Notes on math, computer science, life
I left DeepMind to join the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) as a Research Director in December 2023 and officially started in April 2024 (I spent the intervening time on family travel, wandering around London, and formalising interval arithmetic ). The past two years have cemented AISI as my favourite job to date: AISI has done a tremendous amount to sharpen the conversation around AI risks within…
There’s a story I like to tell, which I vaguely remembered as originating at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. A researcher had a rubber duck in his office. When he found himself stumped on a problem, he would pick up the duck, walk over to a colleague, and ask them to hold the duck. He would proceed to explain the problem, often realizing the solution himself in the middle of the explanation. Then…
I’m in the middle of the third book in Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson . The books are amazing; I can’t thank David Luan enough for recommending them. In brief, Caro’s thesis is Lyndon Johnson cares only about power, not about issues. He is essentially amoral in pursuit of that power. Lyndon Johnson is spectacularly skilled at politics. It’s unclear how…
Retraction (15 April 2022): Greg Egan has kindly explained on Twitter that I was misinterpreting the narrator’s statements, and specifically that from the “from within” part means that morality is in part a result of human internal mental processes but that those processes of course condition on the external world. I am happy to stand corrected! Post prior to retraction: Greg…
Thanks to a recommendation from Dandelion Mané, I recently read “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari. Both books are wonderful breaths of fresh air and perspective. “Sapiens” is organized as a history of the species Homo Sapiens, tracing from our evolutionary separation from other primates through the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution,…
The Long Now Foundation is a wonderful organization advocating for long term thinking. Specifically, by long term they mean the next ten thousand years : The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s…
I make weird typos when writing. Sometimes I substitute an entirely different word in place of the correct one; otherwise times I simply a word. Both kind of typos are more common than misspelling a word, indicating that the typo mechanism is operating at a higher level than the spelling or typing itself. This parallels some of the intuition people have about deep neural networks, which is backed…
(This is an expanded version of a Facebook comment , because Jeremy asked.) Recently I came across an article about opposition to housing development in San Francisco . The headline positions of everyone involved are uninteresting: housing advocates want more affordable housing, housing developers want less. The really interesting bit is more subtle: at one point the developer says they’re…
I am writing this in Mac OS X, having momentarily given up getting Linux satisfactorily configured on my laptop. So, in the spirit of escapist fantasy and cracking nuts using sledgehammers, I am going to write about what a world with strong AI would be like. Warning: I am in a very lazy, rambling mood. Say we get strong AI. This means we understand intelligence sufficiently to be able to replicate…
I went to the Rootstrikers conference yesterday, which consisted of a few panel debates/discussions plus questions from the audience. I also got to hang out in a bar at a table with Lawrence Lessig for a half hour or so after the conference, which was pretty cool. I’ll summarize the conference here, and include links for anyone who wants to follow the movement or get actively involved.…
The normal scheme for donating to charities is to divide money up among several different charities. The following argument shows why this strategy is often wrong. Both the statement and the proof will be extremely informal: One charity theorem: Assume we have a fixed amount of money to divide between $n$ charities. Assume that utility is a smooth function of the performances of the charities,…
In the scale free government post, one of the completely unresolved issues was what to do about the federalism axis. There are two scale free extremes to choose from: completely uniform democracy and pure libertarianism (i.e., anarchy). This post will ramble about the anarchy option without getting anywhere very useful. Anarchy would only work if the universe is such that the middle ground can be…
A past girlfriend and I would occasionally (cheerfully) quibble over the optimal strategy for extracting toothpaste. It occurred to me recently that the disagreement was fundamentally about amortized vs. worst case complexity. Being lazy, I tend to squeeze the toothpaste out of the front of the tube, optimizing the time spent in the moment and reducing the degree of control required since pressure…
The phrase “everything happens for a reason” came up in a couple contexts recently (conversation with a friend, Radiolab, etc.). It’s a good example of an obviously false statement that contains plenty of useful insight, and is interesting to think about in that context. We’ll get the pedantic out of the way first: “everything happens for a reason” is literally…
In well designed cryptographic security systems, the attacker needs to do exponentially more work than the defender in order to read a secret, forge a message, etc., subject to appropriate hardness assumptions. Maybe this is true for many non-computer security-ish systems as well, like choosing good representatives in a voting system or avoiding overpaying for advertised merchandise, and we simply…