Sometimes I’m talking about lifting weights and someone asks me, “What’s your goal weight?” I don’t understand why I would have a goal weight.

Say I want to bench press 300 pounds. What happens when I reach 300? I just give up on the bench press now? That would be silly. If I can keep getting stronger, I should.

What happens if I fall short of my goal? Say I haven’t been able to bench more than 285.¹ Should I start eating 5000 calories a day to put on as much muscle as possible? No, I’m not going to do that, I don’t want to get fat. Realistically, if I fall short of my goal, the answer to the question of what I should change is “nothing”.

The point of a goal is to make tradeoffs between objectives. But when you set goals, you have less information about your costs than when you’re trying to implement them. At implementation time, you have new information that might change how you prioritize things, which may result in failing to achieve a goal; and that’s perfectly fine.

Sometimes a goal turns out to be easier than you thought; that doesn’t mean you should give up after you achieve it.

Sometimes a goal turns out to be harder than you thought; that doesn’t mean you should sacrifice everything else for it.

Continue reading

A curiosity stopper is an answer to a question that gets you to stop asking questions, but doesn’t resolve the mystery.

There are some curiosity stoppers that I’ve heard many times:

• Why doesn’t cell phone radiation cause cancer? Because it’s non-ionizing radiation.
• Why are antioxidants good for you? Because they eliminate free radicals.
• Why do bicycles stay upright? Because of gyroscopic forces.
• Why do solids hold together? Because of intermolecular forces of attraction.

For the first three, those answers confused me because I didn’t know what those words meant. I guess I know what an ion is (it’s an atom with an electrical charge) but why do I care whether radiation is ionizing? And what makes radiation ionizing or non-ionizing?

What’s a free radical? Why is it bad?

What’s a gyroscopic force? (What even is a gyroscope? It’s some sort of top, right?) How on earth does a bicycle generate a gyroscopic force?

The fourth curiosity stopper—”intermolecular forces of attraction”—is even more of a non-answer. Of course solids hold together because a force holds them together. That’s what a force is. But what is the force, and where does it come from?

Another genre of curiosity stopper is the out-of-context number:

• “The Dow is down 600 points today.” (How much is that?)
• “My proposed policy will create two million jobs.” (What percentage is that? What are the odds that I, personally, get a new job?)
• “This product has 7 grams of protein per serving!” (How big is a serving? How much would I need to eat to meet my daily protein requirement?)

Answers (sort of)

Continue reading

Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I’m doing it again this year.

Continue reading

Vizzini: Inconceivable!

Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

What did Inigo mean by this?

(Don’t laugh, this is serious.)

Continue reading

Introduction

Even if we solve the AI alignment problem, we still face non-alignment problems, which are all the other existential problems¹ that AI may bring.

People have written research agendas on various imposing problems that we are nowhere close to solving, and that we may need to solve before developing ASI. An incomplete list of topics: misuse; animal-inclusive AI; AI welfare; S-risks from conflict; gradual disempowerment; risks from malevolent actors; moral error.

The standard answer to these problems, the one that most research agendas take for granted, is “do research”. Specifically, do research in the conventional way where you create a research agenda, explore some research questions, and fund other people to work on those questions.

If transformative AI arrives within the next decade, then we won’t solve non-alignment problems by doing research on how to solve them.

Continue reading

Previously, I reviewed the five strongest studies on protest outcomes and concluded that peaceful protests probably work (credence: 90%).

But what about disruptive or violent protests?

Peaceful protests use nonviolent, non-disruptive tactics such as picketing and marches.

Disruptive protests use nonviolent, in-your-face tactics such as civil disobedience, sit-ins, and blocking roads.

Violent protests use violence.

There isn’t much evidence on the other two categories of protest. My best guesses are:

• Violent protests probably don’t work. (credence: 80%)
• Violent protests may reduce support for a cause, but it’s unclear. (credence: 40%)
• For disruptive protests, it’s hard to say whether they have a positive or negative impact on balance. I’m about evenly split on whether a randomly-chosen disruptive protest is net helpful, neutral, or harmful.
• A typical disruptive protest doesn’t work as well a typical peaceful protest. (credence: 80%)
• Peaceful protests are a better idea than disruptive protests. (credence: 90%)

Continue reading

Classically, according to the Abrahamic religions, God is a man.

According to some more recent depictions, God is a woman. Which is a nice subversion.

But like, y’all are both a bit crazy. If there is an omnipotent Creator of the universe, then it definitely doesn’t have a gender.

When people call God “he” or “she”, this is what they’re saying happened:

Continue reading

An investor is considering putting her money into a mutual fund. “I will just invest some money for the next six months,” she says, “and see how it goes.”

A philanthropist is considering donating to a charity. “I will donate some money and see how it goes.”

Harvard University is considering whether SAT scores are all that important for admissions. “Let’s make SAT scores optional and see what happens.”

A child climbs to the top of a slide and is about to jump off the edge. “Don’t jump off of that,” his mom says, “you’ll get hurt.” He jumps off the slide. He gets hurt.

Not-invented-here syndrome is when an organization unnecessarily re-invents products or tools that already exist elsewhere. The cousin of this phemonenon is not-discovered-here syndrome, in which people refuse to consider evidence unless they’ve collected it themselves.

“A wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.” Not-discovered-here syndrome is what happens when you insist on making mistakes for yourself.

Continue reading

One day, I was at my grandma’s house reading the Sunday funny pages, when I suddenly felt myself getting sucked into a Garfield comic.

Continue reading

If we are correct about the laws of physics, then ghosts can’t exist. But some people are insistent that they’ve directly interacted with ghosts. Is there a way ghosts could exist if we modified the laws of physics a bit?

Continue reading