#Tom Chivers

[psycheapuleius]

[maxksx]

Yudkowsky’s explicit goal in ‘Staring into the Singularity’ is to bring about AI – the singularity – as soon as possible.

“I have had it. I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships, torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger. I have had it with a planetary death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. I have had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality. None of this is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer necessary to look nervously away, repeating the mantra: “I can’t solve all the problems of the world.” We can. We can end this.”

[dipnotski]

Tom Chivers – Yapay Zekâ Senden Nefret Etmiyor (2023)

Yapay zekâ teknolojisi şimdiden öngörülenin ötesine geçmeye başladı. Yine de yapay zekâyla ilgili asıl korkutucu olan şey yapay zekânın öz bilinç ve özgür irade geliştirerek bize karşı isyan etmesi değil, dünyayı ve insanlığı yok etmesi. Ne de olsa bizler yapay zekâ için yalnızca atomlardan ibaret olabiliriz! Ödüllü yazar Tom Chivers tarafından kaleme alınan ve The Times’ın “Yılın Bilim…

[pazodetrasalba]

Devotio Scōticī

Dear Caroline:

This isn't the first instance in which you show your devotion to the Scot(t) -I should use the plural here, as besides Scott Alexander, you also had a partiality for Scott Aaronson, and just as well: I think I have mentioned in a previous post that they were the only two people from whom I have read kind comments with regard to you since the explosion of the FTX affair.

As opposed to you, have never heard Scott Alexander speak, so I can only imagine from what you say that he must have a very clear, easy-to-follow and easy-to-focus rhetoric. Only recently I learned two more things about him: he has just got married, and his Moloch article was highly praised by Max Tegmark in a podcast I listened to this week, which gives me food for though (and materials to read).

It is also difficult to imagine from the outside, and only by gleamings from your blog, how important he and his blog were as a hub for discussion and debate among the Rationalist community and as a mentor or leadership-like figure. He definitely transmits the vibes of a wise and kind person with unusual perspectives and ideas. Besides exploring his virtual home, I am tempted to try to learn a bit more about the Rationalists, as I know you were at the very least adjacent, and it is part of the Venn Diagrams of yours were it overlaps with EA, AI and general nerdiness. As you know, I am already plodding through Yudkowsky, but perhaps it would pay to take a glimpse at The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy, by Tom Chivers. And back to Scott's blog, I am sure there are a ton of comments there under your authorship and some hidden name(s).

Quote:

The rationalist community is a place where people can come together to explore some of the most interesting and challenging ideas in the world today. It's a place where people can learn from each other, challenge each other, and grow together.

Anna Salamon

[thepotentialof2007]

We struggle, sometimes, with randomness and uncertainty. We struggle with it in the sense that we don’t enjoy it – we don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. We struggle with it in the sense that we are bad judges of how likely or unlikely things are, of thinking in more complex shades than “will happen, won’t happen, might happen”.

But we also struggle with it in the sense that we don’t recognise it: after the fact, contingent facts seem inevitable; randomness dissolves into fate. We judge decisions not by whether they were made using the best information available at the time, but by what actually happened – a mistake known as “outcome bias”.

We have an inbuilt need to explain success and failure. And sometimes that’s important. But in some situations, huge outcomes hinge on tiny moments; a dice-roll, in essence, but a hidden dice-roll.

Too much of sports and politics journalism, I think, is finding narratives after the fact, “analysing” events by looking at the results.

Similarly, tiny, unnoticeable differences in reality can have major impacts on your outcome. David Foster Wallace, writing about tennis in 2006, talks about the minuscule details a tennis player has to pay attention to: the tiniest difference in the angle of the racquet’s face; hitting a ball a millisecond earlier or later. Tennis players repetitively, obsessively hit the same shots thousands and thousands of times in training, so that it is second nature, so they can hit it 999 times out of 1,000. But still, a minor irregularity in the court’s surface can change a bounce; a momentary slip can make a shot fail. The difference between a bad player and a good one is that the good one is more able to control randomness, to put the ball into the area they want to more often.

excerpts from “What Warhammer taught me about football” by Tom Chivers [x]

[cherylmmbookblog]

#BlogTour London Clay by Tom Chivers

#BlogTour London Clay by Tom Chivers

It’s a pleasure to take part in the Blogtour London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City by Tom Chivers About the Author Tom Chivers is a poet and publisher. He is the author of two pamphlets and two full collections of poetry to date, and is the director of the independent press Penned in the Margins.  In 2008 he was the Bishopsgate Institute’s first writer in residence, and has appeared widely at…

