rationalnewsletter

Issue #233

Media has become increasingly negative since 2000, with more and more headlines expressing fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Neutral headlines are getting rarer. // twitter.com

# Coronavirus

Covid 10/6/22: Overreactions Aplenty // Zvi, 38 min

Ivermectin: Much Less Than You Needed To Know // George3d6, 1 min

# Instrumental

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox // henrik-karlsson, 13 min

Consider your appetite for disagreements // adamzerner, 7 min

Finding Great Tutors // ulisse-mini, 1 min

Will you let your kid play football? // 5hout, 2 min

Baby Monitor with Delay // jkaufman, 1 min

# Epistemic

The "you-can-just" alarm // Emrik North, 1 min

Truth seeking is motivated cognition // gworley, 3 min

What makes a probability question "well-defined"? // noah-topper, 8 min

Self-defeating conspiracy theorists and their theories // M. Y. Zuo, 3 min

# Ai

Warning Shots Probably Wouldn't Change The Picture Much // So8res, 3 min

Don't leave your fingerprints on the future // So8res, 6 min

AI Timelines via Cumulative Optimization Power: Less Long, More Short // jacob_cannell, 30 min

The Teacup Test // lsusr, 2 min

Polysemanticity and Capacity in Neural Networks // Buck, 3 min

# Meta-ethics

Against Arguments For Exploitation // blackstampede, 8 min

The Biggest Problem with Deontology: The Aggregation Problem // arjun-panickssery, 3 min

Reflection Mechanisms as an Alignment target: A follow-up survey // marius-hobbhahn, 8 min

# Longevity

How Trustworthy Are Supplements? // Scott Alexander, 27 min Favorite

# Anthropic

How does anthropic reasoning and illusionism/eliminitivism interact? // Shiroe, 1 min

# Decision theory

Analysis: US restricts GPU sales to China // Aidan O'Gara, 5 min

Adversarial vs Collaborative Contexts // jkaufman, 1 min

Deprecated: Some humans are fitness maximizers // DarkSym, 7 min

Do uncertainty/planning costs make convex hulls unrealistic? // edward-pierzchalski, 1 min

Easy fixing Voting // charbel-raphael-segerie

# Math and cs

Paper: Discovering novel algorithms with AlphaTensor [Deepmind] // LawChan, 1 min

Boolean Primitives for Coupled Optimizers // paulbricman, 9 min

# Books

Notes on Notes on the Synthesis of Form // Vaniver, 7 min

American invention from the “heroic age” to the system-building era // jasoncrawford, 12 min

# Culture war

Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war // MaxTegmark, 4 min

The Village and the River Monsters... Or: Less Fighting, More Brainstorming // ExCeph, 10 min

# Misc

Calibrate - New Chrome Extension for hiding numbers so you can guess // cmessinger, 1 min

Research Deprioritizing External Communication // jkaufman, 9 min

Quick notes on “mirror neurons” // steve2152, 2 min

Signaling Guilt // Krieger, 1 min

Dependency Tree For The Development Of Plate Tectonics // pktechgirl, 4 min

# Podcasts

Currents 070: Brian Chau on Propaganda & Populism // The Jim Rutt Show, 53 min

172 – Virtue Ethics // The Bayesian Conspiracy, 127 min

YANSS 243 – A tour of the latest, most interesting psychological research with Jay Van Bavel as our guide //

Currents 069: Bonnitta Roy and Euvie Ivanova on Collective Intimacy // The Jim Rutt Show, 45 min

# Rational fiction

The Shape of Things to Come // alexbeyman, 9 min

The Patent Clerk // alexbeyman, 4 min

The Beautiful Ones // alexbeyman, 52 min

Not Long Now // alexbeyman, 81 min

The Three Cardinal Sins // alexbeyman, 9 min

# Videos of the week

How Gaming Can Be a Force for Good | Noah Raford | TED // TED, 14 min