Luke Muehlhauser

Media diet for Q1 2019

April 6, 2019 by Luke 3 Comments

Music

Spotify playlist for this quarter is here. Playlists for past quarters and years here.

Okay, music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

  • Attrition: Etude (1997)
  • Sons of Kemet: Your Queen is a Reptile (2018)
  • Sharon van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow (2019)
  • Buke & Gase: Scholars (2019)
  • Kasper Bjorke: The Fifty Eleven Project (2018)
  • The Hangovers: Slow Dirty Tears (1998)
  • Her Name is Calla: The Quiet Lamb (2010)
  • Daniel Pemberton: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
  • The Woodentops: Well Well Well: The Unabridged Singles Collection (1986)
  • Ill Considered: Ill Considered (2017)
  • Rattlemouth: Walking Like a Full Moon Dog (1996), Fist Full of Iffy (1998)
  • Jean Derome & Rene Lussier: Soyez vigilants, restez vivants! (1986)
  • Chandra: Transportation (1980)
  • Drowning Pool: Aphonia (1989)
  • Plasticland: Salon (1987)
  • Theon Cross: Fyah (2019)
  • The Comet is Coming: Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery (2019)
  • Quinsin Nachoff: Path of Totality (2018)
  • Victoria Williams: Happy Come Home (1987)
  • Nihiloxica: Biiri (2019)
  • Christian Scott: Ancestral Recall (2019)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Media I’m looking forward to, Q2 2019 edition

April 6, 2019 by Luke 1 Comment

Added this quarter:

  • Asma & Gabriel, The Emotional Mind (Apr 2019)
  • Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Apr 2019)
  • Cowen, Big Business (Apr 2019)
  • Rosenblum & Muirhead, A Lot of People are Saying (Apr 2019)
  • Friedman, War and Chance (May 2019)
  • Ward, The Other Side of the Story (Aug 2019)
  • Courtwright, The Age of Addiction (May 2019)
  • Milo, Good Enough (Jun 2019)
  • Frey, The Technology Trap (Jun 2019)
  • Frunton, Digital Cash (Jun 2019)
  • Chivers, The AI Does Not Hate You (Jun 2019)
  • Chambers, The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology (Jul 2019)
  • Edge, Statistical Thinking from Scratch (Aug 2019)
  • Dawkins, Outgrowing God (Sep 2019)
  • Marcus & Davis, Rebooting AI (Sep 2019)
  • Bloom, untitled book about benign masochism (TBD)
  • Vincent, Beyond Measure (TBD)
  • Stevenson & Wolfers, Principles of Economics (TBD)
  • Cobb, The Mind Machine (TBD)
  • Pinker, untitled book about common knowledge (TBD)
  • Fukanaga, 25th Bond movie (Apr 2020)
  • Nolan, untitled film (Jul 2020)
  • Villeneuve, Dune (Dec 2020)

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Some funny or interesting Scaruffi quotes (part 2)

January 24, 2019 by Luke Leave a Comment

(Previously.)

On Black Sabbath (Google translated):

Rarely an artist so poorly equipped technically and so unimaginative has had such a great influence on subsequent generations…

Black Sabbath were a constant assault on the cultured tradition of Western civilization, and a continued exaltation of barbarism and primitivism. They were hated by almost everyone: by the hippies (of which they represented the exact opposite moral), by the rockers (who were horrified by their technical inadequacy), by the singer-songwriters (who wrote much more meaningful lyrics). But the average teenager did not have any culture or the vocation to judge Black Sabbath music and, all things considered, their harmonic simplicity represented a form of collective appeal much easier to understand than the King Crimson symphonic poems or the Pink Floyd psychedelic scores. Black Sabbath fans were dirty and bad, but actually they were listening to Black Sabbath for the same reason that the previous generation of clean and good teenagers had listened to The Beatles: their music was the easiest to hear. Listening to their music was a simple act of collective ritualism that required no culture and no intelligence. But, unlike the Beatles’ fans (who at most became light music singers), the teenagers who identified themselves with the “ease” of Black Sabbath music were just those who would have formed rock music bands: the Black Sabbath were spreading an alien virus, that of heavy metal.

