rationalnewsletter

Issue #122

Something as simple as saying “have a nice day” or “thank you” to a stranger that we encounter in everyday life is linked with greater subjective well-being. // drive.google.com

# Coronavirus

Covid 7/23: The Second Summit // Zvi, 11 min

School Vouchers As Pandemic Response // Robin Hanson, 1 min

# Instrumental

Be impatient // benkuhn, 8 min

Become a person who Actually Does Things // neel-nanda-1, 3 min

Construct a portfolio to profit from AI progress. // deluks917, 1 min

If you are signed up for cryonics with life insurance, how much life insurance did you get and over what term? // elityre, 1 min

Photos Before Drywall // jkaufman, 1 min

# Epistemic

The Basic Double Crux pattern // elityre, 4 min

A New Way to Visualize Biases // dtm, 1 min

An Old Way to Visualize Biases // zachary-robertson, 1 min

Operationalizing Interpretability // lifelonglearner, 5 min

Aggregating forecasts // Jsevillamol, 4 min

# Ai

To what extent is GPT-3 capable of reasoning? // TurnTrout, 18 min Favorite

Alignment As A Bottleneck To Usefulness Of GPT-3 // johnswentworth, 4 min

Can you get AGI from a Transformer? // steve2152, 14 min

Competition: Amplify Rohin’s Prediction on AGI researchers & Safety Concerns // stuhlmueller, 3 min

$1000 bounty for OpenAI to show whether GPT3 was "deliberately" pretending to be stupider than it is // jacobjacob, 2 min

# Meta-ethics

No Ultimate Goal and a Small Existential Crisis // elriggs, 3 min

# Anthropic

Longevity interventions when young // George3d6, 47 min Favorite

# Decision theory

Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.) // sustrik, 29 min Favorite

Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know (II.) // sustrik, 15 min

Chains, Bottlenecks and Optimization // curi, 4 min

Bottleneck Examples // curi, 11 min

A Natural Explanation of Nash Equilibria // Dr. Birdbrain, 6 min

# Math and cs

What Would I Do? Self-prediction in Simple Algorithms // Scott Garrabrant, 6 min

Uncalibrated quantum experiments act clasically // justinpombrio, 10 min

Optimizing arbitrary expressions with a linear number of queries to a Logical Induction Oracle (Cartoon Guide) // donald-hobson, 2 min

Weak HCH accesses EXP // evhub, 3 min

Math. proof of the superiority of independent guesses? // Milton, 1 min

# Books

Using books to prime behavior // ryan-wong, 1 min

# Community

Criticism of some popular LW articles // AllAmericanBreakfast, 7 min

More Right // adamzerner, 4 min

Praise of some popular LW articles // AllAmericanBreakfast, 9 min

Inefficient doesn't mean indifferent, but it might mean wimpy. // AllAmericanBreakfast, 6 min

Forum Assisted Discussion // dan-b-1, 3 min

# Culture war

Reveal Culture // malcolmocean, 8 min

Musical Outgroups // evan-huus, 4 min

Beware RightTalkism // Robin Hanson, 4 min

# Misc

"Can you keep this confidential? How do you know?" // Raemon, 4 min

Thiel on Progress and Stagnation // ricraz, 12 min

How good is humanity at coordination? // Buck, 3 min

A Scalable Urban Design and the Single Building City // edward-swernofsky, 19 min

Artificial vs. Real Intelligence // nixtaken, 15 min

# Podcasts

EP67 Tomas Björkman on The Nordic Secret // The Jim Rutt Show, 92 min

# Videos of the week

The new science of personalized vaccines | Ofer Levy // TED, 11 min