Open and Welcome Thread - May 2021

I’m Jose.  I’m 20.  This is a comment many years in the making.

I grew up in India, in a school that (almost) made up for the flaws in Indian academia, as a kid with some talent in math and debate.  I largely never tried to learn math or science outside what was taught at school back then.  I started using the internet in 2006, and eventually started to feel very strongly about what I thought was wrong with the institutions of the world, from schools to religion.  I spent a lot of time then trying to make these thoughts coherent.  I didn’t really think about what I wanted to do, or about the future, in anything more than abstract terms until I was 12 and a senior at my school recommended HPMOR.

I don’t remember what I thought the first time I read it up until where it had reached (I think it was chapter 95).  I do remember that on my second read, by the time it had reached chapter 101, I stayed up the night before one of my finals to read it.  That was around the time I started to actually believe I could do something to change the world (there may have been a long phase where I phrased it as wanting to rule the universe).  But apart from an increased tendency in my thoughts at the time toward refining my belief systems, nothing changed much, and Rationality from AI to Zombies remained on my TBR until early 2017, which is when I first lurked LessWrong.

I had promised myself at the time that I would read all the Sequences properly regardless of how long it took, and so it wasn’t until late 2017 that I finally finished it.  That was a long, and arduous process, and much of which came from many inner conflicts I actually noticed for the first time.  Some of the ideas were ones I had tried to express long ago, far less coherently.  It was epiphany and turmoil at every turn.  I graduated school in 2018; I’d eventually realize this wasn’t nearly enough though, and it was pure luck that I chose a computer science undergrad because of vague thoughts about AI, despite not yet deciding on what I really wanted to do.

Over my first two years in college, I tried to actually think about that question.  By this point, I had read enough about FAI to know it to be the most important thing to work on, and that anything I did would have to come back to that in some way.  Despite that, I still stuck to some old wish to do something that I could call mine, and shoved the idea of direct work in AI Safety in the pile where things that you consciously know and still ignore in your real life go.  Instead, I thought I’d learned the right lesson and held off on answering direct career questions until I knew more, because I had a long history of overconfidence in those answers (not that that’s a misguided principle, but there was more I could have seen at that point with what I knew).

Fast forward to late-2020.  I had still been lurking on LW, reading about AI Safety, and generally immersing myself in the whole shindig for years.  I even applied to the MIRIx program early that year, and held off on starting operations on that after March that year.  I don’t remember what it was exactly that made me start to rethink my priors, but one day, I was shaken by the realization that I wasn’t doing anything the way I should have been if my priorities were actually what I claimed they were, to help the most people.  I thought of myself as very driven by my ideals, and being wrong only on the level where you don’t notice difficult questions wasn’t comforting.  I went into existential panic mode, trying to seriously recalibrate everything about my real priorities.  

In early 2021, I was still confused about a lot of things.  Not least because being from my country sort of limits the options one has to directly work in AI Alignment, or at least makes them more difficult.  That was a couple months ago.  I found that after I took a complete break from everything for a month to study for subjects I hadn’t touched in a year, all those cached thoughts I had that bred my earlier inner conflicts had mostly disappeared.  I’m not entirely settled yet though, it’s been a weird few months.  I’m trying to catch up on a lot of lost time and learn math (I’m working through MIRI’s research guide), focus my attention a lot more in specific areas of ML (I lucked out again there and did spend a lot of time studying it broadly earlier), and generally trying to get better at things.  I’ll hopefully post infrequently here.  I really hope this comment doesn’t feel like four years.

The #lesswrong IRC channel has moved to Libera due to drama.

Some background links: https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt https://wiki.obormot.net/Public/2021FreenodeDrama https://gist.github.com/shadowcat-mst/998cea12794768bdb3da2daeff31baad https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ev8y/freenode-open-source-korea-crown-prince-takeover

Hey there, been sporadically reading stuff on LW for maybe ~8ish years? Just created an account today to comment on the animal intelligence thread. I can't remember if I had an account on the old v1.0 site, but in any case I don't remember ever posting previously. Found out about LW via HPMOR.

I'm grateful to the folks at LW for introducing me to cryonics. I signed up a few years back.

I'm interested in animal communication (among other things) — I'm currently building a prosthetic human voice meant for animal use. Would love to connect with anyone who has experience with consumer electronics development.

