Miscellaneous writings on various topics.
I think you should almost never use AI to write – that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page – whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive [1] thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated…
Today, I’m releasing an EP titled There Were Some Kingdoms , recorded with my brother Hampus, under my dungeon synth project, Icewind Dale. In this post, I describe how we composed, recorded, and mixed this EP. I’ll then mention a few directions I’d like to see more of in dungeon synth, hoping they inspire someone to explore them. The EP is available on Bandcamp – I’d suggest going there now and…
… I admit that these questions are not exactly frequently asked of me. They are questions that I imagine would’ve been frequently asked of me, had I had a sizable, curious following. I don’t, but perhaps this will be of interest to my readership, such as it is, even so … Preamble # Why did you write this FAQ? I wrote this FAQ to explain why I think it is the case that animals raised for food…
midihum is a command-line tool for humanizing MIDI – that is, for taking as input MIDI compositions and producing as output those same compositions with new velocity (loudness/dynamics) values for each of the contained notes. midihum uses gradient boosted trees, with ~400 engineered features, and is trained on 2.6K competition piano performances. You can use it to make your digital compositions…
Summary # In the past year, public fora have seen growing concern about existential risk (henceforth, x-risk) from AI. The thought is that we could see transformative AI in the coming years or decades , that it may be hard to ensure that such systems act with humanity’s best interests in mind , and that those highly advanced AIs may be able to overpower us if they aimed to do so , or otherwise…
He rarely watched movies anymore, but not long ago he let himself enjoy Peter Weir’s Witness , a film about a police detective who goes into hiding among the Amish. It had been billed as a crime thriller, but he found its crime and thriller elements forgettable – it was the drama of the stranger among the Amish that was worth seeing. The drama was most beautifully expressed in the famous…
Summary # In the first half of this essay, I recount two anecdotes. (The impatient reader can skip these.) First, Gerald Murnane tries, around Melbourne in the 1950s, to find a system that’ll make him money betting on horse races. Then, Bill Benter, in Hong Kong in the 1990s, comes up with a system for picking horses that makes him nearly $1B. In the second half of this essay, I discuss alpha: In…
Summary # William Eden forecasts an AI winter. He argues that AI systems (1) are too unreliable and too inscrutable, (2) won’t get that much better (mostly due to hardware limitations) and/or (3) won’t be that profitable. He says, “I’m seeing some things that make me think we are in a classic bubble scenario, and lots of trends that can’t clearly continue.” I put 5% on an AI winter happening by…
Summary # Large language models (henceforth, LLMs) are sometimes said to be “just” shallow pattern matchers, “just” massive look-up tables, or “just” autocomplete engines. These comparisons amount to a form of (methodological) reductionism. While there’s some truth to them, I think they smuggle in corollaries that are either false or at least not obviously true. For example, they seem to imply…
Here are some ways of acquiring the full text of an academic paper: Search Sci-Hub . Give it the DOI (e.g. https://doi.org/... ) or, if that doesn’t work, give it the URL to the paper’s page at an academic journal (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science... ). Search Libgen . Give it the DOI or title. (You can also use Libgen to find academic books .) Search Google Scholar . I often just search…
The majority of Swedes, and Swedish politicians, and certainly the new conservative Swedish government, want Sweden to join NATO. Swedish socialists want no such thing. They protested against NATO and Erdogan and for the Kurds in Stockholm a few weeks ago (they walked past me as I lounged in a bookstore), chanting “No alliance with the fascist state!” and other jingles. [1] That same day, and in…
This post explains my reasoning on three forecasts I made on questions that have to do with Nigeria. I spent ~1 hour on the first two questions and ~3 hours on the third question, having had little prior knowledge. The questions are: Will Nigeria’s population exceed 400 million before 2050? I give 32% probability that it will. Will Nigeria have a successful coup before 2025? I give 8% probability…
