eca

Karma: 1,124

eca 7 Dec 2023 15:11 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: EliezerYudkowsky’s comment on: Why Yudkowsky is wrong about “covalently bonded equivalents of biology”
Yea, idk. I was thinking of the quotes where you explicitly mentioned Van der Waals forces. Tbc, my preference would be to not be forced to pick a single force

eca 7 Dec 2023 2:33 UTC
50 points
5 ∶ 1
on: Why Yudkowsky is wrong about “covalently bonded equivalents of biology”
Hi, computational protein engineer and person who-thinks-biology-can-do-amazing-stuff here.

Just wanted to report that while “Proteins are like Folded Spaghetti Held Together By Static Cling” is obviously incorrect as a matter of fact, I immediately thought it was a pretty good analogy for capturing some critical and often under-appreciated aspects of the functionally important character of proteins. When I read the sentences you’ve quoted him saying about proteins held together by covalent bonds, I (think) I understood what he was pointing at with this and roughly agree. I absolutely did not think he was saying proteins did not contain covalent bonds, but rather that you could imagine an alternative protein-like molecular structure which had all of its key structural and functional characteristics determined by covalent bonds. I believe such a “protein” would, among other things, be predicted to function at a much wider range of temperatures than extant proteins, maintain its structure and function in many different solvents (and probably gas phase?) etc etc.

This analogy is also definitely failing to capture other important characteristics of proteins, some of which the OP mentioned and I agree with.

By the way, if I was forced to say one thing which “held together” proteins (in the sense of “is most responsible for determining the functional characteristics of a polypeptide chain) it would be tough but I might pick something I don’t think anyone has mentioned: hydrophobicity/ hydrophilicity.

eca 2 Nov 2022 16:49 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Biosecurity Dual Use Filtering—Project Proposal (seeking vetting & project lead)
Sorry I’m late to the party- as per the OP’s request for short takes with no explanation, mine is that this is probably not worth doing, fwiw.

eca 18 May 2022 16:51 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Try working on something random with someone cool
One impression I could imagine having after reading this post for the first time is something like: “eca would prefer fewer connections to people and doesn’t value that output of community building work” or even more scandalously, “eca thinks community builders are wasting their time”.

I don’t believe that, and would have edited the draft to make that more clear if I had taken a different approach to writing it.

A quick amendment to that vibe.
1. Community building is mission critical. It’s also complicated, and not something I expect to have good opinions about currently, overall, because of lack of context and careful thought, among other things.
2. I have personally found these types of introductions enormously valuable, especially in other phases of my career, and it would make me very sad if people turned them off!
3. Even if I didn’t find them personally valuable, I’d guess that they were still very valuable overall because I expect this to be person and context dependent, and I see others get value.
4. Even if more should be invested in work connections overall, its not clear that the folks sending me intros (THANK YOU!! PLEASE DON’T STOP!) should be the ones doing the collaboration themselves (“Have you worked with [Someone] on anything? Or do you know anyone who has?”). Gains from specialization could imply that the folks making intro connections should focus on that, and others should do more deliberate working on stuff.
5. Rather, my nebulous aim is some combo of A) sharing what my intuitions (narrowly trained) say the marginal effect of trading intros for work experience would be, for me, B) gesturing at an opportunity for even more value to be produced by community builders, if my experience generalizes and C) hoping selfishly that someone will help me understand whats going on here, so I quite complaining about it to my dinner companions before impulsively writing a forum post.
Not sure how much of this is in my head, but thats a thing.

eca 18 May 2022 16:17 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Try working on something random with someone cool
Meta note: this was an experiment in jotting something down. I’ve had a lot of writers block on forum posts before and thought it would be good to try erring on the side of not worrying about the details.

As I’m rereading what I wrote late last night I’m seeing things I wish I could change. If I have time, I’ll try writing these changes as comments rather than editing the post (except for minor errors).

(Curious for ideas/approaches/ recommendations for handling this!)
What links here?
- eca's comment on Try working on something random with someone cool by eca (18 May 2022 16:51 UTC; 7 points)

eca 18 May 2022 14:43 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Florence’s comment on: Try working on something random with someone cool
This seems like a great idea- I actually woke up this morning realizing I forgot it from my list!

