Books

• Ross, The Rest is Noise (2nd read-through)
• Seabrook, The Song Machine
• Glass, Words Without Music
• Miller et al., Agenda Setting
• Smith, Epic Measures
• Bosso, Environment, Inc.

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• John Adams, Absolute Jest (written 2010, rel. 2015)
• A.D.D. Trio, Instinct (1996)
• Make a Rising, Infinite Ellipse and Head with Open Fontanel (2008)
• Trio 3, “Summit Conference” (2013)
• Hannibal Lokumbe, Dear Mrs. Parks (2009)

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

• Show Me a Hero (2015, Paul Haggis)
• What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi)
• White God (2014, Kornél Mundruczó)
• A Brilliant Young Mind (2014, Morgan Matthews)
• The Tribe (2014, Miroslav Slaboshpitsky)
• About Elly (2009, Asghar Farhadi)

* = added this round

• Jones, Hive Mind (Nov 2015)
• Munroe, Thing Explainer (Nov 2015)
• *Sumner, The Midas Paradox (Dec 2015)
• *Boldizzoni & Hudson, Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History (Dec 2015)
• Corbett, A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (Feb 2016)
• Häggström, Here Be Dragons (Mar 2016)
• Hernan & Robins, Causal Inference (Mar 2016)
• Hubbard, How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk (Apr 2016)
• Christian & Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (April 2016)
• Carroll, The Big Picture (May 2016)
• Hanson, The Age of Em (Jun 2016)
• Bier, Gower Handbook of Extreme Events (Jul 2016)
• Yong, I Contain Multitudes (Aug 2016)
• Callaghan et al. (eds.), The Technological Singularity (2016)
• *Ogden, Experimental Conversations (2016)
• Aaronson, Speaking Truth to Parallelism (2016)
• Joyce, Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy (2016)
• Mcpherson & Plunkett, Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (2016)
• Guyenet, The Hungry Brain (late 2016)
• Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain (spring 2017)
• Caplan, The Case Against Education (TBD)
• Bengio et al., Deep Learning (TBD)
• Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh (TBD)
• Morris, In the Beginning (TBD)
• Bloom, Against Empathy (TBD)
• Mody, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law (TBD)
• Arrhenius, Population Ethics (TBD)
• Forman, book on mass incarceration (TBD)
• *Easwaran, The Foundations of Bayesian Epistemology (TBD)

Books

• Tetlock & Gardner, Superforecasting
• Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain
• Li, Blockbuster Drugs
• Ross, Listen to This
• Powell, How Music Works

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• Keith Jarrett, “Beginning” (1976, from The Survivor’s Suite)
• Wadada Leo Smith, Golden Hearts Remembrance (1997)
• Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (1967)
• Michael Mantler, Movies (1980)
• Carla Bley, Social Studies (1981)
• Joanna Newsom, Divers (2015)
• Gato Barbieri, almost everything from The Third World (1969) through Alive in New York (1975)
• Ray Anderson, It Just So Happens (1987)

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

• Alfonso Gomez-Rajon, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

There are lots of job openings in the effective altruism world right now. Many of these positions will be hard to fill, and I’m sure the hiring organizations would appreciate you sending their job ads to people who might be a good fit, or sharing the job ad on social media if your followers might be particularly likely to include some candidates who might be good fits.

Most of what you see below is re-organized from a recent EA newsletter. Jobs are listed by organization; organizations are listed alphabetically. Jobs that can be done remotely from any location are marked “(remote),” though I probably missed a few of these.

If you work at an explicitly EA-motivated organization and you have additions or corrections to the job openings listed below, please let me know.

 

80,000 Hours (Oxford, UK) wants a full-stack web developer with an eye for design. $1000 for successful referrals. Deadline is Oct. 18.

Animal Charity Evaluators (San Diego, USA) wants an Advocacy Research Program Officer. No deadline specified.

The Centre for Effective Altruism (Oxford, UK) wants an Event Manager, a Project Manager, an Office Manager, a Director of US Operations, a Finance Manager, a Full-Stack Marketer, a Strategy Fellow, and a Development Manager. Deadlines are Oct. 18.

