Contents of this page:

• Open Philanthropy Project
• Miscellaneous
• Machine Intelligence
• Less Wrong Posts

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)

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:

1. A personal take on longtermist AI governance
2. What Do We Know about AI Timelines? (2016)
3. What should we learn from past AI forecasts? (2016)
4. Replies to people who argue against worrying about long-term AI safety risks today (2015)
5. A reply to Wait But Why on machine superintelligence (2015)
6. Exponential and non-exponential trends in information technology (2014; w/ Lila Rieber)
7. Why We Need Friendly AI (2014; w/ Nick Bostrom, in Think)
8. Can we really upload Johnny Depp’s brain? (2014; w/ Stuart Armstrong, in Slate)
9. Three misconceptions in Edge.org’s conversation on “The Myth of AI” (2014)
10. AGI outcomes and civilizational competence (2014)
11. Exploratory Engineering in AI (2014; w/ Bill Hibbard, in Communications of the ACM)
12. The Financial Times story on MIRI (2014)
13. How to study superintelligence strategy (2014)
14. Facing the Intelligence Explosion (2013)
15. What is intelligence? (2013)
16. What is AGI? (2013)
17. When will AI be created? (2013)
18. AGI impact experts and Friendly AI experts (2013)
19. From philosophy to math to engineering (2013)
20. Friendly AI research as effective altruism (2013)
21. AI risk and the security mindset (2013)
22. Transparency in safety-critical systems (2013)
23. Mathematical proofs improve but don’t guarantee security, safety, and Friendliness (2013)
24. Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import (2013; w/ Anna Salamon, in Singularity Hypotheses)
25. Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics (2013; w/ Louie Helm, in Singularity Hypotheses)
26. Ideal Advisor Theories and Personal CEV (2013; w/ Chris Williamson)
27. 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).

1. The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship (169)
2. Back to the Basics of Rationality (79)
3. The Best Textbooks on Every Subject (151)
4. Statistical Prediction Rules Out-Perform Expert Human Judgments (68)
5. Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge (133)
6. David Chalmers’ ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis’ (33)
7. The Urgent Meta-Ethics of Friendly Artificial Intelligence (43)
8. How to Beat Procrastination (151)
9. Secure Your Beliefs (39)
10. Plant Seeds of Rationality (33)
11. How to Be Happy (125)
12. Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy (102)
13. Costs and Benefits of Scholarship (38)
14. The Neuroscience of Pleasure (34)
15. Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline (84)
16. The Good News of Situationist Psychology (54)
17. The Neuroscience of Desire (53)
18. How You Make Judgments: The Elephant and its Rider (42)
19. Build Small Skills in the Right Order (87)
20. No, Seriously. Just Try It. (44)
21. Heading Toward: No-Nonsense Metaethics (37)
22. Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience (38)
23. What is Metaethics? (29)
24. On Being Okay with the Truth (31)
25. Your Evolved Intuitions (15)
26. Intuition and Unconscious Learning (32)
27. The Power of Agency (57)
28. When Intuitions Are Useful (14)
29. Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently (109)
30. Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory (59)
31. How and Why to Granularize (62)
32. Inferring Our Desires (37)
33. Pluralistic Moral Reductionism (34)
34. Not for the Sake of Pleasure Alone (36)
35. Entangled with Reality: The Shoelace Example (18)
36. Not for the Sake of Selfishness Alone (22)
37. Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings (36)
38. Do Humans Want Things? (23)
39. Remind Physicalists They’re Physicalists (18)
40. Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? (38)
41. A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation (113)
42. A History of Bayes’ Theorem (53)
43. Is Rationality Teachable? (43)
44. A Rationalist’s Tale (79)
45. The Cognitive Science of Rationality (85)
46. The Optimizer’s Curse and How to Beat It (42)
47. Knowledge is Worth Paying For (45)
48. Concepts Don’t Work That Way (55)
49. Rationality Drugs (26)
50. Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance (53)
51. Better Disagreement (67)
52. Rhetoric for the Good (47)
53. Great Explanations (23)
54. Rational Romantic Relationships Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics (50) (w/ Minda Myers & Hugh Ristik)
55. Existential Risk (28)
56. Living Metaphorically (25)
57. Hack Away at the Edges (47)
58. So You Want to Save the World (40)
59. What Curiosity Looks Like (29)
60. Can the Chain Still Hold You? (105)
61. Leveling Up in Rationality (33)
62. The Human’s Hidden Utility Function (Maybe) (44)
63. My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination (78)
64. Get Curious (49)
65. How to Fix Science (48)
66. The Power of Reinforcement (92)
67. Reply to Holden on the Singularity Institute (44)
68. An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction (51) (w/ Alex Altair)
69. Original Research on Less Wrong (20)
70. How Can I Reduce Existential Risk from AI? (42)
71. Overconfident Pessimism (25)
72. Intuitions Aren’t Shared That Way (31)
73. Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn’t (27)
74. Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant (63)
75. Decision Theory FAQ (50) (w/ crazy88)
76. Fermi Estimates (48)
77. Start Under the Streetlight, then Push into the Shadows (29)
78. Four Focus Areas of Effective Altruism (40)
79. Model Combination and Adjustment (48)
80. How to Measure Anything (46)
81. Is my view contrarian? (22) [2014]
82. Quick thoughts on empathic metaethics [2017]
83. Preliminary thoughts on moral weight [2018]