On Kanye West:

[In 2018] he released “Lift Yourself” that has perhaps his best lyrics ever: Poopy-di scoop / Scoop-diddy-whoop / Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop.

The album Ye… wasn’t even an album: at 23 minutes, it was just an EP. The songs are clumsy and goofy. The best one is “Ghost Town,” because it takes the melody from Shirley Ann Lee’s “Someday,” the organ from Vanilla Fudge’s “Take Me For A Little While,” and because of guest female vocalist Danielle Balbuena, aka 070 Shake. (The only reason that i mention this song is that, if i don’t mention any song, his fans will accuse me of not having listened to the album, but i refuse to publicize any other song).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Quotes

Favorite media discovered in 2018

January 12, 2019 by Luke 1 Comment

Hard to compare across media, of course, but here’s my attempt:

  1. Dark Souls (2011) 🎮
  2. Eighth Grade (2018) 🎥
  3. The Favourite (2018) 🎥
  4. Celeste (2018) 🎮
  5. Better Call Saul, season 4 (2018) 📺
  6. Hollow Knight (2017) 🎮
  7. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) 🎥
  8. The Death of Stalin (2017) 🎥
  9. Lady Bird (2017) 🎥
  10. Maniac (2018) 📺
  11. Incredibles 2 (2018) 🎥
  12. The Elephant in the Brain (2018) 📖
  13. Atlanta, season 2 (2018) 📺
  14. Diabolicus Felinae Pandemonium (2017) 🎵
  15. Logan Lucky (2017) 🎥
  16. The Florida Project (2017) 🎥
  17. I, Tonya (2017) 🎥
  18. 4 Visions (1981) 🎵
  19. The Disaster Artist (2017) 🎥
  20. Adventure Time, season 10 (2018) 📺
  21. War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) 🎥
  22. All Melody (2018) 🎵
  23. You Were Never Really Here (2017) 🎥
  24. Dead Magic (2018) 🎵
  25. Blue Planet II (2017) 📺

Filed Under: Lists

Media diet for Q4 2018

January 1, 2019 by Luke 1 Comment

Games

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

  • Dark Souls ★
    • The first “soulslike” I’ve played. It has its flaws, and it’s not as relentlessly fun as (say) Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, but I found it pretty awe-inspiring, and I can see why it has been so influential. I’m tempted to write at length about what’s so great about Dark Souls, but of course that’s been done hundreds of times since its release in 2011, so if you’re curious I’ll just point you to these four video essays. Dark Souls isn’t the very best video game experience I’ve had,  but it is probably the one that feels most profound.
  • Guacamelee!
  • Guacamelee! 2
  • Diablo III
  • Hollow Knight ★
    • One of the best Metroidvanias.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Media I’m looking forward to, Q1 2019 edition

January 1, 2019 by Luke Leave a Comment

Added this quarter:

  • Sadler & Regan, Game Changer (Jan 2019)
  • Land, Eyes to See (Jan 2019)
  • Meibauer, The Oxford Handbook of Lying (Jan 2019)
  • Joseph et al., Adversarial Machine Learning (Jan 2019)
  • Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Feb 2019)
  • Wilson, This View of Life (Feb 2019)
  • Thagard, Natural Philosophy (Feb 2019)
  • Thagard, Brain-Mind (Feb 2019)
  • Thagard, Mind-Society (Feb 2019)
  • Kagan, How to Count Animals, More or Less (Mar 2019)
  • Duffy, The Perils of Perception (Mar 2019)
  • Glanzel et al., Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators (Apr 2019)
  • Sunstein, How Change Happens (Apr 2019)
  • Reagle, Jr., Hacking Life (Apr 2019)
  • Caro: Working (Apr 2019)
  • Metzl, Hacking Darwin (Apr 2019)
  • O’Mara, The Code (Jul 2019)
  • Chen et al., Foundations of Prediction Markets (Aug 2019)
  • LeDoux, The Deep History of Ourselves (Aug 2019)
  • Caplan, Poverty: Who to Blame (TBD)
  • Erdman, Shut Out (TBD)
  • Chalmers, Reality 2.0 (TBD)
  • Peele, Us (Mar 2019)
  • Netflix, Our Planet (Apr 2019)
  • Johnson, Knives Out (Nov 2019)