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (Cambridge, UK) wants four post-docs and an Academic Project Manager to work on extreme technological risk. Deadlines are Nov. 12.

The Future of Life Institute (Boston, USA) wants a Project Coordinator and a News Website Editor. Deadlines not specified.

GiveWell (San Francisco, USA) wants Summer Research Analysts for 2016, Research Analysts, Outreach Associates, Operations Associates, and (remote) Conversation Notes Writers. Deadlines not specified.

Giving What We Can (Oxford, UK) wants a Director of Growth and multiple Research Analysts. Deadlines are Oct. 18.

The Global Priorities Project (Oxford, UK) wants a Director of Policy and multiple Research Fellows. Deadlines are Oct. 18.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Berkeley, USA) wants Research Fellows to work on technical problems related to superintelligence alignment.

The Open Philanthropy Project (San Francisco, USA) wants a Biosecurity Program Officer, Advisors and Senior Advisors for its Life Sciences program category, and (remote) Social Sciences Research Assistants. Deadlines not specified.

Sentience Politics (Basel, Switzerland) wants a Project Manager to establish the organization in Germany. Deadline is Oct. 31.

* = added this round

• *Ridley, The Evolution of Everything (Oct 2015)
• Jones, Hive Mind (Nov 2015)
• Munroe, Thing Explainer (Nov 2015)
• Yong, I Contain Multitudes (late 2015)
• *Corbett, A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (Feb 2016)
• Häggström, Here Be Dragons (early 2016)
• Hernan & Robins, Causal Inference (Mar 2016)
• Hanson, The Age of Em (Jun 2016)
• Hubbard, How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk (Apr 2016)
• Carroll, The Big Picture (May 2016)
• Christian & Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (spring 2016)
• *Bier, Gower Handbook of Extreme Events (Jul 2016)
• Callaghan et al. (eds.), The Technological Singularity (2016)
• Aaronson, Speaking Truth to Parallelism (2016)
• *Joyce, Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy (2016)
• *Mcpherson & Plunkett, Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (2016)
• *Guyenet, The Hungry Brain (late 2016)
• Caplan, The Case Against Education (TBD)
• Bengio et al., Deep Learning (TBD)
• Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh (TBD)
• Morris, In the Beginning (TBD)
• Bloom, Against Empathy (TBD)
• Mody, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law (TBD)
• Arrhenius, Population Ethics (TBD)
• Forman, book on mass incarceration (TBD)
• Hanson, book on signaling (TBD)

Books

• Hickok, The Myth of Mirror Neurons
• Tett, The Silo Effect
• Domingos, The Master Algorithm
• Bova, How the World Works, 2e

I thoroughly enjoyed MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning. It does contain at least one error:

[Stephanie] didn’t know what [“bigger” thing she should be doing]… [maybe] preventing malevolent computers from attacking mankind, like the people at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute?

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• Blanck Mass, Dumb Flesh (2015)
• Labrinth, “Jealous” (2014)
• Mingus Big Band, Essential Mingus Big Band (2001)
• Herbie Hancock, Crossings (1972)
• Miracles of Modern Science, “Secret Track” (2011)
• Buck Tardley, Unavailable (2010) [a cover of The Residents’ Not Available]
• Lots of albums by Henry Threadgill, whom I’ve just learned is one of my favorite composers. Maybe start with Rag, Bush and All (1988).
• Odesza, In Return (2014)
• Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives (composed 1978-1980, rec. 1991)

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

• Peter Strickland, The Duke of Burgundy (2014)
• David Robert Mitchell, It Follows (2014)

Here’s a playlist of tracks or albums pushing musical boundaries, released in 2012 or later:

• Abu Lahab – Humid Limbs of the Torn Beadsman (2012)
• Amogh Symphony – Vectorscan (2014)
• Andy Stott – Luxury Problems (2012)
• Arca – Baron Libre (2012)
• Amnesia Scanner – “Angels Rig Hook” (2015)
• Haxan Cloak – Excavation (2013)
• Holly Herndon – “Breathe” (2012)
• Igorrr – Hallelujah (2012)
• Katie Gately – “Pipes” (2013)
• Lil Ugly Mane – Absence of Shitperson (2014)

This list is exclusive to rock-descended music. My knowledge of jazz and contemporary classical is less comprehensive than my knowledge of rock and its descendents, so I’m less able to tell what is genuinely new for jazz and contemporary classical.

