Luke Muehlhauser

Some books I’m looking forward to, October 2015 edition

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* = added this round

Books, music, etc. from September 2015

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Books

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:

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

Unabashedly emotional or catchy avant-garde music

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Holden wrote me a fictional conversation to illustrate his experience of trying to find music that is (1) complex, (2) structurally interesting, and yet (3) listenable / emotional / catchy (at least in some parts):

Holden: I’m bored by pop music. Got anything interesting?

Person: Here, try this 7-second riff played repeatedly for 26 minutes.

Holden: Umm … but what about … something a little more varied?

Person: Check out 38 minutes of somebody screaming incoherently while 5 incompatible instruments play random notes and a monotone voice recites surreal poetry.

Holden: But like … uh … more listenable maybe?

Person: I thought you didn’t want pop bullshit. Well, here’s something middlebrow: a guy playing 3 chords on a guitar who sounds kind of sarcastic.

Holden’s three criteria describe a great deal of my favorite music, much of which is scattered throughout my guides to modern classical music and modern art jazz. So if those criteria sound good to you, too, then I’ve listed below a few musical passages you might like.

Osvaldo Golijov, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, I. Agitato, 4:53-7:45

A string quartet + clarinet piece with a distinctly Jewish sound which, in this passage, sounds to me like a scene of building tension and frantic activity until all falls away (6:23) and the clarinet screams prayers of desperation to God (6:59).

Carla Bley, Escalator Over the Hill, Hotel Overture, 6:26-10:30

A circus-music refrain ambles along until things slow down (7:40) and a sax begins to solo (7:45) over repeating fatalistic-sounding chords in a way that, like the clarinet in the passage above, sounds to me like a cry of desperation, one with a cracking voice (e.g. at 8:03 & 8:09), and, at times, non-tonal gargled screaming (8:32), finally fading back into earlier themes from the overture (9:45).

Arvo Pärt, Tabula Rasa, Ludus, 4:10-9:52

Violins swirl around chords that seem to endlessly descend until a period of relative quiet (4:50) accented by bells. The earlier pattern returns (5:26), eventually picking up pace (5:44), until a momentary return to the calm of the bells (6:14). Then another return to the swirling violins (6:55), which again pick up their pace but this time with a thundering crash (7:15) that foreshadows the destruction that lies ahead. The violins ascend to a peak (7:55), and then quiver as they fall — farther and farther — until booming chords (8:44) announce the final desperate race (8:49) to the shattering end (9:36). If this doesn’t move you, you might be dead.

Sergey Kuryokhin, The Sparrow Oratorium, Summer, 0:55-4:36

Squeaky strings wander aimlessly until the piece suddenly jumps into a rollicking riff (1:11) that will be repeated throughout the piece. Variations on this riff continue as a high-gain guitar plays a free jazz solo. The solo ends (2:30), the noise builds, and then suddenly transitions (2:46) to a silly refrain of “zee zee zee zee…” and other vocalizations and then (3:17) a female pop singer with a soaring chorus that bleeds into (4:05) a variation on the original riff with sparse instrumentation which then launches into a louder, fuller-sounding version of the riff (4:20). (To me, this track is more catchy than emotional.)

John Adams, Harmonielehre, 1st movement, 12:19-16:18

Melancholy strings descend, but there is tension in the mood, announced by an ominous trill (12:45), and then another (12:51). But then, the mood lifts with piano and woodwinds (13:03) repeating an optimistic chord. The music accelerates, and takes another tonal shift toward a tense alert (13:22). Booming brass and drums enter (13:41) as things continue to accelerate, and the drums and brass strike again (14:29) and drag the whole piece down with them, in pitch and pace. The strings and horns struggle to rise again until the horns soar free (15:11) . The instruments rise and accelerate again until they break through to the upper atmosphere (15:32). Then they pull back, as if they see something up ahead, and… BOOM (16:04) there are the thundering E minor chords the opened the piece, here again to close the movement.

Tracks or albums pushing musical boundaries

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

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.

Some books I’m looking forward to, September 2015 edition

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* = added this round

Books, music, etc. from August 2015

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Books

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:

Movies/TV

Ones I really liked, or loved:

Films I’m looking forward to

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  • 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)

Replies to people who argue against worrying about long-term AI safety risks today

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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.

 

Some books I’m looking forward to, August 2015 edition

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* = added this round

Books, music, etc. from July 2015

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Books

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:

Albums I liked a lot, from other genres:

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)

Some books I’m looking forward to, July 2015 edition

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Audio music explainers

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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:

Do you know of others?

July links

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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, music, etc. from June 2015

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Books

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:

Music I particularly enjoyed from other genres:

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.

June 2015 links, round 2

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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.

Some books I’m looking forward to, June 2015 edition

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June 2015 links

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Men have more hand-grip strength than women (on average), to an even greater degree than I thought.

I now have a Goodreads profile. I’m not going to bother making it exhaustive.

100+ interesting data sets for statistics.

Five silly fonts inspired by mathematical theorems or open problems.

Pre-registration prizes!

