FWIW CFAR workshops were not AIUI funded by Sam Bankman-Fried and are not officially discontinued—though CFAR hasn’t done mainline workshops for a while it’s done various other less-public workshops and projects, and I think there’s a good chance that there will be at least something similar to the old mainline CFAR workshops in the future...
(source: work for CFAR sometimes)
Davis_Kingsley
Karma: 2,090
The OODA Loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?
Fun little more dakka example—I drink a lot of water. It’s sort of annoying having to refill a glass/water bottle/whatever all the time, so I’m using this huge glass instead that I think was intended to be a vase or carafe or something. It’s great.
Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic
What is a “chara inductor”?
I’m personally rather annoyed by all the AI discussion here and have been a lot less engaged recently. I would like to see much more rationality-type content.
Features and Antifeatures
You say :
Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks “how can I become smart like you?”, you no longer need to answer “Have you ever read Harry Potter?” because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it.
On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn’t recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It’s highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than Harry Potter stuff), is very difficult to get into thanks to the formatting, and also just… generally isn’t all that good? I like some of Eliezer’s writing, but I think this is very much not him at his finest.
Further, I very seriously doubt the idea that reading about a fictional government ruled by hell is meaningfully providing any real policy experience at all.
I’m not sure I agree. The normal art project also requires a bunch of “art director time”—there can be multiple rounds of back and forth between author and artist, different sketches or concepts to evaluate, and so on. If anything, I think there’s more context-switching cost required for a traditional project because of the inherent major delay in creating traditional art.
In other words, if I have an AI art prompt that doesn’t come out quite right, I know that very quickly and can then run another prompt to refine what I’m going for. If I have a traditional art prompt and a professional artist comes back a while later with sketches that aren’t right, I can send them art direction to refine the project—but doing so will impose more context-switching because of the delay on communications between us, the fact that these sketches/drafts will be arriving substantially after I’ve sent my initial piece, etc.
AI art isn’t “about to shake things up”. It’s already here.
This is already mentioned a bit elsewhere, but it seems perhaps worth flagging for potential readers that this technique (or perhaps, as you mentioned, a similar but different offshoot of it) is now considered… impure? flawed? risky? and is no longer part of the CFAR mainline workshop curriculum as I understand it—I would say it’s one of the more notable changes recently, though who’s to say where things will evolve in the future...
You know what I’ve been impressed by? Some eSports broadcasts intentionally upload videos with large amounts of dead air at the end if they’re showing a two-out-of-three where one side won the first two games—that way you won’t get spoiled on the result by the length of the video!
[Question] How to Navigate Evaluating Politicized Research?
I think it’s somewhat complicated—the VDV is also used in conventional operations thanks to its elite and volunteer status (see for instance this primer on Russian military methods), which makes them more reliable and effective than conscript forces even in some more “conventional” tasks.
In some ways this might be considered similar to the structure of the post-WWII French military, where the paratroopers and the Foreign Legion were made up of volunteers and used preferentially over conscript forces—indeed, as I understand it France did not use conscripts at all in the Indochina War, and favored using its “more reliable” volunteer units in the Algerian War, with the infamous Battle of Algiers conducted primarily by paratroopers.
(Ironically, the reliability of these units in combat did not mean political reliability—when the French government eventually decided to grant Algerian independence, some of the paratroopers joined a coup attempt!)At the same time though, Russia has invested substantially in technological capabilities for its airborne forces to assist in their primary airborne mission, with things like the BMD- and BTR- series of airborne APCs/IFVs, multi-canopy and rocket-assisted parachutes to allow these vehicles to be dropped (in some cases with crews inside!), and so on.
Innovation, Stagnation, and Paratrooper Operations
The problem I find harder is people who are mildly symptomatic, in ways that could be an illness or allergies, or are on the trail end up symptoms after a disease has probably but not definitely been cleared. “No interaction for five days after a sniffly nose” is life ruining for a lot of people.
Yeah, this is a much more difficult situation for me. I think I more or less always have minor COVID symptoms if construed strictly, given that various minor allergies or similar have the same symptoms as COVID...
Crossposted from Facebook:
The term used in the past for a concept close to this was “Fake frameworks”—see for instance Val’s post in favor of it from 2017: https://www.lesswrong.com/.../in-praise-of-fake-frameworksUnfortunately I think this proved to be a quite misguided idea in practice, and one that was made more dangerous by the fact that it seems really appealing in principle. As you imply, the people most interested in pursuing these frameworks are often not I think the ones who have the most sober and evenhanded evaluations of such, which can lead to unfortunate results.
(Also, uh, note that I myself converted to Catholicism, but not because of this sort of thing, so give or subtract points from my reply as you will.)
In the past, I have sometimes criticized various works of media for focusing too much on bullying in school, which struck me as kind of an embarrassing and unworthy theme to spend a lot of time on. I had been bullied in school myself to some degree and considered it annoying but not ultimately that big a deal, so my view was that this sort of stuff was kind of making a mountain out of a molehill and very exaggerated compared to reality.
Recently, I was in a conversation that really broadened my perspective and I learned that my experiences had actually been very mild and for some people it Really Was That Bad. I renounce previous criticisms that I have made of works for focusing on these themes and apologize to anyone who was hurt by my doing so.
CFAR has run European workshops in Czechia for many years, I think starting in… 2017 maybe, though with a break for the pandemic.
The venue used for workshops in 2022 was bought/is run by separate organizations from CFAR and holds a bunch of stuff besides CFAR workshops; I’m not totally up on what’s going on over there or the financial situation with the venue but I believe at least some events are still being held there.
Before that venue was acquired CFAR ran a bunch of European CFAR workshops in other venues; insofar as that venue does end up having to close down or whatever it would not in principle prevent CFAR from doing workshops elsewhere, potentially going back to some of the sites it used in the past, etc.