What I have been reading - March/April 2019

[Purpose: I decided to start collecting what I’m reading (roughly) over the course of a month (roughly). The reason I do this is because I want to be able to go back later in time and remember what I’ve read and consequently, what I have been thinking about (partially). Moreover, I hope that the act of collecting the links/articles/papers will as of itself already increase my memory of what I’ve been reading.]

[Note 1: This is not an exhaustive list. Even if I tried, it would be extremely difficult (and not worthwhile) to note down every single piece of text I’ve read in the last month. But having some overview is better than none.]

[Note 2: For the sake of having an overview, I wanted to group roughly related articles together. I haven’t spent much time on thinking about the categories, so they remain very hand-wavey and I’m not particularly embarrassing what I came up with as group headers.]

Epistemic Rationality   

• The Optimizer’s curse and wrong-way reductions + comments on EA Forum (did some more reading down a similar ally; this remains the best article though)

  • terms/concepts I found particularly interesting: empirically grounded vs hazy probabilities , model skepticism, wrong-way reductionism; made me think of a paper on cluelessness’ by Hillary Greaves

• Following an idea to its logical conclusion

• Frequentist and bayesian approaches in statistics

• Evidence on good forecasting practice from Good Judgement Project

Rationality (general)

• Thesis Culture (triggered thoughts on team/group rationality and (our) epistemic standards)

• Phenomenological Complexity Classes (made me want to read up more Kegan again)

• Degrees of Freedom - LessWrong 2.0

• On the nature of Agency (triggered thoughts on: locus of action and stoicism)

• “Boosting” (as part of a deep dive on nudging, for the research agenda)

  • Paper: Nudge Versus Boost: How Coherent are Policy and Theory? - Ralph Hertwig, Till Grüne-Yanoff, 2015

  • Paper: Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions - Ralph Hertwig, Till Grüne-Yanoff, 2017

• Literature review: distributed teams

• Paper: Variability in the interpretation of Dutch probability phrases - a risk for miscommunication - Willems et al., 2019 (ties into extensive discussions on the nature and use of language)

Instrumental Rationality (specific)

• Mental Habits and 5 second rationality, among others:

  • Culture vs Mental Habits

  • Slipping Sideways

• Agenty Duck, among others:

  • Creative Focusing

  • Person Framing Language

  • Memorization

• Musings and Rough Drafts, among others:

  • Committed Engagement and the Critical Importance of Ambiguity

  • Some ways to “clear space”

  • What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

Philosophy

• What’s Wrong with Moral Foundations Theory, and How to get Moral Psychology Right

• Being 97

• What AI Safety Researchers Have Written About the Nature of Human Values

Neuroscience, AI, multi-agent minds

• Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences

• Predictable Identities 6

• Brain Areas May Use “Subspace” Communication to Talk to One Another

• Attention and Learning in a Predictive Processing Framework (Eli)

• Multi-agent predictive minds and AI alignment

Relationships

• Pain as Active Ingredient in Dating

• The short instruction manifesto of relationship anarchy

• Relationship Anarchy Smorgasbord

Podcasts

• SSC (a selection)

  • Beware the Man of One Study

  • Rule thinkers in, not out

  • Book review: Black Swan

  • Book Review: The Mind Illuminated

  • The Economic Perspective on Moral Standards

• Rationally Speaking

  • Helen Toner on "Misconceptions about China and artificial intelligence"

  • John Nerst on "Erisology, the study of disagreement"

• Making Sense, Sam Harris

  • #153 - Possible Minds (Conversations with George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Stuart Russell)

• The odd Kurzgesagt video for an occasional episode of mind boggling

Miscellaneous

• Serious Games, among others:   

  • A Paradim for game design - Duke, 1980

• Typology of Meditation Traditions

• Pros and Cons of knowing one’s own IQ

• Squarespace info material (learnt how to set up, design and manage a website/blog)

• Started using Yeb

Geneva, Summer 2018 - Hello Sun, I have been looking for you!