This is a lit­er­ary way of say­ing I am not as in­ter­est­ing as my writ­ings, and in some re­spect, it should not mat­ter who I am or what I have done be­cause ⁠ar­gu­ment screens off au­thor­ity⁠.

When I say “re­search as­sis­tant”, I mean it in the older sense of some­one who does de­tail work for an­other per­son’s orig­i­nal re­search—so I spent a lot of time read­ing up on spe­cific areas and mak­ing notes about stuff my boss needs, and only oc­ca­sion­ally do in­de­pen­dent work. Not all my work can be made pub­lic, but some of it is. A par­tial list in rough chrono­log­i­cal order:

• “In­tel­li­gence Ex­plo­sion: Ev­i­dence and Im­port”⁠, Muehlhauser & Sala­mon 2012_14ya?

  One of my first projects was work­ing on this paper—dig­ging up ci­ta­tions for var­i­ous claims and giv­ing gen­eral feed­back; most of my changes or com­ments are pri­vate when we switched to work­ing through Google Docs, but some of my ⁠ini­tial com­ments⁠ were pub­lic.

• ⁠find­ing pre­dic­tions/es­ti­mates for whole-genome se­quenc­ing costs⁠

• ⁠“The Per­son­al­ity of (great/cre­ative) Sci­en­tists: Open and Con­sci­en­tious”⁠

  Sum­ma­riz­ing some of the ex­ist­ing re­search; be­sides being in­trin­si­cally in­ter­est­ing, this is also rel­e­vant to com­puter in­tel­li­gence—if achieve­ment is just a re­flec­tion of IQ, then any com­puter in­tel­li­gence will im­prove on hu­mans only to the ex­tent it has greater raw in­tel­li­gence, but if achieve­ment is lim­ited past 130s IQ, then the pic­ture be­comes more com­plex. (Com­puter in­tel­li­gence may be far more more pow­er­ful than pre­dicted for a given in­tel­li­gence level be­cause there’s no ap­par­ent rea­son you couldn’t eas­ily make its ‘per­son­al­ity’ open-minded—it not re­ally being clear that truly ran­dom ex­plo­ration and com­put­ing power don’t yield ⁠cre­ativ­ity⁠ in some fields al­ready—and a com­puter can be tire­less and self-disciplined, which takes care of Con­sci­en­tious­ness. On the other hand, Open­ness and Con­sci­en­tious­ness may cor­re­spond to sub­tle high-level dy­nam­ics which can’t be eas­ily de­signed into an AI and can’t be pro­duced by throw­ing com­put­ing power at the prob­lem, in which case the AI will un­der­per­form what­ever mea­sure of in­tel­li­gence we ul­ti­mately use, like ⁠AIXI-style IQ tests⁠.)

• ⁠Re­mote mon­i­tor­ing⁠

  Some quick notes on re­mote mon­i­tor­ing soft­ware MIRI could use to mon­i­tor free­lancers such as my­self. (It’s a good thing, re­ally—trust but ver­ify.)

• ⁠Some⁠ ⁠info⁠ on the big Bei­jing ge­nomics project, and es­ti­mates about per­son­al­ity and IQ, and past Chi­nese abuse of ge­netic in­for­ma­tion

• Are Sunk Costs Fal­lac­ies?⁠

  A de­tailed ex­am­i­na­tion of one cog­ni­tive bias ask­ing whether it has been mis­in­ter­preted as a prob­lem for in­di­vid­u­als.

• ⁠“Against Util­i­tar­i­an­ism: Sobel’s at­tack on judg­ing lives’ good­ness”⁠

  Phi­los­o­phy essay sum­ma­riz­ing and at­tempt­ing to an­a­lyze a re­cent class of ob­jec­tions to util­i­tar­i­an­ism (that one can­not judge util­i­ties of lives, and hence the util­i­tar­ian eth­i­cal project is im­pos­si­ble).

• Neu­ro­science ad­di­tions to Wikipedia; I had a hard time find­ing ref­er­ences for a MIRI paper, and do­nated my re­sults to Wikipedia so at least no one else has to suf­fer so much:

  • Ex­actly how big are chim­panzee & human brains, any­way?⁠

  • Pri­mate and human brain size cor­re­lates with IQ⁠ (No, re­ally. The cor­re­la­tion isn’t ter­ri­bly big, though.)

