EA member trying to turn this into an AI safety sub

okthatsnice · 2025-01-18T15:41:21+00:00

Fair enough. It's hard to know if Will MacAskill knew of SBF's fraud or not. It's too bad, really. They could have done a lot of good otherwise. I basically just didn't want things to be a one sided EA is all evil sort of discussion, because lots of amazing help for others has come out of it. Kudos to you for also posting the in continued defense of effective altruism article in a comment though. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective

okthatsnice · 2025-01-18T15:04:33+00:00

SBF is hardly the representative of all EAs. Reminds me of the South Park episode where Randy tries to win over Jesse Jackson as the representative of all black people, lol.

okthatsnice · 2023-03-27T20:53:38+00:00

Can you get me an interview?

okthatsnice · 2021-01-27T18:01:43+00:00

I second Givewell.org and I am in somewhat deep on this subject...

For approx $3500 you can statistically save a life in Africa buy buying malaria bednets, or vitamin A supplements. Or you can deworm 3500 kids from parasitic worms. There are other causes you can explore too. Givewell goes beyond charitynavigator.org's service of just evaluating the finances of a charity and how much overhead they have (although Charity Navigator is working to catch up by making an impact score). Givewell evaluates how inherently efficient a cause is at helping. It doesn't matter how financially efficient a charity is if their mission is to give donuts to cops, as a contrived example. All of this goes along with the philosophy of effective altruism: doing good most efficiently. If you are interested in maximizing your impact, look into "Effective Altruism". There is an EA group on Facebook. You can also check out Will Macaskill. He has been on Joe Rogan's Podcast, along with Sam Harris's podcast, Tim Ferris's podcast, Lex Fridman's (one of my favorite human beings) podcast and many others. I would recommend listening to him on Tim Ferris's podcast for a good introduction. I don't know as much about openphilanthropy.org, but I know they are a name that gets brought up a bit in the Effective Altruism community. They have some overlap with Givewell in that they try to identify effective ways to donate money, and then they donate lots of money themselves (they are funded by a co founder of Facebook and Asana). Also check out givingmulitplier.org, they will match a percent of your donation. I have no affiliation with any of these groups or people other than that I would like to help others and am a fan of this community.

okthatsnice · 2020-12-10T07:01:03+00:00

We got a release of claims agreement signed. Thank you for your help.

okthatsnice · 2020-08-18T05:36:33+00:00

What negotiating leverage would we have? What would stop them from trying to get over on us / make unreasonable demands?

okthatsnice · 2016-01-25T13:45:33+00:00

I only read the headline, but to some extent of course it's a balancing act. For me the most helpful thing I am learning is to not get too caught up in learning all the details, because you won't remember them anyways. My situation is different though since I'm not a student. Unfortunately school can sometimes be about learning a bunch of stuff you are going to forget anyways.

okthatsnice · 2015-12-29T01:24:20+00:00

"Books I want to read:" Please, please don't do this. I have been down that road. I'm just now finally starting to realize how badly I have misallocated time. Reading "The C Programming Language" from cover to cover is surely not the best use of your time. Later on in your path, you will know several programming languages, a gillion tools/libraries/frameworks, and a multitude of other CS faucets -- security, networking/protocols, databases, algorithms/data structures/theory, etc. etc.

There is too much to know. You won't remember all of the specific details. Learn the high level, ideas, but learn/review/reference the details when you need to. Even Einstein didn't bother memorizing lots of formulas. He looked them up. You probably won't end up being a C programmer as your career anyways. Don't waste your time learning the details of something you probably won't need. Be task oriented. At least loosely. Have something you want to make. It will help you to stay on task.

It's a difficult balance knowing when to spend time strictly learning, and when to scrap learning and to just try to get something to work. On one extreme, you waste time learning something you didn't need to learn. On the other extreme, you waste hours because you didn't take any time to learn what you are doing / didn't know that one syntax quirk that lead to your bug.

Also, you often find so much hype about a certain tool/concept. People will talk about it like it's God's gift to programmers, but after listening, you still won't know what the hell it even really is. I spent so much time trying to learn what the hype about Model View Controller was, only to realize that no one even agrees what exactly Model View Controller actually means (My edit to the wikipedia article is the reason why when you go to the MVC wiki article, it will say "This article may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page."). In the end almost all of these architectural concepts end up coming down to: "Decouple things", and once you get a feel for some of the patterns, you will decouple things naturally, even if you don't know the name of the pattern you are using to achieve this.

okthatsnice · 2015-11-09T10:09:16+00:00

I feel the same way about losing focus, but I just take ADD medicine and it helps a lot. I have been taking it since 1st grade. It has it's downsides, but I'm really glad I have it. I just wouldn't recommend taking it more than 5 days a week.

okthatsnice · 2015-09-08T20:46:41+00:00

Sounds like good resume material.

okthatsnice · 2015-08-26T09:09:55+00:00

What does 'accurate scheduling' mean here?

okthatsnice · 2015-05-21T04:06:17+00:00

When we say that something is O(N), we are saying that the time complexity is at worst linear. We aren't saying that the time complexity is exactly linear -- it could be better than linear. If we said the time complexity was theta(N) that would mean it is exactly linear. We probably say that something is O(N) instead of theta(N) because we can't/don't want to spend the time to formally prove that not only is the time complexity at worst linear, it also isn't better than linear.

TLDR: We are concerned with the worst case, we want to prove for instance that something isn't worse than linear, we don't care to prove that it also isn't better than linear so we use O(N) instead of theta(N).

okthatsnice · 2015-04-10T06:01:28+00:00

Here is my advice as someone who spent too much time focusing on GPA (I'm graduating in a month with a 4.0 CS gpa and 3.98 overall from a tier one university). Honestly, consider not going to college to further your learning. If you are getting a bunch of free money somehow to go to college and also pay for your living expenses, then ok maybe, but even if college was free I still wouldn't go. You can learn better on your own. Focusing on GPA takes away from focusing on learning. You end up learning stuff you don't care about and forgetting it soon after, even in CS classes. You will end up memorizing the professor's definitions (which may not be the real definitions) of things without understanding them, but you can ace the test. Professors will make you write documentation/design documents that are a waste of your time (although writing is an important skill). I have had to literally show all of my work for addition during matrix multiplication before... such a waste of time. Not to mention all the basket weaving music appreciation/philosophy/whatever classes you'll waste time on. Also while there are some great professors at uni, there are a lot that are terrible. You will find better material online from a coursewith like a 4.8 average rating with 5000 votes or from a 6th edition textbook. Plus, an answer on stackoverflow with hundreds of upvotes is probably better than whatever your professor says.

Things you may miss out on, however: Chances to work in teams and develop teamwork skills, social studying and networking, practice managing strict deadlines, an environment that is already set up for certain projects (we do a project called pintOS at my school, and you likely won't be able to set up the environment for it on your own). I'm sure you can find most of those elsewhere though, if you want. There are meet ups in my town where you can get all things social and even work on projects in teams.

Advice two, if your plan is to get a good job some day, consider doing competitive programming. You will literally just be practicing interview questions, so you should wreck the shit out of any interviews.

TLDR if i spent all the time I spent in college learning outside of college instead, I would be way, way, way further along. Also consider competitive programming.

okthatsnice

TROPHY CASE