2016-17 New Year review

2016 progress

Research / career:

• Got a job at DeepMind as a research scientist in AI safety.
• Presented MiniSPN paper at ICLR workshop.
• Finished RNN interpretability paper and presented at ICML and NIPS workshops.
• Attended the Deep Learning Summer School.
• Finished and defended PhD thesis.
• Moved to London and started working at DeepMind.

FLI:

• Talk and panel (moderator) at Effective Altruism Global X Boston
• Talk and panel at the Governance of Emerging Technologies conference at ASU
• Talk and panel at Brain Bar Budapest
• AI safety session at OpenAI unconference
• Talk and panel at Effective Altruism Global X Oxford
• Talk and panel at Cambridge Catastrophic Risk Conference run by CSER

Rationality / effectiveness:

• Went to a 5-day Zentensive meditation retreat with Janos, in between grad school and moving to London. This was very helpful for practicing connecting with my direct emotional experience, and a good way to reset during a life transition.
• Stopped using 42goals (too glitchy) and started recording data in a Google form emailed to myself daily. Now I am actually entering accurate data every day instead of doing it retroactively whenever I remember. I tried a number of goal tracking apps, but all of them seemed too inflexible (I was surprised not to find anything that provides correlation charts between different goals, e.g. meditation vs. hours of sleep).

Random cool things:

• Hiked in the Andes to an altitude of 17,000 feet.
• Visited the Grand Canyon.
• New countries visited: UK, Bolivia, Spain.
• Started a group house in London (moving there in a few weeks).
• Started contributing to the new blog Approximately Correct on societal impacts of machine learning.

2016 prediction outcomes

Resolutions:

1. Finish PhD thesis (70%) – done
2. Write at least 12 blog posts (40%) – 9
3. Meditate at least 200 days (50%) – 245
4. Exercise at least 200 days (50%) – 282
5. Do at least 5 pullups in a row (40%) – still only 2-3
6. Record at least 50 new thoughts (50%) – 29
7. Stay up past 1:30am at most 20% of the nights (40%) – 26.8%
8. Do at least 10 pomodoros per week on average (50%) – 13

Predictions:

1. At least one paper accepted for publication (70%) – two papers accepted to workshops
2. I will get at least one fellowship (40%)
3. Insomnia at most 20% of nights (20%) – 18.3%
4. FLI will co-organize at least 3 AI safety workshops (50%) – AAAI, ICML, NIPS

Calibration:

• Low predictions (20-40%): 1/5 = 20% (overconfident)
• Medium predictions (50-70%): 6/7 = 85% (underconfident)
• It’s interesting that my 40% predictions were all wrong, and my 50% predictions were almost all correct. I seem to be translating system 1 labels of ‘not that likely’ and ‘reasonably likely’ to 40% and 50% respectively, while they should translate to something more like 25% and 70%. After the overconfident predictions last year, I tried to tone down the predictions for this year, but the lower ones didn’t get toned down enough.
• I seem to be more accurate on predictions than resolutions, probably due to wishful thinking. Experimenting with no resolutions for next year.

2017 predictions

1. Our AI safety team will have at least two papers accepted for publication at a major conference, not counting workshops (70%).
2. I will write at least 9 blog posts (50%).
3. I will meditate at least 250 days (45%).
4. I will exercise at least 250 days (55%).
5. I will visit at least 2 new countries (80%).
6. I will attend Burning Man (85%).