Summary # CICERO is a new AI developed by Meta AI that achieves good performance at the board game Diplomacy. Diplomacy involves tactical and strategic reasoning as well as natural language communication: players must negotiate, cooperate, and occasionally deceive in order to win. CICERO comprises (1) a strategic model deciding which moves to make on the board and (2) a dialogue model…
Summary # There are at least four ways of thinking about replaceability : The naive view , where your impact is the value you produced using some amount of resources. The single comparison view , where your impact is the value you produced using some amount of resources, minus the value someone else would’ve produced using those resources had you not done so. The replacement view , where your…
I bought The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa having read Forever Someone Else , a collection of poetry by the same author, the Portuguese modernist. The latter is great and beautiful. The former, a mishmash of short stories, plays, letters, essays, introductions, commentaries, manifestos, automatic writing, fragments, and more, is weirder. Reading it is to be both awed and bewildered. In a…
Irony is saying one thing while expressing another, often opposite, thing. As Schaeffer (1975) observes: The ironist make truth appear in errors, or in erroneous language. The ironist chooses to temporarily partake in an error. Irony is similar to metaphor in that there’s a literal meaning and an intended meaning. I interpret “error” here not only to mean “mistake”, but more broadly, and mirroring…
Tomorrow the Swedish General Election takes place. It got me wondering. In order to get elected as a Prime Minister in Sweden, you need to be the leader of a party. In order to be the leader of a party, you need to have risen through the ranks of that party. [1] In order to rise through the ranks of a party, you need to spend time in that party. So given that we Swedes don’t usually elect seniors…
Summary # I argue that, while each nation should be free to decide for itself whether to receive Russian tourists, the arguments commonly given in favor of tourist visa bans for Russians are weak: I don’t think a ban will affect the outcome or timeline of the war. I don’t think a ban will meaningfully reduce the risks of high-stakes Russian black ops. I don’t think it makes sense to assign guilt…
A year and a half ago I wrote a post on whether veganism can be healthy . The short answer was “most probably yes, if you supplement wisely” [1] . But one thing I was unsure about was its effect on mental health and cognitive function. (In hindsight, I think I should’ve emphasized this uncertainty more in the original post.) Since then, a few new studies have come out looking at some aspects of…
Addendum 2023-02-04: Given that Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang appear to have committed serious fraud at FTX, and as a consequence have lost most of their fortunes, it would appear EA is at minus two billionaires since I wrote this. I haven't thought much on how this changes the forecast, but here's a rough guess. First, as I mention in a footnote, the model predicts the number of additional…
Gerald Murnane, in his “memoir of the turf” (Murnane 2015), describes having spent much of his life trying to devise a “reliable and profitable” system for betting on horses. “In my early years as a follower of racing”, he writes, “I tried to pick winners haphazardly, but in 1952, when I was only thirteen, I began recording the recent form of every winner, hoping to discover some recurrent pattern…
There’s been some consternation within effective altruism recently about whether “dumb” people have a place in the community. [1] The linked post generated quite a bit of discussion. Some commenters observed that the post’s author, who’d communicated a feeling of not fitting in on account of not being smart enough, seemed not dumb at all, but quite intelligent. Occasionally, such-and-such a…
Herr, warum trittst du so ferne; Herr, sei mir gnädig, denn ich bin schwach … Ich bin so müde vom Seufzen … Ich bin ausgeschüttet wie Wasser … Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen? Lord, why do you stand so far off; Lord, have mercy, for I am weak … I’m so tired from groaning … I’m emptied like water … My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? – Excerpts from the Book of Psalms John…
“I must make an admission”, Ivan began. “I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbours. In my opinion, it is precisely one’s neighbours that one cannot possibly love. Perhaps if they weren’t so nigh … I read sometime, somewhere about ‘John the Merciful’ (some saint) that when a hungry and frozen passerby came to him and asked to be made warm, he lay down with him in bed,…
Summary # Human extinction would involve the death of everyone, which is a bad thing under any moral theory. But the deontologist in me thinks complete extinction would be especially bad for three reasons: We’d be failing in our duty to humanity itself (55% confidence). We’d be failing in our duty to all those who have worked for a better future (70% confidence). We’d be failing in our duty to…
