rational
Issue #181: Full List
12 September, 2021 // View curated list
# Coronavirus
Covid 9/9: Passing the Peak // Zvi, 21 min
How do you decide when to change N95/FFP-2 masks? // ChristianKl, 1 min
Cliffs Notes: How much should fully vaccinated people care about Long COVID? // Sameerishere, 10 min
# Instrumental
The Best Software For Every Need // Bjartur Tómas, 1 min
Three Principles to Writing Original Nonfiction // lsusr, 5 min
Prefer the English Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American // Erich_Grunewald, 1 min
Pack a travel bathroom bag // Alex Hollow, 1 min
Thinking About College Funding // jkaufman, 1 min
How does your data backup solution setup work? // ChristianKl, 1 min
Lots of Hooks // jkaufman, 1 min
Tasks apps w/ time estimates to gauge how much you'll overshoot? // iamef, 1 min
# Epistemic
Assigning probabilities to metaphysical ideas // Jotto999, 1 min
[Link post] When pooling forecasts, use the geometric mean of odds // Jsevillamol, 1 min
A Taxonomy of Research // Jemist, 2 min
How to Find a Problem // Jemist, 2 min
# Ai
The alignment problem in different capability regimes // Buck, 5 min
Paths To High-Level Machine Intelligence // Daniel_Eth, 40 min
Measurement, Optimization, and Take-off Speed // jsteinhardt, 15 min
Gradient descent is not just more efficient genetic algorithms // leogao, 1 min
Countable Factored Spaces // Diffractor, 27 min
Obstacles to gradient hacking // leogao, 5 min
Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Suboptimal Demonstrations and Alternative Solution Concepts // sage_bergerson, 1 min
Alignment via manually implementing the utility function // Chantiel, 2 min
Alignment via being part of the optimizer // Chantiel, 2 min
Conditional on the first AGI being aligned correctly, is a good outcome even still likely? // iamthouthouarti, 1 min
# Meta-ethics
Pleasure and Pain are Long-Tailed // lsusr, 4 min
A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence // michael-edward-johnson, 8 min
# Longevity
How much should we value life? // adamzerner, 45 min Favorite
Conflict in Kriorus becomes hot today, updated, update 2 // avturchin, 1 min
The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being // Scott Alexander, 6 min
A New Approach to Methylation Clocks // Josh Mitteldorf, 9 min
# Anthropic
The Duplicator: Instant Cloning Would Make the World Economy Explode // HoldenKarnofsky, 8 min
The Insular Fertile Future // Robin Hanson, 2 min
Think of the (Alien) Children! // Robin Hanson, 1 min
# Decision theory
Acausal Trade and the Ultimatum Game // yair-halberstadt, 3 min
Decision theory question: Is it possible to acausally blackmail the universe into telling you how time travel works? // dxu, 3 min
Framing Practicum: Comparative Advantage // johnswentworth, 5 min
# Math and cs
The Blackwell order as a formalization of knowledge // alexflint, 12 min
# Books
I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should) // David_Gross, 8 min
# Community
What Motte and Baileys are rationalists most likely to engage in? // Chris_Leong, 1 min
Why there are no online CFAR workshops? // Just Learning, 1 min
# Culture war
Does Diverse News Decrease Polarization? // jsteinhardt, 10 min
Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts // Scott Alexander, 8 min
# Misc
Kids Learn by Copying // lsusr, 1 min
# Podcasts
145 – You Are In Newcomb’s IQ Shredder // The Bayesian Conspiracy, 133 min
# Rational fiction
Bayeswatch 7: Wildfire // lsusr, 4 min
Bayeswatch 9: Zombies // lsusr, 3 min
Bayeswatch 8: Antimatter // lsusr, 3 min
# Videos of the week
GPT-X, DALL-E, and our Multimodal Future [video series] // bakztfuture, 1 min
Simulating the Evolution of Sacrificing for Family // Primer, 22 min