The Security Mindset Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some…
Thao (Amelia) P.
I’ve suffered from depression intermittently since I was a teenager. Some of these episodes have been highly debilitating – resulting in self-harm, withdrawal (where I would spend months on end in my own room, only venturing out to sign-on or to buy the minimal amounts of food I was consuming), and…
For most of its history, Feeding America, the nation’s largest nonprofit, relied on a broken system to distribute its 220 million pounds of food per year. It ignored existing stocks and donations, flooding fully stocked food banks in Idaho with potatoes and warehouses in Alaska with five gallon…
It’s hard to make progress in a field without a consensus about what it studies or what would constitute a solution to its most important open questions. Not unrelatedly, there hasn’t been much progress in the field of ensuring that extremely powerful AI systems don’t kill us all, even as there’s…
Me: Is there a quote from The Art of War about how if each side can predict the result of a battle, they won't fight it? Claude 3 Opus: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles" [but that's not quite what you're talking about]. I did some more…
Precaution Shouldn't Keep Open-Source AI Behind the Frontier Ben Brooks — Invoking speculative risks to keep our most capable models behind paywalls could create a new form of digital feudalism. open-source AI, frontier models, precautionary policy, digital feudalism, OpenAI, Meta, Llama, GPT-OSS,…
March 2025 What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at…
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I’ve written about exploration and exploitation before, but I realized recently that this may be more important than I thought. Talking to a friend about what different people thought about what role effort vs. innate ability played in success, I went down my list of successes and ended up realizing…
Research Taste Exercises Posted on Jan 9, 2021 This article is a rough note. Writing rough notes allows me share more content, since polishing takes lots of time. While I hope it's useful, it's likely lower quality and less carefully considered than my usual articles. It's very possible I wouldn't…
Home Blogs! Research Lab Website Happiness isn't a myth TLDR: I'm honestly not sure how to summarize this because the set of feelings I'm describing might be pretty unique to me? This is also pretty personal so it's outside my usual realm of tech-centric things. I mostly wrote it for myself as part…
In the decade that I have been working on AI, I’ve watched it grow from a tiny academic field to arguably the most important economic and geopolitical issue in the world. In all that time, perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: the progress of the underlying technology is…
[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness] I. Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “If you could bang any celebrity who would it be?” – turn to “What will you say as your last words?” Sounds like a valid…
In this post, I outline some advice (and links to other advice) that I find myself giving increasingly frequently, despite having less and less time to do so. My hope is that in future I will be able to redirect people to this post. I also hope that, if nothing else, the resource list at the end of…
Tl;dr: In this post, I describe a concept I call surface area for serendipity — the informal, behind-the-scenes work that makes it easier for others to notice, trust, and collaborate with you. In a job market where some EA and animal advocacy roles attract over 1,300 applicants, relying on…
1. When a coffee shop makes a bagel, it’s a pretty good bet they can make a croissant as well. Not every shop that has one has the other, but they’re pretty strongly correlated. We call this correlation “baking”. This sounds like a weird way to say it. We call “this correlation” baking? It just…is…
This is actually a revised copy of something i wrote on March 7th 2021, before i started my PhD. It had two purposes at the time: 1) it clarified my ideas about pursuing a PhD and 2) acted as a manifesto of what i hope to achieve. Now i’m coming to the end of it, I feel comfortable with it and think…
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective.…
A friend of mine who worked as a social worker in a hospital told me a story that stuck with me. She had a conversation with an in-patient having a very difficult time. It was helpful, but as she was leaving, they told her wistfully 'You get to go home'. She found it hard to hear—it felt like an…
Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”1 Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of…
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