neural network interpretability, meditation, the void. born at frontier math 0%
18 subscribers
Jan 18 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
willingness to think for myself before asking claude is reaching new lows, some glare on my screen i instinctively take photo of desk and ask claude how to reduce rather than thinking about it. barely even read output i just skim. brain use baseline lower than ever. i am happy
i had a (luckily minor) head accident recently and claude was like try to avoid using brain too much for a few days to avoid concussion risk and i'm like way ahead of you doc you solved that for me a while ago
Jan 14 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
i think more accurate than long term meditation turning you into a wise sage is it turning you into a happy dog. little object permanence, happy mostly for no reason, whatever is in front of you right now is your whole world. little state / short term memory, hard to traumatize
prob unlike a dog it usually ups intelligence in practice, bc being able to sit with a problem for an hour effortlessly without distraction just helps a lot, and for some reason it seems to way up long term memory for almost everyone. i can remember almost every month of my life
Jan 12 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
neural network interpretability is so fun, it’s always nice when things that are important also turn out to be a blast to do
I used to assume all the important things probably look like sitting in meetings fighting with bureaucracy. but neural network interpretability is like all the beauty of going to the zoo mixed with all the beauty of mathematics
Jan 5 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
as a whole ai research right now is way off on the acid-adderall balance imo. too much tunnel vision rigor not enough playfully trying new ideas
I think between adderall and acid the field should lean towards the former bc we kind of know what works, but it should be like 80/20 imo and rn it’s more like 99/1. Nearly all the worlds sharpest talent is focused on it and I hear one interesting new idea every like 3mo
Dec 27, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
relatedly i often see people plan to sprint super hard towards an ambitious goal for eg a month and i rarely see it work. i actually think they can go way above that goal in a month, but i'm skeptical they get to choose when the energy will arise
i see it like catching a wave. if a giant wave comes and you ride it well it'll probably be shocking how well it goes. but our wave conjuring tools aren't very good. i think if people listened for waves more things like einstein's annus mirabilis would be more common
Dec 17, 2024 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
meditation has transformed life from a concerningly short (eg 80yrs) timeline of complex moments to mostly quite simple peaceful moments (some touch, sound, shapes, etc) that spans all beings across all time. the timeline’s simplified and vastly widened
the thing you used to identify with (ball of tension claiming to be you) is gone and has been gone for a long time, so the only reasonable thing to identify is the emptiness that all sensations arise from and return to, and that’s going to be around for a long time
Dec 17, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
enlightenment could have been a good word if it were seen as a small deal that isn’t particularly impressive, a change you can go through like puberty is. but somewhere along the way it became a grand claim that’s synonymous with “I’m perfect” and now it’s too cursed to touch
the change can be amazing without you being amazing for going through it, they’re orthogonal. airplanes are amazing but all you did was walk into an airport and that’s fine and good. we should want great things to be as accessible and easy as possible
Dec 16, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
i think you can smile away most of your trauma but the smile needs to be genuine and tears might be needed to relax enough to get there
i think the mechanism is the same, it's a burning away, a dropping. i think we normally associate smiling as like not paying attention or something, blissfully unaware, but i mean a different and more present form of joy
why hasn't ea ever cared about pms? it's among the few biggest causes of suffering / disability for like half the women i know, relatively small interventions seem to improve it (eg various tcm herbs) and i don't think i've ever heard it brought up as a serious cause area
are there subsets of it i've missed that care about it a lot, or is ea just so male coded that women's challenges never made the candidate list
Dec 14, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think it’s pretty easy to beat the s&p if you even live a little in the future, which I think most people here do
I think this circle of twitter should be less pro index funds than it is. Not way less pro, but like 50% less pro
Dec 11, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
it’s almost ridiculous how unequally tension can be stored across the body. your head can be rainbows and unicorn for years while your hamstrings are a brick of accumulated stress and tension
and by you I mean me
Dec 7, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
it’s hard to give credit to anyone in ai at a macro level. each step (neural networks, + gpu, llms, chat, interp, reasoning etc) feels so obvious looking back, building so cleanly on what came before it. No sparks of genius that wouldn’t have inevitably come a year or two later
I think this is the problem the Nobel committee had. Obv ai is amazing and worthy of celebration but the project of ai feels more like an impersonal force of nature, like we’re sinking into an inevitable gradient. More like digging up an ancient fossil than drawing a painting
Dec 6, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the rats usually try their best to do what they believe is good, even if it’s done awkwardly, and I would love to see more of that from the postrats
you can define good however you want and also how to implement it, but I think it’s important to avoid doing not much for too long. no gradients is worse than almost any particular gradients
Dec 5, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
people train their attention to try and become more productive and find it helps a little but the real improvement is in feeling more alive. It’s hard to feel fully alive if you’re not able to fully attend to whatever you’re doing
a bad song fully attended to is so much more beautiful than a good song without the ability to give yourself fully to it
Dec 5, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
genie 2 is the most impressive thing google has done from my pov since go / alpha zero, nailing a totally new domain I wasn't following
(I think alphafold probably should count but I know too little about bio to appreciate it)
i thought i'd updated my ai progress timelines sufficiently after about twenty updates upwards but this still beat what I expected
has working on your health ever been as cool / high status as it is now? Basically every rich person I know is microdosing bryan johnson, cleaning up diet, getting a good exercise routine, hiring doc to advise them, few drink alcohol, etc
no one I know cares about what car you drive, nor care what they drive, but everyone wants a better hrv
Dec 2, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
meditation is a meaning solution disguised as a stress reduction solution
where meaning is feeling connected to something greater than yourself. which it certainly does, but not in the obvious way
Nov 29, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I love my problems, I know them so well, I get to be so nuanced with experiments on how to solve them. The ones that are left are at the limits of my ability (by definition) so they always match you like an ideal tennis opponent. I wouldn’t trade them for someone else’s problems
I don’t love them so much I wouldn’t trade them for not having them though, I think it is worth trying your best to solve problems, run lots of experiments, hire people to cover your weaknesses if possible, etc
Nov 28, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
most people i know who have done a ton of meditation get more net traumatized in a sense, at least for a while, bc more stuff comes up faster and they're far more sensitive than before. but they feel so much lighter and their hedonic baseline is wildly higher at the same time
we think of it as 1 dimension of how much pain are you in right now and how good do you feel, but i think it's higher dimensional than that. you can be aware of far more contractions, fear, sadness etc than before and feel amazing almost all the time even when it's there
Nov 28, 2024 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
my friends are feeling the agi but it doesn't even feel like ai or an impressive demo, just their friend claude they talk to eleven times a day
it used to be like omg look at this demo and send link to three friends and then forget it ever happened. now there's no wow, but there is a relationship
Nov 13, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
increasingly obsessed with christian mysticism. they’re pointing to the same thing as all the other groups, but i love the way they do it