  • Rat IQ⁠ (mixed ev­i­dence, thank­fully)

• ⁠polyamory re­view⁠

  Not re­ally enough data to do any­thing but point out prob­lems for re­li­able as­sess­ment. My sub­jec­tive im­pres­sion is that polyamory⁠ is com­plex enough that it may not be a good idea even for polyamor­ists.

• ⁠“Cash­ing Out Cog­ni­tive Bi­ases as Be­hav­ior”⁠

  Spin off from “Are Sunk Costs Fal­lac­ies?”—2 stud­ies ex­am­in­ing con­se­quences in per­sonal life from vul­ner­a­bil­ity to cog­ni­tive bi­ases in ques­tion­naires

• ⁠“Ex­per­i­ment: a good re­searcher is hard to find”⁠

  A sim­ple email ex­per­i­ment on mak­ing ap­pli­cants feel that their ad­mis­sion test is not a waste of time: they seem to do bet­ter work.

• ⁠Geopo­lit­i­cal in­tel­li­gence fail­ures⁠—notes from some read­ing in the his­tory of in­tel­li­gence fail­ures

• ⁠“Notes on the Psy­chol­ogy of Power”⁠

• ⁠“Notes on Psy­chopa­thy”⁠

• ⁠“Notes on Au­tonomous Cars”⁠

• LSD⁠ & ⁠Modafinil and schiz­o­phre­nia⁠

The fol­low­ing is a list of my sub­mis­sions to LW I re­gard as sub­stan­tive or par­tic­u­larly good, ex­clud­ing con­tent which can be found on Gwern.net, in chrono­log­i­cal order with in­ter­est­ing ones high­lighted:

• ⁠“Poker Play­ing”⁠

• ⁠“Lifel­og­ging: the record­ing de­vice”⁠

• ⁠“AIXI-style IQ tests”⁠

• ⁠“Is Kiryas Joel an Un­happy Place?”⁠

• ⁠“SL4 META: list clo­sure 2 month fol­lowup”⁠

• Life ex­ten­sion:

  • ⁠“Liv­ing For­ever is Hard, or, The Gom­pertz Curve”⁠

  • ⁠“Liv­ing For­ever is Hard, part 2: Adult Longevity”⁠

  • ⁠“Pre­dic­tion is hard, es­pe­cially of med­i­cine”⁠

  • ⁠“Liv­ing For­ever is Hard, part 3: the state of life ex­ten­sion re­search”⁠

• ⁠“(Philo­soph­i­cal) Dis­agree­ments are not Ra­tio­nal”⁠

• ⁠“A good vol­un­teer is hard to find”⁠

  fol­lowup: ⁠“Ex­per­i­ment: a good re­searcher is hard to find”⁠

• ⁠“On the un­pop­u­lar­ity of cry­on­ics: life sucks, but at least then you die”⁠

• ⁠“How to be Deader than Dead”⁠

• ⁠“Case Study: Read­ing Edge’s fi­nan­cial fil­ings”⁠

• ⁠“Athe­ism & autism spec­trum”⁠

• ⁠“Stanislav Petrov Day”⁠

• ⁠“Not By Em­pa­thy Alone”⁠

• ⁠“On the Open­ness per­son­al­ity trait & ‘ra­tio­nal­ity’”⁠

• ⁠“So­cial sta­tus & testos­terone”⁠

• ⁠“Amanda Knox: post mortem”⁠

• ⁠“Cry­on­ics costs: given es­ti­mates are low”⁠

• JET paper re­views:

  • ⁠“‘Ray Kurzweil and Up­load­ing: Just Say No!’, Nick Agar”⁠

  • ⁠“‘Vul­ner­a­ble Cy­borgs: Learn­ing to Live with our Drag­ons’, Mark Co­eck­el­bergh”⁠

  • ⁠“‘Mis­be­hav­ing Ma­chines: The Em­u­lated Brains of Tran­shu­man­ist Dreams’, Corry Shores”⁠

  • ⁠“‘Per­sonal Iden­tity and Up­load­ing’, by Mark Walker”⁠

• ⁠“Does Hy­per­bolic Dis­count­ing Re­ally Exist?”⁠

• ⁠“Cry­on­ics is Far, Cord-blood is Near”⁠

• “In­verse p-zombies: an­other di­rec­tion in the Prob­lem of Con­scious­ness”⁠

• ⁠“The Per­son­al­ity of (great/cre­ative) Sci­en­tists: Open and Con­sci­en­tious”⁠

