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AI Governance (Q3 2023 Cohort)
| 872 wordsCore Content (Q3 2023) Week 1: Intro to ML (100 minutes) The AI Triad and What It Means for National Security Strategy by Ben Buchanan (2020) Visualizing the deep learning revolution (2023) by Richard Ngo But what is a neural network by 3Blue1Brown (2017) Gradient descent, how neural networks learn...
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AI Safety Summary (Q1 2023 Cohort)
| 4766 wordsBackground, Context, & Goals 📚 This is my summary & extrapolations for the Artificial Intelligence Technical Safety Fundamentals Alignment Course (“Course” hereafter) offered by BlueDot, which spun out of Effective Altruism Cambridge in collaboration with Richard Ngo from OpenAI/DeepMind. In total, the Course is expected to take ~30 hours taking...
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Human Information Speeds & Gain
| 439 wordsReading & speaking speeds I have mild dyslexia where I’m attuned to fonts & have searched to optimize my reading. A person reading English averages about 200 words per minute [WPM] as our base rate. This base rate can be roughly doubled (500 WPM) by simply following along with a...
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Why Eudaimonia & Zen?
| 574 wordsEudaimonia translates roughly into happiness in ancient Greek. However, the deeper meaning is human flourishing. Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics starts his lecture with the argument that most things have a function and the function for humans is to achieve the highest state of human flourishing in accordance with reason. This...
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Why AGI?
| 818 wordsUpdated October 2023 Epistemic Status: Authoritative My Introduction to Our Last Invention In a university philosophy course, I read a paper that first touched on the topic of humankind’s last invention. At that time I was fascinated by the concept of an Artificial General Intelligence [AGI] that would self improve...
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Ego Death
| 494 wordsI woke up in the middle of the night (around 3AM) and couldn’t fall back asleep. To relax myself & go back to sleep, I began to meditate. As I sat zazen & following my breath, I began to notice this wave of energy flowing through me. I opened my...
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Books to Read this Year (2022)
| 177 wordsAt the start of 2022, I made a pact to myself to read 1 book a month and will update this periodically as I finish them. I do like Holden Karnofsky’s cold take for Honesty about Reading. as there is just too much to read in what little time we...
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All Jobs to Date & A Handful of Lessons
| 901 wordsI recently listened to a podcast where the hosts were talking about their various jobs. It made me reflect on the many I’ve had in my first 30 years. Educational Attainment Job Title Weekly Hours (avg) Role or Project Junior High Mowing lawns 5 Project Junior High Landscaping 10 Project...
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Bootcamp & Beyond
| 1140 words“How did you become a Data Scientist?” I get asked this quite often and thought I’d finally put my story into writing. My aim is to give you a few lessons I learned along my path and my leap into data science. Overall, I think taking that leap is one...
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What They Won’t Tell You about Pursuing an Economics PhD
| 956 wordsA couple years ago, I investigated the cost-benefit for an Economics PhD. I’ve also included some rapid fire advice at the end of this article for those short on time. I hope this provides a novel perspective on any graduate program research that you are currently undertaking. How did I...