And no, I don’t know why the artists named above all begin with a letter in the first half of the alphabet.

* = added this round

• Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain (Sep 2015)
• Tetlock & Gardner, Superforecasting (Sep 2015)
• *Dawkins, Brief Candle in the Dark (Sep 2015)
• Ferguson, Kissinger (Sep 2015)
• Akerlof & Shiller, Phishing for Phools (Sep 2015)
• Domingoes, The Master Algorithm (Sep 2015)
• Regis, Monsters (Sep 2015)
• MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning (Sep 2015)
• Jones, Hive Mind (Nov 2015)
• Munroe, Thing Explainer (Nov 2015)
• Yong, I Contain Multitudes (late 2015)
• *Häggström, Here Be Dragons (early 2016)
• Hernan & Robins, Causal Inference (Mar 2016)
• *Hubbard, How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk (Apr 2016)
• *Carroll, The Big Picture (May 2016)
• Christian & Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (spring 2016)
• Hanson, The Age of Em (spring 2016)
• Callaghan et al. (eds.), The Technological Singularity (2016)
• Aaronson, Speaking Truth to Parallelism (2016)
• Caplan, The Case Against Education (TBD)
• Bengio et al., Deep Learning (TBD)
• Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh (TBD)
• Morris, In the Beginning (TBD)
• Bloom, Against Empathy (TBD)
• Mody, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law (TBD)
• Arrhenius, Population Ethics (TBD)
• *Forman, book on mass incarceration (TBD)
• *Hanson, book on signaling (TBD)

Books

• MacAskill, Doing Good Better
• Coyne, Faith vs. Fact
• Shanahan, The Technological Singularity
• Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People
• Kissinger, World Order
• Harris, @War
• Silberman, NeuroTribes
• Krebs, Spam Nation

López’s Dog Whistle Politics was rarely persuasive. A lot of stuff like “Reagan said these two race-baiting things, and then people voted for him and didn’t mind his regressive tax policies, because they were racist and fell for his dog whistle statements.” I assume lots of Americans are fairly racist, and I assume politicians use racist dog whistles from time to time, but I don’t know how important those dog whistles are for American politics, and López didn’t put much effort into supporting his claims on that question.

Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this month:

• Sarah Manning, Harmonious Creature (2014)
• Cut Chemist, The Audience’s Listening (2006)
• Mal Waldron, Up Popped the Devil (1973)
• Patrick Carney, “Bojack’s Theme” (2014)
• The Weeknd, House of Balloons (2011)

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

• George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
• Joe Swanberg, All the Light in the Sky (2012)
• Joe Swanberg, Digging for Fire (2015)

• Swanberg, Digging for Fire (Aug 21, 2015)
• Perry, Queen of Earth (Aug 26, 2015)
• Villeneuve, Sicario (Sep 25, 2015)
• Mendes, Spectre (Nov 6, 2015)
• Haynes, Carol (Nov 20, 2015)
• Sohn, The Good Dinosaur (Nov 25, 2015)
• Abrams, The Force Awakens (Dec 18, 2015)
• Tarantino, The Hateful Eight (Dec 25, 2015)
• Russell, Joy (Dec 25, 2015)
• Iñárritu, The Revenant (Dec 25, 2015)
• Coen brothers, Hail, Caesar! (Feb 5, 2016)
• Nichols, Midnight Special (Mar 18, 2016)
• Stanton, Finding Dory (Jun 17, 2016)
• Edwards, Rogue One (Dec 16, 2016)
• Scorsese, Silence (TBD 2016)
• Reeves, War of the Planet of the Apes (Jul 14, 2017)
• Cameron, Avatar 2 (Dec 2017)
• Audiard, Dheepan (TBD)
• Haneke, Flashmob (TBD)
• Dardenne brothers, The Unknown Girl (TBD)

More replies will be added here as I remember or discover them. To focus on the “modern” discussion, I’ll somewhat-arbitrarily limit this to replies to comments or articles that were published after the release of Bostrom’s Superintelligence on Sep. 3rd, 2014. Please remind me which ones I’m forgetting.

