PodQueue

Invited Talk: Metric Perversity and Bad Decision-Making

Lea Kissner

People keep making terrible decisions. Shockingly often, bad decisions are because of perverse metrics—metrics that are technically correct but drive people to bad decisions. This is an especially bad problem for security, privacy, abuse, and related fields: we have adversaries, we have unknowns, and we have many small risks with incredibly high impacts. In this talk, we'll go through the types of perverse metrics—and how to avoid them.

View the full Enigma 2023 program at https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2023/program

Abstract: The deliberate failure of national leaders, whether in politics, business, journalism or indeed much of academia to be honest about the climate emergency has left us facing fundamental questions of every facet of modern society. Central amongst these is the issue of equity – both between and within nations. In this presentation, Kevin Anderson will unpick the policy gulf that exists between the temperature and equity commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement and the emission trajectory of so called “developed” countries. He will close by looking beyond techno-optimistic solutions, concluding there are now no non-radical futures. The choice is between immediate and profound social change or waiting a little longer for chaotic and violent social change. In 2023 the window for this choice is rapidly closing.

Speaker: Kevin is professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester and visiting professor at the Universities of Uppsala (Sweden) and Bergen (Norway). Formerly he held the position of Zennström professor (in Uppsala) and was director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (UK). Kevin engages widely with governments, industry and civil society, and remains research active with publications in Climate policy, Nature and Science. He has a decade’s industrial experience in the petrochemical industry, is a chartered engineer and fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KevinClimate

Website: https://climateuncensored.com

The presentation builds on the following work:

- How alive is 1.5°C? [https://bit.ly/3KBJmV7]

- Phaseout schedules for fossil fuel production [https://bit.ly/3KaxWGb]

- What's in a name? [https://bit.ly/40Z0PMq]

- The New Denialism [https://bit.ly/40GFEz1]

- Three decades of failure to bend the emissions curve [https://bit.ly/40Z18a2]

- Critique of the IPCC’s 2023 Synthesis report [https://bit.ly/40L7fzc]

For more information on how get involved with Scientist Rebellion, head over to https://linktr.ee/scientistrebellion and https://scientistrebellion.com/how-to-join.

Introduction (00:00)

Talk (02:32)

Q&A (39:59)

Most of us, young and old, are addicted to something. Addictions can take many forms: alcohol, drugs, pornography, sex, games, work, phone, eating, shopping, etc. etc. Even patterns in our thinking can be addictive.

In this sharing Sister Dang Nghiem invites us to look deeper at our addictions, and to understand the roots of it. Why are we addicted? Only when we understand the deeper emotions - and sometimes trauma - underlying our addictions, we can start to heal and to transform.

Most people don't want to face their addiction, as they would have to face the underlying emotions. These emotions are often so painful, or so dark, that people do everything to cover them up and to run away from them ... they look for solace in alcohol, drugs, pornography, sex, games, work, phone, eating, shopping, etc. to numb themselves. But by doing so, they create more suffering, for themselves and for others.

With deep understanding Sister Dang Nghiem explains the working of our emotions, and shows us a path of healing: the way out is in. The key and power of healing lies inside each one of us. When we learn to be really present for our deep emotions, to embrace and transform them, we can liberate ourselves from repetitive patterns of suffering. In the same way we can learn how to be really present for family members, friends and collegues, who struggle with addictions.

As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh always said: 'To love is to be there. How can we love if we are not there?' We breathe mindfully with our emotions, we walk mindfully with our emotions, we embrace them, and this way we heal. We can do this for ourselves and for our loved ones. Healing our addictions, is healing our world.

If you want to discover more, Sister Dang Nghiem wrote three very personal, powerful and practical books about strong emotions, trauma and the path of healing:

1. Healing, A Woman's story from doctor to nun: https://www.parallax.org/product/healing-a-womans-journey-from-doctor-to-nun/

2. Mindfulness as Medicine: https://www.parallax.org/product/mindfulness-as-medicine-a-story-of-healing-body-and-spirit/

3. Flowers in the Dark: https://www.parallax.org/product/flowers-in-the-dark/

An important title written by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh about this topic is Taming the Tiger Within: https://www.parallax.org/product/taming-the-tiger-within/

I wish all of you lots of strength and determination, and yes, also lots of joy, on the path of healing. We know you can do it!

With love and gratitude,

Wouter Verhoeven

Find more free videos on:

https://evermind.media/bonus/

Psst... You've found it. This is the JavaScript meetup for mad science, hacking, and experiments. Hang out virtually on Friday at 4pm Pacific Time each week. https://speakeasyjs.com​

CONTRIBUTORSMartin O'Neill at the University of YorkJonathan Wolff at the University of OxfordFabienne Peter at the University of WarwickREADING LISTSamuel Freeman, Rawls (Routledge, 2007)Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls

(Cambridge University Press, 2002)Gerald Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal (Princeton

University Press, 2016)Jean Hampton, Political Philosophy (Westview Press,

1996)Christine M. Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity

(Cambridge University Press, 1996)Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University

Press, 1997)Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family

(Basic Books, 1991)Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson (eds.), Property-Owning

Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson, ‘Beyond the Welfare

State: Rawls's Radical Vision for a Better America’ (Boston Review, 24

October 2012)Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive

Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge University Press, 1996)John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition

(first published 1971; Harvard University Press, 2005)John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Harvard

University Press, 1999)John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University

Press, 2005)John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard

University Press, 2001)Samuel Scheffler, ‘The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump’

(Boston Review, Feb 12, 2019)Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Oxford University

Press, 1995)Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy

(4th edition, Oxford University Press, 2022)RELATED LINKSJonathan Wolff on John Rawls' A Theory of Justice –

Philosophy BitesJohn Rawls by Leif Wenar - Stanford Encyclopedia of

PhilosophyJohn Rawls (1921-2002) by Henry Richardson - Internet

Encyclopedia of PhilosophyRawls at 100 – Boston ReviewLiberalism and John Rawls, with Katrina Forrester - The

Prospect Podcast #112, December 19, 2019

A deep dive into the game theory and exponential growth underlying our modern economic system, and how recent advancements in AI are poised to turn up the pressure on that system, and its wider environment, in ways we have never seen before. Not a conversation for the faint hearted, but crucial nonetheless.