Here’s an Emacs Lisp function for getting a BibTeX entry from a URL (like those URLs you get when clicking “cite” and copying the “BibTeX” link on a Google Scholar search result): ( defun get-bibtex-from-url ( url ) "Get a BibTe X entry from URL and store it in my `references.bib'." ( interactive "MBibTe X URL: " ) ( write-bibtex-entry ( get-bibtex-url-contents url ) ) ) It’s very simple:…
Jacques says he really likes some new Star Wars movie. Then immediately Gilberte says she really dislikes it. Isn’t Gilberte being a little rude? If I were Gilberte, I’d probably feel the urge to cushion my opinion, maybe emphasizing that mine is the minority view or saying I only dislike the thing due to some weird personal deficiency. Now imagine it was the other way round. First Gilberte says…
It’s not obvious from a Darwinian point of view why people (even people who aren’t related) often cooperate with one another. Researchers like Axelrod and Hamilton (1981) have used game theory to show that some strategies are both adaptive and favor cooperation. Though these projects may not say anything about how we should act toward one another [1] , they do say something about why we do act the…
The end result is our present age’s maladaptation and creative incapacity. We must, at this point, either accept the death of our civilization or else opt for artificial adaptation, since natural, instinctive adaptation has failed. (Pessoa 2001) – Álvaro de Campos I started reading about Game B after a friend asked what I thought about it. I’ve now spent about four to six hours reading about it…
You’ll have noticed that I’ve redesigned the blog somewhat. The main changes are a new (sans-serif) typeface and the replacement of the sidebar with a menu at the top. What hasn’t changed is the focus on content, the brutalism, and the reliance on plain HTML and CSS. I hope it strikes the right balance between innovative art museum caption that doesn’t understand itself and free software blog of…
ENDEQUINA: Dear cousin, dear Frunimius, don’t you think I see, in those tired eyes, in those pursed lips, in those slumped shoulders, that you are not quite all right? You look like a rainy day, that’s just it. No, no, that’s not it, you look like a small, tired animal in its burrow, like an old rabbit lying down somewhere to die … I spoke to your lovely wife yesterday, who painted a picture of…
Everyone knows it’s easier to solve a complex problem if you break it up into simpler subproblems. This is called decomposition and it works in many domains. For example: A method I use when trying to answer a non-trivial question – and I don’t remember whence I got this – is to recursively break it down into subquestions until these start feeling answerable, and researching the subquestions,…
As gods once lived in streams and forests and then on mountain tops and deep down below the earth, then withdrawn to the blue heavens and, at last, as we mapped the heavens too, altogether outside the material world, so purpose is on the retreat as science marches on, telling us first that we humans, like all animals, are mere products of evolution, that love is an adaptation executor , that the…
I’m no productivity monster, but I know a thing or two about doing things, and am after all able to write a blog post a week, make music , and read some while working a fairly demanding full-time job. (It helps, of course, to have, when times are busy, low enough standards that one is ok with publishing posts as lazy as this one.) Even if that does qualify me as a giver of advice, given that I do…
Summary # Impossible Foods has not been able to put its product on the European market because it contains a genetically modified organism (GMO); the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is hesitant to approve GMO products for human consumption. I estimate, with a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, this delay to have caused the deaths of something like 20 cattle so far, and to cause the…
The Nazarene said: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32 [NIV]) And: “[E]veryone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:34-36 [NIV]) What does he mean? What truth is he…
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. – C. S. Lewis (1952) The departed Ravi Zacharias solves the problem of evil in an interview with Ben Shapiro using the following logic: In order to blame God for the world’s evil, you must…
The sirens mesmerized their victims with song. Snake charmers play their vipers and cobras music that they – the snakes – don’t even perceive. And the Rat-Catcher of Hamelin misled the children of that town with a silver flute. What these stories tell us is that music is an intoxicating drug. The one philosopher who above all others saw in music this overwhelming power was Arthur Schopenhauer. In…