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Media diet for Q3 2018

October 2, 2018 by Luke 9 Comments

Books

  • Lukianoff & Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Only adds a bit beyond the article, mostly additional horror stories that have occurred in the meantime, and precious little data. I’m broadly sympathetic to their concerns but hardly convinced.
  • Several books by Thomas Sowell. I do like him better in longform than shortform. In general I like his “basic economics applied to X” and “bunch of facts you didn’t know” books more than his “my rambly theory of culture” books (e.g. Conflict of Visions). His style is fun and easy to read but his analyses aren’t systematic/rigorous and so it’s often hard to know how much to trust the conclusions. He’s an economist, but in his books he writes like a historian (e.g. ~no identification strategy).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Media I’m looking forward to, Q4 2018 edition

October 2, 2018 by Luke Leave a Comment

Added this quarter:

  • Mitchell, Innate (Oct 2018)
  • Lewis, The Fifth Risk (Oct 2018)
  • Kerr, The Gift of Global Talent (Oct 2018)
  • Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them (Oct 2018)
  • Reich, Just Giving (Nov 2018)
  • Roddy et al., The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912 (Nov 2018)
  • Healy, Data Visualization (Dec 2018)
  • Greenberg, Sandworm (May 2019)
  • Caplan, All Roads Lead to Open Borders (TBD 2019)
  • Fleischman, forthcoming book (TBD)
  • Harden, The Genetic Lottery (TBD)
  • Ng, Markets and Morals (TBD)
  • Gal, The Power of the Status Quo (TBD)
  • Lindsay, Models of the Mind (TBD)
  • DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia (TBD)
  • Hill, Mid90s (Oct 2018)
  • Lanthimos, The Favourite (Nov 2018)
  • Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Jul 2019)
  • Cameron, Avatar 2 (TBD 2020)

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Media diet for Q2 2018

July 1, 2018 by Luke 4 Comments

Books

  • Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Interesting, albeit obviously not convincing. Just me trying to get a sense for how international relations debates work.
  • Rosling, Factfulness. Decent for what it’s trying to be. Similar in spirit and content to Enlightenment Now, but narrower in scope and written for a wider audience.

These days I finish fewer books than I used to, and prefer to skip around more.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists Tagged With: luke_admin

Media I’m looking forward to, Q3 2018 edition

July 1, 2018 by Luke 2 Comments

Added this quarter:

  • Chater, The Mind Is Flat (Aug 2018)
  • Quammen, The Tangled Tree (Aug 2018)
  • North, How to Invent Everything (Sep 2018)
  • Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Sep 2018)
  • Andrew, The Secret World (Sep 2018)
  • Hooper, Superhuman (Sep 2018)
  • Liberman & Tversky, Critical Thinking (Oct 2018)
  • Poldrack, The New Mind Readers (Oct 2018)
  • Rees, On the Future (Oct 2018)
  • Williamson, Doing Philosophy (Nov 2018)
  • Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe (Dec 2018)
  • Kahneman et al., Noise (TBD)
  • Portmore, Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism (TBD)
  • Ritchie, Hypeology (TBD)
  • Chandor, The Triple Frontier (2019 film)

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Projects I wish I had time for

