Tiled With Pentagons

(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...

(Epistemic status: A prophecy of the shape of things to come, if one that seems well-attested. "The sun will rise around this time a year to the day from now" is a prophecy, too.) Taiwan is toast. There, I said it, roll credits. The Republic of China is one of a handful of strange carveouts in the world of Westphalian sovereignty and the (supposedly) rules-based international order, alongside such curiosities as the Vatican, Portugal's exclaves in Africa, Singapore, Lesotho, Cootch-Behar, Bir Tawil, Transnistria, and French Guiana. Unlike the rest of these, it has been a locus of geopolitical struggle since its effective founding. A rump state of the post-Qing Chinese state, it was founded in 1912, but only took on its current form after the vicious betrayals and grand atrocities of the Chinese Civil War, the brief pause to fight off the Japanese, and not-quite-final defeat of Kuomintang forces followed by flight to Taiwan, where it has remained ever since. Until the earl...

(Epistemic status: a riff on existing cogtech. May not land for you unless you're a huge puzzle game nerd like me. Mild spoilers for The Witness.) There's a practice you may have heard of or even use yourself, in order to break through blocks and make progress on hard problems that you face. It's called a Yoda Timer, and it goes like this: First, fix the problem in your mind. Understand it. Face it. Then, set a timer for 5 minutes. Start the timer. Then, simply... solve the problem. Completely. In 5 minutes. Don't try to do it! There is no try! Do, or do not! Usually you will fail to actually totally solve the problem, but what you will have done is make serious progress on it. Maybe you've made a solid plan for tackling it. Maybe you've solved a significant subproblem and are now unblocked. Maybe you've spent time figuring out what you need to even make a serious attempt; you were underprovisioned from the start, and those 5 minutes weren't wasted, but ...

(This will make much more sense if you read "11. Why the First "High Dimension" is Six or Maybe Five" first. As before, epistemic status: morally correct, in the mathematician’s sense; here to give flavor and intuition without too much rigor. Frankly, I'm going to move even faster and more cursorily than last time. With thanks to IL, and to everyone I've tried to shill 4D Golf to.) After talking with IL a bit more and doing some thinking for myself, I realized with creeping delight that the long heuristic argument that I gave for why we should consider the first qualitatively high dimension to be six or maybe five is not remotely the only one. In fact, a shocking number of strong heuristic arguments all converge on the same figure: very specifically, "six or maybe five". That is: five is marginal, and six is definite. To give a very quick recap of the heuristic argument from the original post, the idea is that we can operationalize what it means fo...