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue around global catastrophic risks and technology.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:21 Moloch Framework

13:20 Meta Crisis

27:52 Bad People or Bad System?

32:13 Capitalism & Moloch

40:12 Misalignment

52:35 Incentive Pressures Driving Misalignment

58:02 Moloch Driving AI Development

01:01:54 AI Risks Pre AGI

01:08:35 AI Accelerates Existing Systemic Issues

01:16:39 Social Media

01:20:09 Alternative Goals

01:25:00 Cooperation on AI

01:29:20 Call to Action

This video is part of a series on game theory, civilizational risk, and Moloch: the God of unhealthy competition. It is the bad guy of humanity’s story, and time is running out for us to figure out how to defeat it.

Further viewing:

Liv's stuff

♾️ Moloch: The Beauty Wars https://youtu.be/fifVuhgvQQ8

♾️ Moloch: The Media Wars https://youtube.com/video/PRz54V7rU4U

Daniel's stuff

♾️ The Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org/

♾️ Green Pill | The Metacrisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVEP0zAK-xQ

♾️ Bend Not Break series | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxzo79SjpE

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

-------

Follow me here:

♾️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/liv_boeree

♾️ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liv_boeree

♾️ Website: www.livboeree.com

Liv Boeree is a channel exploring the fringes of science, game theory, technology and philosophy. You should subscribe, innit.

GPT3 & Beyond: Key concepts and open questions in a golden age for natural language understanding

Listen in as Professor Christopher Potts discusses the significance and implications of recent Natural Language Understanding developments including GPT-3. He describes the fundamental building blocks of these systems and describes how we can reliably assess and understand them.

Learn more about the AI Professional Program: https://stanford.io/3kYThd2

View the slides for this webinar here: https://stanford.io/potts-GPT3-webinar2023

#gpt3 #stanfordwebinar

Chapters:

0:00 Opening

00:09 Introduction for Chris Potts

1:09 Chris Potts - Welcome to the webinar

03:43 Quick Demo of GPT-3

06:41 GLUE benchmark

10:26 How can you contribute to NLU in this era of these gargantuan models?

11:44 The last mile problem

13:35 GPT example

14:50 Contrast In-Context learning with the standard paradigm of standard supervision

16:47 What are the mechanisms behind this?

18:18 Why does this work so well?

18:35 Self-Supervision

21:08 The role of human feedback

21:32 Chat GPT Diagram

23:42 Step-by-step reasoning

28:13 LLMs for everything approach

41:29 AI Courses at Stanford

46:28 Predictions about the future

Pay Attention: Prevent the Tragedy of the Social Media Commons via Community-driven Governance

As our society transitions more online, social media is playing an increasingly central role in public discourses and in turn, political processes. However, abuse and pollution are prevalent in these information ecosystems, resulting in polarization, extremism and erosion of trust in governments.

We argue that Ostrom’s resource management frameworks could be a useful approach to mitigate these threats. Under this view, attention is conceptualized as a common-pool resource, and high-quality information as a public good resulting from effective stewardship of both individual and collective attention. We discuss the potential applications of analytical tools by the Ostrom Workshop to study the social media commons as a socio-ecological system (SES). As an example, we examine the importance of local organization by resource users in resolving collective action problems in online communities. However, with the exceptions of some platforms, community-driven moderation is still sorely overlooked. The paper ends with an open call for more research to be done on community moderation ¬— a promising aid to the current dominating, yet ineffective top-down approach by platforms.

The Anti-Dystopians is back from its summer hiatus! In this episode, Alina Utrata talks to Dan McQuillan, a Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths University of London, about his new book “Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.” They discuss how the dangers of automated bureaucracy and algorithmic cruelty, what Max Weber and Hannah Arendt can tell us about AI, whether AI might bring back eugenics in a new coat and how to resist AI and fascism across the world.You can order Dan's book here: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/resisting-ai For a complete reading list from the episode, check out the Anti-Dystopians substack at bit.ly/3kuGM5X.You can follow Dan McQuillan on Twitter @danmcquillan, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians.All episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production of the show, subscribe to the newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5X.Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Economist Michael Hudson analyzes the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate, and Signature Bank, explaining the similarities to the 2008 financial crash. He also addresses the US government bailout (which it isn't calling a bailout), the role of the Federal Reserve and Treasury, the factor of cryptocurrency, and the danger of derivatives.

TRANSCRIPT: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/03/14/us-banks-collapsed-economist-michael-hudson

Check out the playlist for the show that Michael Hudson co-hosts here, Geopolitical Economy Hour: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDAi0NdlN8hMl9DkPLikDDGccibhYHnDP

Michael's column "Why the US banking system is breaking up": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/03/12/michael-hudson-why-the-us-banking-system-is-breaking-up

Michael's other article "Why the US bank crisis is not over": https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/03/13/michael-hudson-us-bank-crisis

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