What type of support feels most enjoyable/meaningful to give?
Sometimes friends ask how to support us. Realistically, there are a lot of helpful things people could do, if they wanted to. And this is kind of a long-term Situation we're going through.
Our main goal is just maintaining fun, mutually supportive relationships with people, despite being in a strange and isolating situation. So I think I wanna tailor my "things you could do for us" suggestions to be enjoyable!
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man, dancing is great, I am glad the bay has so much of it
don't get to do it nearly as much now that I get up at 6am (for the child) but it's always worth it when I do
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More AXRP! Joel Lehman!
Typically this podcast talks about how to avert destruction from AI. But what would it take to ensure AI promotes human flourishing as well as it can? Is alignment to individuals enough, and if not, where do we go form here? In this episode, I talk with Joel Lehman about these questions.
Misty morning at Lanhydrock. Cornwall, England. NMP
From: https://x.com/HoganSOG/status/1882211656283111582/photo/1
#art
Junichiro Sekino 1914-1988
Night in Kyoto
#art
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1882215670282166390
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Tanaka Ryōhei (1933-2019)
Crow and Persimmon in the Snow
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1881097630148907230/photo/1
#art
Adria on AXRP!
Yet another new episode!
Suppose we're worried about AIs engaging in long-term plans that they don't tell us about. If we were to peek inside their brains, what should we look for to check whether this was happening? In this episode Adrià Garriga-Alonso talks about his work trying to answer this question.
6 days!
I'm probably starting my sixth day of feeling a lot more normal, health-wise. (Don't know for sure til later in the day.)
I might have returned to the level of health I was at in mid Dec — which was concerningly-bad at the time, but things got significantly worse after that.
While I'm feeling better, I'm trying to un-decondition my body a bit. Strategy: Walk a few minutes, get tired, and then put myself in a quiet/dark/controlled/alone environment to conduct Optimal Rest
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the desire for portability is so that I can easily take it to and from work
I think for now I will try doing this with my existing keyboard but I suspect it will be annoying
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A partial list of people whose art I've loved, and who I might have liked to be friends with, but who I think would not like me very much (all for different reasons):
- Ursula K. LeGuin (I'm not MtG Green enough)
- Ayn Rand (I'm too MtG Green)
- Ezra Koenig (I'm too MtG Blue)
I'm not really sure how or why I generated this list. It feels related to the thing about wanting to get stronger, and deleting my facebook last month. It's kind of an "edge-y" question: I don't know how to emotionally deal with the existence of people in this category, but they go on existing.
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I feel like I'm living on the internet these days, since my health is too bad for in-person stuff. So it sucks that the internet is so much more aggro.
> My strategy so far in life has just been to avoid being the kind of person who attracts "sharp" / "angry" critics, and also to filter my social bubble to exclude them. But this doesn't scale if you're trying to do the things I'm trying to do.
What are you doing that is incompatible with filtering your social bubble?
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Re: method "c": I'm wondering if you could intentionally give yourself exposure to critics in a way that's less vulnerable. The most obvious ways to do this might be too insincere for your taste, but idk, maybe there's still something you can do?
Like if I were trying to do this, I might create an anonymous account and intentionally share my most controversial (yet unimportant) thoughts/opinions, in places where some people will probably get mad at me. (Hopefully not in a way that, like, antagonizes people? I'd want it to be net good.) Then I'd try to lean into a mindset that getting criticism is a necessary/normal part of getting noticed.
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The raddest palindrome I have ever written
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current progress on Bluesky OAuth login for my web app:
- you give me your Bluesky handle
- I have two methods of turning this into your DID, one via DNS and one via HTTP. I try both and use whichever works.
- Now I have your DID, I need to go get your DID document. There's more than one type of DID, but so far I've only bothered to support one, which I just fetch from the directory.
- Now I have your DID document, I can look up what your PDS is.
- Now I have your PDS, I can ask it where the authorization servers are.
- Now I've got an authorization server, I can ask it for the authorization server endpoints.
- Now I think I can start the OAuth process?
- It's not like the OAuth process is simple either
😵💫
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I never want to go viral — well, unless I figure out how to become comfortable with getting a ton of mean comments from strangers. It seems like this happens basically no matter what you go viral for.
Like, the mob will be much more aggro if you're viral for something controversial. But even the most innocuous things will attract lots of mean comments, if enough people see it.
And people are biased to weight negative comments more highly, so I worry this has a rough psychological impact even if there's a lot more support than there is hate. (Unsure about this though. Maybe that's not the case. And maybe people who go viral are more ok hearing insults than average?)
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So I've been listening to Hadestown 2010. One of my favorites is Hey, Little Songbird. It's just such a pushy, patient, practical, sinister vibe, and pushes the narrative forward at the same time.
Lyrically:
The extended bird metaphor is really fun. Especially with all these phrases that are flipped from their typical positive connotation.
"fly south for the winter" [south = the underworld]
"I could use a canary" [He wants a songbird for music, but this line comes right after a reference to "down in the mine"]
Structurally:
Whenever Hades comes back in after Eurydice's part, he overlaps on her last word, which adds to the pushy feel to the song. (Eurydice doesn't start singing till he's fully finished.) Also, Hades' part has this lovely AABBC structure. The extra C line on each stanza makes it feel like he's taking his time.
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Happy New AXRP!
