I. My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings we owned. That’s how I came to spend a substantial part of my teenage years…
Status dynamics are weirder than you might think. I recently found myself longing for male friends to act dominant over me. Imagining close male friends putting their arms over my shoulders and jostling me a bit, or squeezing my shoulders a bit roughly as they come up to talk to me felt good. Actions that clearly convey ‘I’m in charge here and I think you’ll like it’. I was surprised at first.…
Ray Bradbury once explained with a poem why he writes science fiction and why space travel is so important to him. It is perhaps my favorite poem. Text version: The fence we walked between the years Did balance us serene It was a place half in the sky where In the green of leaf and promising of peach We’d reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky If we could reach and touch, we said,…
Followup to : Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles , Guessing The Teacher’s Password Jessica Taylor recently wrote a description of Paul Christiano’s and MIRI’s differing driving intuitions for thinking about the AI alignment problem . Jacob Steinhardt observes that the “do cognitive reductions” intuition seems to be at the heart of MIRI’s thought and the “search for solutions and fundamental…