On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses

On Brains, Minds, And Their Possible Uses

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The Greedy Doctor Problem
TL;DR: How to reason about people who are smarter than you. A few proposals, interspersed with reinforcement learning and humorous fiction. Ending on a…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
39
Making of #IAN
TL;DR: I fine-tuned a large language model on my personal notes and embedded the resulting model in my everyday workflow. Personal experience, Roam…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
1
TSPSIs and How I Write
TL;DR: Writing about writing and having written, and self-referentiality. Complementary musings on AI.
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
9
Via productiva
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
2
A quick one while he's away
TL;DR: deep reflections on names and identity, life-changing decisions, and mental renovations. And all of that in ~500 words!
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
2
On (Not) Reading Papers
TL;DR: Related to "scaling academia", thoughts on how to engage with academic papers. Examining the standard response to an overwhelming flood of new…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
6
This week in fashion
TL;DR: A holiday obsession turns into a deep meditation on all things pretty. Albatrosses and reward *models* included. Also, check out…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
2
Elementary Infra-Bayesianism
TL;DR: I got nerd-sniped into working through some rather technical work in AI Safety. Here's my best guess of what is going on. Imprecise probabilities…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Drug addicts and deceptively aligned agents - a comparative analysis
A young man, let’s call him Dave, starts consuming different kinds of illegal drugs (mostly heroin) as early as age 14, as a reaction to the divorce of…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
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Nadia
4
I'm not getting in that van.
TL;DR: An EAG 2022 retrospective, but also a creative writing exercise.
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
1
Simulator Musings
TL;DR: a seminar series on simulator theory; a toy model, the semiotic coin flip, unpacks the strange physics of language models a tiny bit.
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models
TL;DR: LMs exhibit some cognitive biases. Additionally, explain how cognitive biases can come about in humans. Raising questions about how universal…
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Jan Hendrik Kirchner
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