Contents of this page:
Open Philanthropy Project
I began work at the Open Philanthropy Project in June 2015. My OpenPhil writings thus far are:
- The carbs-obesity hypothesis (updated Oct 2015)
- Statement of interest in research on the health effects of trace lithium in drinking water (Dec 2015)
- Explanatory and pragmatic research (Feb 2016)
- Evidence for common oral hygiene practices (Apr 2016)
- What should we learn from past AI forecasts? (May 2016)
- What do we know about AI timelines? (updated Jul 2016)
- Behavioral treatments for insomnia (Aug 2016)
- Evaluation of some technology forecasts from The Year 2000 (Sep 2016)
- Efforts to improve the accuracy of our judgments and forecasts (Oct 2016)
- Technical and Philosophical Questions That Might Affect Our Grantmaking (Mar 2017)
- Some case studies in early field growth (Apr 2017)
- 2017 Report on Consciousness and Moral Patienthood (Jun 2017)
- A Software Agent Illustrating Some Features of an Illusionist Account of Consciousness (Oct 2017)
- Reasoning transparency (Dec 2017)
- New web app for calibration training (Dec 2018)
- Reflections on Our 2018 Generalist Research Analyst Recruiting (Mar 2019)
- How feasible is long-range forecasting? (Oct 2019)
- Forecasting the COVID-19 Pandemic (Mar 2020)
- Our AI governance grantmaking so far (Dec 2020)
- 12 tentative ideas for US AI policy (Apr 2023)
Miscellaneous writings
- A beginner’s guide to modern classical music
- A beginner’s guide to modern art jazz
- Favorite Movies Since 2009
- Favorite TV Since 2016
- Three wild speculations from amateur quantitative macrohistory and How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?
- Effective altruism as I see it
- Tips for conducting worldview investigations
- Features that make a report especially helpful to me
- Better rationality might have saved Steve Jobs
- Was Nate Silver the most accurate 2012 election pundit? (w/ Gwern Branwen)
- Information security careers for GCR reduction (w/ Claire Zabel)
- WorldviewNaturalism.com
- CommonSenseAtheism.com
- Design a Book with OpenOffice.org Writer
- Pre-Socratics: A Painless Introduction
- Ancient Indian Philosophy: A Painless Introduction
- How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group (w/ Kaj Sotala)
Machine Intelligence
My views on AI have evolved significantly over the time, so only the most recent of these might accurately represent my current views. Thus, I list the most recent articles first:
- A personal take on longtermist AI governance
- What Do We Know about AI Timelines? (2016)
- What should we learn from past AI forecasts? (2016)
- Replies to people who argue against worrying about long-term AI safety risks today (2015)
- A reply to Wait But Why on machine superintelligence (2015)
- Exponential and non-exponential trends in information technology (2014; w/ Lila Rieber)
- Why We Need Friendly AI (2014; w/ Nick Bostrom, in Think)
- Can we really upload Johnny Depp’s brain? (2014; w/ Stuart Armstrong, in Slate)
- Three misconceptions in Edge.org’s conversation on “The Myth of AI” (2014)
- AGI outcomes and civilizational competence (2014)
- Exploratory Engineering in AI (2014; w/ Bill Hibbard, in Communications of the ACM)
- The Financial Times story on MIRI (2014)
- How to study superintelligence strategy (2014)
- Facing the Intelligence Explosion (2013)
- What is intelligence? (2013)
- What is AGI? (2013)
- When will AI be created? (2013)
- AGI impact experts and Friendly AI experts (2013)
- From philosophy to math to engineering (2013)
- Friendly AI research as effective altruism (2013)
- AI risk and the security mindset (2013)
- Transparency in safety-critical systems (2013)
- Mathematical proofs improve but don’t guarantee security, safety, and Friendliness (2013)
- Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import (2013; w/ Anna Salamon, in Singularity Hypotheses)
- Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics (2013; w/ Louie Helm, in Singularity Hypotheses)
- Ideal Advisor Theories and Personal CEV (2013; w/ Chris Williamson)
- How can I reduce existential risk from AI? (2012)
Less Wrong Posts
I’ve written many articles for Less Wrong, a community devoted to improving human rationality. I’m a lot more skeptical of most scientific research now than I was when I wrote these, so I don’t really stand by them anymore, although I still suspect the “basic thrust” of most of them is more accurate than its inverse. Here is a complete list of my posts on Less Wrong, listed chronologically and showing the number of community up-votes each has received (as of ~2015).
- The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship (169)
- Back to the Basics of Rationality (79)
- The Best Textbooks on Every Subject (151)
- Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments (68)
- Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge (133)
- David Chalmers’ ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis’ (33)
- The Urgent Meta-Ethics of Friendly Artificial Intelligence (43)
- How to Beat Procrastination (151)
- Secure Your Beliefs (39)
- Plant Seeds of Rationality (33)
- How to Be Happy (125)
- Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy (102)
- Costs and Benefits of Scholarship (38)
- The Neuroscience of Pleasure (34)
- Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline (84)
- The Good News of Situationist Psychology (54)
- The Neuroscience of Desire (53)
- How You Make Judgments: The Elephant and its Rider (42)
- Build Small Skills in the Right Order (87)
- No, Seriously. Just Try It. (44)
- Heading Toward: No-Nonsense Metaethics (37)
- Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience (38)
- What is Metaethics? (29)
- On Being Okay with the Truth (31)
- Your Evolved Intuitions (15)
- Intuition and Unconscious Learning (32)
- The Power of Agency (57)
- When Intuitions Are Useful (14)
- Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently (109)
- Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory (59)
- How and Why to Granularize (62)
- Inferring Our Desires (37)
- Pluralistic Moral Reductionism (34)
- Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone (36)
- Entangled with Reality: The Shoelace Example (18)
- Not for the Sake of Selfishness Alone (22)
- Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings (36)
- Do Humans Want Things? (23)
- Remind Physicalists They’re Physicalists (18)
- Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? (38)
- A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (113)
- A History of Bayes’ Theorem (53)
- Is Rationality Teachable? (43)
- A Rationalist’s Tale (79)
- The Cognitive Science of Rationality (85)
- The Optimizer’s Curse and How to Beat It (42)
- Knowledge is Worth Paying For (45)
- Concepts Don’t Work That Way (55)
- Rationality Drugs (26)
- Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance (53)
- Better Disagreement (67)
- Rhetoric for the Good (47)
- Great Explanations (23)
- Rational Romantic Relationships Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics (50) (w/ Minda Myers & Hugh Ristik)
- Existential Risk (28)
- Living Metaphorically (25)
- Hack Away at the Edges (47)
- So You Want to Save the World (40)
- What Curiosity Looks Like (29)
- Can the Chain Still Hold You? (105)
- Leveling Up in Rationality (33)
- The Human’s Hidden Utility Function (Maybe) (44)
- My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination (78)
- Get Curious (49)
- How to Fix Science (48)
- The Power of Reinforcement (92)
- Reply to Holden on the Singularity Institute (44)
- An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction (51) (w/ Alex Altair)
- Original Research on Less Wrong (20)
- How Can I Reduce Existential Risk from AI? (42)
- Overconfident Pessimism (25)
- Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way (31)
- Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn’t (27)
- Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant (63)
- Decision Theory FAQ (50) (w/ crazy88)
- Fermi Estimates (48)
- Start Under the Streetlight, then Push into the Shadows (29)
- Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism (40)
- Model Combination and Adjustment (48)
- How to Measure Anything (46)
- Is my view contrarian? (22) [2014]
- Quick thoughts on empathic metaethics [2017]
- Preliminary thoughts on moral weight [2018]