I work on New Science, building new institutions of basic science, starting with the life sciences.
Over the weekends, I’m tinkering with GPT-3 and thinking about the course of development of advanced ML systems and their impact, both positive and negative, on science and society in the coming decades.
Please direct New Science-related inquires to alexey@newscience.org. For everything else, you can contact me at alexey@guzey.com or via Twitter.
December 3, Best of Holden Karnofsky and Sam Altman
November 21, If the moon doesn't need gravity, why do we? The necessity of understanding for general intelligence
November 16, Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
November 11, Who is the real prophet of longtermism: Will MacAskill or Sam Altman?
November 9, Forecasting humans becoming generally intelligent with biological anchors: year 10,000,000,000,002,2022
October 31, What is the alternative to utilitarianism?
Most Notable
- Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
- How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
- I no longer believe that it’s possible to achieve extremely high productivity sustained over long periods of time working on difficult projects alone, so now I spend the majority of my working time co-working with my friends over video in my virtual gather.town office
- Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- Theses on Sleep
- The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment
If you would like to catch up with the archives at a comfortable pace, you can sign up to receive one email with 3 selected old posts weekly (only active until it runs out of great posts to send) by clicking on this link.
AI
- Forecasting humans becoming generally intelligent with biological anchors: year 10,000,000,000,002,2022
- Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
- If the moon doesn’t need gravity, why do we? The necessity of understanding for general intelligence
Notable
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
- What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice
- Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit?
- Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research
- Intelligence killed genius
- What is the alternative to utilitarianism?
- Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design
- Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders
- Ideas not mattering is a psyop
- It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
- How to make friends over the internet
- Tools / Gear
- My low-demand, worry-free, and healthy diet
- How to use your wife/husband/gf/bf correctly
- Links
- Issues with Bloom et al’s “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation
- Research Ideas
- Best of Holden Karnofsky and Sam Altman
- Gwern’s Most Important Writing (in essays, tweets, book reviews, and other forms
- Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
- Don’t believe self-reported data
- Is anything inherently difficult?
- Why You Should Join Twitter Right Now
- William MacAskill misrepresents the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
Personal
- Q&A with my high school self: helping 14-16 year old Alexey to deal with his emotions, to ask for help, to talk to people (and his dad), to learn, to get things done.
- On Friendship and on Finding Your People
- 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College
- My journal: years of depression and self-loathing; learning to accept myself and others; overcoming video game addiction
- My Favorite Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts, Music, Video games
- People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire
- My 4-monitor computer setup (16-inches + 49-inches + 34-inches + 24-inches
Fiction & Art
- How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same
- Why You Should Not Go on a Tinder Date with Me
- Dating
- RAPIDLY PRESS X TO REFUSE TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN MORTALITY
- A dying snake
Other
- How Our Commitments Slip Away From Us (pdf, my bachelor’s thesis)
- Why We Likely Underappreciate the Pace of Technological Progress
- Instilling Novel Thought Patterns and Making Your Long-Term Memory Accountable with Anki
- Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”
- Fun Economic Facts
- Interview with Ben Kuhn about productivity, his college experience, job choice, the value of an inside view, the EA community #interview
- Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
- Polynomial Time Reductions and the P vs NP problem
- Three Questions for Russia
- Online courses and textbooks I recommend
- Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?
- Tweet rot
- Low tech stuff I recommend
- Can We Trust Peter Turchin?
- Scientific experiments I want to fund
- Tweet-Sized Insight Porn
- Philosophers for Sale
- Julian Jaynes and the Ancient Tablets
- The most we can say about earnings of Substack’s top writers
- Who is the real prophet of longtermism: Will MacAskill or Sam Altman?