AI doom
How long to AGI and possibility of it destroying the world?
2031 median [2026 (lower 25%) –2043 (upper 25%) – Metaculus on @March 28, 2023
2026 -2038 [most likely from 3 – 15 years (probably not 50) – Eliezer Yudkowsky 2023 prediction source YT interview on Bankless – seemed like 90% of chance AGI/ASI is gonna end the world]
Robin Hanson The best architectures today are plausibly those behind large language models, which are indeed impressive. But similarly impressive to how the best new systems of each decade have looked in the past. They do not seem especially close to being either AGI or SIAI, and it seems pretty clear to me that they would not become such just by adding more hardware and data. link
Female vs male
Female exclude often Women as Worriers who Exclude
Science progress – is it possible to ask big / general questions?
You can answer big question but you must be prepared you may be 100% wrong
We generate more and more primary data, it gets harder and harder to go to the bottom and read everything. The sort of questions you’re able to ask and answer in this way get narrower and narrower and narrower. Most make fun of this trend among academics, and rightly so, to get to these ridiculous tiny questions that some people ask. Yet in a way, that’s the only way to be a valid scientist. – Ian Morris on 80000 hours show (Historical methodology [01:02:35])
The longer in time the more scientist you need to have to solve problems.
Fragment from Where is Todays Bethovens? by Holden Karnovski where he explains
Why science is wrong so often why Replication Crisis?
Health
During a health symposium @StanfordMed I learned from a cardiologist colleague that even if we get our 180min of zone 2 cardio per week, the benefits are largely (or entirely) erased by sitting >5 hours per day. Solution: standing (1:1 ratio w/sitting) & 3-4, 10min walks per day. Andrew Huberman
World is a highly efficient place.
Efficient market hypothesis
"If it were so easy, why wouldn't everyone else have done it already?" Thus if something seems easy and obvious to do, you must be missing something in it's difficulty However if an idea seem ridiculous on the surface, you can rest assure that less people have thought about it deeply.
Specifically for economic markets this is the idea that any predictable nature in the market will be exploited to maximum potential by everyone who knows about them. If you know a stock is underpriced, it makes sense to buy it until it is priced to equilibrium. This is how markets work.
Pro
- Naval claims this. And a followup conclusion is that there are rarely openings, opportunities. e.g. biology the way your hand skeleton, tendons work is highly efficient and it would be hard to design it from scratch to improve it
VS.
- I think this comes from the lack of imagination. There are wells of efficiency. Biology really optimize hand for the purpose of having four finger one direction and one in another. If we would want artificially build hand with that constraints using "human parts" and adding all functions this hand does currently it would be hard to come up with better design. But this view lacks imagination. How about adding 3rd hand or more fingers? I believe there are wells of efficiency – a limited areas that nature or culture excel in innovation and efficiency. But there are huge hole in between these silos there are huge breaks.
- There is Foundation-Paralysis Effect 🎨 that is highly inefficient and constraining (see example QWERTY vs. DVORAK)
- Peter Thiel in his book "From Zero to One" sees the same thing in a technology. e.g. in a startup world if there is a possibility for a business its probably already existing. It's really hard to do a new big startup because as soon as the technological opportuinty opens up somebody will figure out and go into it.
VS.
- I believe there are hundreds of new social media startups possible right now with a technology we have currently but it's really hard to pull them off (idea, design, marketing). Paul Graham to explain why startups are possible in the world of large companies uses the following metaphor. When small planes are flying into big cloud it's not that they have radars. They cannot see where they are flying into. The reason it's safe to do is that this is humongous space and it's highly unlikely to crash with another plane. Paul Graham says that it's important and difficult excercise to distinguish weather some startup idea is impossible (yes, as soon as new technology opens new possibilities it is filled with new applications) or nobody thought about it or was able to bring a successful product. Patrick Collison asked why is this so hard to make a good app. There are so many bad apps. And I think that's the core of it. Why good apps are good is not obvious. There are many things synced, working that look minimalistic and obvious but took a lot of effort to arrive at.
In technology winner takes it all
Not sure if following is true. There are a lot of technologies that are existing in parallel. Maybe this applies more to technologies such as electrical circuits, algorithms.
If there are two competitors in the technology (does it more apply to technologies such as algorithms usually the one that is a little bit more effective tend to slowly snowball into a bit larger, a bit larger and eventually only
Nature or nurture
"Since the 1950s, the nonprofit Holt International has helped American families adopt tens of thousands of children from Korea and other countries. Parents would sign up, get approved, and get the next available child who fit their general criteria. The process was essentially random, which gave scientists an opportunity. They could compare genetically unrelated children who were assigned to the same parents: The more the parents influenced the children, the more these adopted brothers and sisters would end up alike.What the scientists found was that the family a kid was raised in had surprisingly little impact on how that kid ended up. Unrelated children adopted into the same home ended up only a little more similar than unrelated children who were raised separately. The effects of nature on a child’s future income were some 2.5 times larger than the effects of nurture.”
"Other researchers have done further studies of adoptees and twins, with similar results. As Bryan Caplan notes in his 2011 book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, parents have only small effects on their children’s health, life expectancy, education, and religiosity (though studies have found that they have moderate effects on drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teenage years, as well as how kids feel about their parents).”
Making photos
This is beautiful moment.
I want to share how high am I on the hierarchy ladder.
Is taking notes on net positive?
Naval Ravikant that note taking is a waste of time for him because if there is something important you will remember it.
It may be pretty effective strategy for things you naturally tend to agree, things that expand your knowledge in a predictable manner.
That said these area of knowledge, perhaps in a smaller extend, is gonna be subjected to constant forgetting process as well.
But won’t work with thing you don’t understand, didn’t click, didn’t connect as an epiphany with different areas of knowledge, are on the verge of grasping. These ones will be discarded even though they have a high potential of being an important building blocks for knowledge. A high potential for changing or calibrating your views – probably the most important feature of learning.
Is this area actually expanding your understanding more effectively than the things you more naturally agree with?
Some learn through ANKI cards I think having a wiki type of blog like mine is an incredible way to come back to the definitions. My social brain makes me reevaluate what I put in front of the public.
How to square The grass is greener somewhere else bias vs. My-side bias?
On aggregate is it more about sum of all parts or specific combination of ingredients?
- Universal: Cooking all things together. Cooking each thing seperately and adding one by one. No difference in temeperature or length. How much value can you get out of the two?