May 27, 2018 by Luke 25 Comments

  1. Everyone Is Lying Again: A blog dissecting how, in response to the majority of even slightly controversial or partisanship-evoking news stories, all “sides” (right, left, etc.) grossly misrepresent the facts and/or their scientific, historical, or cultural context. Probably one dissection per week, allowing time for substantial research for each post.
  2. The Story of Rock Music: This podcast would guide the listener through the history of rock music, playing extended clips of >10 tracks per episode and helping the listener hear exactly how different styles developed, split off from their roots, and recombined later. For example in one episode I might explain what a raga is and play an example clip, then explain what modal vs. chordal improvisation is and play contrasting clips, then explain what blues rock is and play an example clip, then explain what post-bop jazz is and play an example clip, and finally talk through (with example clips) how these forms were fused together in the classic Mike Bloomfield track “East-West,” one of the earliest examples of “raga rock.” Episodes would proceed in roughly chronological order, so that the listener could “hear” the evolution of music over time, as later episodes build on the stylistic evolutions described in past episodes.
  3. Evolving Sounds: Relatedly, I’ve long wanted to research, compose, and record a many-hour continuous piece of music that recapitulates the entire history of “Western music” (which is better documented than other traditions). The piece would begin with sections composed in accordance with scholarly guesses about how prehistoric music might have sounded, eventually transition into the earliest styles from recorded history, then evolve into styles covered in e.g. Burkholder’s History of Western Music, up to the present day. This is a pretty obvious idea and I’m upset that nobody has attempted it yet.
  4. Everything is Awesome and We’re All Going to Die: This book would start off like a more thorough and epistemically scrupulous version of the empirical sections from Enlightenment Now, and would then proceed to explain in detail why global catastrophic risk is nevertheless increasing over time via Moore’s Law of Mad Science, inescapable asymmetry in the difficulty of creation vs. destruction, inadequate equilibria, and related phenomena.
  5. Better Moral Judgments: Moral philosophy makes little attempt to estimate what our moral intuitions would be if we were smarter, better informed, etc. Works like The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes  are baby steps in the right direction, but still far less ambitious than what I sketch here, which could easily be expanded into quite a large research program. But I’d start with a book sketching out that research program and working through some initial examples.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Books, music, etc. from Q1 2018

April 1, 2018 by Luke 14 Comments

Books

  • Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine. Pretty good, scary.
  • Kwak, Economism. Not ideal, but still: many people need to read an economics 101 textbook, and many other people need to read Economism.
  • Simler & Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain. Pretty great, especially given the authors’ own caveat that “we are no doubt wrong in many places, not just in the details, but also in some larger conclusions” and that “to demonstrate that hidden motives are common and important” they “don’t need to be right about everything.” Though I wish it was more clearly flagged that one key reason much of the book is likely wrong is just that the underlying research is false, as must be true for ~all books summarizing large amounts of “soft” science.
  • Caplan, The Case Against Education. I read about half. I don’t know much about the research in this area but I personally find the “mostly signaling” model more intuitive than the alternatives. A good example of synthesizing important relevant data from multiple fields (not just from economics).
  • Pinker, Enlightenment Now. Generally pretty good. I disagree with the section on existential risks and AI, and I disagree with Pinker’s weird transcendental argument in favor of humanism, and I’m less confident in humanism’s role in human progress than Pinker seems to be, and his account of “the Enlightenment” is inaccurately clean & rosy, and some his data are exaggerated and cherry-picked, but shrug, I generally agree with most of the book, and with the overall thesis about human history. Pinker also skips over the history of likely-sentient animal welfare, but at least he tweeted Jacy Reese’s essay about that.
  • Sowell, The Thomas Sowell Reader. I read this on Pinker’s recommendation of Sowell in general. These short essays didn’t exhibit much of anything special. Maybe he’s more impressive in longer formats.
  • Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon. I found it pretty informative, but I’m still far too much a China novice to know whether Pillsbury’s overall take is more reasonable than the other high-level takes I’ve read.
  • Rid, Rise of the Machines. Fine, I guess.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

Media I’m looking forward to, Q2 2018 edition

April 1, 2018 by Luke Leave a Comment

Added this quarter:

  • Agrawal et al., Prediction Machines (Apr 2018)
  • Leigh, Randomistas (Apr 2018)
  • Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets (Apr 2018)
  • Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town (Apr 2018)
  • Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct (Apr 2018)
  • Winchester, The Perfectionists (May 2018)
  • Fox & Christoff, The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought (May 2018)
  • Pearl & Mackenzie, The Book of Why (May 2018)
  • Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (May 2018)
  • Boyer, Minds Make Societies (May 2018)
  • Posner & Weyl, Radical Markets (May 2018)
  • Baumberg, The Secret Life of Science (May 2018)
  • Sanger, The Perfect Weapon (Jun 2018)
  • Cirkovic, The Great Silence (Jul 2018)
  • Sejnowski, The Deep Learning Revolution (Aug 2018)
  • Quammen, The Tangled Tree (Aug 2018)
  • Kandel, The Disordered Mind (Aug 2018)
  • Sunstein, The Cost-Benefit Revolution (Aug 2018)
  • Johnson, Farsighted (Sep 2018)
  • Lee, AI Superpowers (Sep 2018)
  • Ausiello, The Making of a New Science (Oct 2018)
  • Page, Model Thinker (Nov 2018)
  • Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden (2019)
  • Sumner, The Money Illusion (TBD)
  • Seth, some book about consciousness (TBD)
  • Wellerstein, some book (TBD)
  • Tetlock, another book about forecsting tournaments (TBD)
  • Kaufman, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things (TBD 2019) [film]