My name is Justin Bullock. I live in the Seattle area after 27 years in Georgia and 7 years in Texas. I have a PhD and Public Administration and Policy Analysis where I focused on decision making within complex, hierarchical, public programs. For example, in my dissertation I attempted to model how errors (measured as improper payments) are built into the US Unemployment Insurance Program. I spent time looking at how agents are motivated within these complex systems trying to develop general insights into how errors occur in these systems. Until about 2016, I was very much ignorant of the discussions around AI. I was introduced to the arguments around AGI and alignment through the work PR works of Sam Harris and Max Tegmark leading me eventually to the work of Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky. It's been a wild and exciting ride.

I currently have a tenured Associate Professor position at Texas A&M University that I'm resigning on July 1 to focus more on writing, creating, and learning without all of the weird pressures and incentives that come from working within a major public research university in the social sciences. In preparation for changing my employment status, I've been considering the communities I want to be in discussion with and the LessWrong and AlignmentForum communities are among the most interesting on that list. 

My writing is on decision making, agents, communication, governance and control of complex systems, and how AI and future AGI influences these things. I've been thinking about the issue of control of multi-agent systems a lot lately and what types of systems of control can be used to guide or build robust agent-agnostic processes of AI and human constitution. In agreement with George Dyson's recent arguments, I also worry that we have already lost meaningful human control over the internet. Finally, I've recently been significantly influenced by the works of Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker, Last and First Men, Sirius) and Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy) in thinking more carefully about the mind/body problem, the endowment of the cosmos, and the nature of reality.  

My hope is that I can learn from you all and bring to this conversation thoughts on alignment, control, governance (in particular of multi-agent systems that contain only humans, humans and AI, and only AI), and form a map together that better reflects the territory . I look forward to engaging with the community!

Hey there ! My name is Mae, and I’m an ML engineer from Paris, France.

To be a bit more precise, my work revolves around AI R&D and prototyping for various industries. Right now I’m focusing on using models rather than creating them because that’s what my current job requires, but I’m still very interested in R&D. I mainly have experience with Recsys, NLP, and have a CV side project I’m working on.

I guess my reason for signing up is, I feel like I should listen more to people who might challenge my enthusiastic view of AI.

I’m not a long time lurker like some I’ve seen below, I really just found out about LW very recently, so I have a lot to learn about this community.

It’s nice to meet you all. :)

I'm Viegos, a software engineer who's been reading threads on lesswrong, anything by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander for a couple of years now
Great interest in Math/probability theory, I study it greatly in my free time
I hope to derive from the lesswrong community a greater understanding of human consciousness, or at the very least, a less wrong interpretation of the human mind

Hello LessWrong,

My name is Nate. Currently an undergrad studying computer science with a specialization in intelligent system, AI. I grew up indoctrinated into an extremist fundamentalist christian ideology and recently broke free from that world after leaving for university. It's finally great to develop my own ideas about faith and hope to build up a value and ethics framework that will grow my agnostic atheist position I hold today. Being open-minded is freeing and I hope to expand my philosophical position.

Hello all. My name is Duncan, as my username suggests, and I guess you could say I'm new around these parts, (although I first read the sequences years ago). My hope is that by participating in this community, I'll be able to gain clarity and understanding by open-sourcing my opinions and getting feedback from open-minded and thoughtful folks like yourselves. Cheers!

Hello!

I'm David.  I'm a philosophy PhD student and longtime LessWrong/Overcoming Bias/SSC/rationalish-sphere lurker.  This is me finally working up the strength to beat back my commenting anxiety!  I discovered LW sometime in high school; my reading diet back then consisted of a lot of internet and not much else, and I just stumbled onto here on my own.

Right now I'm really interested in leveling up my modern math understanding and in working up to writing on AI safety/related topics.

Hi, my name his Henrik. I've been lurking here for a long time, and today finally dared write something myself [LW · GW]. I have been looking for a community like this for a long time, and I'm so grateful for being able to listen in to all the conversations happening. Emerging oneself in a better culture can really bring out good things in oneself. The last few months, after hanging out here, it feels like my thoughts are moving in new, orthogonal and fruitful directions. I just want to say my thanks to all the people working to make sure that this bubble can exist.

LW Front Page: Is the following intentional behavior, i.e. seeing the same essay twice in the Latest list because it's been curated?

Hi y'all.

Recently I've become very interested in open research. A friend of mine gave me the tip to check out lesswrong. 

