Zachary

Karma: 57

Zachary Jan 30, 2025, 6:24 PM
5 points
5
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Fertility Will Never Recover
Collins not Gladwell lmao

Zachary Nov 26, 2024, 5:11 PM
3 points
0
on: Ultralearning in 80 days
If you’re trying to make the most of your abundant free time then learning Quenya is a mistake. Learning a language nobody speaks seriously is at best a way to signal status to a very specific group of people and at worst a party trick
Some ideas of ways to spend that time that would pay higher dividends over the course of the rest of your life:
- learn a musical instrument
- become skilled at a competitive game (mtg, poker, rocket league, chess, etc)
- practice yoga
  - personally I’ve found practicing yoga to be the best thing I can do for making me feel good in my body on a daily basis, which I see as a prerequisite for being effective at pursuing other goals
- go running
- invest in a relationship (call a friend/family member on the phone whom you otherwise wouldn’t)
Read at least 20+ books on rationality, decision-making, heuristics and biases, etc.
Here are some of my favorites, in order of the impact they made on my life:
1. Language in Thought and Action
2. Yudkowsky’s sequences
3. Class by Paul Fussel (taken with a large grain of salt. not really rationalist but caused me to update significantly)
4. Influence: science and practice

Zachary Jul 17, 2024, 4:09 PM
4 points
1
on: Housing Roundup #9: Restricting Supply
Hey Zvi. Love and appreciate your writing. I’ve been an avid reader since the covid posts. I know it’s difficult since your posts are so long, but this one and others could use a proof-reading for typos. I regret that I didn’t write down any particular instances, but there were a number in this post.
That sort of thing doesn’t usually bother me, but your writing is precise and high-entropy to the point where a single mistaken word can make the thought much harder to digest. For example, in the sentence:
If this changes the rule from ‘you can build a house but you owe us $23k’ to ‘you can build a house and pay us $230’ then that is good on the margin.
I wasn’t sure where the $230 number came from. Was it supposed to be $230k, a figure you used later in that section? Or did it follow from something you wrote previously in that section and I just didn’t understand? I just skipped to the next section without trying to resolve my confusion, since I knew that your posts often contain typos and trying to scrutinize the $230 may be futile in the end. If I had confidence that your writings lacked typos I would have spent more time with it

Zachary Jun 25, 2024, 8:58 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: p.b.’s comment on: Zachary’s Shortform
It’s very possible that Murati’s talk at Dartmouth was my source’s source, i.e. the embedded video around 13:30. She doesn’t say GPT-5 specifically but does sort of imply that by mentioning the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4, then says “And then in the next couple of years we’re looking at PhD-level intelligence for specific tasks...Yeah, a year and a half let’s say”

Zachary Jun 25, 2024, 5:40 PM
2 points
0
on: Zachary’s Shortform
I have moderately strong evidence that OpenAI has pushed back GPT-5 to late 2025 (not naming source for confidentiality reasons). Conditional on this being true:
1. What do you think the most likely explanation is as to why it’s being delayed?
2. How would this affect your AI timelines?
3. What impact would you expect this news to have on AI relevant stocks?

Zachary’s Shortform

ZacharyJun 25, 2024, 5:40 PM

2 points

7 comments LW link

Zachary Apr 27, 2023, 4:30 PM
5 points
0
on: Romance, misunderstanding, social stances, and the human LLM
Strong upvoted. This post (especially as it relates to ask/guess culture) puts into words what I’ve previously referred to vaguely as “spiritual differences”. I’m hopeful that I can train myself to recognize mismatched stances and pivot instead of concluding that someone else and I have incompatible personalities

Zachary Apr 24, 2023, 4:29 PM
10 points
9
in reply to: frontier64’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread – April 2023
The speed with which GPT-4, was hooked up to the internet via plugins has basically convinced me that boxing isn’t a realistic strategy. The economic incentive to unbox an AI is massive. Combine that with the fact that an ASI would do everything it could to appear safe enough to be granted internet access, and I just don’t see a world in which everyone cooperates to keep it boxed.