Books

bold = especially excited

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Lists

My worldview in 5 books

March 22, 2018 by Luke 4 Comments

If you wanted to communicate as much as possible to someone about your worldview by asking them to read just five books, which five books would you choose?

My choices are below. If you post your answer to this question to Twitter, please use the hash tag #WorldviewIn5Books (like I did), so everyone posting their list can find each other.

1. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies

(2015; ebook/audiobook/podcast)

A singular introduction to critical thinking, rationality, and naturalistic philosophy. Both more advanced and more practically useful than any comparable guide I’ve encountered.

2. Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

(2016; ebook/paperback/audiobook)

If Yudkowsky’s book is “how to think 101,” then Carroll’s book is “what to think 101,” i.e. an introduction to what exists and how it works, according to standard scientific naturalism.

3. William MacAskill, Doing Good Better

(2015; ebook/paperback/audiobook)

My current favorite “how to do good 101” book, covering important practical considerations such as scale of impact, tractability, neglectedness, efficiency, cause neutrality, counterfactuals, and some strategies for thinking about expected value across diverse cause areas.

Importantly, it’s missing (a) a quick survey of the strongest arguments for and against utilitarianism, and (b) much discussion of near-term vs. animal-inclusive vs. long-term views and their implications (when paired with lots of empirical facts). But those topics are understandably beyond the book’s scope, and in any case there aren’t yet any books with good coverage of (a) and (b), in my opinion.

4. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

(2018; ebook/paperback/audiobook)

Almost everything has gotten dramatically better for humans over the past few centuries, likely substantially due to the spread and application of reason, science, and humanism.

5. Toby Ord, forthcoming book about the importance of the long-term future

(forthcoming)

Yes, listing a future book is cheating, but I’m doing it anyway. The importance of the long-term future plays a big role in my current worldview, but there isn’t yet a book that captures my views on the topic well, and from my correspondence with Toby so far, I suspect his forthcoming book on the topic will finally do the topic justice. While you’re waiting for the book to be released, you can get a preview via this podcast interview with Toby.

A few notes about my choices

  • These aren’t my favorite books, nor the books that most influenced me historically. Rather, these are the books that best express key aspects of my worldview. In other words, they are the books I’d most want someone else to read first if we were about to have a long and detailed debate about something complicated, so they’d have some sense of “where I’m coming from.”
  • Obviously, there is plenty in these books that I disagree with.
  • I didn’t include any giant college textbooks or encyclopedias; that’d be cheating.
  • I wish there was a book that summarized many of my key political views, but in my case, I doubt any such book exists.
  • Economic thinking also plays a big role in my worldview, but I’ve not yet found a book that I think does a good job of integrating economic theory with careful, skeptical discussions of the most relevant empirical data (which often come from fields outside economics, and often differ from the predictions of economic models) across a decent range of the most important questions in economics.
  • These books are all quite recent. Older books suffer from their lack of access to recent scientific and philosophical progress, for example (a) the last several decades of the cognitive science of human reasoning, (b) the latest estimates of the effectiveness of various interventions to save and improve people’s lives, (c) the latest historical and regional estimates of various aspects of human well-being and their correlates, and (d) recent arguments about moral uncertainty and what to do about it.

As always, these are my views and not my employer’s.

Filed Under: Lists, Musings

Favorite podcasts of 2017

January 15, 2018 by Luke 6 Comments

(no order)

  • S-Town
  • Ponzi Supernova
  • Crimetown
  • Planet Money
  • StartUp
  • Slate Star Codex
  • Everything Hertz
  • Casefile
  • Reply All
  • This American Life
  • Pessimists Archive
  • Waking Up
  • EconTalk
  • 80,000 Hours
  • Rationally Speaking
  • The Weeds
  • The Daily
  • Conversations with Tyler
  • The Insight
  • Criminal
  • Radiolab
  • More Perfect
  • Ben Shapiro Show [good for popping my filter bubble, but also see here]

Filed Under: Lists

Excerpts from The Doomsday Machine

January 14, 2018 by Luke 1 Comment

Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame recent published a book about his days as a nuclear war planner, The Doomsday Machine. Below are just a few of the bits I found interesting. (There were many others, but they were more difficult to excerpt.)