Accustom yourself to the idea that death is nothing to us. For all good and all bad are vested in sense perception, and death is deprivation of sense perception. – Epicurus, quoted in Laertius (2018) In Prague, in the beginning of June 1924, the writer and critic Max Brod was faced with a dilemma. His friend, having just perished of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Kierling outside Vienna, had…
Say we have a Python app that is doing something with the internet. A minimal example would be a program that retrieves the names of a few characters from the Rick and Morty API and prints the result to standard output. (We could just as well be talking about other I/O tasks, like reading from a file or database.) Let’s take that as our specification. So we write a _get() function that, given some…
Edit 2022-10-20: I've revised this post, notably: clarifying things and making the language flow more smoothly, revising my degree of confidence in "cultural change has always been and will always be a part of human life" from 100% down to 95% (mainly to account for the possibility of future value lock-in ), and clarifying that the real crux when it comes to reforms probably has to do with how and…
Addendum 2022-10-20: Seven months later, I think this post is essentially correct, but probably wasn't worth writing at the time, because (1) most effective altruist resource allocation is done by a handful of people, primarily Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz and their advisors, who are all far better informed than I am, (2) it's unclear how to even approach balancing longtermist versus neartermist…
Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. – Thomas Paine (1797) Rome, once a mere collection of huts on a hilltop overlooking the Tiber, grew to become a vast and hugely influential empire. Why? That is, why Rome? Why not Alba Longa, by some accounts the oldest Latin city, the mother of Rome…
There is no group in history I admire more than the abolitionists, but from their example I conclude that there are two questions we must always ask ourselves – what do we choose not to know, and what do we fail to anticipate? (Robinson 1998) – Marilynne Robinson I have not read Marilynne Robinson’s 1989 book Mother Country , but I understand that it is a critique of nuclear power and the British…
“What led you to start writing essays?” she was asked . And the famous author Marilynne Robinson answered: To change my own mind. I try to create a new vocabulary or terrain for myself, so that I open out – I always think of the Dutch claiming land from the sea – or open up something that would have been closed to me before. That’s the point and the pleasure of it. I continuously scrutinize my own…
I have my own way of assessing the worth of a book – not just a so-called work of literature but any sort of book or, for that matter, any piece of music or any so-called work of art. I could say in simple terms that I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind […] – Gerald Murnane (2021, 9) Like many people of my age and place, much of the…
Utilitarians occasionally submit as evidence in favor of their philosophy the fact that early utilitarians were advocates for social and political positions that have now become norms. One example among many, from the authors of utilitarianism.net : While not constituting an argument per se, it is worth noting that utilitarian moral reasoning has a strong track record of contributing to humanity’s…
Six months ago I vowed to adopt the vegan diet and set up a step-by-step plan to get there. I also made six predictions about how things would turn out. I prophesied: On February 1, 2022, I will not have purchased any non-vegan cosmetics, carmine, beeswax, wool, silk, or down after August 1, 2021 ⇒ 90% I will not have consumed honey (except to finish the jar we already have at home) after…
My own instinct is that in the feminist utopia, there will be no gender, or there will be so many genders as to be fairly meaningless. I would like a totally arbitrary relation between people’s bodies and how they perform: how they dress, how they act, with whom they partner, how they choose to have families, and so on. [1] – Amia Srinivasan Here is an extract from a guide written in 2014 (and…
No one at my work actually cares how many hours I work; they just care that I get a certain amount of work done each day or week or month. But for the sake of my own sanity, I still track the number of hours I work each day. That might surprise you, if you associate time clocking with cost-cutting management and employee surveillance. But of course I don’t share my numbers with anyone else. This…