Posts

Tips for reducing thinking branching factor 2023-08-07T20:21:43.298Z
AI Risk US Presidential Candidate 2023-04-11T19:31:08.638Z
LED Brain Stimulation for Productivity 2023-03-20T22:30:03.756Z
Bing Chat is a Precursor to Something Legitimately Dangerous 2023-03-01T01:36:17.490Z
Buy Duplicates 2023-02-15T23:06:41.570Z
I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month 2023-02-05T01:19:39.182Z
Elastic Productivity Tools 2022-11-19T21:59:39.913Z
TOMT: Post from 1-2 years ago talking about a paper on social networks 2022-10-24T01:29:11.453Z
You Don't Have To Click The Links 2022-09-11T18:13:24.817Z
sberens's Shortform 2020-08-06T16:12:52.238Z

Comments

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Matthew Barnett's Shortform · 2024-06-18T18:27:48.183Z · LW · GW

As a counterpoint, Sydney showed aligning these models on the first go, and even discovering unsafe behavior is non-trivial.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Just admit that you’ve zoned out · 2024-06-04T15:00:26.831Z · LW · GW

The flip side of this is that it helps to speak in a way that’s almost repetitive to make sure someone who zoned out can catch back up.

For example, frequently once the subject/object of a sentence is known, people refer to the subject/object with pronouns instead of repeating the subject/object. If someone misses the initial definition, they are immediately lost.

(This also applies somewhat to writing — above, I’m repeating “subject/object” instead of “it”. People also zone out during reading, and this repetition saves them from having to scroll back up and figure out what a pronoun is referencing.)

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Increasing IQ is trivial · 2024-03-02T21:19:24.054Z · LW · GW

Did you feel a subjective increase in your intelligence? E.g. feeling like you’re thinking faster, more clearly, having a better memory?

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on GPT-4 for personal productivity: online distraction blocker · 2023-09-27T07:36:31.419Z · LW · GW

Cool project!

I’m curious—what does the long tail of websites look like for you? For me, it’s the small number of sites that i repeatedly go to (twitter, youtube, hackernews, etc…) that take up the vast majority of my wasted time.

(Btw, I also built my own website blocker: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webblock/jeahkphmdfbddenabgndnooheiciocka)

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Startup Roundup #1: Happy Demo Day · 2023-09-12T22:58:53.737Z · LW · GW

I think the main beneficiaries of being able to sideload apps will be incumbents, not startups. Big companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Tinder will offer users discounts if they sideload because it will spare them the 30% Apple tax.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-07T08:19:43.824Z · LW · GW

I am confused how to square your claim of requesting extra time for incontrovertible proof, with Ben’s claim that he had a 3 hour call with you and sent the summary to Emerson, who then replied “good summary!”

Was Emerson’s full reply something like, “Good summary! We have incontrovertible proof disproving the claims made against us, please allow us one week to provide it?”

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Twitter Twitches · 2023-07-04T19:17:24.719Z · LW · GW

Bloomberg reported 2 weeks ago that Twitter resumed paying Google Cloud: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-patching-up-relationship

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on AI Risk US Presidential Candidate · 2023-04-11T19:31:53.070Z · LW · GW
Comment by sberens on [deleted post] 2023-03-22T21:31:07.375Z

I agree AI should be regulated, but lumping social media in with AI only weakens your argument.

Also, is it just me or does this writing style feel like a NYT op-ed?

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Want to predict/explain/control the output of GPT-4? Then learn about the world, not about transformers. · 2023-03-16T16:53:40.807Z · LW · GW

You might want to clarify that, because in the post you explicitly say things like “if your goal is to predict the logits layer, then you should probably learn about Shakespearean dramas, Early Modern English, and the politics of the Late Roman Republic.”

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Want to predict/explain/control the output of GPT-4? Then learn about the world, not about transformers. · 2023-03-16T06:36:25.783Z · LW · GW

This is probably obvious, but maybe still worth mentioning:

It’s important to take into account the ROI per unit time. In the amount of time it would take for me to grok transformers (let’s say 100 hours), I could read ~1 million tokens, which is ~0.0002% of the training set of GPT3.

The curves aren’t clear to me, but i would bet grokking transformers would be more effective than a 0.0002% increase in training set knowledge.