• ⁠“The Con­di­tional Fal­lacy in Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy”⁠

• ⁠“Cash­ing Out Cog­ni­tive Bi­ases as Be­hav­ior”⁠

• ⁠“On the eti­ol­ogy of re­li­gious be­lief”⁠

• ⁠“To Learn Crit­i­cal Think­ing, Study Crit­i­cal Think­ing”⁠ -(gen­eral phi­los­o­phy stud­ies are not as ef­fi­cient in im­prov­ing crit­i­cal think­ing as crit­i­cal think­ing courses)

• ⁠“Against NHST”⁠ -(the sta­tis­ti­cal con­tro­ver­sies over the p-value par­a­digm)

• ⁠“Notes on Brain­wash­ing & ‘Cults’”⁠

Of course, I don’t agree with every MIRI or LW po­si­tion. The in­tel­lec­tual ho­mo­gene­ity has been much over-estimated by out­siders who have not ⁠both­ered to look at the an­nual sur­veys⁠, I think. Here are some major points for me:

1. MWI⁠: I think that LWers who were per­suaded by ⁠Eliezer’s MWI writ­ings⁠ are wrong to do so, as they are un­fa­mil­iar with even the rudi­ments of any al­ter­na­tives in­ter­pre­ta­tions and can­not judge in the mat­ter; how many LWers have ever se­ri­ously looked at all the com­pet­ing the­o­ries, or could even name many al­ter­na­tives? (“Col­lapse, MWI, uh…”), much less could dis­cuss why they dis­like pilot waves⁠ or what­ever. Lack­ing any real un­der­stand­ing, they ought to sim­ply adopt the ex­pert con­sen­sus, where MWI seems to have a plu­ral­ity or bare ma­jor­ity of ad­her­ents (with the weak con­fi­dence that im­plies).

2. Heuris­tics and cog­ni­tive bi­ases: I am not much con­vinced that knowl­edge of heuris­tics & bi­ases help in or­di­nary life. Feed­back & learn­ing are pow­er­ful tools in elim­i­nat­ing error, cal­i­brat­ing pre­dic­tions, and jus­tify com­mit­ting what may look like the ⁠sunk cost fal­lacy⁠; and feed­back is what one gets in or­di­nary life.

   Per Moravec’s para­dox⁠, where our knowl­edge of heuris­tics & bi­ases will pay off most is in what Han­son would call “Far”⁠ sce­nar­ios: evo­lu­tion­ary novel sit­u­a­tions with few prece­dents and only costly or non-existent feed­back. (For ex­am­ple, the ques­tion of whether ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence will be de­vel­oped by 2040: it will only hap­pen or not once, there are few com­pa­ra­ble events, the con­se­quences may be dra­matic, and our or­di­nary lives offer no use­ful in­sights.) As it hap­pens, this de­scribes much of fu­tur­ism & fore­cast­ing but we can­not jus­tify our fu­tur­ism by claim­ing its tech­niques are in­cred­i­bly valu­able in or­di­nary life!

3. ⁠Cry­on­ics girl⁠: The do­na­tions ap­pall me, for rea­sons I lay out at length there—they are a com­plete aban­don­ment of core ideas like util­i­tar­i­an­ism & op­ti­mal phil­an­thropy.

4. Al­icorn’s ⁠“Liv­ing Lu­mi­nously”⁠ par­a­digm struck me as du­bi­ous, not backed by even token re­search, and likely idio­syn­cratic to her; I thought her Lu­mi­nos­ity e-novel was merely OK de­spite the end­less dis­cus­sions on LW (ri­val­ing those for Meth­ods of Ra­tio­nal­ity it­self) and that her fol­lowup, Ra­di­ance, was just ter­ri­ble. Nev­er­the­less, her novel ca­reer seems to con­tinue.

There is a ⁠slightly funny story⁠ about how Ger­ard came to write it, based on my mu­si­cal in­com­pe­tence.

That is, sum­ming up the (sur­viv­ing) edits of my var­i­ous ac­counts over the years: User:Gwern⁠, User:Marudub­shinki⁠, & User:Rhwawn

Com­pare the CSE re­sults⁠ with the Google Re­sults⁠ for the anime Wings of Honnêamise⁠. Which is more use­ful for an ed­i­tor? For more de­tails, see my ⁠re­lease an­nounce­ment⁠.

