Monthly Archives: May 2015

That Chocolate Study

Several of you asked me to write about that chocolate article that went viral recently. From I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s How: “Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found … Continue reading

No Time Like The Present For AI Safety Work

I. On the recent post on AI risk, a commenter challenged me to give the short version of the argument for taking it seriously. I said something like: 1. If humanity doesn’t blow itself up, eventually we will create human-level … Continue reading

Links 5/15: Link Floyd

Researchers Find Bitterness Receptors On Human Heart. This wins my prize for “most unintentionally poetic medical headline”. New volleys in the debate about whether moderate drinking is good for your health or it’s all just bad statistics. At the age … Continue reading

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AI Researchers On AI Risk

I first became interested in AI risk back around 2007. At the time, most people’s response to the topic was “Haha, come back when anyone believes this besides random Internet crackpots.” Over the next few years, a series of extremely … Continue reading

Beware Summary Statistics

Last night I asked Tumblr two questions that had been bothering me for a while and got some pretty good answers. I. First, consider the following paragraph from JRank: Terrie Moffitt and colleagues studied 4,552 Danish men born at the … Continue reading

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Bicameral Reasoning

[Epistemic status: Probably not the first person to think about this, possibly just reinventing scope insensitivity. Title with apologies to Julian Jaynes] Non-American readers may not be familiar with the history of the US House and Senate. During the Constitutional … Continue reading

OT20: Heaven’s Open

This is the semimonthly open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. Also: 1. Corrections from last week’s links: thinking probably doesn’t fuel brain cancers (thanks, Urstoff), and the discussion of the psychology replication results is still … Continue reading

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California, Water You Doing?

[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been a lot of dumb … Continue reading

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Links 5/15: Tall And Linky

If The Machines Are Taking Our Jobs, They Are Hiding It From The Bureau Of Labor Statistics. An argument that the ‘rise of the robots’ can’t be behind stagnant employment numbers, because increasing the amount of work done by robots … Continue reading

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Growth Mindset 4: Growth Of Office

Previously In Series: No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet // I Will Never Have The Ability To Clearly Explain My Beliefs About Growth Mindset // Growth Mindset 3: A Pox On Growth Your Houses Last month I criticized a recent paper, … Continue reading