One part of my perspective which is possibly worth reemphasizing: IMO, what you choose to work together does not need to be highly optimized or particularly EA. At least to make initial progress in this direction, it seems plausible that you should be happy with anything challenging/ without an existing playbook, collaborative, and “real” in the sense of requiring you to act like you would if you were solving a real problem instead of playing a toy game.

So in this case, while “EA should host hackathons” seems reasonable and exciting to me, especially as a downstream goal if working together turns out o be really useful, it doesn’t need to block easier stuff. I dont think a shortage of good hackathon prompts or organizers should stop groups of EAs from voting on the most interesting local hackathon run by someone else, going together as a group, and teaming up to work on something (with an EA lens if you want). Thats just extremely low cost to try out.

(Im also noticing that “Host an awesome EA hackathon” seems like type of collaborative, challenging project a person could team up on!)

eca 15 Jan 2022 21:38 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
thanks for the kind words! I agree that we didn’t have much good stuff for ppl to do 4 yrs ago when i started in bio but don’t feel like my model matches yours regarding why.

But I’m also wanting to confirm I’ve understood what you are looking for before I ramble.

How much would you agree with this description of what I could imagine filling in from what you said re ‘why it took so long’:

“well I looked at this list of projects, and it didn’t seem all that non-obvious to me, and so the default explanation of ‘it just took a long time to work out these projects’ doesn’t seem to answer the question”

(TBC, I think this would be a very reasonable read of the piece, and I’m not interpreting your question to be critical tho also obviously fine if it is hahah)

eca 15 Jan 2022 4:59 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big)
meta note- its super cool to see all this activity! but the volume is makin me a bit stressed and i probably won’t be trying to respond to lots even if i do one sporadically. does not mean i am ignoring you!

eca 6 Nov 2021 3:03 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: BrianTan’s comment on: What are your favourite ways to buy time?
Well I hope it works out for ya! Thanks haha

In case you are looking for content and have interests similar to me I like the following for audio:
- Institute for Advanced Study lectures (random fun science)
- Yannic Kilcher (ML paper summaries)
- Wendover Productions/ Kurzgesagt (random probably not as useful but interesting science and econ funfacts)
- LiveOverflow (Security)
And i find that searching for random academics names is more likely to turn up lectures/ convos than podcasts

eca 2 Nov 2021 21:18 UTC
13 points
0 ∶ 0
on: I’ll pay you a $1,000 bounty for coming up with a good bounty (x-risk related)
Are you looking for shovel ready bounties (eg write them up and you are good to go) or things which might need development time (eg figuring out exactly what to reward, working out the strategy of why the bounty might be good etc)?

eca 2 Nov 2021 13:54 UTC
15 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Can EA leverage an Elon-vs-world-hunger news cycle?
FWIW this seems like a reasonable idea to me and I would be pretty sad if no one at e.g. Givewell had even considered it.

eca 2 Nov 2021 13:50 UTC
71 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What are your favourite ways to buy time?
- Order groceries online! Maybe this is obvious but I have the impression not as many ppl do this as they should. Saves me at least 1 hr (usually closer to 2) for < $20
- Pay for a bunch of disk space. I find it generates a lot of overhead to have files in different places. For me, the solution has been a high performance workstation plus remote desktop forwarding to my laptop when I travel so I can always have the same disk and workspace
- Buy more paid apps/ premium upgrades/ digital subscriptions. I haven’t done the math on this so might not be as good as I think, but I have the impression that time spent watching adverts ads up and that in general apps are underpriced/ people have irrational behavior around eg not buying the $5 app they would have been excited for if free. A big one for me is Premium Youtube which lets you listen to videos with the screen off and gives me access to all youtube lectures as if they were podcasts (there are a surprising number of high quality informational videos that can be listened to!)
- Related to above: make slack time more useful by listening to stuff. Mix of podcast, audiobooks, youtube and text to speech of articles. I use a mix of Pocket, Speechify and Voicedream for the latter. I invested in noise-cancelling earbuds and (separately) found some pretty cheap earbuds you can wear in the shower
- extra battery packs and unlimited data plan to allow for work time in more places. For same reason, laptop with long battery life. I couldnt find anything better than the newest macbook pro M1.
- pay for flights at times which work better and reduce time in transit. Your comfort/ restedness affects productivity. Also plane wifi.
- give yourself a budget for productivity experiments that feel speculative. Many of the above were discovered by spending that budget, a lot of other things failed but its worth it for the wins
- stop worrying about late fees (within reason). Most of the time the fees for things like late registration at a uni are small relative to not needing to occupy your brain with those sorts of deadlines
- pay for excercise/ hobbies that increase your wellbeing + energy. For me this is climbing
- buy extra of things you lose frequently. This is an embarrassing one but I cannot for the life of me keep track of sleep masks, for example. I have like >6 pairs now lol, but there is usually one when I need it. If you are scatterbrained like me, this is worth it for cheap things.
- corollary of above: don’t waste time looking for cheap things you’ve lost, just buy another.
I think I have a few more I’m forgetting but I will stop there for now.