I found that lesswrong has been interested in trying to support collaborative open research (one [LW · GW], two [LW · GW], three [LW · GW]) for a few years at least. That was the original idea behind lesswrong.com/questions. Recently Ruby explained [LW(p) · GW(p)] some of their problems getting this sort of thing going with the previous approach and sketched a feature he's calling "Research Agendas." I think something like his Research Agendas seems quite useful. 

So that's what brought me here. But I've had a lot of fun reading through old top rated posts.

I just made my first post [LW · GW] about a question centered wiki I've been working on. I guess it's a sort of self promotion, so I hope that's ok. I felt that it's the sort of thing that people here may be interested in. I'm also very interested to hear critiques of the argument I put forward in that post.

Hello! My name is Cal. I've been a Slate Star Codex reader for years and read LessWrong occasionally, but just made an account for the first time today.

I would love some advice on improving my fiction writing. Writing short-form fiction has been a major hobby of mine for my entire life (really, starting at age 7 or 8), but I don't think I'm particularly good at it, I just enjoy it a lot and enjoy reading other amateurs' fiction as well. I've never tried to get anything published anywhere as I don't think it's at that level of quality.

Here is the smallest one of my stories. I would be incredibly appreciative of constructive criticism.

“Drainage ditch” is too vulgar a term for the narrow creek that ran through the fenced off little park twenty yards behind the last condo before we left.

It was good to be near it. I think all running water is like that, even that small amount of it-- at the narrowest part a child could jump across, and I did, when I was eight or nine and we lived another few streets down from the place.

My grandma called it a “babbling brook.” This is still how I think of it: the water running fast enough at the narrow parts that it made the pleasant sound you can hear recorded on relaxation CDs buried in the bottom of a box in your storage closet.

Where the stream widened at the end of the park, though, it pooled shallow and near-stagnant among a patch of cattails and other wet reedy plants. There was always garbage in the water. I never thought of it as dirty, only invasive. It was just as much a part of the environment as the fauna: here was the forsythia (Forsythia suspensa), and the juniper trees (Juniperus virginiana), and here the empty half-liter soda bottle (polyethylene terephthalate).

And that time I ran back to what I knew as home, along the sidewalk that flanked Blue Spring and then the asphalt, and cut through the grassy hill behind the townhouses to get to the one that was mine. (The back door would have been closer, but we did not use that door.)

The beads of granular lawn herbicide (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, 3,6-dichloro-2-methoxybenzoic acid) embedded in the soles of my shoes meant that I was to leave them outside today on the porch.

In my sock feet I went inside only to get a Shoprite bag (HDPE) to stuff in my pocket to bring back with me, and back on the porch I put my shoes on one at a time without untying them.

The stick that I used to fish the empty cigarette box (LDPE and paper) from the water had only recently snapped from the pin oak (Quercus palustris) that stood tall above this park. The park he now stood in, of course, was neither public nor more than an acre and a half; he judged that harshly.

I characterized him alternately as watching over the goings-on in this neighborhood with a silent protectiveness and as too old and tired to see the scrubby pines and patches of clover as anything but pathetically little consolation for what used to be here. 

He had been here before they had put these houses up, I was sure of it. The townhome I lived in as a child was built in 2001. The last one I lived in before I left the state was built in 1992, and failing in dozens of small insidious ways that pooled in the sump much faster than the pathetic battery backups (lead dioxide, sulfuric acid) stacked in the basement closet could handle. Security theater was unconvincing to the driving weight of the water. 

The pin oak, which I would guess had stood there since the 1960s, would stand for fifty years more unless someone came to destroy it. He did watch, I knew, as the condos in the long gray buildings across the street settled down to piecemeal destroy themselves.

I took the cigarette box in my ungloved hand from the end of my fishing-stick and put them in the bag and then I did not think about what my mother’s reaction might be. I often thought of it before I did things; that day I did not.

And hence I filled the bag with invasive treasures: three-quarters of a faded water bottle label (polypropylene), an empty chip bag (oriented polypropylene), a small chunk of styrofoam (polystyrene). 

I pulled the bag into a tight knot at the top, and down from my small fingertips to my elbow ran the freed little rivulet of water (water, trichloroethylene, 1,1-dichloroethene).

Hi!

