I will continue to think very thoroughly and deeply about what it means to do good, and aim to actually do good instead of feel like I am doing good. Once I identify what the good is, I will try to do a lot of it. I will aim to
It's a new year and that often calls for some sort of annual planning. But in my opinion, doing annual planning is going over too long of a timescale. Annual planning and goal setting is too infrequent and it's thus too easy to lose track. You
Some of these are classics. Some of these are insightful. Some of these don’t make sense. Some of these might be misattributed. Some of these I just made up. Enjoy! Acton’s Dictum - “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Allen’s Maxim - “You can
Here is a list of things I do starting from a fresh Macbook to get it the way I want. This is mostly for my personal reference but others might find interesting tips within it. Download Chrome, set as default browser, log in Ensure that key extensions I like load:
Potential initial reading * Understand how AI works… * CSET’s The Surprising Power of Next Word Prediction: Large Language Models Explained: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 * Eight Things to Know about LLMs * Understand AI threat models… * What risks does AI pose? * GPT-2030 and Catastrophic Drives: Four Vignettes * Racing through a
I will continue to think very thoroughly and deeply about what it means to do good, and aim to actually do good instead of feel like I am doing good. Once I identify what the good is, I will try to do a lot of it. I will aim to
It's a new year and that often calls for some sort of annual planning. But in my opinion, doing annual planning is going over too long of a timescale. Annual planning and goal setting is too infrequent and it's thus too easy to lose track. You
I like using Twitter. Here are some policies I want to aim to follow in order to make Twitter more useful for myself and others. Please hold me accountable! * "Not a hater" policy - I will avoid dunking on people, or amplifying dunking on people, unless I really
Content warning: discusses race, links to a piece that contains an unredacted racial slur, written while I am very angry Nick Bostrom is not a person I have ever spent much time thinking about and is a person I’ve never interacted with. I am grateful to him for his
OVERALL: * Dem Senate control -- Unclear but slight no (46% chance) * Dem House control -- Somewhat leaning no (27% chance) BALANCE OF POWER: * D House + D Senate: Somewhat leaning no (21% chance) * R House + D Senate: Somewhat leaning no (24% chance) * D House + R Senate: Likely no (6% chance) * R
OVERALL: * Dem Senate control -- Unclear but slight no (49% chance) * Dem House control -- Somewhat leaning no (33% chance) BALANCE OF POWER: * D House + D Senate: Somewhat leaning no (26% chance) * R House + D Senate: Somewhat leaning no (23% chance) * D House + R Senate: Likely no (7% chance) * R
My wife, Samantha Wildeford, passed away this week. While I'm sad that she's gone, I'm so happy she could pass away with myself and all the others who loved her. Her life wasn't always kind to her, but she filled it with
So what exactly can and can’t language models do? What's the least impressive thing GPT-4 won't be able to do? What will GPT-4 be incapable of? BIGBench is kind of a way to figure this out. BigBench, aka “The Beyond the Imitation Game” Benchmark, is
Wikipedia has a cool feature where they summarize various decades in pictures. These are really fun to see, to get a sense of history - especially a sense of what events were happening at the same time. 2020s (so far) 2010s 2000s 1990s 1980s 1970s 1960s 1950s 1940s 1930s 1920s
Here are some examples of questions I forecasted on last year, my rationale for the forecasts I made, and how I feel like the forecast turned out. All forecasts were made on 2021 Aug 5. I think doing this kind of practice (writing your rationale out and then examining how
Post co-written with Amber Dawn - In 1950, Alan Turing suggested that machines might one day be able to deceive a human in an ‘imitation game’ - a game where a human judge interacts with both a computer and a human and has to distinguish which is which. Since then,
“It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is a brazen ad for working at Basecamp, the company founded by the book’s authors. But if you can get past that, it has some good advice for those managing companies and designing
Cal Newport previously wrote “Deep Work”, which outlined a rule for success - you do your best work when you are in a large uninterrupted distraction-free block of time called a “deep work block”. Newport’s thesis is that a single uninterrupted 3-4 hour block of focused work on your
Chess is about conventional warfare. But conventional warefare is boring. We need some… nukes. Battle Chess is like Chess, but every piece has a special ability. One of these abilities might involve a nuke. Disclaimer: I made this game when I was in Elementary school. It sounded cool. I make
I like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and want to watch it. But there are several problems: (1) I don’t want to commit the time to watch 176 episodes (2) I’ve seen about a third of DS9 already but not in any particular order, so watching would be
Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney, in founding their Institute for Progress, declared that "Progress is a Policy Choice". I agree, but I'm also worried about something a bit more simple - in addition to making progress, we also have to survive[1]. This survival is a
Summary * I find there have been ten accidental nuclear incidents in history where I think there was some non-negligble chance that, had things played out differently, there could've been a nuclear exchange. * I think the chance of another accidental nuclear incident happening in the next decade (2022-2032) is
I've been blogging since I was 17 (I'm 30 now[1]) and it has always been a really critical part of my intellectual development. Blogging helped me sort out my personal beliefs and philosophy, bringing me through atheism, and then an interest in philosophy, and then
The book “Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results” by Alison Green and Jerry Hauser comes highly recommended from a wide variety of top executive directors of non-profits, and after reading it, I can say these positive recommendations are entirely justified. Don’t
It's been awhile since I've posted some sort of links post. Maybe this can come back more for 2022? I read a lot of articles in the past six months. Here I’ve decided on my top ten favorites (in descending order). I present each one,
Throughout the New York City mayoral race, between January and June 2021, I made multiple predictions about the fate of various political candidates. I think these predictions are my most successful set so far in my forecasting career, greatly outperforming the conventional wisdom and netting >200% ROI on prediction
Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young is all about how to learn things well and quickly. In summary, ultralearning = specific goal + specific benchmark + specific timeframe + significant upfront and periodic investment in learning how to learn + intense amount of time + spaced schedule based
“Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career” by Hermina Ibarra is a book oriented around case studies of people transitioning careers. At its heart, it has a reasonable methodology and it contains nuggets of wisdom that I think are useful …and maybe even “unconventional”. However, it shrouds this in
Peoplware is a popular book about management for software projects, though I imagine it is applicable to nearly every project. The core idea is that managers are managers of people, not technology, yet most people don’t manage that way. Most software projects that go wrong go wrong because of
Last summer, I finished reading David Bornstein’s book “How to Change the World: Social Entreprenuers and the Power of New Ideas”. The book is pretty neat, detailing the work of several “social entrepreneurs”, or talented people who work to solve social problems in their communities. The book also details
I’ve noticed that quite a few people are interested in fostering communities – both creating communities and improving them to make them work together. But how do we go about actually doing this? What’s there to community that we can foster and build upon? What makes a community thrive,
Elad Gil, among other thing, was a VP at Twitter who helped scale the company from 90 to 1500 people. He wrote a book, ”High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People”, to write about how to scale a company, mainly through the hiring of lots of
Some of these are classics. Some of these are insightful. Some of these don’t make sense. Some of these might be misattributed. Some of these I just made up. Enjoy! Acton’s Dictum - “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Allen’s Maxim - “You can
Originally written on 2016 May High Output Management [https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fsmile.amazon.com%2FHigh-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove%2Fdp%2F0679762884&t=NDFiMzI5MWQzMDM0MzZiZTczNWNiNTk1ZmFlNTc4OWY1YzlmMzUxMSx6M2RuRmpFZQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AV4PauJm3isl5XsOhjkhguw&p=https%3A%2F%2Fpeterhurford.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F144004296021%2Fnotes-on-high-output-management&m=0&ts=1647111249] is
Originally written on 2016 January In “Deep Work” [https://href.li/?http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/], Cal Newport spends the first third of the book arguing for the importance of “deep work” and the second 2/3s telling you how to achieve it. Deep Work Deep work is spending a
What is this? This is an essay where I explain my opinions on meta-ethics through a guided discussion with a hypothetical inquisitor. It seemed like a much easier, more efficient, and more fluid format than writing a dozen tinier essays. The only downside is at 4797 words, it’s a
Originally written on 2011 January. Pokémon has been a fixture of many childhoods, and of all the Pokémon, seem few to captivate as much as Mew [https://href.li/?http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew]. He was popularized in the very first Pokémon movie, which featured a showdown between Mew
Originally written on 2009 April. This is a famous thing from the advanced annals of mathematics again. Luckily there is very little mathematical debate on this, but at a time — there used to be. However, this is a problem that many people (including me) have trouble visualizing, so they just
