Thanks for the feedback Emiya! I hope it ends up being useful for helping you get what you want to get done, done.

I never got the chance to update here, but I cleaned up some of the essays in the years since writing this series.

They can now be found here. Of note is that I massively edited Habits 101, and I think it now reads a lot tighter than before.

The extent to which this app is used and to which people bond over the assistant.

my friend from china says this is likely sensationalized. agree w/ gwillen about being skeptical.

Seconding the Boox Note as being a very good device I'm overall pleased with. (I have the large 13 inch Boox Note Max which makes reading papers very bearable, and it can do file drop via local wifi.)

The way I did this for a specific ordering of cards (used for a set of magic tricks called Mnemonica) was to have some sort of 1 to 1 mapping between each card and its position in the deck.

Some assorted examples: 5 : 4 of Hearts because 4 is 5 minus 1 (and the Hearts are just there). 7 : Ace of Spades because 7 is a lucky number and the Ace of Spades is a lucky card. 8 : 5 of Hearts because 5 looks a little like 8. 49 : 5 of Clubs because 4.9 is almost 5 (and the Clubs are just there).

This is a good point, and this is where I think a good amount of the difficulty lies, especially as the cited example of human interpretable NNs (i.e. Microscope AI) doesn't seem easily applicable to things outside of image recognition.

Interesting stuff!

My understanding is that the OpenAI Microscope (is this what you meant by microscope AI?) is mostly feature visualization techniques + human curation by looking at the visualized samples. Do you have thoughts on how to modify this for the text domain?

Interesting stuff!

I would guess that one of the main difficulties is figuring out how to actually get a Modular NN. Do you have thoughts on how to enforce this type of structure through regularization during training, or through some other type of model selection?

Same here. I am working for a small quant trading firm, and the collective company wisdom is to prefer CDFs over PDFs.

Regarding how interpretability can help with addressing motivation issues, I think Chris Olah's views present situations where interpretability can potentially sidestep some of those issues. One such example is that if we use interpretability to aid in model design, we might have confidence that our system isn't a mesa-optimizer, and we've done this without explicitly asking questions about "what our model desires".

I agree that this is far from the whole picture. The scenario you describe is an example where we'd want to make interpretability more accessible to more end-users. There is definitely more work to be done to bridge "normal" human explanations with what we can get from our analysis.

I've spent more of my time thinking about the technical sub-areas, so I'm focused on situations where innovations there can be useful. I don't mean to say that this is the only place where I think progress is useful.

I think that the general form of the problem is context-dependent, as you describe. Useful explanations do seem to depend on the model, task, and risks involved.

However, from an AI safety perspective, we're probably only considering a restricted set of interpretability approaches, which might make it easier. In the safety context, we can probably less concerned with interpretability that is useful for laypeople, and focus on interpretability that is useful for the people doing the technical work.

To that end, I think that "just" being careful about what the interpretability analysis means can help, like how good statisticians can avoid misuse of statistical testing, even though many practitioners get it wrong.

I think it's still an open question, though, what even this sort of "only useful for people who know what they're doing" interpretability analysis would be. Existing approaches still have many issues.

I mostly focused on the interpretability section as that's what I'm most familiar with, and I think your criticisms are very valid. I also wrote up some thoughts recently on where post-hoc interpretability fails, and Daniel Filan has some good responses in the comments below.

Also, re: disappointment on tree regularization, something that does seem more promising is Daniel Filan and others at CHAI working on investigating modularity in neural nets. You can probably ask him more, but last time we chatted, he also had some thoughts (unpublished) on how to enforce modularization as a regularizer, which seems to be what you wished the tree reg paper would have done.

Overall, this is great stuff, and I'll need to spend more time thinking about the design vs search distinction (which makes sense to me at first glance)/

Got it.

I think unbundling them seems like a good thing to strive for.

I guess the parts that I might still be worried about are:

• I see below that you claim that more accountability is probably net-good for most students, in the sense that would help improve learning? I'm not sure that I fully agree with that. My experience in primary to upper education has been that there is a great many students who don't seem that motivated to learn due to differing priorities, home situations, or preferences. I think improving education will need to find some way of addressing this beyond just accountability.

