I’m bumping into walls but hey now I know what the maze looks like.
Neil
Karma: 700
I’ve been at Sciences Po for a few months now. Do you have any general advice? I seem to have trouble taking the subjects seriously enough to any real effort in them, which you seem to point out as a failure mode you skirted. Asking as many people I can for this, as I’m going through a minor existential crisis. Thanks!
Yeah that’d go into some “aesthetic flaws” category which presumably has no risk of messing with your rationality. I agree these exist. And I too am picky.
I agree about the punchline. Chef’s kiss post
Can I piggy-back off your conclusions so far? Any news you find okay?
Well then, I can update a little more in the direction not to trust this stuff.
Ah right, the decades part—I had written about the 1930 revolution, commune, and bourbon destitution, then checked the dates online and stupidly thought “ah, it must be just 1815 then” and only talked about that. Thanks
“second” laughcries in french
Ahem, as one of LW’s few resident Frenchmen, I must interpose to say that yes, this was not the Big Famous Guillotine French revolution everyone talks about, but one of the ~ 2,456^2 other revolutions that went on in our otherwise very calm history.
Specifically, we refer to the Les Mis revolution as “Les barricades” mostly because the people of Paris stuck barricades everywhere and fought against authority because they didn’t like the king the other powers of Europe put into place after Napoleon’s defeat. They failed that time, but succeeded 15 years later with another revolution (to put a different king in place).
Victor Hugo loved Napoleon with a passion, and was definitely on the side of the revolutionaries here (though he was but a wee boy when this happened, about the age of Gavroche).
Later, in the 1850s (I’m skipping over a few revolutions, including the one that got rid of kings again), when Haussmann was busy bringing 90% of medieval Paris to rubble to replace it with the homogenous architecture we so admire in Ratatouille today, Napoleon the IIIrd had the great idea to demolish whole blocks and replace them with wide streets (like the Champs Elisées) to make barricade revolutions harder to do.
Final note: THANK YOU LW TEAM for making àccénts like thìs possible with the typeface. They used to look bloated.
Do we know what side we’re on? Because I opted in and don’t know whether I’m East or West, it just feels Wrong. I guess I stand a non-trivial chance of losing 50 karma ahem please think of the daisy girl and also my precious internet points.
Anti-moderative action will be taken in response if you stand in the way of justice, perhaps by contacting those hackers and giving them creative ideas. Be forewarned.
Fun fact: it’s thanks to Lucie that I ended up stumbling onto PauseAI in the first place. Small world + thanks Lucie.
Update everyone: the hard right did not end up gaining a parliamentary majority, which, as Lucie mentioned, could have been the worse outcome wrt AI safety.
Looking ahead, it seems that France will end up being fairly confused and gridlocked as it becomes forced to deal with an evenly-split parliament by playing German-style coalition negociation games. Not sure what that means for AI, except that unilateral action is harder.
For reference, I’m an ex-high school student who just got to vote for the first 3 times in his life because of French political turmoil (✨exciting) and am working these days at PauseAI France, a (soon to be official) governance non-profit aiming to, well—
Anyway, as an org we’re writing a counter to the AI commitee mentioned in this post, so that’s what’s up these days in the French AI safety governance circles.
I’m working on a non-trivial.org project meant to assess the risk of genome sequences by comparing them to a public list of the most dangerous pathogens we know of. This would be used to assess the risk from both experimental results in e.g. BSL-4 labs and the output of e.g. protein folding models. The benchmarking would be carried out by an in-house ML model of ours. Two questions to LessWrong:
1. Is there any other project of this kind out there? Do BSL-4 labs/AlphaFold already have models for this?
2. “Training a model on the most dangerous pathogens in existence” sounds like an idea that could backfire horribly. Can it backfire horribly?
I’m taking this post down, it was to set up an archive.org link as requested by Bostrom, and no longer serves that purpose. Sorry, this was meant to be discreet.
Poetry and practicality
I was staring up at the moon a few days ago and thought about how deeply I loved my family, and wished to one day start my own (I’m just over 18 now). It was a nice moment.
Then, I whipped out my laptop and felt constrained to get back to work; i.e. read papers for my AI governance course, write up LW posts, and trade emails with EA France. (These I believe to be my best shots at increasing everyone’s odds of survival).
It felt almost like sacrilege to wrench myself away from the moon and my wonder. Like I was ruining a moment of poetry and stillwatered peace by slamming against reality and its mundane things again.
But… The reason I wrenched myself away is directly downstream from the spirit that animated me in the first place. Whether I feel the poetry now that I felt then is irrelevant: it’s still there, and its value and truth persist. Pulling away from the moon was evidence I cared about my musings enough to act on them.
The poetic is not a separate magisterium from the practical; rather the practical is a particular facet of the poetic. Feeling “something to protect” in my bones naturally extends to acting it out. In other words, poetry doesn’t just stop. Feel no guilt in pulling away. Because, you’re not.
Too obvious imo, though I didn’t downnvote. This also might not be an actual rationalist failure mode; in my experience at least, rationalists have about the same intuition all the other humans have about when something should be taken literally or not.
As for why the comment section has gone berserk, no idea, but it’s hilarious and we can all use some fun.
Can we have a black banner for the FHI? Not a person, still seems appropriate imo.
See also Alicorn’s Expressive Vocabulary.
I think you could get a lot out of adding a temporary golden dollar sign with amount donated next to our LW names! Upon proof of donation receipt or whatever.
Seems like the lowest hanging fruit for monetizing vanity— benches being usually somewhat of a last resort!
(The benches seem still underpriced to me, given expected amount raised and average donation size in the foreseeable future).