My first summer [at RAND] I worked seventy-hour weeks, devouring secret studies and analyses till late every night, to get up to speed on the problems and the possible solutions. I was looking for clues as to how we could frustrate the Soviet versions of RAND and SAC, and do it in time to avert a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Or postpone it. From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn’t believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust. Alain Enthoven and I were the youngest members of the department. Neither of us joined the extremely generous retirement plan RAND offered. Neither of us believed, in our late twenties, we had a chance of collecting on it.

Just one of many stories on how unreliable Ellsberg found command and control procedures to be:

To prevent unauthorized action by a single duty officer with access to Execute codes in any particular command post, there was a universal and supposedly ironclad rule that at least two such officers must be on duty at all times, day and night, and they must both be involved in, and agree on, the authentication of an order to execute nuclear war plans from a higher authority and on their decision to relay this order to subordinate commands… One way or another, each post purported to have arrangements so that one officer by himself could neither authenticate orders received nor send out authenticated Execute commands.

But in practice, not. As various duty officers explained to me, oftentimes only one man was on duty in the office. The personnel requirements for having two qualified officers sitting around in every such station at literally every moment of the night were just too stringent to be met. Duty rosters did provide for it, but not for backups when one officer “had” to be elsewhere—to get some food or for a medical emergency, his own or, on some bases, his wife’s. Did that mean that all subordinate commands would be paralyzed, unable to receive authenticated Execute orders, if the one remaining duty officer received what appeared to be an order to commence nuclear operations during that interval?

That couldn’t be permitted, in the eyes of the officers assigned to this duty, each of whom had faced up to the practical possibility of this situation. So each of them had provided for it “unofficially,” in his own mind or usually by agreement with his fellow duty officers. Each, in reality, had the combinations to both safes, after all, or some arrangement for acquiring them. If there was only one safe, each officer would, in reality, know the full combination to it. One officer would hold both envelopes when the other had to be away. Where there were more elaborate safeguards, the officers had always spent some of their idle hours late at night figuring out how to circumvent them, “if necessary.” They had always succeeded in doing so. I found this in every post I visited.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Quotes

Books, music, etc. from Q4 2017

January 1, 2018 by Luke 2 Comments

Books

  • Berezow & Campbell, Science Left Behind: Meh.
  • Biederman & Bennis, Organizing Genius: Some interesting stories, not sure how reliable they are, authors make no attempt to get data on the question.

Music

Spotify playlist for all of 2017 is here.

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

  • Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: The Kid (2017)
  • James Holden: The Animal Spirits (2017)
  • Daniele Luppi & Parquet Courts: MILANO (2017)
  • Kristofer Maddigan: Cuphead (2017)
  • Tale of Us: Endless (2017)
  • The Great Harry Hillman: Tilt (2017)
  • Schnellertollermeier: Rights (2017)
  • Bent Knee: Say So (2016)
  • The Kandinsky Effect: Somnambulist (2015), Pax 6 (2017)

Movies/TV

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

  • Denis Villenueve: Blade Runner 2049 (2017) ★
  • Mike Mills: 20th Century Women (2016)
  • Various: Top of the Lake, season 1 (2013) ★
  • Various: Bojack Horseman, season 3 (2017)
  • Noah Baumbach: The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) ★
  • Mike Leigh: Life is Sweet (1990)
  • Dee Rees: Mudbound (2017)
  • Various: Broad City, season 4 (2017)
  • Various: Better Things, season 2 (2017)
  • Johnson: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
  • Aronofsky: Mother! (2017) ★

Games

Ones I “really liked” (no star), or “loved” (star):

  • Breath of the Wild (2017) ★
  • Super Mario Odyssey (2017) ★
  • Steamworld Dig 2 (2017)