[poleom]

What are these numbers? 4 Ways to Check Statistics in the Media

What are these numbers? 4 Ways to Check Statistics in the Media #TomChivers #economics #statistics

Popularizer of science Tom Chivers gives advice on how not to fall for the bait of loud headlines. A functioning democratic state is impossible without a literate population. This fact has been recognized since at least the middle of the Victorian era. The Reform Act of 1867 expanded the voting rights of many working-class men, not all of whom were literate, and the elite were concerned that it…

[pepaldi]

‘The Devil’s Hour’: Jessica Raine, Peter Capaldi To Headline Amazon Thriller Series

EXCLUSIVE: Patrick Melrose actress Jessica Raine and Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi have been cast as the leads in Amazon’s The Devil’s Hour, the latest series from Sherlock and Dracula producer Hartswood Films.

From rising British writer Tom Moran, The Devil’s Hour is a UK original that tells the story of Lucy Chambers (Raine), a woman who wakes up every night at exactly 3.33AM, in the middle of the so-called devil’s hour between 3AM and 4AM.

Lucy Chambers’ eight-year-old son is withdrawn and emotionless. Her mother speaks to empty chairs. Her house is haunted by the echoes of a life that isn’t her own. Now, when her name is inexplicably connected to a string of brutal murders in the area, the answers that have evaded her all these years will finally come into focus.

Capaldi features in the six-part series as a reclusive nomad, driven by a murderous obsession. He becomes the prime target of a police manhunt led by compassionate detective Ravi Dhillon, played by Nikesh Patel, who recently featured in HBO Max/BBC Three comedy Starstruck.

Other cast includes Meera Syal (Yesterday), Alex Ferns (Chernobyl), Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso), Barbara Marten (Sanctuary), Thomas Dominique (Blood Drive), Rhiannon Harper-Rafferty (The Donmar Warehouse’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy), John Alastair (Swimming with Men), Sandra Huggett (Coronation Street) and newcomer Benjamin Chivers.

The Devil’s Hour is now filming in London and Farnborough Studios. Executive producers are Hartswood bosses Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue, and Moran. Johnny Allan is set as the director after helming episodes of Netflix’s The Irregulars.

[jadagul]

Read two essays lately that I'm finding interesting to read against each other.

One is this Megan McArdle essay, which goes back to the original "Broken Windows" article.

I realized that they had focused less on major crimes than I’d remembered, and more on disorder itself.

The original article begins with a foot patrol experiment in Newark, which didn’t reduce violent crime at all, yet somehow still made residents feel safer. Were they deluded? No, say Kelling and Wilson; the patrols had reduced disorder. And disorder itself makes people feel unsafe, particularly if they are elderly or otherwise vulnerable.

Over time, that may lead to worsening crime — for example, as law-abiding citizens stay home or leave town and cede the streets to scofflaws. But even if it doesn’t, fear and avoidance behaviors are themselves bad.

And there are a lot of things I could relate this to, like my San Francisco friends' bafflement that a wealthy city can't make public urination less than ubiquitous. But it really made me think of a Twitter essay I read earlier this week.

I don't think I can find the Twitter thread again, but it was responding to the argument that men are at substantially higher risk of being victims of violent crime, so it's irrational for women to be so scared of e.g. walking alone at night.

And this thread made a couple of points, but one was that women spend a lot of time dealing with low-grade harassment, and that is frightening on its own, regardless of whether it escalates to actual violent crime. All sorts of people checking you out and yelling at you and maybe following you and most of them won't attack you and you never know if this one is going to be dangerous. And none of this stuff shows up in the crime stats—how could it? What would you report? Who would listen?—but it contributes to a general feeling of anxiety and unsafety.

You can see a similar point from Tom Chivers here:

For one thing, it’s not just getting murdered that women fear. They fear getting abducted. They fear being raped. They are made by men to feel uncomfortable. Men yell things out of cars at women as they drive past, or follow them as they walk home, shouting out to them. One woman I know finished a half marathon as a bunch of men at the finish line loudly rated the attractiveness of the runners (“would, wouldn’t.”)

...

It’s mercifully true that almost none of those cases will escalate into murder, and few into actual violence. But, equally, I don’t think it’s irrational to be unnerved, in a world where these things happen reasonably regularly, and so to avoid being out alone after dark.

