@?notes

Metadata date: 2021-10-01 21:14 finished: false rating: -1 tags: - '@?notes' - '@?book' - '@?public' - '@?island' - '@?safe-to-post-online' title: Island

Man chooses if he is good or bad? This took me a while to finish because I stopped reading for about 2 months halfway through. I thought it was good, the description of the setting and atmosphere was amazing. Reading that first chapter as Steinbeck describes the Salinas Valley was great. Backlinks [[Book Notes]]N Metadata date: 2021-10-01 21:13 finished: true rating: 7 tags: - '@?notes' - '@?book' - '@?east-of-eden' - '@?

Man builds an AGI and then either destroys all of humanity or colonises $4\times 10^{20}$ stars. This book was really, really good. I’ve been interested in the idea of AI safety for a while now after reading LessWrong and this book was just full of so much good information and new perspectives. Flashcards Past developments and present capabilities Growth models and big history A few hundred thousand years ago, it took on the order of a million years to increase civilisations ability to support an extra one million citizens living at subsistence level.

From Replacing Guilt, “Have no excuses”: Resolve to refuse to excuse your own failures in the even that you do fail, even if it was understandable. Don’t try to excuse bad luck; think of it more like it was a bet worth taking ( [[The Scout Mindset]]N). The difference is it means you own the choice. Admitting failure is and feeling pressure on yourself is “precisely the impetus to learn and adapt”. “Stop generating reasons why you never could have won, and play to win”.

From Replacing Guilt, “The value of a life”: If you have money and want to save lives, you had better put a price on life. Lives should be treated as priceless, but it’s instrumentally rational to assign a value to a life in order to effectively do the most good. The gap between the value and the price is a measure of the difference between the universe that is, and the universe that should be.

how do poets make rhymes, it’s a crimes?

what properties does this function that behaves like an exponential have?

what can you deduce about the area of this weird, self-area function?

what’s the maximum value of this funky function?

how do you rotate a point over a line?

what is the sum of this recursively defined sequence?

what is the area between a circle and a straight line?