By me

• My reply to critics in Edge.org’s “Myth of AI” discussion. (Timelines, malevolence confusion, convergent instrumental goals.)
• My reply to AI researcher Andrew Ng. (Timelines, malevolence confusion.)
• My reply to AI researcher Oren Etzioni. (Timelines, convergent instrumental goals.)
• My reply to economist Alex Tabarrok. (Timelines, glide scenario.)
• My reply to AI researcher David Buchanan. (Consciousness confusion.)
• My reply to physicist Lawrence Krauss. (Power requirements.)
• My reply to AI researcher Jeff Hawkins. (Self-replication, anthropomorphic AI, intelligence explosion, timelines.)
• My reply to AI researcher Pedro Domingos. (Consciousness confusion? Not sure.)
• My reply to AI researcher Yann LeCun. (Timelines, malevolence confusion.)

By others

• Eliezer Yudkowsky replies to Francois Chollet. (Intelligent explosion, nature of intelligence, various.)
• Matthew Graves replies to Maciej Cegłowski. (various)
• Stuart Russell replies to critics in Edge.org’s “Myth of AI” discussion. (Convergent instrumental goals.)
• Rob Bensinger replies to computer scientist Ernest Davis. (Intelligence explosion, AGI capability, value learning.)
• Rob Bensinger replies to roboticist Rodney Brooks and philosopher John Searle. (Narrow AI, timelines, malevolence confusion.)
• Scott Alexander replies to technologist and novelist Ramez Naam and others. (Mainstream acceptance of AI risks.)
• Olle Häggström replies to nuclear security specialist Edward Moore Geist. (Plausibility of superhuman AI, goal content integrity.)
• Olle Häggström replies to science writer Michael Shermer. (Malevolence confusion.)
• Olle Häggström replies to philosopher John Searle. (Consciousness confusion.)
• Olle Häggström replies to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. (Malevolence confusion.)
• “On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines,” a parody of bad arguments commonly made against the possibility of AGI.

 

* = added this round

• *Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain (Sep 2015)
• *Tetlock & Gardner, Superforecasting (Sep 2015)
• *Ferguson, Kissinger (Sep 2015)
• *Akerlof & Shiller, Phishing for Phools (Sep 2015)
• *Domingoes, The Master Algorithm (Sep 2015)
• Regis, Monsters (Sep 2015)
• MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning (Sep 2015)
• Aaronson, Speaking Truth to Parallelism (fall 2015)
• Jones, Hive Mind (Nov 2015)
• Munroe, Thing Explainer (Nov 2015)
• Yong, I Contain Multitudes (late 2015)
• Hernan & Robins, Causal Inference (Mar 2016)
• Christian & Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (spring 2016)
• Hanson, The Age of Em (spring 2016)
• Callaghan et al. (eds.), The Technological Singularity (2016)
• Caplan, The Case Against Education (TBD)
• Bengio et al., Deep Learning (TBD)
• *Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh (TBD)
• Morris, In the Beginning (TBD)
• Bloom, Against Empathy (TBD)
• *Mody, The Long Arm of Moore’s Law (TBD)
• *Arrhenius, Population Ethics (TBD)

Books

• Mooallern, American Hippopotamus
• Messenger, Elements of Jazz
• Buehrer, How To Listen To and Appreciate Jazz
• Chomsky, Understanding Power
• Chomsky, Power Systems
• Chomsky, Failed States
• Cohan, Money and Power
• Gioia, The History of Jazz, 2e

Minger’s Death by Food Pyramid has some good warnings against the missteps of the nutrition profession, government nutrition recommendations, and fad diets. Minger is mostly excited by Weston Price ideas about nutrition. I haven’t examined that evidence base, but I’d be surprised if e.g. we actually had decent measures of the rates of cancer, etc. in the populations Price visited. His work might elevate some hypotheses to the level of “Okay, we should test this,” in which case my question is “Have we done those RCTs yet?”

Ansari & Klinenberg’s Modern Romance was mildly amusing but not very good.

