Open Thread June 2018

I made a small programming tutorial for beginners, and tried it on kids in a programming class I'm teaching. It seems to work pretty well. Don't want to publish it yet, but I'd like to try it on someone online, preferably someone who never learned programming and doesn't feel naturally gifted at it. Any takers?

Last month I got published on an Australian national media website.

I also moved into Sydney's first lesswrong group house.

I read a book about schema therapy (post coming soon).

I read Scott Adams, "how to fail at everything and still win big".

I also read my first paper book this year. (it was a novel)

Also discovered bone conduction headphones and I am impressed with the quality.

I am reading "principles of neural science".

I am moving to the Bay Area from the east coast, and have been looking for a job out there for some time. I signed an offer letter last week from a company I am excited to start working with.

Yesterday I published an app that will send you to a random slatestarcodex article. You can find it as a subdomain of my blog: http://random-ssc.pulsarcoffee.com.

I am reading The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, and Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky.

OpenAi has recently released this charter outlining their strategic approach.

We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.

My reaction to this was that it sounds like incredibly good and pretty important news. it reads very genuine and distinct from trying to merely appease critics. But I haven't seen anyone on LW mentioning it, which leaves me wondering if I'm naive.

So I guess I'm just curious about other opinions here. I'm also reminded of this post [LW · GW] which seemed reasonable to me at the time.

I have a LW draft, but I'm only mostly sure its publishing would help AI safety research more than AI research if it works. We should have a review process for this. I could just send Eliezer the .html, but surely he has random internet people sending him quite enough.

On recommendation from the #lesswrong IRC channel, I'm sending it to a particular LW account for review.

I have an exercise app that feeds me lotus if I work out every day. (In the form of streaks, achievements, and eventually unlocking more exercises.) I want not to work out every day.

I'm solving this dilemma by lying to the app.

I finished my senior thesis and graduated from college (okay technically the thesis was done in April, but it was at the end of April and the presentation was in May).

I am reading:

• Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• r!Animorphs: The Reckoning by Duncan Sabien
• Volume II of On What Matters by Derek Parfit (Also about halfway through Reasons and Persons, but that's on hold for the moment)
• I am also rereading Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and when I'm done with Other Minds I'm intending to start Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics

Also, I have a question: What do people think of the His Dark Materials series? I see a decent bit of discussion of Ender's Game around here, and while I love Ender's Game I think His Dark Materials is on a similar level, and should be similarly revered by rationalists. Granted, Lyra is not portrayed as extraordinarily intelligent like Ender, but she is extremely strong, and the series has several rationalist themes, e.g. s-risk (gur haqrejbeyq*), x-risk (gur fhogyr xavsr*), saving the world from these, the Problem of Evil, many-worlds (kind of), etc. Is it just that not as many people have read His Dark Materials, or is there some other reason it's not really talked about?

*rot13

Test comment. Please don't upvote etc. etc.

(Sorry moderators, I assume you deleted my other ones, but I can't really try to debug notification breakage without creating more.)