Bit of a Tangent

Kat Woods is an effective altruist and the co-founder of Nonlinear, which incubates longtermist nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship. Gianluca and Kat discuss brain hacks for curing imposter syndrome and being more agentic, infohazards, the simulation hypothesis, why you don’t need permission to do things, “passive impact” via automation, and Kat’s exciting new projects at Nonlinear.

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Kat Woods on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Kat__Woods

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Kat’s blog: www.katwoods.org/

Nonlinear: www.nonlinear.org/

Effective Altruism (EA): https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

The Effective Altruism Handbook: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/handbook

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality

Replacing Guilt: https://anchor.fm/guilt

SMBC cartoon on compatibilism: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/compatibilism

 Nonlinear Library (podcast): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JTZTBienqWEAjGDRv/listen-to-more-ea-content-with-the-nonlinear-library

Kat’s post on text-to-speech automation: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tAWK33eNXZKMckPhn/how-and-why-to-turn-everything-into-audio

EA Houses: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4zHWQNzCusaTfD7jz/ea-houses-live-or-stay-with-eas-around-the-world

Nonlinear support fund: www.nonlinear.org/productivity-fund.html

Nonlinear bounty programme: https://super-linear.org/

EA hiring agency: https://second-bellflower-54f.notion.site/EA-Hiring-Agency-0d6d75a0f5934455be9003fd7886d537

Nonlinear newsletter: www.nonlinear.org/subscribe.html

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter: www.twitter.com/podtangent

Bit of a Tangent on Instagram: instagram.com/podtangent/

Gianluca and Jared have survived 2020 (so far) and are back for Season 3 of Bit of a Tangent. In this episode they bring you 7 new habits and techniques that can be used to iteratively upgrade yourself — even in lockdown. Forget everything else that’s going on in the world, and take a deep dive into personal optimisation. Or, as they’d put it, prepare to geek out on organisation hacks, bootstrapped learning, and motivation pumps. 

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Shownotes:

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last episode: https://www.podtangent.com/e/026-drink-and-be-rational/

Matt D’Avella’s video on Checklists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n2vL2I__WY

Alex Vermeer’s Tangibles: https://alexvermeer.com/tangibles/

Roam research: https://roamresearch.com/

Put iPhone in grayscale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNuziJOl61o

FitNotes Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.jamesgay.fitnotes

Matt D’Avella’s 30-day challenges: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXKuahfdkl6zkBULJhEMNy_RnErOYXwJk

How Jerry Seinfeld writes jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s

Anki (flashcards tool): https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Michael Nielsen’s essay on learning with Anki: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

POLAR bookshelf software: https://getpolarized.io/

How to wrap your headphones up: https://youtu.be/3_FueKBoRO0?t=171

[Epistemic status: slightly intoxicated]

Jared and Gianluca exchange rapid-fire questions whilst becoming increasingly inebriated. Think of this episode as the Ferriss/Rose “Random Show,” but with more references to Bayesian inference. It’s pretty likely to entertain you, but hopefully you’ll find it interesting too. Topics include Email response times, VR projects, and the statistical approach to an ethical diet. 

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Shownotes:

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last episode: https://www.podtangent.com/e/025-self-supervised-machine-learning-introduction-intuitions-and-use-cases/

The Game Changers: www.imdb.com/title/tt7455754/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq4Apc2Xk7Q

Sam Altman on Conversations with Tyler: conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-altman/

Top 19 Ideas from 2019: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/

Jared’s Twitter thread (19 ideas I couldn't stop thinking about in 2019): https://twitter.com/jnearestn/status/1211681767742156803

Donald Knuth on Lex Fridman’s podcast: https://lexfridman.com/donald-knuth/

Glen Weyl on the 80000 Hours podcast: https://soundcloud.com/80000-hours/glen-weyl-radically-reforming-capitalism-and-democracy

Eric and Brett Weinstein talking about DISC and the failings of peer review on The Portal: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/19-bret-weinstein-the-prediction-and-the-disc/id1469999563?i=1000462975502

Gianluca’s paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05363

This equation will change how you see the world by Veritasium: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJcsL7vyrk

On this episode of Bit of A Tangent, we discuss the emerging field of self-supervised machine learning. This is an immensely exciting area of active research in machine learning and AI - one which most people haven’t even heard about yet! We build up to the intuition for the topic by covering supervised and unsupervised learning; autoencoders and dimensionality reduction, and exploring how these techniques could be applied to Gianluca’s Quantified Self n=1 sleep quality dataset. We culminate in a detailed discussion of the state-of-the-art Contrastive Predictive Coding model, and how it allows us to learn about the structure of the world, without tonnes of labelled training data!

