Purpose in an AI World, Research Independence, and The Value of Boring Technology
Here’s my weekly roundup of articles that made me pause and think – I hope you find them as insightful as I did.
The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander)
One of the principles of living a happy life is keeping oneself busy. We set goals, when we reach those goals, we set other goals. We limit our daily meditation sessions to a few minutes, aside from that, we are projecting ahead. The journey is what matters, not the destination. So far, life has kept us very busy. No single person was able to “attain everything”. So far so good. But what if we find a way to unlock everything? As talks are now are about AGI and ASI, we may still want to (individually) limit ourselves to attain purpose. We can set obstacles to be overcome and (actively) block “external help”! This prompts me to share an interesting short story around a magical earring that whispers advice to its wearer, however, its first advice “was always that itself be removed”. It raises questions about autonomy, decision-making, and the nature of consciousness and personhood.
How I formed my Own Views about AI Safety (Neel Nanda)
We can’t reconstruct and verify all of humanity’s knowledge from first principles. Most of our knowledge is “by reference”, where we simply adopt the opinions of other people we respect. However, we should form our own opinions in the fields of our expertise. We form an “inside view” when we can reconstruct it from the ground up in a single session without need of external references. Here is my summary of advice from the article to form your own inside views:
- Surround yourself with experts in the field (as opposed to working in self-isolation).
- Learn how to listen: pay attention when others are talking and internalize their knowledge.
- Ask lots of questions. There are no “dumb questions”.
- When someone is done explaining, paraphrase and summarize your understanding back to them. Ask if your summary is correct.
- Think deeply about their (world) models. Filter them and weight them to form yours.
- Write a google doc summarizing a convo and send it back to them for comments.
- Understand why people (and yourself) want to work on something. Is it about fun or importance/value/impact?
- Disagree with a bunch of the experts after hearing them out.
- Read and think. But also work hard on projects to get first hands experience.
Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley)
This post is an invitation to consider ignoring the nerdy part in you and embrace boring predictable technology for real-life business. Most young product builders fall into the trap of obsessing over tech stacks. However, it is all about solving an actual problem that frequently can be solved (to various degrees of difficulty) using different technologies. Minimizing the effort to get to an MVP leads us to pick lindy tools. We want to dedicate most of our energy and time to our core offerings (not tech but product). We want to map problems to a compact and predictable solution space, one that is manageable and can accommodate solving adjacent problems at marginal cost, in other words, our goal is to minimize overhead, operations, and cognitive load!
Some advice on independent research (Marius Hobbhahn)
My overall impression reading the article is that independent research is quite hard because you are responsible for everything. However, it comes with some rewards that are worth considering:
- If you are working on a side or transition project.
- If your research agenda is not part of your existing research org.
- If you are not interested in a full-time job.
- If there are currently not enough positions in existing institutions.
- If you want to be independent.
Some responsibilities when pursuing independent research:
- Set your own research agenda.
- Learn basic research skills.
- Self-discipline.
- Evaluating and correcting your own research.
- Ability to attract funding.
Overall procedure:
- Write down your project and get feedback early on
- Actively look for collaborations
- Join a group or program
- Create accountability mechanisms
- Be very clear on what your goals are: e.g., provide evidence that I understand the scientific frontier in my research area and am able to contribute.
- Do whatever is most effective to reach your goal.
How AI Takeover May Happen in 2 Years (joshc)
Extremely speculative and not to be taken seriously. But an enjoyable read!