And that's...exactly the point Wilson and Kelling were making in "Broken Windows", right?

[psycheapuleius]

[curlygirl79]

London Clay - Tom Chivers

If you enjoy history, you will love London Clay by @ThisIsYogic #bookreview #bookblogger #nonfiction #history #geology #london #londonclay #fictioncafebookclub @randomttours

I have a fascinating non-fiction book to share with you all today, in the form of London Clay by Tom Chivers. Many thanks to Tom, and to Doubleday, for providing me with a copy of the book, and to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part. BLURB: Part personal memoir, part lyrical meditation, London Clay takes us deep in to the nooks and crannies of a forgotten city: a hidden…

[argumate]

Didn't Tom Chivers write a book about rationalists too?

isn’t that book relatively positive? positive books don’t count!

[nostalgebraist]

“The AI Does Not Hate You,” Tom Chivers’ book about LessWrong rationalism, is very different from other general-audience writing about the topic.

For one thing, it’s unabashedly and near-uniformly positive in its assessments (insofar as it makes assessments at all), which is quite a contrast with stuff like NAB and Sam Frank’s Harper’s article.  More fundamentally, though, it isn’t in the business of assessment or interpretation the way those works were.  Mostly, Chivers just tells you about the core arguments and ideas of LW-rationalism, piece by piece, in a complete enough way that a reader starting from zero would be able to grasp why it’s all at least supposed to make sense, whether or not they end up agreeing with it.

It’s definitely the most concise, complete, and accessible primer on this stuff I’ve seen, and as a default place to start, it has many advantages over “uh, read these 20 blog posts that all kind of assume you’ve read some of the others.”

On the other hand, the content being conveyed mostly just is the content you’d see in some greatest-hits rationalist blog post collection, without much interpretive gloss.  This makes the book underwhelming if you already follow this stuff -- which is fine, that just isn’t the target audience -- and also makes the book feel sort of weird compared to what I normally expect from journalism.  Even if Chivers doesn’t take everything at face value himself, he tends to present things at face value.  He doesn’t “delve under the surface,” he doesn’t “expose lurking tensions,” he (mostly) doesn’t hunt for conflicts and “show you both sides.”  Instead he just spends the whole book telling you what rationalists think and say, with relatively little editorial commentary.

This is clearly valuable expository work, the more so because others have avoided doing it and jumped straight to interpretation and critique.  But, because it’s so different from what others do and so close to what the rationalists themselves do, Chivers’ book occupies an odd position: it is for people sympathetic enough to read an extended exposition of LW-rationalism, played straight and taken seriously, yet it distinguishes itself from the many other such texts in existence largely by being framed as journalistic coverage from the outside.

(A bit like a book from, I dunno, the 1930s, that starts out with “I will tell you about my journey into the weird world of the Marxists, a subculture with striking and distinctive views” and then proceeds to give earnest step-by-step expositions of the labor theory of value, modes of production, vanguardism, etc., much as you’d find in writing by avowed Marxists, except they of course wouldn’t use the framing device.)

[pazodetrasalba]

TVF - Performatively creative

Dear Caroline:

This little snippet is from Adam Yedidia, one of the first witnesses at the FTX trial. In just a few brushstrokes, he manages to capture some of your most admirable virtues beyond the selflessness mentioned in your relative’s letters: your hard work, intelligence, kindness, creativity, joyfulness, and fun-loving spirit. I smiled at his oxymoronic mention of your “spare time”—a rarity, I imagine, given the intensity of your commitments. Yet from your blog, I already knew a bit about your LARP talents (like your notes from the Hong Kong game) and a touch of your culinary skills. These gems were tucked away on worldoptimization - life advice posts with tips about vinegars, shrub syrups, and scone recipes. I’m tempted to try those scones myself, if the links are still active.

Mr. Yedidia’s letter concludes with a suggestion that you might channel your empathy and skill with words into future careers in writing and education. I wholeheartedly agree. But I would add that the range of your abilities and interests is so broad that whatever you choose to focus on, I’m certain you’ll excel—not only for your own fulfillment but for the world around you as well.

Thinking about your future and the high likelihood of a positive outcome brough to mind the book I am currently reading: Everything is Predictable, by Tom Chivers. It is a light primer in Bayesianism (the subtitle is 'How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World). It would be light reading for you, but I think you would enjoy it - you reviewed one of Chivers's other books in your blog and goodreads before.

May these reflections bring you encouragement as you consider the possibilities awaiting you.