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Shownotes:

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Summer school on Computational Neuroscience: http://imbizo.africa/

Control problem in AI: https://intelligence.org/stanford-talk/

Coordination problem: https://conceptually.org/concepts/coordination-problems

Deep learning overview: https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/2017/06/21/an-overview-of-deep-learning.html

t-SNE explained: https://mlexplained.com/2018/09/14/paper-dissected-visualizing-data-using-t-sne-explained/

Variational autoencoders explained: https://anotherdatum.com/vae.html

Self-supervised learning by fast.ai: https://www.fast.ai/2020/01/13/self_supervised/

CPC model papers on Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.03748.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09272.pdf 

Blog posts explaining CPC: https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/2019/11/10/self-supervised-learning.html

https://yann-leguilly.gitlab.io/post/2019-09-29-representation-learning-with-contrastive-predictive-coding/

https://mf1024.github.io/2019/05/27/contrastive-predictive-coding/

Gianluca announces his latest project—the audio version of Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series—and Jared explains why it’s a notable contribution to the rationalist community. Together, they discuss how to gain the most from listening to the series and why it’s something you should strongly consider doing if you often find yourself binging Netflix until 3 AM.  

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Replacing Guilt podcast: https://anchor.fm/guilt

Rationality: From AI to Zombies podcast: www.from-ai-to-zombies.eu/

SlateStarCodex podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/slate-star-codex-podcast/id1295289140

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (audio): http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/

Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Jared and Gianluca have an uncompromising exchange about computational neuroscience and its implications for life and AI research.

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last episode: www.podtangent.com/e/022-6-books-you-need-to-read-in-2020/

Ideas episode: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/

The Portal podcast episode with Garrett Lisi: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/15-garrett-lisi-my-arch-nemesis-myself/id1469999563?i=1000458879827

Don Hoffman on Sam Harris’ podcast: https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/178-reality-illusion/

Gianluca presents his much-requested three non-fiction and three fiction recommendations for 2020. Jared recommends a book so long and gripping that you should probably avoid it if you have anything productive to do in the next six months. 

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Shownotes:

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Jared (twitter.com/jnearestn) and Gianluca (twitter.com/QVagabond) on Twitter

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (www.instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last week’s episode: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/

Gianluca on Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/user/show/56535709-gianluca

Books Gianluca read in 2019: www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/14773941

Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths: www.goodreads.com/book/show/25666050-algorithms-to-live-by

80000 Hours podcast with one of the authors of Algorithms to Live By: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-algorithms-to-live-by/

Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://equilibriabook.com/

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

007 | Game Theory, Alignment, and Civilisational Inadequacy: https://www.podtangent.com/e/007-game-theory-alignment-and-civilisational-inadequacy/

Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The Replacing Guilt Series by Nate Soares: http://mindingourway.com/guilt/

Half-assing it with everything you’ve got: http://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/

Discussions of Replacing Guilt on The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast: www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2019/08/92-replacing-guilt/

Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncertainty

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens

Neil Gaiman on the Tim Ferriss show: https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/

The Metropolitan Man by Alexander Wales: www.goodreads.com/book/show/22872436-the-metropolitan-man

Alexander Wales on the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast: www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2018/07/63-rational-fiction/

The Metropolitan Man audiobook (free podcast): www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin: www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu: www.goodreads.com/book/show/39803561-the-paper-menagerie

Worm (the webseries you should probably never read): https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

Bit of a Tangent is back! In this episode, Jared shares the 19 ideas he couldn’t stop thinking about in 2019, whilst Gianluca does two B-grade Joe Rogan impressions. Together, they discuss everything from mechanism design to personal fitness hacks, and throw in some recommendations for supercharging your learning in the new year. Strap yourselves in for a taste of the fascinating conversations that lie ahead in 2020!

