over-controlled appeared first on Otherwise.
A method for not sweating the small stuff
The post Tool: “Is this causing a problem?” appeared first on Otherwise.
overall direction • people management • project management • technical leadership • example divisions of labor non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust Helping kids learn to climb things that are at the edge of their ability
The post Coaching kids as they learn to climb appeared first on Otherwise.
There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in the LLM and generative AI case when compared to "classical" bugs in cases where there's a clear bug. In particular, if you look at forums or other discussions with lay people, people frequently deny that a model which produces output that's sort of the opposite of what the user a…
From 2011-2012, the FTC investigated the possibility of pursuing antitrust action against Google. The FTC decided to close the investigation and not much was publicly known about what happened until Politico released 312 pages of internal FTC memos that from the investigation a decade later. As someone who works in tech, on reading the memos, the most striking thing is how one side, the side that argued to close the investigation, repeatedly displays a lack of basic understanding of tech indust… After 7 years at Deep End (and 4 more years in other group houses before that), Janos and I have moved out to live near a school we like and some lovely parks. The life change is bittersweet – we will miss living with our friends, but also look forward to a logistically simpler life […] I posted a postmortem of a community I worked to help build, Clarendon, in Cambridge MA, over at Supernuclear.
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't usable for people with slow internet, but the exponential increase in bandwidth (Nielsen suggests this is 50% per year for high-end connections) has outpaced web bloat for…
I'm lying in bed, pleasantly sleeping when it's supposed to be 6am.
Then my alarm goes off. Later, at school, I am very tired. Why do
you think this is? This is all the fault of daylight savings time.
Daylight savings time is a thing the government does so that in the
summer we have daylight in the evenings but in the winter it's light
out when kids are walking to school. They think it probably wouldn't
be fun to walk to school in the dark. For the record, I think it
would be ve…
When the nurse comes to give you the flu shot, they say it won't hurt
at all, right? And you trust them. Then they give you the shot, and it
hurts! They lied to you. A lot of nurses lie to children about shots
and blood draws.
Part of it is they probably don't remember what it's like to be a kid
about to get a shot. But also they kind of have to do whatever they
can to convince the children to let them give them the shot.
When they lie to kids, the next time that happens the kids won'… budget 2+ hours to build • think ahead about follow-ups and rubric • focus on a small number of skills • dig into details • make yourself a rubric
If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my local reputable electronics shop (Memory Express, B&H Photo, etc.), I trust my local reputable electronics shop more. Not only are they less likely to sell me a counte… I wrote ~2 years ago that it was hard to find concrete ways to help the most important century go well. That’s changing. I designed a puzzle for family for Christmas! This was designed to be solved in-person, but blog readers can solve it too (mostly – some pieces weren’t particularly web-friendly). I also wrote my notes below about how I designed it and what I learned. But first: This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and draw conclusions from my life tracking data. Overall, this year went pretty well (and definitely better than the previous two). Highlights include a second kid, hiking in […] Last year, a major focus of my research was developing a better understanding of threat models for AI risk. This post is looking back at some posts on threat models I (co)wrote in 2022 (based on my reviews of these posts for the LessWrong 2022 review). I ran a survey on DeepMind alignment team opinions […] This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. I sat down for a conversation with Alex Long. He took notes and sent them to me, and it seemed worth lightly-editing the notes and posting. I’ve left it quite raw, more like a tweet thread than a proper blog post.
One day my dad was reading this book called the "Going to Bed Book" to
my sister Nora. The book is
basically about a bunch of animals who are getting ready for bed on a
boat. They go down the stairs, take a bath, hang their towels on the
wall, find their pajamas, brush their teeth, go up and exercise, then
go down again and fall asleep.
