Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: I'm not claiming that this is actually how cognition works, but I do claim that it's a useful frame, and one which I find predictive. For and with thanks to NC, IL, and M/T.)   You know how sometimes there’s something you think you want to do but whenever you try to do the thing you mysteriously lack energy? You want to do the task. You know you need to do it. You even know what to do, and how. But every time you take a run up at it to try, you lose all motive force and find yourself sliding off to some onerous chore instead, tidying up or doing dishes instead. How mysterious! Or: you have something you need to write. A paper, a grant application, an email, whatever. You sit down to work on it. It's right there in front of you. You have the time and the tools and the necessary knowledge. And yet... nothing happens. You stare at the half-finished writeup before you. You close the file. Then you open it again. You read the same paragraph three times without...

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context again. There’s a point to it, I promise. Dedicated to Grandma Kim on the occasion of her 86th birthday.)   You've been through so much. You escaped North Korea, survived the Korean War and the loss of your father - my great-grandfather - and got married terribly young. You uprooted completely in pursuit of more stability and better education for my mother and her sibings, showing them all the best schools in the nation. You ran a department store for decades, mostly on your own; I will never forget the days I spent at 5 W 32nd Street when it was still yours.  You're canny and willing, even wanting, to learn, even in your old age; you're a good deal smarter and more alive than more people are at your age. The ESL courses you took for years, ending up with a much better grasp of English, are evidence enough of that. You've got grit to you, persistence, as well, even now - more so, again, than most people do in their late 80s. ...

(This one's just plain weird; a stream-of-consciousness meditation in deep time. Written while riding back from a long and interesting day spent with SP full of sunshowers. Thanks, SP.)     ...And I found myself staring out at the skyline as the sun set, feeling a wistful sort of emotion I had and have no name for, wondering whether it really might be beautiful on fire - "all twisted metal stretching upwards, everything washed in a thin orange haze" - and thinking about how permanent concrete was; how solid the pourable stone was once set, how it was so durable and so literally castable stone that cement mixers must hurry along on their way, lest their cargo sit still for too long and cure solid, becoming a total loss, unless you felt like going in for days with a jackhammer. So concrete can't burn, actually, any more than the stone of the hill beneath me could burn. But hillsides aren't permanent, nor even mountains, it occurred to me - "until Mount Baektu w...

(Epistemic status: A frame that someone else came up with which I've found useful and personally resonant, and which I am elaborating on independently. For IL, AZ, T/M, and of course JSW.) JSW has written about Wizard Power, and the ways in which it differs from King Power; others have followed, sketching out more ways in which it differs and elaborating a taxonomy of different types of Role Powers. I recommend seeking out the original article, but in brief: Wizard Power is the ability to make things happen, to wreak your will in the world in a way that specifically need not depend all that much on other people or rely on social structures in order to manifest it, except to the extent that the target of that Wizard Power is the world of people and of society; this is perhaps the most important aspect of Wizard Power that characterizes it. Wizard Power is the capacity to consider something that doesn't yet exist, desire that it exist, and bring it into being. It can be mundane, ...

(Epistemic status: Philosophy of observation and memories of physics. The math is real and the metaphysics are probably reasonably solid too. As usual, morally correct, skipping over some of the finer details. Dedicated with bittersweet fondness for the Integrated Sciences Curriculum program. Even still, everything is a spring.)   Plucked guitar strings and the quantized modes of trumpet blasts. Carbon dioxide's vibrational modes. Cyclical stock market trends, despite the efficient market hypothesis. The length of a day over the course of a year. These and many other phenomenta should make you ask one simple question: why do so many physical systems like to vibrate? Why are so many such systems well-modelled by reducing them to simple or damped harmonic oscillators? That is: Why is everything a spring? After years of chewing it over in quiet moments, I've eventually come to a conclusion, and I'm not sure whether it's profound, trivial, both, or some secret fourth thing....

(Epistemic status: Opinions, but justifiable ones. For RD, and to a lesser extent RK and DN/LT; with thanks to JM and PR.) ...then what would I make absolutely sure that the new blood read, played, or otherwise interacted with? And why? This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but I've tried pretty hard to cover a lot of ground very fast. You may assume that this is in addition to classics, like "A List of Lethalities", excerpts from Bostrom, and "Ten Levels of AI Alignment Difficulty". Accordingly, this is the things that I would personally add to that curriculum, or maybe bump some marginal things in favor of. It's aimed all over the spectrum of what "new AI safety researcher" means; some of them are for totally new people, some are for people who have a sense of what subfield they want to attack, and some could benefit literally everyone including established researchers. I've tried to pick things that are specifically underutilized and a re...