Critique of trim-and-fill as a technique for correcting for publication bias.

Interesting recent interview with Ioannidis.

I have begun work on A beginner’s guide to modern art jazz.

Data analysis subcultures.

Scraping for Journalism, a guide by ProPublica.

 

AI stuff

Scott Alexander, “AI researchers on AI risk” and “No time like the present for AI safety work.”

Stuart Russell & others in Nature on autonomous weapons.

MIT’s Cheetah robot now autonomously jumps over obstacles (vide0), and an injured robot learns how to limp.

Scherer’s “Regulating Artificial Intelligence Systems: Risks, Challenges, Competencies, and Strategies” discusses AI regulation possibilities in the context of both medium-term and long-term challenges, including superintelligence. I remain agnostic about whether regulation would be helpful at this stage.

(Note that although I work as a GiveWell research analyst, I do not study AI impacts for GiveWell, and my view on this is not necessarily GiveWell’s view.)

Books, music, etc. from May 2015

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Books

Learn or Die has some good chapters on Bridgewater, the rest is meh.

I read about half of Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels. The parts I read were good, but I lost interest because the book confirmed for me that we don’t have good evidence about the values of people over most of history, and so even the most well-argued book possible on the subject couldn’t be all that compelling. We have much better evidence for the historical measures used in Morris’ earlier book, The Measure of Civilization.

Consciousness and the Brain has several good chapters, and some chapters that are a bit too excited about the author’s personal favorite theory of consciousness.

The Sixth Extinction was an enjoyable read, but don’t go in expecting any argument.

Favorite tracks or albums discovered this month

Favorite movies discovered this month

Other

Of course the big news for me this month was that I took a new job at GiveWell, leaving MIRI in the capable hands of Nate Soares.

May 2015 links

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Practical Typography is really good.

A short history of science blogging.

The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010.

 

AI stuff

The Economist’s May 9th cover story is on the long-term future of AI: short bit, long bit. The longer piece basically just reviews the state of AI and then says that there’s no existential threat in the near term. But of course almost everyone writing about AI risk agrees with that. Sigh.

6-minute video documentary about industrial robots replacing workers in China.

Bostrom’s TED talk on machine superintelligence.

PBS YouTube series It’s Okay to Be Smart gets AI risk basically right, though it overstates the probability of hard takeoff.

Sam Harris says more (wait ~20s for it to load) about the future of AI, on The Joe Rogan Experience. I think he significantly overstates how quickly AGI could be built (10 years is pretty inconceivable to me), and his “20,000 years of intellectual progress in a week” metaphor is misleading (because lots of intellectual progress requires relatively slow experimental interaction with the world). But I think he’s right about much else in the discussion.

NASA, “Certification considerations for adaptive systems”

Lin, “Why ethics matters for autonomous cars”

Books, music, etc. from April 2015

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Books

Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was decent.

Carrier’s Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus were decent. Of course, if they contained a bunch of bogus claims about matters of ancient history, I mostly wouldn’t know, but the published criticisms of these books that exist so far don’t seem to have identified any major problems on that front. I think the application of probability theory to historical method is less straightforward than Carrier presents it to be (esp. re: assignment of priors via reference classes), but he’s certainly right that his approach makes one’s arguments clearer and easier to productively criticize. Also, I continue to think Jesus mythicism should be considered quite plausible (> 20% likely), even though mainstream historians almost completely dismiss mythicism. As far as I can tell, these two books constitute mythicism’s best defense yet, though this isn’t saying much.

Goodman’s Future Crimes is inaccurate and hyperbolic about exponential tech trends and a few other things, but most of the book is a sober account about current and future tech-enabled criminal and security risks, and also accidentally constitutes a decent reply to the question “but how would an unfriendly AI affect the physical world?”

I got bored with The Powerhouse and gave up on it, but that might’ve been because I didn’t like the audiobook narrator.

I read Taubes’ Why We Get Fat and some sections of GCBC. I’m no expert in nutrition, but my impression is that Taubes doesn’t accurately represent the current state of knowledge, and avoids discussing evidence that contradicts his views. See e.g. Guyenet and Bray.

Vaillant’s Triumphs of Experience seemed pretty sketchy in how it was interpreting its evidence, but I probably won’t take the time to dig deep to confirm or disconfirm that suspicion. But e.g. the author often makes statements about the American population in general on the basis of results from a study for which nearly all the subjects were elite white Harvard males.

Zuk’s Paleofantasy covered lots of interesting material, but also spent lots of time on arguments like “Remember, evolution isn’t directed!” (Do paleo fans think it is?) and “Sure, farmers worked more than foragers, but foragers worked more than pre-human apes, so why not say everything went downhill after the pre-human apes?” (Uh, because we can’t make ourselves into pre-human apes, but we can live and eat more like foragers if we try?)

I skimmed Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do very quickly, since I’m already familiar with the arguments and stories found within. At a glance it looks like a good EA 101 book, probably the best currently available. Give it as a gift to your family and non-EA friends.

Favorite tracks or albums discovered this month

Favorite movies discovered this month

Other updates