Links for 2022-06-15
“Progress on AI alignment: we've created an AI system which can write a critique of a short story summary, successfully helping humans find hidden flaws (a task that takes humans ~10 minutes).” https://openai.com/blog/critiques/
“AGI alignment is Hard in ways many other scientific problems aren't, and it's important to be clear about one’s assumptions.” — Epistemological Vigilance for Alignment https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/72scWeZRta2ApsKja/epistemological-vigilance-for-alignment
“Deeper and comparatively much less explored is the unpredictable ability of GPT-3 to learn new tasks by just seeing a few examples, without any training/backpropagation – the so called in-context learning (sometimes called metalearning)…I decided to investigate whether GPT-3 could fit numerical models in-context.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c2RzFadrxkzyRAFXa/who-models-the-models-that-model-models-an-exploration-of
Some fascinating stats about timelines of novel technologies in this post: Contra EY: “The iPod, which took 290 days between the first designs and the device being launched to Apple stores.” — Can AGI destroy us without trial & error? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qfDgEreMoSEtmLTws/contra-ey-can-agi-destroy-us-without-trial-and-error
Two simple antennas can protect computer hardware against physical manipulation https://www.mpg.de/18787930/hardware-attack-cyber-security
Glyphosate not carcinogenic, says EU chemicals agency https://www.politico.eu/article/glyphosate-not-carcinogenic-says-eu-chemicals-agency/
Sex differences in academic achievement and school attitudes are: ✅Found internationally ✅Strong enough to correctly predict the sex of 2/3 of teenagers ✅Larger in more egalitarian countries (exactly the opposite of what feminist theory predicts) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101453
Space-Based Solar Power Plants Could Soon Be a Thing https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/space-based-solar-power-plants-could-soon-be-a-thing/
Video recording of the second attempted coup in Venezuela in 1992 where. An F-16 shoots down an OV-10 Bronco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6Xw8e7lFi8
That the environmental assessment for Musk's Starship took years is a grueling abomination.
Billions of animals are killed per year for the sole pleasure of eating meat and some bureaucrats are concerned that hatching turtles are disturbed by rocket launches? SpaceX is working to make humanity a spacefaring civilization.
From the perspective of our intergalactic descendants, some fucking turtles are completely and utterly irrelevant. They are no more than a few organic compounds in the primordial soup that is earth whereas space colonization is the abiogenesis process itself.
Any action that doesn't directly contribute to lighting the spark of virtually all life in the universe will be as irrelevant to our descendants as small perturbations in the primordial soup are to us.
This kind of irrational environmentalism is one of the four great scourges of mankind (anti-nuclear; anti-GMO (golden rice etc.); slowing down economic growth; preventing, delaying, and making important infrastructure projects massively more expensive via insane environmental impact assessments; …;). The others are dogmatic bioethics (preventing human challenge trials; preventing people from trying experimental drugs; preventing animal testing on non-human primates; …;), regressive social justice, and crippling bureaucracy.