I'm a lurker on LW but I've had a question I've been thinking about for awhile. I'm an extremely neurotic person and have great trouble interacting with people online, so I've always struggled (and never succeeded) with finding a venue for talking with people about things I've thought of, or have questions about. But LW seems like the kind of crowd who would have a thoughtful answer to this question; and this seems like the / a place for it. At least, I hope this is an acceptable place to ask it

Anyway, my question is whether anybody has had success emulating showering, or otherwise found some method, to induce shower thoughts / diffuse-mode thinking patterns / default mode network activity?

Some things I've heard people say online and in person related to this:

Sleeping, dreaming, and the hypnagogic state just before sleep. This could look like just keeping a notebook beside your bed and writing anything that comes to mind down when you wake up, or just before you fall asleep. I've read some people have even went so far as to hold something heavy so that when they fall asleep it falls and wakes them up and they presumably have access to whatever they were thinking just before falling asleep. I've found that this is a lucrative time for ideas and thoughts, but if you have sleeping problems like I do it can be extremely disruptive, and counterproductive

Meditation. There are some forms of meditation that involve specifically waiting for thoughts to occur so you can contemplate them. Which seems like the most direct route to spontaneous thoughts like shower thoughts. Anybody whose ever meditated knows that thoughts interject themselves during meditation regardless whether you want them to or not. However, I've never had much success with this method

Walking and pacing. This is a big one for certain people I know, and used to be much more important for me. Basically, you just walk around, either in a tight circuit inside, or over a longer distance outside. Some people say this is the most effective method for them

Some other assorted ideas related to this:

Talking to people seems to be a way of shaking your thoughts up, and getting you into a different way of thinking about things. And others can be used to generate ideas, and evolve ideas: they come up with things, they tell you and you come up with a variant of it, or manipulate it in a way they wouldn't have done otherwise. But this is an unreliable method because other people aren't always available to talk with, and aren't necessarily receptive to helping someone deliberately work through a problem. In an institutional setting where the whole point for everyone involved is solving a particular problem, I imagine this is one of the most important methods available Related: I have had this idea (plus partially written source code) for awhile for a hybrid chat / forum / collaborative note taking system where individuals write in separate note logs but can arbitrarily combine individual logs to collaborate, and can spawn child logs based off of any given note to tackle it as a subproblem. I imagine sort of like a micro-microblogging platform for idea generation, and recording problem-solving notes, specifically structured in a way that encourages breaking problems into subproblems, babbling, bouncing ideas off others, etc. I also have considered a sort of collaborative zettelkasten-like system. And some sort of wiki for ideas as well. If this is something somebody is interested in participating in developing, or even just discussing platforms like this, or the potential for such a platform and its effect on society, then hmu

It seems to be possible to use different representational tools (tools for representation) to assist in getting your thoughts in the right place. Like writing, for instance, seems to act like a form of memory augmentation, allowing you to effectively increase the size of your working memory. This seems to enable you to produce more ideas related to your problem because they don't have to be stored in brain memory, they can be dumped into physical memory and essentially forgotten about for the time. Drawing and graphical note-taking is another one: sort of like augmenting your visual imagination in the same way that writing augments your memory, and apparently enables you to evolve an idea by way of manipulating your drawing. Interestingly, it almost seems like your brain considers the representations formed by these tools as equivalent to the representations it generates internally; ie: internal, mental representations and physical representations you create in external reality are treated the same internally. I don't know if that's true or not

Frequently even taking a shower, or any of the usually-lucrative techniques, isn't effective because you have ideas and thoughts about things which just generally aren't about the things you want. For example, you think about something someone said, or what you have to do after showering. It's not to say that these kinds of thoughts can't be useful, but if you intend to use your shower thoughts to aid in solving a particular problem then those other thoughts are interfering. So getting your head in the right place is obviously important

In general, getting your thinking (conscious and/or unconscious) to stick to a particular line of thought is its own challenge that I don't have much traction in finding a solution for. It seems like if you think about something for long enough, there is a momentum to your thinking and that persists without deliberate, conscious effort. However, if your mind isn't already sticking to the target line of thought, and especially if you aren't immediately interested in it, or if other things are on your mind as well, then it can be extraordinarily difficult to get your mind to stick to your target thoughts