A trick I dis­cov­ered when vis­it­ing FHI in 2015_11ya—I had used widescreen lap­tops for so long I had for­got­ten how nice portrait-orientation was for read­ing.

I had a Ki­ne­sis Ad­van­tage key­board⁠, but strug­gled with the keymap­ping & large phys­i­cal size mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to find a com­fort­able desk & chair height which left my arms high enough to use the thick Ki­ne­sis. In July 2020, I switched to the split er­gonomic⁠ me­chan­i­cal key­board⁠ Er­go­dox EZ ($409^$325₂₀₂₀), but that wound up hav­ing sim­i­lar is­sues.

At this point, I began get­ting frus­trated with the time & money I was spend­ing dab­bling in ex­otic key­boards—the biggest prob­lem with the generic key­board was the switches, and that the ten-key is­land took up a lot of space & made it hard to reach for the track­ball. So in Sep­tem­ber 2022, I looked through a key­board search site until I found a cheap $50 thin ten-key-less key­board with good low-travel me­chan­i­cal switches (to help fore­stall RSI from heavy key­presses) from G.Skill⁠, and called it a day. It is thin enough to fit my pos­ture, didn’t re­quire painful re­learn­ing of decades of mus­cle mem­ory, and has been sat­is­fac­tory.

My best guess is that my prob­lem ini­tially was that I se­ri­ously un­der­es­ti­mated how much pres­sure it takes to in­sert a Thread­rip­per CPU into its socket—it re­quired a truly ter­ri­fy­ing amount of force and I only got it right after triple-checking on­line tu­to­ri­als & videos & dis­cus­sions—and that was why the first moth­er­board never worked at all, and the sec­ond one was killed by sta­tic elec­tric­ity or a short.

See also “Ac­tively Open-Minded Think­ing Scale”, “Clar­ity Scale”, “En­gage­ment with Beauty”, & “a mea­sure of what types of sto­ries you enjoy”.

See also “Zim­bardo Time Per­spec­tive In­ven­tory”. Brent W. Roberts crit­i­cizes these two in­ven­to­ries when used to mea­sure Con­sci­en­tious­ness.

See also “Re­la­tional Mo­bil­ity scale”, “Em­pathiz­ing and Sys­tem­iz­ing scales” & “Ra­tio­nal vs Ex­pe­ri­en­tial In­ven­tory”.

See also “Self-Report Psy­chopa­thy Scale”.

See also “Ex­pe­ri­ence in Pur­chas­ing Be­hav­ior Scale” & “Ken­tucky In­ven­tory of Mind­ful­ness Skills”.

For fur­ther read­ing on over­con­fi­dence, see ⁠all LW ar­ti­cles so tagged⁠. I once read in a book of a study in which sub­jects were asked to gen­er­ate ideas for, IIRC, putting out a fire, and to stop only when they were con­vinced they had thought up all good ones, and usu­ally stop­ping when they had thought up only a third; but I have been un­able to re­find it and would ap­pre­ci­ate know­ing de­tails if this de­scrip­tion rings any bells for a reader.

⁠Chap­ter 17, Tao Teh Ching⁠

For ex­am­ple, my clean-up and ex­ten­sion of the browse-url⁠ mod­ule was com­pletely rewrit­ten by RMS⁠; so I can hardly take credit there.

Hence­forth, this im­plies I have a commit-bit (or equiv­a­lent) for that project.

Hence­forth, ‘cleanup’ should be taken as re­fer­ring to ex­ten­sive mis­cel­la­neous changes which in­clude (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• fix­ing GHC’s -Wall or hlint warn­ings

• re­plac­ing OP­TION prag­mas with LAN­GUAGE prag­mas

• track­ing down li­cens­ing in­for­ma­tion

• switch­ing from Haskell98 im­ports to the stan­dard hi­er­ar­chi­cal mod­ule im­ports

  1. eg. import Char → import Data.Char; non­triv­ial in some cases where Haskell98 mod­ules were dis­persed over mul­ti­ple base mod­ules

• re­or­ga­niz­ing the file tree

• im­prov­ing the Ca­bal­iza­tion

• white­space for­mat­ting, and so on.

Hence­forth, this typ­i­cally im­plies that I up­loaded it to Hack­age as well

Hence­forth, this im­plies that I made what­ever changes nec­es­sary to get it com­pil­ing on GHC 6.8.x and 6.10.x