April 2023 BenGoldhaber.com Newsletter
treating groupchats like coachella, LLM simulations, and the Ghibli aesthetic.
This will be a shorter than normal newsletter, as it has both been a bit of a hectic work month and I’ve been working with a friend on a new content project… expect to receive an additional (!) email later in the week on that.
In the meantime:
I wrote a short essay about a project I’d like to see someone create: event specific temporary chat servers. Let us recreate the feeling of festivals and design web gathering places that are purposefully ephemeral.
Tuning your Cognitive Strategies: A ‘meditative’ essay I read a few years ago that I was glad to re-encounter. The author describes an approach to noticing your thought patterns and… gently allowing them to become calibrated. I‘ve personally found it a helpful approach and attitude.
Imagine your mind as a giant bubbling cauldron full of "thoughts", including "feelings", "ideas", "words", "concepts", "memories", etc. Some of those "thoughts" rise to the top of the cauldron, and get picked up by your conscious attention…. the rules of how thoughts interact and form new thoughts are the same, regardless of whether those thoughts are conscious or not.
Metformin as Geroprotector: Metformin is one of the most promising general longevity drugs currently available, with a number of studies showing it slowing down the effects of aging. Gwern has compiled a cost-benefit analysis. Provided you don’t have too many side-effects - largely GI related, which stop if you decide to discontinue it - the benefits, particularly for those over 45, seem worth it. Related: Extending Human Healthspan and Longevity
Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior: The authors used large language models in a video game like setting to simulate day-in-the-life style interactions. The results are impressive; for instance, they explored social behaviors that emerged organically from the agent’s day to day routines:
We observed evidence of the emergent outcomes across all three cases. During the two-day simulation, the agents who knew about Sam’s mayoral candidacy increased from one (4%) to eight (32%), and the agents who knew about Isabella’s party increased from one (4%) to twelve (48%), completely without user intervention.
As someone who has worked on simulations, it’s pretty clear this is the future of the field. Agent based modeling has underperformed data intensive modeling methods for a long time, and I expect that this type of fusion could resuscitate the paradigm.
Tangentially related: Davidad's Bold Plan for Alignment: An In-Depth Explanation, an unusual but exciting plan for aligning AI. Create a world scale formal simulation that incorporates preferences from a diverse collection of stakeholders, and train an AI exclusively in that environment to find decisive positive strategies.
Use ML to finally find Waldo: GPT3 + Image Segmentation automatically solves the most annoying children’s book.
#good-content
Howl’s Moving Castle: Surprisingly, this is the first Studio Ghibli film I’ve seen. I really liked it - a fun and sweet movie, with that enchanting, ‘pastoral’ art style that is instantly recognizable. I’m looking forward to watching more Ghibli.
Big Trouble in Little China: The exact opposite of a Ghibli film, Big Trouble in Little China was an action-comedy from the 80s featuring Kurt Russel as a true All American action hero dealing with the dark mystic forces of San Francisco’s Chinatown. That description alone is all the recommendation I need proffer.
Children of Memory: The third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s series depicting a far future where traditional humanity has gone extinct and its ‘children’ are surviving and thriving in the galaxy. It does a good job bringing philosophical depth and creative storytelling to old tropes.
Galaxy Quest: The classic send-up/love-letter to Star Trek is still great nearly 25 years later, and on a rewatch you will notice all the character actors with one line who later go on to become famous.
Stick Season: Noah Kahan’s album is excellent; I’m falling in love with singer-songwriter folk-rock all over again. I miss you Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
- Ben