I've actually considered making some kind of "game" or task that involves certain arbitrary tasks in a particular order for a particular amount of time, in hopes that it will encourage thinking in the background while doing it. I've considered some previously-solved puzzles, for this, like: going through the motions of solving towers of hanoi, or a sliding block puzzle. The point isn't that you achieve anything by doing the thing, its that you have done it so many times that it becomes automatic and you essentially free your mind up for free thinking until you are done with the task

Incidentally, while searching for posts here related to this topic here I found a years-old post here which ended up with a discussion about cutting shower time down. Also, this morning I read a hacker news post and associated comments about what happens to you when you lose slack (see this tag) [? · GW] by trying to increase efficiency. I kept thinking while I read these (contextualized also by thoughts about shower thoughts) that your unconscious thinking is doing something while you're apparently not actively engaged. It isn't completely useless. And its probably not generally useless at all. Like, while you're training an ANN model, or running a search algorithm: that isn't wasted time: you really are moving toward something; its effective. This seems related because showering, or whatever appears to be useless time, may really be very useful. Cutting time and rushing for efficiency / productivity reasons seems like errant and misinformed optimizing in some cases. However, I won't make the mistake of saying that all such optimizing (such as cutting down shower time) should be avoided universally. That is up to every individual to decide for themselves, and depends on their current circumstances specifically. Sometimes people really don't get anything extra out of doing something, and they really should streamline doing it so they don't have to do it for very long. Sometimes cutting down your shower time is the best thing for someone personally, even if they are remarkably productive while doing it

Generally, I think that having shower thoughts, and spontaneous ideas and insight about some problem, is an extremely important part of solving big primarily-mental problems. I think that in order to trek through a problem-solution space, you are dependent on the quality and quantity of your ideas. If you want to solve a problem faster then that (abstractly) means having more, higher quality ideas about the current subproblem you're working on. It seems like the quantity and quality of ideas are monotonically related somehow, and the larger the quantity of ideas you have the higher quality they are as well. Probabilistically speaking, if you sample more from a particular distribution you will likely sample more from any partitions of that distribution; so the higher the quantity of ideas you have, the more likely some will be of higher quality I imagine this sort of like gradient descent: you sample solutions (via ideas) in problem-solution space immediately around your current subproblem, when you find one that works you go there and then choose a different subproblem, and slowly you wander toward your goal. Alternatively, you can imagine it like: you have a well-understood part of problem-solution space, and a not-well-understood section, and your ideas slowly eat away at the not understood section to incorporate it into the well understood section, and you slowly slime-mold your way to your objective state In either of these representational models the quantity (number of problem-solution space samples) and quality (step size / bite size) are both responsible for the rate which you move toward your goal Also, along the lines of problem-solution space trekking and representations thereof, you can talk about the direction of your steps. For example, you can be moving in a direction completely opposite your intended goalstate, or you can be moving directly towards it. In principle it isn't possible to know which direction (which subproblem to solve, for example) is the preferred one unless you have some interpretation of the space which does have a direction attached. Taking this idea to the ridiculous extreme: if you establish an analogical mapping between your current problem-solution space, and an already-solved one, then you could potentially map your current state in your space to a state in the analogical space and establish a direction that way. It seems plausible this may actually be related to how people usually establish such directions

Sorry I sort of went off track there. Thank you for any comments in advance. No comments is alright too, just posting this somewhere feels good

Why Not Nano-Apartments?

There seem to be goods of many different sizes and price-tags, with people being able to buy bulk or the bare minimum, e.g. transportation: walking by foot, biking, public transport, leasing a car, owning a car, or by helicopter.

However, the very small scale for apartments seems to be neglected – cheap apartments are often in bad neighbourhoods, with longer commutes and worse living conditions, but rarely just extremely small (<10 m²). But one could easily imagine 5 m² apartments, with just a bed & a small bathroom (or even smaller options with a shared bathroom). However, I don't know of people renting/buying these kinds of apartments – even though they might be pretty useful if one wants to trade size against good location.

Why, therefore, no nano-apartments?

Possible reasons:

No Supply

Perhaps nano-apartments are not economically viable to rent. Maybe the fixed cost per apartment is so high that it's not worth it below a certain size – every tenant being an additional burden, plumbing + upkeep of stairways, organising trash & electricity just isn't worth it. Or, perhaps, the amount of walls is too big – the more separate apartments you want to create, the more floor-space is going to be used on walls to separate those apartments, and at some fixed point around 15 m² it's just not worth it.

