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Articles by Mo Putera
A Test Suite for Concepts
Lately I’ve been spinning up on natural abstractions, and in particular on John Wentworth’s work on natural latents. As I’ve been studying, I’ve noticed some big gaps in the existing literature. Some of my biggest questions have not been answered by existing blog posts and writeups. One of my grumps about the existing body of work has to do with the typology of concepts, and the representative examples we’re using for that typology.
With the influx of new funding, don’t hunt for new problems - stop suffering first
A new article went viral on Twitter today: Nan Ransohoff's "The Third Wave of American Philanthropy" (link). Worth reading first. Nan is right about the shape of what's coming: hundreds of billions in new philanthropic capital, no ecosystem yet to absorb it, and a shortage of builders and organizations. I very much agree with that sentiment and the direction. More money, more people willing to start things, more urgency. But the conclusion I draw is a little different.
Dancing in a World of Horseradish — LessWrong
Commercial airplane tickets are divided up into coach, business class, and first class. In 2014, Etihad introduced The Residence, a premium experience above first class. The Residence isn't very popular. The reason The Residence isn't very popular is because of economics. A Residence flight is almost as expensive as a private charter jet. Private jets aren't just a little bit better than commercial flights. They're a totally different product.
Reminder: Morality is unsolved — LessWrong
Here is a game you can play with yourself, or others: a) You have to decide on a moral framework that can be explained in detail, to anyone. b) It will be implemented worldwide tomorrow. c) Tomorrow, every single human on Earth, including you and everyone you know, will also have their lives randomly swapped with someone else. This means that you are operating under the veil of ignorance. You should make sure that the morality you decide on is beneficial whoever you are, once it takes effect.
Mo Putera's Shortform — LessWrong
This is a special post for quick takes by. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page
2022 (and All Time) Posts by Pingback Count — LessWrong
Title/Link Post Karma Pingback Count Total Pingback Karma Avg Pingback Karma AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities 870 158 12,484 79 MIRI announces new "Death With Dignity" strategy 334 73 8,134 111 A central AI alignment problem: capabilities generalization, and the sharp left turn 273 96 7,704 80 Simulators 612 127 7,699 61 Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover 367 83 5,123 62 Reward is not the optimization target 341 62 4,493 72 A...
"Humanity vs. AGI" Will Never Look Like "Humanity vs. AGI" to Humanity — LessWrong
When discussing AGI Risk, people often talk about it in terms of a war between humanity and an AGI. Comparisons between the amounts of resources at both sides' disposal are brought up and factored in, big impressive nuclear stockpiles are sometimes waved around, etc. I'm pretty sure it's not how that'd look like, on several levels. 1.
Value systematization: how values become coherent (and misaligned) — LessWrong
Many discussions of AI risk are unproductive or confused because it’s hard to pin down concepts like “coherence” and “expected utility maximization” in the context of deep learning. In this post I attempt to bridge this gap by describing a process by which AI values might become more coherent, which I’m calling “value systematization”, and which plays a crucial role in my thinking about AI risk.
At 87, Pearl is still able to change his mind — LessWrong
Judea Pearl is a famous researcher, known for Bayesian networks (the standard way of representing Bayesian models), and his statistical formalization of causality. Although he has always been recommended reading here, he's less of a staple compared to, say, Jaynes. So the need to re-introduce him. My purpose here is to highlight a soothing, unexpected show of rationality on his part. One year ago I reviewed his last book, The Book of Why, in a failed submission to the ACX book review contest.
Feedbackloop-first Rationality — LessWrong
I've been workshopping a new rationality training paradigm. (By "rationality training paradigm", I mean an approach to learning/teaching the skill of "noticing what cognitive strategies are useful, and getting better at them.") I think the paradigm has promise. I've beta-tested it for a couple weeks. It’s too early to tell if it actually works, but one of my primary goals is to figure out if it works relatively quickly, and give up if it isn’t not delivering.
Yes, It's Subjective, But Why All The Crabs? — LessWrong
Crabs Nature really loves to evolve crabs. Some early biologist, equipped with knowledge of evolution but not much else, might see all these crabs and expect a common ancestral lineage. That’s the obvious explanation of the similarity, after all: if the crabs descended from a common ancestor, then of course we’d expect them to be pretty similar. … but then our hypothetical biologist might start to notice surprisingly deep differences between all these crabs.