This might change if you only want to predict GPT’s output in certain scenarios.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Bing Chat is a Precursor to Something Legitimately Dangerous · 2023-03-01T02:22:41.250Z · LW · GW

I agree that recursive self-improvement can be very very bad; in this post I meant to show that we can get less-bad-but-still-bad behavior from only (LLM, REPL) combinations.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Buy Duplicates · 2023-02-16T01:33:14.832Z · LW · GW

Yeah, this isn't something I have an ugh field around, but having portable versions of travel stuff like shampoo, skincare, and chargers ready to go is nice.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month · 2023-02-15T22:57:42.123Z · LW · GW

Awesome! What GitHub integration are you talking about?

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month · 2023-02-07T16:48:46.556Z · LW · GW

I think the hackernews comment section, though still somewhat emotionally charged, is of substantially better quality.

Also, I responded to some comments/questions there.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a month · 2023-02-07T07:15:10.389Z · LW · GW

This is awesome! I highly encourage you to write up your experience; I think this should be more normalized!

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Vegan Nutrition Testing Project: Interim Report · 2023-01-27T05:39:06.885Z · LW · GW

I didn’t feel a difference; I guess because it was my iron reserves that were low, not my actual iron levels.

But yeah, if it does continue to be a problem I will do something like that.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Vegan Nutrition Testing Project: Interim Report · 2023-01-27T05:34:54.146Z · LW · GW

Sure, but my point was I don't know what dose per unit time to take.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Vegan Nutrition Testing Project: Interim Report · 2023-01-27T05:33:31.517Z · LW · GW

Whoops, I meant year. Edited.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Vegan Nutrition Testing Project: Interim Report · 2023-01-20T06:21:10.256Z · LW · GW

A relevant experience of mine: after being vegan for ~1 year, I got my blood tested to see if there was anything I should watch out for. It turned out that my iron reserves were low, so I was told to take iron supplements. One year later I got another blood test where my iron levels came back as too high. My doctor was confused until I told him I still sporadically took iron supplements; he told me to stop immediately, and that as a male I didn't need to supplement iron much.

Now I feel like I'm in a damned-if-I-do-damned-if-I-don't limbo; it would be great to have some sort of framework of when/if to take iron supplements.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Why don't Rationalists use bidets? · 2023-01-02T22:13:17.139Z · LW · GW

I think a wrench and 20 minutes of time is (1) a higher barrier than you think (not to say it justifies the lack of bidet) and (2) is an underestimate of how inconvenient installing it is. I installed a bidet a few years ago and it probably took 2+ hours and ended up leaking. When I moved, I opted not to install one again and instead follow #2 with a shower. 

However, I agree bidets are great modulo the installation, and I will try to buy a toilet with one pre-installed.

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Elastic Productivity Tools · 2022-11-25T02:00:24.806Z · LW · GW

I actually had that as an example in a draft, but my friends told me it didn't quite fit the mold so I deleted it :)

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Elastic Productivity Tools · 2022-11-20T18:58:14.992Z · LW · GW

Thanks! Here is the extension I made: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/webblock/jeahkphmdfbddenabgndnooheiciocka

Admittedly, I copped out on the UX in a few places (motivation section, link parsing, etc...) but better to publish than wait for perfection!

Edit: 

Right after I published my extension, I found these similar tools:

See also https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-correction-extensio/ 

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on TOMT: Post from 1-2 years ago talking about a paper on social networks · 2022-10-24T01:34:00.398Z · LW · GW

Aha upon further searching I came across this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HaESgyu2BqDMTpujS/a-better-web-is-coming 

It's not the post I remember reading but it's definitely about the same same topic so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on sberens's Shortform · 2020-08-06T18:42:18.697Z · LW · GW

I shouldn't have used a company for my example because as you illustrated that's not a very interesting case; if it wasn't a company but the government (e.g. the TSA), does economic theory say those jobs will come back in a more efficient form?

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on sberens's Shortform · 2020-08-06T16:12:52.788Z · LW · GW

To What Extent is Creating Jobs Good

Is it always better to remove/replace inefficient jobs? For example if a company employs 100 people to do manual data entry, would it be better for either the economy or the utility function to fire them and automate the jobs?

Comment by Simon Berens (sberens) on Self-sacrifice is a scarce resource · 2020-07-22T16:46:36.744Z · LW · GW

How did you meet your roommates? I would like to surround myself with similar people (perhaps less extreme).