Kahneman, Vinge, Dennett, and FHI all within one month.

It's all happening!

Whiteboard or similar space is an interesting tell about how serious an organization is about ideas & understanding

If you want to know if measures taken at schools can help reduce the spread of Covid, you have to actually study it -- not just say what you think works. This team did an intensive case study. Vaccines, daily testing and ventilation all positives. Cost: $880/yr/student

This discourse about the functional form of AI progress doesn’t make any sense.
Scaling laws don’t tell you anything about the rate of capability increase, only perplexity.

E.g. the capability jump from .92 -> .90 perplexity might be >>> that from 1.02 -> 1.0, or it could be ≈.

Friends, I'm happy to announce that my paper with a musician-turned-eugenicist-turned-self-published-historian, The CASTCEALL bundle: Pseudohistorical analysis to attempt to paint groups we dislike as responsible for obviously unrelated things, is finally out.

You’ve probably been hearing lots about Israel — but not about Jews with roots in the Arab and Muslim world. They’re over half of Israel’s Jewish population, yet the American media barely covers them.

So let me tell you a story about my family. 🧵 1/18

vox.com/world-politics…

Huge permitting reform news:

The Bureau of Land Management is giving geothermal energy exploration a categorical exclusion from environmental review under NEPA.

If you care about clean energy abundance, this is a massive win.

I’m super excited to release our 100+ page collaborative agenda - led by Usman Anwar - on “Foundational Challenges In Assuring Alignment and Safety of LLMs” alongside 35+ co-authors from NLP, ML, and AI Safety communities!

Some highlights below...

“Democracy dies behind paywalls,” he says from behind a paywall.

Get paid £4500 to get COVID, instead of the usual £0.

Humans weren't built to socialise 12 hours a day for 12 days straight.

Subtweeting UNRWA?

The eternal sunshine of a mind unburdened by historical memory.