Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: Morally correct; based on lived experience and some hand-wavy probability theory that holds up shockingly well.) Picture this: You're working on something with reasonably high stakes - coding a function on a deadline, writing up a proof, filling out a form or application, or taking a test. You check it once, and it looks good. But a nagging feeling remains - should you check again? And again, after that? And at what point do you actually stop? I'm particularly bad about this. My natural inclination is to check things twice, three times, sometimes four or more times before I throw up my hands and call it good. And I've noticed something curious about the phenomenology of each successive check - they feel different in a way that maps surprisingly well onto the actual mathematics of error detection. On the first check, you're sharp, with focused attention. You're tacitly assuming that you've made an error, but just one error, and one that you can...

(Epistemic status: Tutorial level advice; spelling out things that some people find tacitly obvious and others haven't thought about and still others aren't shaped to naturally accept.) It never gets easier - you just get stronger. If you don't get stronger, you'll have to settle for living small. ...Alright, that's going to require a lot of additional background to make sense. There's this idea in the game Go of "living small". You settle for less, for making a tiny shape worth very few points, because you know you're not strong enough - as a player, or in a fight - to get anything more. This is often the right move. However, you can't win a game this way. At some point, unless the game is going very strangely, you need to be large, take up space, and make points somewhere. For another bit of background, there's the common refrain that "it gets better", or that something desirable about you is "not true yet... growth mindset...

(Epistemic status: A creased, stained map to what were once my favorite hunting grounds. Accessible to anyone who can support substantial abstraction; prior math knowledge is not necessary. In particular, ignorance of calculus is not an obstruction here, but total ignorance of geometry or like, arithmetic or logic, will be. Extremely dense and probably won’t get you there, but at least you’ll ask better questions. Partially dedicated to DG, JM, and PR.)   The path to my old hunting grounds (as pictured above) is long and twisty and winds through a lot of necessary math along the way. You'll be best served by carefully going through the parentheticals and answering the questions I ask, so as to keep track of the blazes and to keep your footing. You'll still get something out of this if you move more quickly, but you might end up lost further down the line. You might find the pace a little slow if you already know the territory - test yourself by answering those same paren...

Here's a thought that's been rattling around my head for the last decade or so: leftovers - as in, leftover food - obey chain complex rules. Let me explain. One thing you can do with leftover food rather than just eat it is to use it as an ingredient - the base for a new meal, remixing it to some extent. Turn a hamburger patty into ground meat for a casserole, or use the carrots and celery from a crudite tray as the start of a mirepoix. There's numerous patterns and a whole art to it - for one, fried rice, French toast, and Spanish omelettes are all exemplars of one excellent pattern: "take slightly stale starch, apply some egg, some seasoning, and maybe some fresh produce". (It's no accident that the French for "French toast" literally translates as "lost bread".) There's only a few techniques, and you can learn most of them and start experimenting if you care about avoiding food waste as much as I do: a few others include "use ad...

(Epistemic status: just my opinion/frame, but I claim to know whereof I speak. With thanks to IL, JSW, and PR.) When people talk about conceptual engineering, what do they mean? And why is conceptual engineering so difficult and yet so important? To triangulate this practice properly, we must surely look at it from many angles - math, philosophy, intuition, and utility, for the best few I can think of. Before any of that, here's a first attempt to describe what conceptual engineering is: it's the cognitive technology or practice of carefully defining some concept. It has to be either a natural category of objects or of other abstractions, or else a property that objects or abstractions might have; it has to both live in the world and be useful for further efforts regarding the world. You can sometimes do conceptual engineering without really trying to; whoever invented currency engaged in conceptual engineering, as was whoever kicked off the Great Sandwich Debates. The importan...

(Epistemic status: Neat-seeming ideas that promise to start paradigmatizing agent foundations, as expounded by JSW... but I dunno, pal, I'm just some research-creature. I didn't run this by him and I didn't consult notes or videos, either, so it might be very wrong or desperately incomplete in places. But also: in neglecting/refusing/failing/setting-off without recourse to notes, maybe I'll say something new and worth poking at some more.)   In seeking a paradigm for AI safety or AI alignment, we sometimes find ourselves seeking a paradigm for agent foundations, the study of what mind-type things that take actions for reasons towards goals might do in maximal generality. But where do we even begin? We find solace in materialistic reductionism, shunning most of metaphysics in the process: agents are a phenomenon first and foremost of the world of things, so it's as a very special type of thing that we will try to understand them.   From reductionism we take a guiding...