Zachary Feb 1, 2023, 7:39 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Rodrigo Heck’s comment on: Peter Thiel’s speech at Oxford Debating Union on technological stagnation, Nuclear weapons, COVID, Environment, Alignment, ‘anti-anti anti-anti-classical liberalism’, Bostrom, LW, etc.
Are you able to strong man the argument in favor of AI being an existential risk to humanity?

Zachary Jan 6, 2023, 9:34 PM
16 points
0
on: The “mind-body vicious cycle” model of RSI & back pain
I wanted to say thank you for this post—I’m 26 years old, and up until last year I’d been afflicted with back pain that would onset after standing still for an extended period of time. I think it started after doing hang-cleans with bad form when I was in high school. Over the years, the amount of time it took for the pain to appear got shorter and shorter, and the pain grew more and more intense, to the point where I would be uncomfortable and unable to enjoy myself after standing for more than ~45 minutes.
Knowing that I would eventually be in pain if I stood for too long would make me seek out opportunities to sit, trying to “conserve” my comfortable standing time. I would squat, lean against things, shift my weight oddly—anything to keep from standing still. If I found myself with no other option but to stand, it would be hard for me not to think about the fact that I would eventually begin hurting.
This sucked, especially since one of my favorite activities is going to concerts, where I may have been forced to stand for a few hours by the time the headliner even comes on. I remember going to lots of shows where I just wasn’t able to appreciate the music because my thoughts were with my back. I would dance, not for pleasure, but as a way of avoiding standing still
I was really interested reading your post, and it was swirling around in my mind while I was at a music festival about a week after I read this post. On the second night of the festival, I was tripping on a half tab of acid. My back had begun to hurt to the point that I needed to sit down, but then I thought of this post, specifically this paragraph:
For me, it was just reading Healing Back Pain, and all the testimonials in Section 1.1, then deciding to live normally starting the next morning (keeping in mind that my muscles would be sore from exercise after a long period of disuse), and I felt better over the course of the next couple days
In that moment, I did what you did. I decided the pain was just pain, and I didn’t have to recoil away from it. I stayed on my feet and realized that the pain wasn’t as unbearable as I had built it up in my head to be. Being on a psychedelic, I even imagined the pain as a ball of light that traveled up my back and out my arm, at which point I stopped feeling it.
The next two days I tested whether this was a permanent effect. I deliberately stood still for much longer than I would have otherwise. I noticed some soreness around where the pain used to appear since I’d been avoiding using those muscles, but otherwise the difference was night and day.
That Sunday at the festival was one of the happiest days of my life. I threw my hands in the air, laughed loudly, and jumped around, soaking in the moment fully sober. It felt like my youth had been returned to me. I stood around for no reason at all wearing a massive smile while my friends took breaks to sit. I danced purely for pleasure for the first time in many years. I told my friend it was as though someone had just deposited a million dollars into my bank account. I was fully convinced I would live with a debilitating pain for the rest of my life before this experience, and now I can stand for hours comfortably. The soreness has even gone away as I stood more often and strengthened my lower back muscles.
I have tears in my eyes as I write this. I’m not sure if I ever would have come across Healing Back Pain on my own or if I would have found it convincing, but your post got through to me and it has made a massive positive impact on my life. Thank you.
What links here?
- The “mind-body vicious cycle” model of RSI & back pain by Steven Byrnes (Jun 9, 2022, 12:30 PM; 91 points)

Zachary Jan 2, 2023, 10:29 PM
10 points
−2
on: Why don’t Rationalists use bidets?
Personally I don’t like the feeling of having a wet asshole

Zachary Dec 27, 2022, 9:26 PM
7 points
3
on: Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
Honestly, smoking weed has always helped me with this because it has a way of forcing those issues I’m ignoring to the surface

Zachary Apr 26, 2022, 8:50 PM
1 point
on: [$20K in Prizes] AI Safety Arguments Competition
We don’t know exactly how a self-aware AI would act, but we know this: it will strive to prevent its own shutdown. No matter what the AI’s goals are, it wouldn’t be able to achieve them if it gets turned off. The only sure fire way to prevent its shutdown would be to eliminate the ones with the power to do so: humans. There is currently no known method to teach an AI to care about humans. Solving this problem may take decades, and we are running out of time.