Anonymous asked:
Five? Why not ten?
1. K____. I am dating her now. It’s going well. She has a job that lets her come to Michigan for extended periods. I am also grateful for everyone else I am dating, but I think she is the only person I started dating in the last year and the only person I’m able to see consistently.
2. Drs. W_____, M_____, and C_____. Having a good vs. bad attending can turn a residency from really good and educational to awful and abusive. So far I have lucked out in having many really good attendings, which means I’ve been able to learn stuff and treat patients and also have the emotional reserve to keep doing other useful stuff.
3. Andrew Gelman. I am trying to read his blog as much as possible and absorb his knowledge, but even when it doesn’t work I’m glad there are people like him out there, trying to figure out what is and isn’t true and make science better. After getting enraged by really terrible reporting and false claims everywhere else, it’s really calming to read his blog and just see him say reasonable and true things all the time. Other people like Daniel Lakens, James Coyne, et cetera also in this category.
4. Jonathan Haidt. I mentioned last night that big parts of the right are so horrible that they are massively counterproductive for their own stated goals. Jonathan Haidt is what happens if you take an actually smart and decent person and direct him at the same problem. If the darkest possible path for American politics sees the free-speech/free-thought movement fall to Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, and Milo Yiannopolous, then the best possible path sees it go through Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and Jerry Coyne. And of those, Haidt is the one actually putting work into it and thinking strategically.
5. Sam Altman. I’ve been getting to talk to more people doing AI risk-related work lately, and one common thread is that a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing or aren’t doing very much. Surprisingly, this is not about MIRI - they know exactly what they’re doing, it’s weird mathematical stuff, and whether or not you think it’s useful nobody can accuse them of not doing it. But a lot of other people/groups seem to just sort of be throwing money at each other without much of a plan. Sam (and a few other people like Elon Musk and Jaan Tallinn) seems to have gotten more involved recently, brought in some executive talent, and gotten things a little bit more shipshape. This is maybe a general stand-in for “people much smarter and richer and more competent than I am who are working on x-risk”.
6. Stephen Hsu is basically Sam Altman, but for genetics instead of AI. He’s one of very few people who strikes me as what you might call “pleasantly ambitious”, a sort of feeling like every time you check on him he’s going to have (very quietly, seemingly effortlessly) taken over a new institution, made it work much better, and turned it to the cause of good. Back when I heard he was running for the Harvard Board of Overseers, I was like “Of course he is”. Even though it didn’t work out I assume he will end up in charge of Harvard or something equally useful eventually, just because otherwise he would get bored having nothing to do besides discovering the deepest secrets of human life and giving us all superbabies.
7. Matt Fallshaw. He runs the webhosting company that hosts SSC, and which was also willing to host Unsong for free just out of the goodness of their hearts. He is totally and bizarrely okay with me using ads and profiting off of the free stuff he gives me. He saves me from having to *actually* know how to run a large and complicated website. Same with C______, who does the actual day-to-day hosting work for SSC, and Bakkot, who fixes technical problems and adds new features.
8. David Friedman makes my comments section about a million times more interesting and allows me to boast to people that I know David Friedman. Every so often when I am in his area he makes ridiculous authentic medieval meals for me.
9. @luminousalicorn and @michaelblume let me stay with them whenever I am in their area, cook me great food, tell me where all of the interesting social happenings are, and reproduce themselves so that there will be some more Bay Area rationalists to keep Andromeda and various Eden children company in the next generation.
10. Obligatory “my parents”, but it’s true.