Favourite things of 2022
This year I decided to get into dancing. I actually got into kayaking, gelato, Haskell. I theorised country music.
This year I quit nicotine. Zyban works! For a while.
Work
- I worked 2103 hours, not counting fun stuff like the blog.
- Started my first company, Arb.
- We crunched most of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke’s nonfiction to answer a question. Probably the most memey thing I will ever be paid todo.
- Proposal about developmental neuroscience and AI.
- Proposal about backfiring AI safety
- Off Road, launch and handover.
- Emergency research teams: writing and executive search.
- Ran an ESPR camp for the first time.
- I learned Haskell tolerably (did Euler).
for
loops are now hopelessly ugly to me.
Breakthroughs
- Epstein-Barr as principal cause of multiple sclerosis
- and immediate immune therapy candidate for MS
- One of the first-ever reverse engineerings of a substantial neural network’s learned algorithm
- Q = 1.5 in some sense (do not misread this as commercial viability!).
- DALLE-2
- Stem cell embryogenesis
- Pan-influenza vaccine working its way towards trials
- US small modular reactor, NuScale, creeps towards approval after a decade
- People wake up to the GLP-1 agonist revolution, prescriptions take off
- Preventing billions of male chicks being born and tortured
Papers
- RL for the human condition
- RESEARCHER DEGREES OF FREEDOM
- ~linear maxflow
- What we missed during covid despite a million researchers
- Citing Fiction
- when do people hate good actions
- We are not in Heuristica
- IDing one big problem with interpretability
- Formalising transformers. Going back and tidying up
- A Neural Network Solves and Generates Mathematics Problems by Program Synthesis
- Actual philosophy of actual physics
- virtue ethics steelmanned
- Pathological Water Science
- Generalizing in the Real World with Representation Learning
- Against covid policy estimation
- https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/handbook_chapter.pdf
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08289
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.01167.pdf
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2124542
- https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/publications-lectures-and-talks-amtb/amt-b-6
- https://philpapers.org/rec/KAHWEW
- Cremer
- https://twitter.com/hashtag/RobSelects
- https://mariokrenn.wordpress.com/fancy-science/
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07870.pdf
- https://www.liamkofibright.com/uploads/4/8/9/8/48985425/on_being_of_some_use_lkb.pdf
- https://www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/3wpc3plu/release/1?readingCollection=01a7b84d
- So fucking metal. Weapons to come.
- Someone actually thinking about thinking
Books
- The Chemistry Book by God
- Frank Ramsey by Misak
- Robbery Under Law by Waugh
- Learn You a Haskell by Lipovaca
- Automation and Utopia by Danaher
-
Moral Mazes by Jackall
- When We Cease to Understand the World by Labatut
- Based on a True Story by Norm
- Moby Dick
- Diaspora by Egan
- The Prince of Nothing by Bakker
- Xenocide by Card
- Shards of Honor by Bujold
- Lord of Light by Zelazny
- China Mountain Zhang by McHugh
Worst book: Mathematics for Human Flourishing
Essays and sites
- The best essay on psychosomatic disease I’ve ever read. The key is compassion; he understands that even when purely mental or “functional neurological”, disease is real and deserves care. And yet awareness raising and the urge to medicalise seems to have massive costs.
- I hope so much this is wrong. Used to hate the author but I read this blinded and came out very impressed.
- How the world works
- Good easy picture of what GPT changed
- One of the best products of the Tumblr Mindset. On the surface it’s about transphobia, but this is too narrow.
- With you other idiots, I have been misreading Omelas for ever.
- Jan Kirchner: on scaling academia
- Jan Kirchner: on not reading papers
- lessons from real simulated economies
- Jan Kirchner on self-construction
- Against Jobs
- Against status races in words and cynicism
- Against historiography
- Galton in the balance
- buy things
- Meades is still the best there is
- Blaming google
- Scott on heuristics
- Scott on motivated reasoning
- Scott on proud sickness unto death
- Scott on justice
- Scott on criticism
- Scott on prophets
- Scott reviews every Californian
- Speedrunning as the essence of science
- Human alignment
- Retracted tour de force of daring and epistemic risk and skin in the game
- A kind of essay I no longer read but which you might
- The mathematics of bad science
- Gratitude
- Davidad doing the true work of philosophy: to name and distinguish and unify the new.
