“(1) we don’t know what is going on in LLMs (2) it’s outlandish to say that LLMs have no understanding of the world” both claims cannot be true

it’s really funny when people tag jimmy wales on twitter when they don’t like some of the content on wikipedia. it’s like someone would tag Nat Friedman when they find a bug in a program hosted there

but also the amount of time a broken clock is right has measure zero

in deontic logic, is ~obligation(~x)=permission(x)?

philosophical technique: A is X, B is Y, but there is a continuous transformation from A to B, but there isn’t from X to Y, where does the switch occur?

I really enjoy the portray of conseqduentialism in the SEP article on deontology: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/

philosophytube followers be pondering the impossibility of white bears in novaya semlya

tbh whenever someone is like “the existing arguments for agi xrisk were insufficient/unclear, here’s my better version” the arguments read exactly the same to me as the existing ones.

Zeynep’s razor (second-order effects): https://nitter.net/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353?lang=en

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7dRGYDqA2z6Zt7Q4h/goals-for-which-less-wrong-does-and-doesn-t-help?commentId=CRMuTvT8sYEYgddME this is just 80k hours. how did they know

Prediction: I will not like the Philosophy Tube Video about Effective Altruism

Daniel Wingman

TIL: gwern has met Jürgen Habermas in person: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DXcezGmnBcAYL2Y2u/yes-a-blog?commentId=nhpQK5787tMoaYDWp

Unlikely events can be good, likely events can be bad.

“I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do that, so we should punish it” is a beautiful warning sign (milder form is “I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do that, so nobody should even try”)

i am looking forward to seeing whether aliens similarly have two sexes, and whether they roughly split up by “sex that does the investing in the offspring” and “sex that provides a lot of variation in mating success”

google maps as a dating app

“But I’d love to be pinned down” — Toby Ord (The Precipice p. 397)

Reading The Precipice & struck by the fact that it was released before GPT-3, just as COVID-19 was ramping up. Pretty insane

“sorry dude, you have vingean uncertainty over the EA community”

critiques of effective altruism in the form “effective altruism isn’t blue/green enough” are really boring, and likely wrong

I need to learn how to crash dates that are going nowhere with way too much escalation. That should be fun

nofap promises so much and in the end just makes my balls ache a bit

tbh i can understand why people dislike Pinker so much—he’s usually right, but he so unfathomably smug about everything

aviation safety is a small shard of dath ilan that fell into our world

rapidly oscillating between nibbanic zero-ontology and plotinian “badness is non-being” views

help

I’m rapidly flip-flopping between believing that I’m extremely autistic and believing that everyone else is autistic compared to me

In this House — We might fail, but never with abandon — Every moment is fresh, unimpeded by the one before — We remove as many obligations as we add — There is something to protect, something to give everything for — Tsuyoku Naritai!

why does meditation make me so horny & temporarily relieve me of erectile dysfunction?

why is >80% of the most read literotica content incest related?

the last century was wild: “Her love of tennis included playing naked, with nude tennis ‘a common practice in those days among the more louche members of the middle classes’”, from the Wikipedia article on Enid Blyton.

pareto improvement: instead of letting students write bachelors/masters theses that are basically just literature reviews, let them rewrite the respective wikipedia articles instead (and then check the article)

gotta get a child with cancer to wish for a tiling-stable subagent-persistent otherizer idiom

another paper which relies on questionnaires for attention span. am i going crazy? how is this a good metric‽

My Generation — The Who (Eurobeat Remix)

noone told me that you can get basically free tutoring from professors during so-called office hours‽

Julius Caesar Scaliger pre-empted Scott Alexanders solution to theodicy: in his view god had created every being that would add more good than not to the cosmos

schelling.party

analogue players link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB3Oj00p83Q

i want that bear onesie

proposal: ability to sort posts on forum magnum by length

Sauerkraut: The German Kimchi

how much programmer activity is spent writing new code vs. debugging existing code?

concept: Codex but fine-tuned on ticket description & diff pairs, for debugging instead of new code.

THE ACTOR OF THE MAIN CHARACTER FROM VGHS MARRIED THE ACTRESS PLAYING HIS LOVE INTEREST

arrière and derrière having the same meaning is just such a thing

of course the Soviet Union failed—they didn’t have computers yet!

computational complexity theory of self-modifying code. probably not good for execution speed, but great for code size.