Misalignment and misuse: whose values are manifest? Nov 13, 2020

AI related disasters are often categorized as involving misaligned AI, or misuse, or accident. Where:

• misuse means the bad outcomes were wanted by the people involved,
• misalignment means the bad outcomes were wanted by AI (and not by its human creators), and
• accident means that the bad outcomes were not wanted by those in power but happened anyway due to error.

In thinking about specific scenarios, these concepts seem less helpful.

Migraine basket Nov 12, 2020

I get migraines about once a week. They aren’t as bad as migraines are classically understood to be—in fact they always start out pretty mild—but they sometimes become terrible by the evening.

While there are always various things I could do to improve such situations, I have often failed to do them promptly. Which seems pretty weird, but I suppose I am not at my most energetic and mentally functional. Also, none of the interventions I know of actually resolve migraines instantaneously, so my sense that I should for instance take painkillers is more of an intellectual one than a felt urge. And I think suffering drains my interest in upholding vague intellectual senses that I should do things. Then even if I did remember, it’s a further effort to even recall what else might be good, let alone go and find the relevant objects.

I have improved this a fair bit with a retrospectively obvious innovation: the migraine basket.

And you'll never hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon Nov 11, 2020

Over toothbrushing tonight, my boyfriend and I analyzed the song ‘Colors of the Wind’, from Pocahontas, which we had just listened to in curiosity over Roger Ebert’s claim that The Hunchback of Notre Dame has a better message than Pocahontas.

A pair of lines that caught my attention were:

‘Come roll in all the riches all around you And for once, never wonder what they’re worth’

This suggests that wondering what everything is worth negates what is valuable about it, which is to say, makes it worth less to you. Is it true that looking out for value like this is self-undermining? It sounds plausible to me, but why?

Tweet markets for impersonal truth tracking? Nov 09, 2020

Should social media label statements as false, misleading or contested?

Let’s approach it from the perspective of what would make the world best, rather than e.g. what rights do the social media companies have, as owners of the social media companies.

The basic upside seems to be that pragmatically, people share all kinds of false things on social media, and that leads to badness, and this slows that down.

On the fifth day of election Nov 09, 2020

I was woken yesterday by cheering and whooping in the streets.

(Which was overall great, though I think replacing the part of the day, [get enough sleep and then wake up and remember who you are and what you were doing and then do some familiar morning rituals while your brain warms up] with [abrupt emergence into city-wide celebration] was disorienting in a way that I failed to shake all day.)

After some music, Champagne, party hats, chatting with the housemates, and putting on our best red-white-and-blue outfits, my boyfriend and I set out for a walk in the city, tentatively toward b. patisserie, legendary and inconveniently distant producer of kouignoù amann.¹

Within a few blocks we found cars and pedestrians breaking into rounds of cheering and waving at each other, and a general sense that the whole street was a party to this. We still had our party hats, one with an American flag sticking out of the top, so there was no ambiguity for other street-goers about whether we were.

Where are the concept factories? Nov 08, 2020

Concepts are arguably critical to our success as humans, our recent success as rich and productive humans, and many of our individual successes at whatever we each individually do.

Why don’t we produce them in an industrial fashion?

Calling it Nov 07, 2020

In an atmosphere of general thirst for someone calling something, I’ll call some stuff.

In my experience and current judgment:

The best non-inert art is the musical Hamilton

The best place in the San Francisco Bay Area is the Essex Hot Tub, and the best place near it is Bodega Bay

The best undergraduate degree to wish you had done is computer science

Why Trump? A survey Nov 06, 2020

It felt strange going into this US election so hopeful for Biden to win while so at a loss regarding why comparably many Americans were badly hoping for the opposite. I heard people speculating about the possible motives, and I considered plausible steelmen. But why should I be guessing about what half of people think? I figured out how to survey some Americans beyond my vicinity.

Everyone headed to win Nov 05, 2020

Last night I was especially curious about why people vote as they do, and whether they were experiencing the election similarly to me. So I set up a survey in Positly and paid a bunch of people to tell me about such things.

I haven’t read all of the responses yet, but a notable feature of them so far is the extent to which people expected their own favorite candidate to win the presidency. If someone said both who they voted for (or would vote for if forced to vote) and who they thought would win, these were the same person 87% of the time.

Is this just ‘wishful thinking’ (whatever that is) or some more interesting phenomenon?

Election night Nov 04, 2020

Earlier in the evening, I reasoned that I should not ‘watch’ the election, since I will learn the result in the end and experiencing the uncertainty in the meantime doesn’t seem productive at all, let alone competitive with other things I could do.

This attitude somehow felt unfriendly though, or like being the kind of spoilsport who says ‘there is no reason to celebrate Christmas, or to celebrate anything for that matter’—both failing to add to the fun, and implicitly asking others to defend their own enthusiasm.