Music

This month I again listened to dozens of jazz albums while working on my in-progress jazz guide. This month, I started finally got to the stage where I hadn’t heard many of the albums, so I had lots of new encounters with albums I enjoyed a lot:

• Pharoah Sanders, Karma (1969) [How had I never heard this before?]
• Cosmosamatics, Zetrons (2005)
• Urszula Dudziak, Future Talk (1979)
• Darry Brenzel / Igor Stravinsky, The Rewrite of Spring (2012)
• John Tchicai, With Strings (2005)

Albums I liked a lot, from other genres:

• Kettel / Secede, When Can (2012)

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

• Andrey Zvyagintsev, Leviathan (2014)
• Noah Baumbach, While We’re Young (2014)
• Abderrahmane Sissako, Timbuktu (2014)
• Judd Apatow, Trainwreck (2015)

• MacAskill, Doing Good Better (Jul 2015)
• Shanahan, The Technological Singularity (Aug 2015)
• Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain (Sep 2015)
• Regis, Monsters (Sep 2015)
• MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning (Sep 2015)
• Aaronson, Speaking Truth to Parallelism (fall 2015)
• Jones, Hive Mind (Nov 2015)
• Munroe, Thing Explainer (Nov 2015)
• Yong, I Contain Multitudes (2015)
• Hernan & Robins, Causal Inference (Mar 2016)
• Christian & Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (spring 2016)
• Hanson, The Age of Em (spring 2016)
• Callaghan et al. (eds.), The Technological Singularity (2016)
• Caplan, The Case Against Education (2017)
• Bengio et al., Deep Learning (TBD)
• Zimmer, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh (TBD)
• Morris, In the Beginning (TBD)
• Bloom, Against Empathy (TBD)

If I had a lot more time, and the licenses to reproduce extended excerpts from tons of recorded music, the ideal versions of my beginner’s guides to modern classical music and art jazz would actually be audiobooks, with me talking for a bit, and then playing 30 seconds of some piece, and then explaining how it’s different from some other piece, and then playing that piece, and so on.

Such audiobooks do exist, and I’m going to call them audio music explainers — as opposed to e.g. text-based music explainers, like these, or interactive music explainers, like these (sorta).

Below are some examples, with Spotify links when available:

• Siepmann, Instruments of the Orchestra
• Naxos’ Classics Explained series: Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 4 & 5, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, Ravel’s Bolero an Ma Mere l’oye, Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A Major, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
• Naxos’ Opera Explained series: Beethoven’s Fidelio, Bellini’s La sonnambula, Bizet’s Carmen, Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and many more (choose one, then search Spotify for it).
• Robert Greenberg’s courses for The Great Courses, e.g. How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, How to Listen to and Understand Opera, The Symphony, The String Quartets of Beethoven, and Stravinsky: His Life and Music.
• The Great Courses‘ other music courses: Elements of Jazz, Broadway Musicals, and How Music and Mathematics Relate (maybe? I haven’t heard it).1
• Britten, A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (with narration, e.g. this version)
• Schiff, Beethoven Lecture-Recitals

Do you know of others?

1. Unfortunately, the music courses by The Modern Scholar don’t play many clips of music amid the explanations, but I’ve only listened to their How To Listen To and Appreciate Jazz so far. [↩]

Karnofsky, Has violence declined, when large-scale atrocities are systematically included?

Winners of the PROSE awards look fascinating.

Five big myths about techies and philanthropy.

Debate on effective altruism at Boston Review.

The /r/AskHistorians master book list.

How Near-Miss Events Amplify or Attenuate Risky Decision Making.

How do types affect (programming) productivity and correctness? A review of the empirical evidence.

What is your software project’s truck factor? How does it compare to those of popular GitHub applications?

Hacker can send fatal doses to hospital drug pumps. Because by default, everything you connect to the internet is hackable.

Lessons from the crypto wars of the 1990s.

 

AI stuff

Jacob Steinhardt: Long-Term and Short-Term Challenges to Ensuring the Safety of AI Systems.

New MIRI-relevant paper from Hutter’s lab: Sequential Extensions of Causal and Evidential Decision Theory.

