Links for 2022-02-14
'2022 AGI Safety Fundamentals alignment curriculum' by Richard Ngo https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mTm_sT2YQx3mRXQD6J2xD2QJG1c3kHyvX8kQc_IQ0ns/edit
“We present the Neuro-stack, a wearable platform for intracranial stimulation & recording of single-neuron & local field potential activity in freely-moving humans” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.05.479253v1
“Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/08/andrew-yang-boys-are-not-all-right/
For people in wealthy countries, organic food is an expensive status symbol. For Sri Lanka, it has been a national catastrophe https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-for-canada-organic-food-is-an-expensive-status-symbol-for-sri-lanka/
GMO crops can contribute significantly to climate change mitigation. https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/fulltext/S1360-1385(22)00004-8
Benefits attributed to organic farming not supported by evidence. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814622003144?via%3Dihub
A “textbook” of neural differential equations https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.02435
What would a language specifically optimized for big deep learning models look like? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FKE6cAzQxEK4QH9fC/qnr-prospects-are-important-for-ai-alignment-research
Learning Performance of Prediction Markets with Kelly Bettors https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.6655
“In complex environments, long delays between causes and effects make separating skill from luck difficult. To tackle this problem, counterfactual credit assignment (CCA) learns to condition the value function on relevant future information.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.09464
"when deciding on behalf of clients, [finance] professionals' decision-making quality does not significantly differ from their clients', neither when compensated with a fixed payment nor when facing aligned incentives." http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inn:wpaper:2022-02&r=&r=exp
“A Fields Medal (the highest honor in mathematics) indicates two things about the recipient: that he was capable of accomplishing something important, and that he didn't.”
― Nick Bostrom quoting a colleague in his book Superintelligence
“I sometimes worry that the world’s best minds are hooked on what are essentially glorified crossword puzzles, since the interestingness of problems scales with features not very correlated with their importance.”
― Amanda Askell
To master the many challenges of a hostile universe we need to become more cautious about the precautionary principle.
Whether it is nuclear power, genetically modified crops, glyphosate, or vaccination, the precautionary principle is killing lots of people in expectation.
Civilizations that are too cautious won't be able to reach technological escape velocity and instead go extinct.
P.S. There are, of course, some things we should be more cautious about than we currently are, such as artificial general intelligence and gain-of-function research.