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Shownotes:

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Jared (twitter.com/jnearestn) and Gianluca (twitter.com/QVagabond) on Twitter

Jared’s Twitter thread (19 ideas I couldn't stop thinking about in 2019): https://twitter.com/jnearestn/status/1211681767742156803

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Radical Markets: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36515770-radical-markets

007 | Game Theory, Alignment, and Civilisational Inadequacy: https://www.podtangent.com/e/007-game-theory-alignment-and-civilisational-inadequacy/

Glen Weyl on Twitter: https://twitter.com/glenweyl

Mechanism design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

Tyler Cowen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tylercowen

Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncertainty

Fast.AI courses: https://www.fast.ai/

When someone tries to “Euler” you: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-culture/

Body by Science, by Little and McGuff: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4642174-body-by-science

FitNotes app for Android: https://www.fitnotesapp.com/

All Debates are Bravery Debates on SlateStarCodex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/

Tim Ferriss on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tferriss

Naval Ravikant on Twitter: https://twitter.com/naval

011 | Slack, attention and focus: https://www.podtangent.com/e/slack-attention-and-focus-or-why-more-is-less/

010 | Flow states, optimal performance, and PhD hunter-gathering: https://www.podtangent.com/e/010-flow-states-optimal-performance-and-phd-hunter-gathering

Michael Nielsen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen

Anki for spaced repetition: https://apps.ankiweb.net/

013 | How To Learn Anything: https://www.podtangent.com/e/013-how-to-learn-anything/

The 7 +-2 principle for memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two

Chunking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820444-the-elephant-in-the-brain

Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36606376-inadequate-equilibria

Robin Hanson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhanson

Awareness by Anthony de Mello: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/94318.Awareness

The Cook and the Chef on WaitButWhy: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

Sam Harris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg

Sam’s Waking Up app: https://wakingup.com/

This is part 3 of the series on Mental Models, in which Gianluca and Jared discuss the cognitive biases that often impede aspiring rationalists. They discuss the idea of “System 1 and 2” thinking as a framing for the entire discussion, before exploring 12 of the most deadly thinking traps and how to avoid them. This includes everything from the Planning Fallacy and Anchoring, to more esoteric pitfalls that are yet to be named. Finally, they describe meta-biases—like the Bias Blindspot and the Fallacy Fallacy—equipping your mental toolkit with everything you need to upgrade your thinking. 

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System 1 and 2 thinking in Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow

An awesome resource, the Cognitive Bias Codex: https://ritholtz.com/2016/09/cognitive-bias-codex/

A superb introduction to biases by Rob Bensinger: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ptxnyfLWqRZ98wnYi/biases-an-introduction

Yudkowsky on scope insensitivity: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ftJ38y9SRBCBsCzy/scope-insensitivity

[Study] Scope insensitivity: The limits of intuitive valuation of human lives in public policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368114000795

Bayes’ Theorem in medical testing: https://plus.maths.org/content/maths-minute-bayes-theorem

Bayes’ Theorem examples visualised: https://oscarbonilla.com/2009/05/visualizing-bayes-theorem/

Hamburg’s philharmonic concert hall that ran 6 years and 1000% over budget: https://www.thelocal.de/20161101/700m-over-budget-hamburg-concert-hall-finally-finished-elbphilharmonie

Fascinating studies on the planning fallacy in students’ academic predictions: https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/biases/67_J_Personality_and_Social_Psychology_366,_1994.pdf

Reference class forecasting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting

How to overcome the planning fallacy with “fudge ratios”: https://wpsmith.net/2015/improving-your-time-estimates-the-fudge-ratio/

Spinning the wheel on the anchoring bias: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/07/27/anchoring-effect/

“Influence” by Robert Cialdini: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence

016 | Free Will, Compassion, and Reinforcement Learning: https://www.podtangent.com/e/016-free-will-compassion-and-reinforcement-learning/

Inferential distances: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances

Findings in Hedonic adaptation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill#Empirical_findings

Dan Harris’ “10% Happier” podcast: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast

The Peak-End Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule

This is part 2 of our series on Mental Models. In it, we’re bringing you the most useful and applicable models we’ve encountered in everything we’ve read, heard or seen over the years! In part 2 we unpack models from Bayesian reasoning, calibration, and expected value. We also cover fat-tailed distributions, counterfactual reasoning, inversion, and red-teaming. Throughout, we build up each model with examples and motivations, and often found ourselves making previously unseen (by us) links to other models which gave us several new insights. We hope this conversation will do the same for you!

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Shownotes:

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Farnam Street Blog - https://fs.blog 

Calibration training app by 80 000 Hours - https://80000hours.org/calibration-training/ 

Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995360-superforecasting 

0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities 

Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157-thinking-in-bets 

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242472.The_Black_Swan 

CGP Grey on 7 Ways To Maximise Misery - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o 

Claude Shannon on Creative Thinking - https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/creative-thinking-by-claude-shannon 

The Bottom Line - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line