• Do you envision students enrolling in this Improved Education program for free? Public schools right now have a distinct advantage because they receive a lot of funding from taxpayers.

• I think the issue of, "Why can't we just immediately get switch everyone to a decoupled situation where credentialing and education are separate?" is due to us being stuck in an inadequate equilibrium. Do you have plans to specifically tackle these inertia-related issues that can make mass-adoption difficult? (e.g until cheap credentialing services become widespread, why would signaling-conscious students decide to enroll in Improved Education instead of Normal Education?)

I think figuring out how to make education better is definitely a worthwhile goal, and I'm reading this post (and your other one) with interest.

I'm curious to what extent you're going to be addressing the issue of education as-partially-or-mostly signaling, like what Caplan argues for in The Case Against Education? I can imagine a line of argument that says paying for public education is worthwhile, even if all it does is accreditation because it's useful to employers. What those actual costs look like and what they should be is, of course, up for debate.

I could also see the point that all this signaling stuff is orthogonal if all we "really" care about is optimizing for learning. Just wondering what stance you're taking.

I think the OSC's reproducibility project is much more of what you're looking for, if you're worried that Many Labs is selecting only for a specific type of effect.

They focus on selecting studies quasi-randomly and use a variety of reproducibility measures (confidence interval, p-value, effect size magnitude + direction, subjective assessment). They find that around 30-50% of effects replicate, depending on the criteria used. They looked at 100 studies, in total.

I don't know enough about the biomedical field, but a brief search on the web yields the following links, which might be useful?

• Science Forum: The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative which aims to reproduce 60-100 Brazilian studies, results due in 2021.
• Section 2 of this symposium report from 2015 which collects some studies (including the OSC one I list above)
• This page references some studies from around early 2010-2011 which find base rates of ~10% for replicating oncology-related stuff.

A quote from the thread which suggests weighing Google and FB more than Amazon, or at least more consideration than above.

I don't understand why one would invest more in Amazon over Alphabet. Alphabet owns 1. the strongest industry research division around (especially DeepMind), 2. a very strong vertical with Google Cloud -> Tensorflow/Jax -> TPUs. Amazon only has an arguably more established cloud (I'm not sure if this is even true for machine learning purposes), but has a much weaker research division and doesn't own any of the underlying stack. I mean, for example, GPT2 was trained primarily on TPUs. So Google owns better shovels and also better diggers.

Facebook owns the second best industry research division, as well as PyTorch (which is the most popular framework in ML research right now). Unfortunately for FB stock, it doesn't have a particularly clear path towards monetizing it. However, many of the other companies mentioned (Microsoft and OpenAI for example) are heavily invested in it.

Relevant thread from r/slatestarcodex which has some additional discussion.

This makes sense to me, given the situation you describe.

Some OpenAI people are on LW. It'd be interesting to hear their thoughts as well.

Two general things which have made me less optimistic about OpenAI are that:

1. They recently spun-out a capped-profit company, which seems like the end goal is monetizing some of their recent advancements. The page linked in the previous sentence also has some stuff about safety and about how none of their day-to-day work is changing, but it doesn't seem that encouraging.

2. They've recently partnered up with Microsoft, presumably for product integration. This seems like it positions them as less of a neutral entity, especially as Alphabet owns DeepMind.

I hadn't heard of the Delphi method before, so this paper brought it to my attention.

It's nice to see concrete forecasting questions laid out in a principled way. Now the perhaps harder step is trying to get traction on them ;^).

Note: The tables in pages 9 and 10 are a little blurry to read. They are also not text, so it's not easy to copy-paste them into another format for better viewing. I think it'd be good to update the images to either be clearer or translate it into a text table.

I found your categorization of three ways to improve explanations to be useful, and they seem like they cover most of the issues.

However, I feel like the brunt of the article itself was too short to give me a good sense of what canonical forms are like in math, or how to apply them conversationally. In particular, I think having more examples (or making the examples clearer) for each item on your list would have been helpful.