eca 21 Oct 2021 15:11 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: eca’s Shortform
Quest: see the inside of an active bunker

eca 19 Oct 2021 23:16 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
Seems like a good idea if it were easy

eca 19 Oct 2021 21:57 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: eca’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
(Sorry, when I said your story for impact was “plausible”, in my head I was comparing it to my own idea for why this would be good, and I meant that it was plausibly better than my story. I actually buy your pitch as written, seems like a solidly good thing; apologies)

eca 19 Oct 2021 21:45 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
What a cool project! I listen to the vast majority of my reading these days and am perpetually out of good things to read.

The linked audio is reasonably high quality, and more importantly, it doesn’t have some of the formatting artifacts that other TTS programs have. Well done.

Your story for why this is a potentially high impact project is plausible to me, especially given how much you’ve automated. I have independently been thinking about building something similar, but with a very different story for why it could be worth my time to do it. That means this could be a different story for why your thing was good :), which I thought I’d share

My story was that the top-performing people in a given cause area are large fraction of the valuable work, if you buy power law type arguments. By definition, their time is a lot more valuable than average. But it is also more valuable for them to be better informed, because the changes they make to their decisions by being better informed are leveraged by their high work output or its consequences.

If you buy this story, I think you wind up focusing on figuring out how to cater what is audio-fied to what would be useful to the most productive people in EA. So like, what do top AI safety researchers wish they had time to listen to. I’d bet that this is actually a very different set of things than Forum/ LW posts.

When I started to do my thing, I suspected that a lot of the researchers who are doing the best work would benefit from being able to hear more academic papers, from arxiv for example. But IMO the key problem is that these don’t get read well because of formatting issues. I think this is a solvable problem, and have a few leads, but it was too annoying for me to do as a side project. DM me if you’re interested in chatting about that

Side point: this view of why this is high impact also speaks to letting the top people in question choose what they listen to, which looks more like an app that does TTS on demand than a podcast feed. This happens to avoid copyright issues, if the existence of other TTS apps is any indication.

You might be able to hack together an equivalent solution (on both copyright and customization) without needing to develop your own app by having a simple website that lets people log in and makes them a private RSS feed (compatible with most podcast players I think, though not confident in any of this). Then if they input a link on the website its compiled and added to their RSS feed for use in the player. If you had an api for calling your TTS script (and had solved these formatting issues) I or someone else could probably hack something like this website together pretty fast

eca 19 Oct 2021 21:18 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
And there are various things one could probably do to make it not illegal but still messed up and the wrong thing to do! Like make it mandatory to check a box saying you waive your copyright for audio on a thing before you post on the forum. I think if, like some of the tech companies, you made this box really little and hard to find, most people would not change their posting behavior very much, and would now be totally legal (by assumption).

but it would still be a bad thing to do.

eca 19 Oct 2021 21:13 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
This is a reason to fix the system! My point is that it reduces to “make all the authors happy with how you are doing things”, there is not some spooky extra thing having to do with illegality

TBC I do not endorse using people’s content in a way they aren’t happy with, but I would still have that same belief if it wasn’t illegal at all to do so.

eca 19 Oct 2021 21:09 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kat Woods’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
I use speechify, its voices are quite good but has the same formatting issues as all the rest (reading junk text) which I think is the real bottleneck here

eca 19 Oct 2021 21:04 UTC
34 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Will Bradshaw’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
FWIW I think I endorse Kat’s reasoning here. I don’t think it matters if it is illegal if I’m correct in suspecting that the only people who could bring a copyright claim are the authors, and assuming the authors are happy with the system being used. This is analogous to the way it is illegal, by violating minimum wage laws, to do work for your own company without paying yourself, but the only person who has standing to sue you is AFAIK yourself.

Not a lawyer, not claiming to know the legal details of these cases, but I think this standing thing is real and an appropriate way to handle