- Data from r/AmItheAsshole
- On power and imprisonment and degradation as strategy
- KK goes full wise old man
- The rhetoric of Jones
- Lewis-Kraus on MacAskill
- I Should Be Able To Mute America
- The Limits of Help
- Microsociology of American elites
- I was moved to tears by Stewart Brand, John Bull
Shorts & poems
- The Borders of Infinity (short) by Lois Bujold
- deWitt, Sexual Codes
- [I Want to Be The One]
- Labatut, Prussian Blue
- Thomas Lux, ‘Motel Seedy’, Fridge
- Onions
- Dirge
- Glasses
- The Utilityverse
Tweets
- https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1546453510920830978
- https://twitter.com/sp_monte_carlo/status/1478783658714673159
- https://twitter.com/the_aiju/status/1495582144009285632
- https://twitter.com/zacharylipton/status/1488669529005821953
- https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1509832349986562048
- https://twitter.com/micefearboggis/status/1554851031670001667
- https://twitter.com/DanSchkade/status/1560552093684903938/photo/4
- https://twitter.com/jackclarksf/status/1555980412333133824
- https://twitter.com/ExileGrimm/status/1436340416513810434
- https://twitter.com/ben_j_todd/status/1504439141924278278
- https://twitter.com/BasisOfCulture/status/1505248977804951552
- https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1507355908321468422
- https://twitter.com/bantablack/status/1510289000812228609
- https://twitter.com/land_planarian/status/1511549227658141705
- https://twitter.com/XanderManshel/status/1538150707060215808
- https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1554648828275347456
- https://twitter.com/Wiglet1981/status/1580197903007907842
- https://twitter.com/ben_golub/status/1582224782728495109
- https://twitter.com/drewcoffman/status/1590527437418684417
Vids
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XWEVoI40sE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHOn8u-c2wk
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrJ6_GAprFE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Mx42zOet4
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoZUjxstIZs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq5inG547JA
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhXSlFjODvs
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-DH4owYP1k&list=LL&index=10
Films / TV
- The Lighthouse
- Top Secret
- Invention for Destruction
- Uncut Gems
- EEAAO
- The General
Podcasts
Gave up on em.
Games
- Inscryption
- Two Crowns
- Backpack Hero
- Star Traders
- https://sdkgames.itch.io/ecocoru
- Iris and the Giant
- The Devil’s Calculator
Albums
- Dragon New Warm Mountain (2022) by Big Thief
- Expert in a Dying Field (2022) by the Beths
- Beach House - Once Twice Melody
- Ab-Soul - Herbert
- Half Man Half Biscuit - The Voltarol Years
- Tourist - Inside Out
- Click Click (2006) by Freschard
- Spinoza (2022) by John Zorn
- Musique Citadine de L’Ere Edo (2007) by Ensemble Hijiri-Kai
- Out of the Blue (1979) by Blue Gene Tyranny
- Live at the Star-Club (1964) by Jerry Lee
- The Songs of Tony Sly (2013) by Various
- 万能青年旅店 (2010) by 万能青年旅店.
- An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) by Hualun
- A Place to Call Home by Pontus Hulgren. Fanfic music!
Songs
- ‘As the World Caves In’ by Matt Maltese
- ‘Discourse on Accents’ by Amy Walker
- ‘Better Days’ by Turner Cody
- ‘Make Me Feel’ by Janelle Monae
- ‘I Won’t Lie to You’ by Francis
- ‘Something’ by Lasgo
- ‘Piano Concerto 2’ by Rachmaninoff
- ‘Вот такой пацан’ by TalanT
- ‘Numb’ by Jerry Galeries
- ‘Acroyear2’ by Autechre
- ‘Seychelles’ by Masayoshi Takanaka
- Expert in a Dying Field (2022) by the Beths
- ‘An Ending, A Beginning’ by Dustin O’Halloran
- ‘Fantasy Baseball’ by John Samson
- ‘Swap Meet Louie’ by Sir Mixalot
- ‘Nosetalgia’, the Kendrick verse
- ‘Wow & Flutter’ by Jeffrey Lewis
- ‘Ana Ng’ by They Might Be Giants
- ‘Kids’ by Current Joys
- ‘You Can Have the Crown’ by Sturgill
- ‘Pretty Girls’ by Coco Peila
- ‘Body Terror Song’ by AJJ
- ‘Silk’ by Wolf Alice
- Op 87 by Shostakovich
- ‘Future of HUmanity’ by Tom Cardy
Deals
- Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 9th Gen (£60) ??????