Things I read and liked in September
Welfare, W.E.B. Du Bois, writing ideas, Wolf on weightlifting
Anthropic is starting an AI welfare program. Sam Bowman, AI safety research lead, announces (in a personal capacity) that Anthropic is “laying the groundwork for AI welfare commitments”:
We’ll want to build up at least a small program in [the current stage of AI development] to build out a defensible initial understanding of our situation, implement low-hanging-fruit interventions that seem robustly good, and cautiously try out formal policies to protect any interests that warrant protecting. I expect this will need to be pluralistic, drawing on a number of different worldviews around what ethical concerns can arise around the treatment of AI systems and what we should do in response to them.
Buck Shlegeris (Redwood Research) presents “a simple system architecture for a system where autonomous AIs are doing AI R&D research”.
Dan Williams explains various kinds of politically motivated reasoning using the lens of “coalitional psychology”—a framework for thinking about cognition that elaborates on the (mere) slogan that human reasoning can be “tribal”.
Book review of Dominion, a case for animal welfare by an unusual advocate: Matthew Scully, a conservative Christian who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush.
Related: animal welfare is for softies? Connor Jennings questions the bizarre meme that it is somehow weak and “unmanly” to … forgo a self-centered pleasure (e.g. bacon) in order to protect the vulnerable (factory-farmed animals)
Helen de Cruz on the value of “friendship with the ancients”: the venerable practice of communing with the greats. W.E.B. Du Bois has a particularly beautiful account:
I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.
Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
Sarah Constantin’s amusing account of all the schlep and corporate politics necessary to get a company’s data in one place, before you can do data science with it.
Hedonism revisited: an older Constantin deep dive on liking, wanting, pleasure, pain.
How to support new parents: tips from Jessica Ocean, a new parent.
The vast majority of ancient works have been lost; we only have copies of about 1% of them. But a huge influx could be on the way, thanks to X-rays and computer vision allowing us to read fragile scrolls without physically opening them.
Niko McCarty’s advice on finding writing ideas.
Positive-sum symbiosis: Séb Krier (DeepMind) on the perils and promises of collaborating with AI systems.
There’s an exercise scientist called Milo Wolf, and he looks exactly like a guy named Milo Wolf. He’s also good at science: Andrew Retteck highlights his new pre-print testing how important full range of motion is for muscle growth.