Also, I personally would have also enjoyed a more technical explanation of how to think about canonical forms mathematically. (Which I would guess would help me understand the connection to conversations.)

I pattern-matched many of your between-task ambiguities to the different types of scheduling algorithms that can occur in operating systems.

I've been working through the textbook as well. I know I've commented a few times before, but, once again, thanks for writing up your thoughts for each chapter. They've been useful for summarizing / checking my own understanding.

For some recent meta-analyses, the OSC's paper on reproducibility in social science has ~100 studies, and I think you can explore those and others at osf.io.

In general, I know that anchoring effects are quite reliable with a large effect size, and many priming effects have in recent years failed to replicate.

Wait, sorry, I misunderstood what you needed. Please disregard.

Desmos has a handy interactive calculator where you can adjust the parameters to get a better feel for what's going on. I think that can potentially help.

Significant Digits.

The new design appears to have higher contrast between the foreground and background, which I'm a fan of. It's an improvement, I think.

(Also hoping for reduced page weight and performance tweaks, but I get that they're already in progress :P)

Specific stories from this list that I've enjoyed:

• Following the Phoenix: probably my favorite continuation fic that ups the ante in an interesting way with a satisfying ending
• Significant Digits: the famous one that got EY's recommendation for worldbuilding. Very cool exploration of a potential future of HPMOR, but the characters' personalities deviate from canon, perhaps too much.
• Orders of Magnitude: an extension (side-quel?) to SD that also goes deep on the worldbuilding.
• Reductionism for the Win: satisfying alternative ending arc.
• Minds, Names, and Faces: also a fairly good alternative ending arc.

Revial also looks promising but I haven't read it fully.

Oh, right, that's a fair point.

Did a cursory look through Twitter and found several critical accounts spreading it, so as gilch said, it's already happening to an extent :/

Is anyone worried about Streisand effect type scenarios with this?

I get that the alternative is Scott being likely doxxed by the article being published, so this support against the NYT seems like a much better outcome.

At the same time, it seems like this might also lead to some malicious people being more motivated (now that they've heard of Scott through these channels) to figure out who he is and then share that to people who Scott would like to not know?

Yes, having them to the margin is much much better. :)

Can other people comment about the UX of preview on hover?

I dislike it because the pop-ups are often quite large, like on gwern.net, where they can completely block whatever it is I'm reading. Arbital-style tool-tips and the Wikipedia ones are borderline okay as they aren't too large, but I find that the visual contrast is often too jarring for me :/

I think that, while it's true that some people might do this, this seems like an especially steep price to pay if it's the only benefit afforded to us by rationalization. (I realize you're not necessarily claiming that here, just pointing out that rationalization seems to have some possible social benefits for a certain group of people.)

If we are crunching the numbers, though, it seems like the flip side is much much more common, i.e. people doing things to benefit themselves under ostensibly altruistic motivations.

Also I want to point out that, perhaps against better design judgment, in actual industry most of modern software engineering has embraced the "agile" methodology where the product is being iterated in small sprints. This means that the design team checks in with the users' needs, changes are made, tests are added, and the cycle begins again. (Simplifying things here, of course.)

It was more common in the past to spend much more time understanding the clients' needs, in what is termed the "waterfall" methodology, where code is shipped perhaps only a few times a year, rather than bi-weekly (or whatever your agile sprint duration is).

Just a note that your windfall clause link to your website is broken. https://cullenokeefe.com/windfall-clause takes me a "We couldn't find the page you're looking for" error.

That seems reasonable, yeah.

Goodhart's Law also seems relevant to invoke here, if we're talking about goal vs incentive mismatch.

You're right that I'm making assumptions about insights which not always be applicable. And I don't mean to claim that theory isn't useful. This post is partially also for me to push back against some default theorizing that happens.

I think that sometimes the right thing to do is to focus on just "reporting the data", so to speak, if we use an analogy from research papers. There are experimental papers which might do some speculation, but their focus is on the results. Then there are also papers which try to do more theorizing and synthesis.

