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Nov 15, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
I wrote a whole book! What's next? I'm currently doing an edit pass on the entire book. I need to rewrite some of the early sections, fix some consistency issues, and generally look with fresh eyes on words I wrote months or years ago. Many of you provided helpful comments, and I'm using those to make the second draft better.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
N.B. This is a chapter in a planned book about epistemology. Chapters are not necessarily released in order. If you read this, the most helpful comments would be on things you found confusing, things you felt were missing, threads that were hard to follow or seemed irrelevant, and otherwise mid to high level feedback about the content. When I publish I'll have an editor help me clean up the text further.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
I've written a lot of words—hundreds of blog posts, thousands of comments, tens of thousands of emails, and hundreds of thousands of short messages. I'm even written most of a book! In total, between personal and professional writing, I estimate to have put north of 3 million words into text. So it may come as a surprise that, despite all this experience, I still struggle to write well. Sure, I've got the basics down, and when I put my mind to it I can achieve some measure of poetic prose.
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Jul 4, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
We may soon build superintelligent AI. Such AI poses an existential threat to humanity, and all life on Earth, if it is not aligned with our flourishing. Aligning superintelligent AI is likely to be difficult because smarts and values are mostly orthogonal and because Goodhart effects are robust, so we can neither rely on AI to naturally decide to be safe on its own nor can we expect to train it to stay safe.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
N.B. This is a chapter in a planned book about epistemology. Chapters are not necessarily released in order. If you read this, the most helpful comments would be on things you found confusing, things you felt were missing, threads that were hard to follow or seemed irrelevant, and otherwise mid to high level feedback about the content. When I publish I'll have an editor help me clean up the text further.
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Mar 22, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
In control theory, an open-loop (or non-feedback) system is one where inputs are independent of outputs. A closed-loop (or feedback) system is one where outputs are input back into the system. In theory, open-loop systems exist. In reality, no system is truly open-loop because systems are embedded in the physical world where isolation of inputs from outputs cannot be guaranteed.
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Mar 6, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
Say you want to plot some data. You could just plot it by itself:Or you could put lines on the left and bottom:Or you could put lines everywhere:Or you could be weird:Which is right? Many people treat this as an aesthetic choice. But I’d like to suggest an unambiguous rule. PrinciplesFirst, try to accept that all axis lines are optional. I promise that readers will recognize a plot even without lines around it. So consider these plots:Which is better? I claim this depends on what you’re plotting.
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Feb 25, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Gordon Worley
First, just want to clarify some terminology, which I know can be a bit confusing when new to the site. Less Wrong is about rationality rather than rationalism, which are linguistically close and not totally unrelated, but are used as jargon to mean different things. The short way to understand it is that rationality is about having accurate beliefs, rationalism is the philosophical stance that reason is the primary source of true knowledge, as opposed to observation, prior beliefs, etc.
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Jan 27, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Carl Feynman |Donald Hobson |Gordon Worley
I. From Scott Alexander’s review of Joe Henrich’s The Secret of our Success:In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multi-day processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid.