Another possibility is that there are regulations dictating the minimal size of apartments (or something that effectively leads to apartments having a minimal size).

No Demand

I could be over-estimating the number of people who'd like to live in such an apartment. I could see myself renting one, especially if the location is very good – I'm glad to trade off space against having a short commute. But perhaps I'm very unusual in this regard, and most people trade off more harshly against the size of the apartment, due to owning just too much stuff to fit into such a small place.

Or the kinds of people who would make this kind of trade-off just move into a shared flat, and bare the higher costs (but most rooms in shared apartments are still larger than 10 m²).

The group of people who would rent those nano-apartments would naturally be young singles who want to save money and live urban, perhaps that group is just too small/already served with university dorms?

So, why are there no nano-apartments? Does anyone have more insight into this? (The title is, of course, a hansonism).

Hello all!

I've been lurking LW and SCC on and off since about 2013, when I stumbled upon the sequences. I got sucked back in and became a daily visitor since the pandemic began. I also started listening to the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast and finally read HPMOR and realized that this (LW) is the crowd of people I'd love to hang out with.

I'm in early 30's and currently doing SRE work remotely. I like to think that wrangling software has infected me with an appreciation for systems thinking (or vice versa?) and the LW topics that grab my attention the most are those that talk about coordination like the one about the Swiss system [LW · GW] or this one about negotiation and Schelling points [LW · GW]. Kaj Sotala's and others' posts about the mind have been very influential for me as well. I'll venture out into other topics like AI safety as well, but less often.

Looking forward to exploring things together!

I'm learning to drive and I'd love to read articles on a game theoretical approach to traffic. I don't mean the "pirates be pirates" approach, but the "here's what the rules say, and here's what people often do, and the actual driver in a similar situation should keep in mind both these things, because the guy in the other lane counts on him knowing them (and they both know people sometimes break rules)". I think it rather odd that I can't remember such articles, but maybe it's because I didn't pay attention to them.

Mabuhay! My name is Brian, 34, born and raised in Manila, Philippines, and currently living in San Francisco, California. 

How did I get here-here? I fell down a rabbit hole. ;)

If you looked at my [insert name of time-eating mainstream internet video platform] history, you'd find countless videos on science, philosophy, art, music, writing, and self-development (along with cheerleading, musicals, fitness, and walking tours of my hometown in Manila). I also have a small collection of books on topics like language, ethics, aesthetics, literary theory, etc. 

Why am I here? I'm here because I wonder, and I'd like to have less-wrong conclusions.

For much of my "conscious" life, I feel like I was being thrown around by invisible forces outside my control. I was adopted at birth by a family that gave me tons of complexes which required years of psychotherapy; I was educated in a country with a system that severely needed restructuring, but also unaccommodating of different types of learners; I grew up multi-cultural while being compelled by a society to adopt a singular socio-political identity; etc, etc. (not to mention that I survived a global pandemic, OMG).

I'm here because I have this insatiable hunger, and I understand that "beings" naturally orient themselves to the direction of sustenance. I also like to think of my situation as looking through a telescope and mercilessly refining the knobs and lenses to get a better view. Whatever it may be, I think I stumbled upon a place that I'd like be in.

Thank you for creating this space of refuge.

I'm Brian.  I'm 27 years of age.  I work as a lawyer in Ireland but am looking to pivot into a career that is: 1) higher impact from an EA perspective; and 2) more intellectually engaging through proactive and longer-term, bigger picture thinking vis a vis the reactive, short-term nature of life as a lawyer. 

I'm interested in a relatively disparate range of areas: epistemology, philosophy, blockchain technology, Bitcoin, animal rights, longtermism, and FinTech in third world countries (I have worked in India and South Africa and seen the need for better access to capital).  I think temperamentally I'd be more suited to a researcher/academic type role since I enjoy studying and breaking down complex topics by communicating them through writing for a public audience.  I keep a Substack blog.  I have considered going back to pursue a masters and/or PhD but there are sunk cost fallacy biases to overcome before then (and financial undertakings).  I have also leveraged 80,000 Hours' helpful resources.  

The thing I most enjoy about the Less Wrong community - beyond the intellectual engagement - is finding connection in the experiences documented and challenges faced as critical, questioning, high standards thinkers.  I also really appreciate the compassion and humility throughout this forum.  I'm often very intimidated by the intellectual might and achievements of the average LW participant; I'm cognisant of my own limitations and (at least, explored) cognitive boundaries. 