I guess I'm trying to discourage what I see as experimental papers focusing too much on the theorizing aspect.

Slight typo: You've used "fair" instead of "fare".

I've also pondered a similar issue, but from the lens of addictiveness and Skinner boxes. I think the key differentiators for me have to do with meaning and skill cap.

As for the moral obligation aspect, this is really interesting. I think the component about group benefit is quite interesting and is most of it. I do wonder about skills which do not get much attention or are mostly for your own benefit, e.g. someone practicing to be the best in the world at skipping stones seems fine, but we're likely not going to make a spectacle out of it. I guess this skill is at least demonstrable in theory, such that it could entertain some people?

I think I'd also feel morally repugnant at someone who, for example, spent all their time writing great fiction and then locking it up somewhere where no one could read it. (Maybe this gives them enjoyment.) Something-something, I think social responsibility is what's going on here in a very interesting way.

Awesome write-up of your ponderings!

Also, I think the folks at Hacker News would very much like this. I think you'd get a lot of attention if you made a Show HN post.

Congrats! That's a great achievement.

How do you feel after removing sugar? What did the timeline of cravings and their strength look like since you started quitting?

Thanks for pointing this out. It's been a while, and I forgot how I made the original epub.

If someone else figures out how to add them all to a new file, I'm happy to update the link in the OP to point to the new file.

It's actually running a modified version of Android, so you have a lot of possible functionality. For example, YouTube and Google Drive technically work. However, the low refresh rate means that you're not really incentivized to do anything else other than read.

I think it's just very good at what it does, which is display ebooks at a very large size. It also comes with a stylus to draw and markup text, but I don't really use that.

I care a lot about visuals, so the e-ink display (as opposed to just an iPad Pro) is a really big pro for me. If you're fine with a backlit display and want to be able to multitask in any reasonable capacity, the iPad is probably still better.

I wonder if there are apps that disable wifi for a while which could be used to achieve a similar result...

As for the Freewrite, I think I'm a sucker for high-quality products that only do a few things well. I think I've gotten a lot of value out of my Onyx Boox Max, which is an absurdly expensive e-reader that has the benefit of being very very big, such that reading textbooks / Arxiv papers no longer feels like a chore (or has to contend with other internet alternatives).

Awesome, thanks for the answers!

One other feature I'd really like is the ability to save the papers (and then export) I find through this tool, which would probably require an account for persistence.

Are there plans for something like this in the works?

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing. There are some fields where I want to read related papers, and this is a step up from just going through the citations list. Very cool work, and I like how there is also a list view which is much less cluttered.

I just tried to generate a graph for a friend's paper on Arxiv, but it told me that the back-end was overloaded, so hopefully it's working soon.

I have a few general questions about the site:

1. Are either the front-end or the graphs themselves open-source?
2. Are the graphs being generated ahead of time or on the fly?
3. How did you parse through the citation lists for papers from different journals? Even for Arxiv, it seems like there are at least a few different formats for citations.
4. What are some surprising things you've learned from analyzing the graphs you've already generated?
5. How do you determine how many nodes to show on the screen?

I think it depends on what you're looking to get out of this.

I took theory of computation at university with a textbook by Michael Sipser, which is the standard textbook on the subject for many university classes. I just did a cursory look on YouTube, and most of the things I find are university lecture series, e.g. one from UC Davis; these might be dry to listen to.

If you're willing to dive into written material, I think Scott Aaronson is probably a very good choice for technical writing that explains clearly, without assuming too much.

Who can name the biggest number? will give you a quick introduction to ideas in computability theory.

Past that, I suspect that his lecture series Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science will also serve as a useful overview to many different topics you'll likely encounter when studying the field of theoretical CS.

Also, happy to talk about things personally. Feel free to ping me here or elsewhere where we've connected if you have questions.

This is the case for a lot of CS topics, which you might notice once you start searching for things about algorithms Java, C++, etc.. I'm guessing that many of these schools + lecturers also use YouTube as a platform, and India has a large population, so these videos get lots of views.