Filed Under: Lists

Media I’m looking forward to, Q1 2018 edition

January 1, 2018 by Luke Leave a Comment

Added this month:

  • Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (Mar 2018)
  • Kurzban, A Different Kind of Animal (Nov 2018)
  • Scharre, Army of None (Apr 2018)
  • Damasio, The Strange Order of Things (Feb 2018)
  • Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Jan 2018)
  • Burns & Shulgan, Autonomy (Aug 2018)
  • Lukianoff & Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind (Jul 2018)
  • Payne, Strategy, Evolution, and War (May 2018)
  • Duke, Thinking in Bets (Feb 2018)
  • Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (Apr 2018)
  • Clark et al., The Origins of Happiness (Jan 2018)
  • Ord, book about existential risk (TBD)
  • MacAskill et al., book on moral uncertainty (TBD)
  • Sandberg, Grand Futures (TBD)
  • Valeriano et al., Cyber Strategy (TBD)
  • several movies & TV seasons

Books

bold = especially excited

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Filed Under: Lists

Pinker on implementing world peace

December 3, 2017 by Luke Leave a Comment

From Better Angels of Our Nature, ch. 5:

In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant envisioned a “federation of free states” that would fall well short of an international Leviathan. It would be a gradually expanding club of liberal republics rather than a global megagovernment, and it would rely on the soft power of moral legitimacy rather than on a monopoly on the use of force. The modern equivalent is the intergovernmental organization or IGO — a bureaucracy with a limited mandate to coordinate the policies of participating nations in some area in which they have a common interest. The international entity with the best track record for implementing world peace is probably not the United Nations, but the European Coal and Steel Community, an IGO founded in 1950 by France, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy to oversee a common market and regulate the production of the two most important strategic commodities. The organization was specifically designed as a mechanism for submerging historic rivalries and ambitions — especially West Germany’s — in a shared commercial enterprise. The Coal and Steel Community set the stage for the European Economic Community, which in turn begot the European Union.

Many historians believe that these organizations helped keep war out of the collective consciousness of Western Europe. By making national borders porous to people, money, goods, and ideas, they weakened the temptation of nations to fall into militant rivalries, just as the existence of the United States weakens any temptation of, say, Minnesota and Wisconsin to fall into a militant rivalry. By throwing nations into a club whose leaders had to socialize and work together, they enforced certain norms of cooperation. By serving as an impartial judge, they could mediate disputes among member nations. And by holding out the carrot of a vast market, they could entice applicants to give up their empires (in the case of Portugal) or to commit themselves to liberal democracy (in the case of former Soviet satellites and, perhaps soon, Turkey).

Filed Under: Quotes

Richard Clarke and R.P. Eddy on AI risk

November 15, 2017 by Luke 3 Comments

Richard Clarke and R.P. Eddy recently published Warnings, a book in which they try to identify “those rare people who… have accurate visions of looming disasters.” The opening chapter explains the aims of the book:

…this book will seek to answer these questions: How can we detect a real Cassandra among the myriad of pundits? What methods, if any, can be employed to better identify and listen to these prophetic warnings? Is there perhaps a way to distill the direst predictions from the surrounding noise and focus our attention on them?

…As we proceeded through these Cassandra Event case studies in a variety of different fields, we began to notice common threads: characteristics of the Cassandras, of their audiences, and of the issues that, when applied to a modern controversial prediction of disaster, might suggest that we are seeing someone warning of a future Cassandra Event. By identifying those common elements and synthesizing them into a methodology, we create what we call our Cassandra Coefficient, a score that suggests to us the likelihood that an individual is indeed a Cassandra whose warning is likely accurate, but is at risk of being ignored.

Having established this process for developing a Cassandra Coefficient based on past Cassandra Events, we next listen for today’s Cassandras. Who now among us may be accurately warning us of something we are ignoring, perhaps at our own peril?

Of the risks covered in the book, Clarke says he’s most worried about sea level rise, and Eddy says he’s most worried about superintelligence.

Below is a sampling of what they say in the chapter on risks from advanced AI systems. Note that I’m merely quoting from their take, not necessarily agreeing with it. (Indeed, there are significant parts I disagree with.)

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Filed Under: Quotes

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