We don’t need AGI for an amazing future — LessWrong
Most of the public discussions about AI safety seem to assume that there is only one plausible path for AI development: from narrow, specialized AI to broad AGI to superintelligence. So we seemingly have to decide between an amazing future with AGI at the risk that it will destroy the world or a future where most of humanity’s potential is untapped and sooner or later we get destroyed by a catastrophe that we could have averted with AGI. I think this is wrong.
Consider The Hand Axe — LessWrong
A long time ago, some primitive apes got addicted to rocks. The earliest stone tools were crude bastards, made by smashing large river pebbles together and calling it a day. José-Manuel Benito Álvarez Stone choppers like the one above took the prehistoric neighborhood by storm almost 3 million years ago. However dull the tools themselves may have been, this was the cutting-edge technology for literally more than a million years, a timescale I have no capacity of comprehending.
Recursive Middle Manager Hell — LessWrong
I think Zvi's Immoral Mazes sequence is really important, but comes with more worldview-assumptions than are necessary to make the points actionable. I conceptualize Zvi as arguing for multiple hypotheses. In this post I want to articulate one sub-hypothesis, which I call "Recursive Middle Manager Hell". I'm deliberately not covering some other components of his model. tl;dr: Something weird and kinda horrifying happens when you add layers of middle-management.
EA career guide for people from LMICs
Individuals from Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) engaging with EA often find that existing EA career advice does not address various frequently arising questions and challenges. This post attempts to address that gap by sharing the tentative outcomes of discussions between the authors (who are all from LMICs) on the pros and cons for various career paths. We hope that this guide will serve as a tool for individuals in LMICs to prioritize career paths.
You Are Not Measuring What You Think You Are Measuring — LessWrong
Eight years ago, I worked as a data scientist at a startup, and we wanted to optimize our sign-up flow. We A/B tested lots of different changes, and occasionally found something which would boost (or reduce) click-through rates by 10% or so. Then one week I was puzzling over a discrepancy in the variance of our daily signups. Eventually I scraped some data from the log files, and found that during traffic spikes, our server latency shot up to multiple seconds.
Against "blankfaces" — LessWrong
(Content note: minor spoilers for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.) Scott Aaronson writes about blankfaces, anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions.
Specializing in Problems We Don't Understand — LessWrong
Most problems can be separated pretty cleanly into two categories: things we basically understand, and things we basically don’t understand. Some things we basically understand: building bridges and skyscrapers, treating and preventing infections, satellites and GPS, cars and ships, oil wells and gas pipelines and power plants, cell networks and databases and websites.
Notes on notes on virtues — LessWrong
In the Notes on Virtues sequence, I’ve been sharing my research into a variety of virtues. In this introductory post, I share my thoughts about why I’ve been on this case and what I’m trying to accomplish. A one-paragraph summary: I think that becoming more skillful and well-rounded in the practice of the virtues is key to being a better, more satisfied, and more effective person.
Transportation as a Constraint — LessWrong
Imagine it’s late autumn of 332 BC. You’re Alexander the Great, and your armies are marching toward Egypt from Gaza. There’s just one little problem: you need to cross the Sinai peninsula - 150 miles of hot, barren desert. How will you carry food and water for the troops? Green triangle on the left is the Nile river delta in Egypt; green chunk in the upper right is Israel. The big desert peninsula between them is the Sinai.
Category Theory Without The Baggage — LessWrong
If you are an algebraic abstractologist, this post is probably not for you. Further meta-commentary can be found in the “meta” section, at the bottom of the post. So you’ve heard of this thing called “category theory”. Maybe you’ve met some smart people who say that’s it’s really useful and powerful for… something.
More Dakka - LessWrong
Epistemic Status: Hopefully enough Dakka Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Eqilibria is excellent. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t done so. Three recent reviews are Scott Aaronson’s, Robin Hanson’s (which inspired You Have the Right to Think and a great discussion in its comments) and Scott Alexander’s.
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