A colleague and I are currently working on curating a critical thinking introductory presentation for high school students in Ireland.  We've received the backing of the UCD School of Philosophy, which has been an encouraging endorsement.  Neel Nanda's post on Less Wrong and the CFAR Handbook (amongst other resources) were both helpful in our process.  Earlier this year I also explored establishing a network of legal practitioners in Ireland to engage in pro bono animal rights work but the startup financial energy required is something I underestimated and need to reconsider my ad hoc approach. 

I would like to start engaging with LW threads a bit more going forward, to positively contribute to this great community and sharpen my own thinking.  I've been a passive observer for a couple of years now. 

I think I've found another small Less Wrong bug:

• I wanted to tag this post [LW · GW] with the "Health" tag, but while tagging it with any other tag was possible, trying to use this tag bugged out, i.e. the action timed out or something, and the tag wasn't applied.
• The "Health" tag is not listed on the Concepts Portal tag page [? · GW].
• Using Less Wrong's search functionality to search for Health shows this:

• And that Health link leads to this page [? · GW] (the URL contains a "health-1" for some reason), which causes a 404 error.

In conclusion, some parts of the website think the Health tag exists, and other parts think it doesn't exist.

Anyone have ideas about how to protect oneself against the higher-than-average inflation we'll likely experience in the next couple of years? I have a fair bit of cash and a fair bit of low-interest debt and I'm wondering if there are any easy no-brainer moves I could make to reduce my expected losses to inflation.

Anyone have tips for calculating someone’s risk of death from COVID? I want to take age, smoking status, gender and pre-existing conditions into account. Thinking about flying my in-laws over here to get vaccinated and wondering whether it’s worth the cost. They are in a country with zero vaccine access.

Hello there, just saw this. I'm Hans, a 22-year-old Software Engineer. I've been reading cursory here for a while, but to be perfectly honest, I have no clue how I stumbled upon it. This page is bookmarked since January, a time at which I was working on my Bachelor's Thesis, so I reckon I found it after taking one to many (or perhaps the exact right amount of) tangents while researching. Another hypothesis has just formed in my mind since gwern wrote about the Libera channel lower, and I faintly remember stumbling upon Libera at the same time. (Not as a tangent to research, but as a procrastination)

I haven't read much here yet, but the Sequences are firmly on my to-read list. What convinced me to stay was the fact that I devoured Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - I've read it over the course of a few days, whenever I was bored and was SHOCKED when I saw how long the PDF-version would have been. (I did not perceive it that lengthy)

When looking back, I've always valued "Rationality" (whatever that was in my mind really) a lot.
In fact, there were times in my life where I, weirdly, regarded emotions as weak.
Even now, Intellect is a large part of my identity, but at the same time I feel terribly lacking in actually rationally applying that and having a direction for advanced thought. I sometimes struggle with taking agency and doing something that I would myself call "productive".
I also value conversation and abstract thinking / arguing tremendously, but I often find that it results in confrontation where non was intended. This might both warrant work on my social circle and my rhetoric.

Of course, I'm as interested in the concept of Artificial Intelligence as the next person, but I have yet invested the time necessary to learn anything but the basics. Especially at this time, where I'll soon be thinking about my future education again, having found a community interested both in Rationality and AI is delightfully helpful for my situation.

I hope to read from many interesting people here and learn (perhaps from each other) in the process. I'm still unsure about most of the M.O. of this community, so I hope that was of interest to anyone.
If it did, I'm looking forward to getting to know you all!

Was there a recent post, where some expert claimed that deep learning can't deal with ... some kind of discreteness? 

My cryptocurrency quant hedge fund is looking to hire engineers. If you're curious, PM me. :)

Anyone have reading recommendations for fiction or even just a summary description of what a positive future with AI looks like? I've been trying to decide what to work on for the rest of my career. I really want to work on genetics, but worry that, like every other field, it's basically going to become irrelevant since AI will do everything in the future.

Is Ziz, the author of https://sinceriously.fyi/, a blog about saving the humanity from unfriendly AI, hating on MIRI and CFAR, and gender, banned on LessWrong? If yes, why and is it for reasons similar to [the ban of ialdabaoth][https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned [LW · GW])? If he reasons are similar , then why was there no site-wide announcement like with ialdabaoth?