Yet another in the Alignment Workshop series.
AI researchers often complain about the poor coverage of their work in the news media. But why is this happening, and how can it be fixed? In this episode, I speak with Shakeel Hashim about the resource constraints facing AI journalism, the disconnect between journalists' and AI researchers' views on transformative AI, and efforts to improve the state of AI journalism, such as Tarbell and Shakeel's newsletter, Transformer.
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Someone linked me to the article Against SQL recently and it resonates with me a lot. I have a temptation to write a new SQL-like relational query language that tries to fix as many of these problems as I can, but this seems unreasonably ambitious for someone whose background is not databases (and who already has like 3 personal projects ongoing...)
(To be clear, I think unreasonable ambition is sometimes commendable. But I want projects that I'll actually finish.)
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Idle thought: I wonder if we'll start seeing "training@home" training runs for open-source LLMs. Anyone care to run some numbers or sanity checks on whether this is possible in principle?
The folding@home project has been hugely successful, reaching at least exaFLOPS of compute.
"Training@home" would have to efficiently do partial gradient updates on extremely heterogeneous hardware with widely varying network properties; I'm not sure if this has any chance of producing base models competitive with e.g. Llama. In terms of ops alone, a 1 exaFLOPS network would have taken 10^7 seconds = ~half a year to train Llama 70b, and I imagine the costs of distributing jobs to such a network and coordinating on weight updates would make this much more expensive. So, probably not going to be competitive?
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I would guess that there will be reasons to at least want an LLM trained on an open corpus, whether it's community-trained or not.
Example reasons include ensuring that the model isn't secretly trying to get you to buy McDonalds, and the possibility that companies start releasing un-fine-tunable models.
Happy new year superstims!
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I am probably being too problem-solvey right now and I hereby to resolve to stop after this round, but in my experience, arborists are willing to produce documentation of their findings that can later be shown to landlords!
You just sound sad about your antenna and I wanna fix it.
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kip
in reply to kip • •Some categories of support! (I don't want to prime people on the type of support that exists)
Reveal/hide
1. Companionship!1a. Get our mind off Things
1b. Hold space for us to talk about Things
1c. Do healthy stuff alongside us, to reduce burnout (e.g. workout buddy for Sam)
2. Hands-on help (e.g. install a dark film on my TV)
3. Problem solving (e.g. research complex medical questions, do data analysis)
Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to kip • •I think I most like giving support when I'm most certain that it will be useful to the person.
But also, relatedly but possibly revealing a not-great personality trait, I also strongly prefer to help people when I predict that they'll appreciate it a lot - I tend to feel unhappy with helping people when I predict the help will be seen as something I owe them, or taken for granted, for example.
e.g. there are some things that I think people assume are just super easy / trivial to provide, and that maybe are super easy / trivial for most people, but that aren't that way for me (e.g., I dunno, taking out the trash every week, or cooking)
And there are other things that I basically enjoy doing for people / don't find as difficult (e.g. fixing stuff, or helping strategize about stuff), but that seem like they're more often deeply appreciated.
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kip
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •It's useful to hear that appreciation makes a big difference for you — I try to show a lot of appreciation for the help people give me, so, guess I'll keep doing that :)
I don't think it's just you. That's gotta be true of almost everyone, now that I think about it. I remember years ago when I offered to help a rationalist stranger online. They were really struggling in life and it sounded like I could help them in a specific way. I was expecting to receive appreciation for my offer, but they just added me to a Discord server full of people trying to help them. This made me feel totally uninterested in helping.
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in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •I'm kind of curious how fulfilling it is to support people by just hanging out with them? (Like, imagine someone who is having a hard time and just wants their mind taken off of things, but no actual emotional labor is necessary)
Even if that IS the most helpful thing, I'm guessing it wouldn't feel any more fulfilling than hanging out with that person normally. It doesn't really look like a favor, so it doesn't really make sense for the other person to act very appreciative about it.
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Ben Millwood
in reply to kip • •I think hanging out with someone purely altruistically doesn't really work, because I can't really pretend to enjoy something that I'm not enjoying, but I do sometimes prioritise people to hang out with based partly on their needs, and if I felt that someone I liked needed me more than usual, I would definitely do at least something to meet that.
(Not quite sure to what extent I should be answering this abstractly vs. specifically about you?)
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Ben Millwood
in reply to kip • •for me generally the most satisfying support I have given people is when they've explained something to me and I've understood it and I've noticed something about it that they find helpful, that they didn't notice without me. This kind of thing: benkuhn.net/listen/
I guess generally I think of my most important virtues as compassion + intelligence and opportunities to use them both together feel good
to respond to your list of ideas, the idea of doing medical research for someone stresses me out somewhat as I think I would not be good at it, but feel very strongly that it is important to be good at it; this is not unrelated to some unsolved / unaddressed problems in my own life (which I can't fix Right, so I can't fix them at all)
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Satvik
in reply to kip • •My favorite way to support people is helping them figure something out, do research, make a plan, or work through internal blocks. These involve doing stuff that I'm good at.
My second-favorite category is support that involves doing things I'm not necessarily good at, like cooking, helping clean up, etc. When my own kids are a bit older I think babysitting will also fall into this category.
I'm mildly positive on support via hanging out. I don't really understand it (as in I don't experience support from something similar) but it feels like a fun, low effort way to help people.
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