Hi there! I’m Arjun, a recent high school graduate entering university soon to study computer science—interested in AI safety (both alignment and policy) and technology in general, feel free to reach out via the contact link on my website!
Arjun Yadav
Karma: 93
Virtual AI Safety Unconference 2024
[Linkpost] My attempt at trying to summarize ‘Intro to ML Safety’
Iftar/Dinner at Neat Burger, The Dubai Mall
Congratulations!
Today is India’s 76th Independence Day! I thought it would be nice to look at some of India’s progress over the last three-fourths of a century:
Infant mortality has gone down by 13.48% since 1960.
The death rate from malaria has gone down from 15.78 deaths per 100,000 people in 1990 to 2.61 deaths per 100,000 in 2019.
The number of children whose development has been stunted (as a consequence of poor nutrition or repeated infections) has gone down from 66.04 million in 1990 to 49.26 million, a ~25% reduction.
The share of Indians living in extreme poverty has drastically reduced from 58.96% in 1981 to 10.55% in 2017.
We still have a long, long way to go in many domains (as one EA-aligned example, lead in paint and lead concentration in children is still a huge issue in India).
Source: Our World in Data
Arjun Yadav’s Quick takes
Distillation of The Offense-Defense Balance of Scientific Knowledge
This LessWrong post about Thomas’ paper is also interesting.
Great post! I was mainly concerned with the -values heading haha. I wonder if Thomas Philippon will follow up on all of the attention his paper received.
Good point! Though I think it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out a lower upper bound, maybe an economist is working on that right now, depending on how actively researched this domain is.
Discussion on Thomas Philippon’s paper on TFP growth being linear
I think focusing on outreach to top schools is less about elitism and more about the potential to have a greater impact (which is sort of talked about here). I guess we suspect that spreading our community building resources to thousands of schools in America won’t be as effective as focusing on the couple hundred universities that have a track record of producing high-impact students, labs, projects, etc. (such as the Ivies or the UC’s)
Make a neural network in ~10 minutes
Great post, it’s amazing to see mental health in the EA-sphere being talked about.
About time tracking, as someone who also tracks their time in little color-coded squares (or rectangles?), you start to associate some colors with negativity and others with positivity, and when you’re in a rough spot (or a ‘rut’ if I may) it can definitely make you feel like you’ve wasted the week as you glance over.
To me, that’s the biggest disadvantage of time-tracking/time-blocking, though for me the advantages vastly outweigh the disadvantages.
Thank you!
Thank you for the quick reply!
I use Notability on iPad for the majority of my notes. It’s free now, organising features are extensive enough for my use case and it auto-backups to Google Drive as PDF. GoodNotes is an alternative.
Other than that, I use Notes on iOS sort of as a “slip box” and Notion for more tabular/structured data (though beware of privacy concerns with Notion).