An introduction to autonomy in weapons systems.

The winners of FLI’s grants competition for research on robust and beneficial AI have been announced.

Joshua Greene (Harvard) is seeking students who want to study AGI with him (presumably, AGI safety/values in particular, given Greene’s presence at FLI’s Puerto Rico conference).

New FLI open letter, this time on autonomous weapons.

New FLI FAQ on the AI open letter and the future of AI.

Deepmind runs their Atari player on a massively distributed computing architecture.

Books

• Thaler, Misbehaving
• Roth, Who Gets What
• Ritchie, Intelligence
• Demick, Nothing to Envy
• Allitt, The Industrial Revolution

I’m not Murray’s intended audience for By the People, but I found it pretty interesting after the first couple chapters, even though I probably agree with Murray about very little in the policy space.

I read the first 1/4 of Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. It’s fairly good for what it is, but it’s the “bunch of random cool stories about history” kind of macrohistory, not the data-driven kind of macrohistory I prefer, so I gave up on it.

Music

This month I listened to dozens of jazz albums while working on my in-progress jazz guide. I think I had heard most of them before, but it’s hard to remember which ones. My favorite listens I don’t think I’d heard before were:

• Paul Bley, Solemn Meditation (1958)
• Roland Kirk, I Talk with the Spirits (1964)
• Andrew Hill, Lift Every Voice (1970)
• Pat Martino, Baiyina (The Clear Evidence) (1968)

Music I particularly enjoyed from other genres:

• Son Lux, Bones (2015)

Movies/TV

I totally loved Inside Out (2015). It’s one of the contenders for best Pixar film ever.

TV’s Wayward Pines is badly written in some ways, but its 5th episode is one of the most satisfying mystery/puzzle resolutions I’ve ever seen. The first four episodes build up a bunch of bizarre mysteries, and then the 5th episode answers most of them in a way that is surprising and rule-constrained and non-arbitrary (e.g. not magic), which is something I see so rarely I can’t even remember the last time I saw it on film/TV.

Authorea actually looks pretty awesome for collaborative research paper writing. (So far I’ve been using Overleaf and sometimes… shudder… Google Docs.)

Abstract of a satirical paper from SIVBOVIK 2014:

Besides myriad philosophical disputes, neither [frequentism nor Bayesianism] accurately describes how ordinary humans make inferences… To remedy this problem, we propose belief-sustaining (BS) inference, which makes no use of the data whatsoever, in order to satisfy what we call “the principle of least embarrassment.” This is a much more accurate description of human behavior. We believe this method should replace Bayesian and frequentist inference for economic and public health reasons.

Understanding statistics through interactive visualizations.

GiveWell shallow investigation of risks from atomically precise manufacturing.

My beginner’s guide to modern classical music is basically finished now, and won’t be changing much in the future.

Effective altruist philosophers.

Peter Singer’s Coursera course on effective altruism.

The top 10 mathematical achievements of the last 5ish years, maybe.

Unfortunate statistical terms.

 

AI stuff

Open letter on the digital economy, about tech unemployment etc. Carl Shulman comments.

Robot swordsman.

Robots falling down during the latest DARPA Robotics Challenge.

AI Impacts collected all known public predictions of AGI timing, both individual predictions and survey medians. Conclusions here.

• Wiesner-Hanks (ed.), The Cambridge World History (June 2015)
• Harcourt, Humankind (June 2015)
• Yampolskiy, Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach (July 2015)
• MacAskill, Doing Good Better (August 2015)
• Shanahan, The Technological Singularity (August 2015)
• Aaronson, Speaking Truth to Parallelism (fall 2015)
• Jones, Hive Mind (November 2015)
• Munroe, Thing Explainer (November 2015)
• Miller et al. (eds.), The Technological Singularity: A Pragmatic Perspective (winter 2015)
• Hernan & Robins, Causal Inference (March 2016)
• Christian & Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (spring 2016)
• Hanson, The Age of Em (spring 2016)
• Yong, I Contain Multitudes (summer 2016)
• Caplan, The Case Against Education (2017)
• Morris, In the Beginning (TBD)
• Bloom, Against Empathy (TBD)