But I noticed there was a big problem: my whole life everyone has been
telling me "don't exercise before bed". The reason you shouldn't
exer… Public discussions about catastrophic risks from general AI systems are often derailed by using the word “intelligence”. People often have different definitions of intelligence, or associate it with concepts like consciousness that are not relevant to AI risks, or dismiss the risks because intelligence is not well-defined. I would advocate for using the term “capabilities” […]
I first started playing fiddle when I was five, just around my
birthday. I had really wanted a fiddle because I wanted to learn how
to play it and my parents got me one for my birthday so I started
taking lessons. Though after a couple of lessons I started to find it
more and more boring and at the time I wasn't really prepared for my
fingers to hurt when I did it, so I didn't really like it that much
and also overall I think that probably starting from that age wasn't
the best idea. … I posted this on the Effective Altruism forum as part of the EA Strategy Fortnight. I’m cross posting it here. the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking AI alignment work is usually considered “longtermist”, which is about preserving humanity’s long-term potential. This was the primary motivation for this work when the alignment field got started around 20 years ago, and general AI seemed far away or impossible to most people in AI. However, given the current rate of progress towards advanced AI […] Early signs of catastrophic risk? Yes and no. Governments could be crucial in the long run, but it's probably best to proceed with caution. Major AI companies can increase or reduce global catastrophic risks. People are far better at their jobs than at anything else. Here are the best ways to help the most important century go well. love for Wave • why leave • where to • why there • what’s next
For Christmas I got a really fun kit about rainbows. It had a rainbow
catcher, a really cool necklace, a streamer thingy, and it also had a
really really cool pinwheel, and it also had a bracelet and a pinata.
Unfortunately the pinata didn't work out that well. I didn't make the
bracelet yet. The pinata just didn't fall apart when we hit it. We
had to take it apart with our hands to get it open.
It even had a really really fun part. Actually, it wasn't really that
fun. It did m…
I went to a farm and at the farm I got to see a corncrib and the corn
that had fell out of the corncrib that no one wanted I got to use my
fingers to take off the corn kernels and once the cobs were empty I
put them in a bag and then once I got back to the house I was staying
in I ate dinner and I got to work with a few pencils some tape and some
paper and some markers and I used some of the markers to make the eyes
and mouth but I didn't want to add a nose so what I did was I made
little pink s…
I really like going in the water and this beach is a great place for
building sand castles and boogie boarding. I also like trying to
float on top of big waves. I'm not very good at it. I only float on
the flat waves.
I love England. Especially because of the big castle called Buckingham
Palace. I got to see the outside there, but my mom showed me some
pictures of the inside. I love it there. But the outside doesn't look
very fancy to me. But I never knew why those people wear big bear skin
black poofy hats.
There are many big buildings here. A lot of them are skyscrapers. And,
there's lots of old buildings here. Like, buildings from long
ago. Like, ones that Romans built! One of them is even a castle. It's
pretty fun here, and it barely ever snows here. So there's always
pretty flowers here. And there's even palm trees.
Contra Scott Alexander On Apologies
Linkpost for September
Don't Help Kids With Contra Dancing If They Don't Need Help
Making blog post source files available with 11ty
Resurrecting My Flickr Account
Some Favorite D70 Shots Spring 2024
Two 19th-century missionary memoirs in China
Book Review: The Science of Evil
When it gets complicated is when your impact is spiking
How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
Relaxing my standards on housekeeping
Children’s appearance is over-controlled
Tool: “Is this causing a problem?”
Categories of leadership on technical teams
Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly
Coaching kids as they learn to climb
A discussion of discussions on AI bias
What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation
Moving on from community living
Clarendon Postmortem
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
Why We Shouldn't Have Daylight Savings Time
When Nurses Lie to You
How I build and run behavioral interviews
Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
Good job opportunities for helping with the most important century
Solve My Mini Puzzle Hunt
2023-24 New Year review
Retrospective on my posts on AI threat models
My first brush with covid
11ty and Observable
My startup advice
A Big Problem With The Going To Bed Book
When discussing AI risks, talk about capabilities, not intelligence
Fiddle
Why altruists can’t have nice things
Some mistakes I made as a new manager
Near-term motivation for AI alignment
What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?
How major governments can help with the most important century
What AI companies can do today to help with the most important century
Jobs that can help with the most important century
Leaving Wave, joining Anthropic
My Rainbow Kit
Corncob Dolls
On the Beach
Buckingham Palace
I Love England