Bit of a Tangent

[Epistemic status: slightly intoxicated]

Jared and Gianluca exchange rapid-fire questions whilst becoming increasingly inebriated. Think of this episode as the Ferriss/Rose “Random Show,” but with more references to Bayesian inference. It’s pretty likely to entertain you, but hopefully you’ll find it interesting too. Topics include Email response times, VR projects, and the statistical approach to an ethical diet. 

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Shownotes:

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last episode: https://www.podtangent.com/e/025-self-supervised-machine-learning-introduction-intuitions-and-use-cases/

The Game Changers: www.imdb.com/title/tt7455754/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Joe Rogan Experience #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq4Apc2Xk7Q

Sam Altman on Conversations with Tyler: conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-altman/

Top 19 Ideas from 2019: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/

Jared’s Twitter thread (19 ideas I couldn't stop thinking about in 2019): https://twitter.com/jnearestn/status/1211681767742156803

Donald Knuth on Lex Fridman’s podcast: https://lexfridman.com/donald-knuth/

Glen Weyl on the 80000 Hours podcast: https://soundcloud.com/80000-hours/glen-weyl-radically-reforming-capitalism-and-democracy

Eric and Brett Weinstein talking about DISC and the failings of peer review on The Portal: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/19-bret-weinstein-the-prediction-and-the-disc/id1469999563?i=1000462975502

Gianluca’s paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.05363

This equation will change how you see the world by Veritasium: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJcsL7vyrk

On this episode of Bit of A Tangent, we discuss the emerging field of self-supervised machine learning. This is an immensely exciting area of active research in machine learning and AI - one which most people haven’t even heard about yet! We build up to the intuition for the topic by covering supervised and unsupervised learning; autoencoders and dimensionality reduction, and exploring how these techniques could be applied to Gianluca’s Quantified Self n=1 sleep quality dataset. We culminate in a detailed discussion of the state-of-the-art Contrastive Predictive Coding model, and how it allows us to learn about the structure of the world, without tonnes of labelled training data!

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Shownotes:

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (www.twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Summer school on Computational Neuroscience: http://imbizo.africa/

Control problem in AI: https://intelligence.org/stanford-talk/

Coordination problem: https://conceptually.org/concepts/coordination-problems

Deep learning overview: https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/2017/06/21/an-overview-of-deep-learning.html

t-SNE explained: https://mlexplained.com/2018/09/14/paper-dissected-visualizing-data-using-t-sne-explained/

Variational autoencoders explained: https://anotherdatum.com/vae.html

Self-supervised learning by fast.ai: https://www.fast.ai/2020/01/13/self_supervised/

CPC model papers on Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.03748.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09272.pdf 

Blog posts explaining CPC: https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/2019/11/10/self-supervised-learning.html

https://yann-leguilly.gitlab.io/post/2019-09-29-representation-learning-with-contrastive-predictive-coding/

https://mf1024.github.io/2019/05/27/contrastive-predictive-coding/

Gianluca announces his latest project—the audio version of Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series—and Jared explains why it’s a notable contribution to the rationalist community. Together, they discuss how to gain the most from listening to the series and why it’s something you should strongly consider doing if you often find yourself binging Netflix until 3 AM.  

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Shownotes:

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Replacing Guilt podcast: https://anchor.fm/guilt

Rationality: From AI to Zombies podcast: www.from-ai-to-zombies.eu/

SlateStarCodex podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/slate-star-codex-podcast/id1295289140

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (audio): http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/

Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Jared and Gianluca have an uncompromising exchange about computational neuroscience and its implications for life and AI research.

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Shownotes:

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Jared on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jnearestn

Gianluca on Twitter: www.twitter.com/QVagabond

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last episode: www.podtangent.com/e/022-6-books-you-need-to-read-in-2020/

Ideas episode: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/

The Portal podcast episode with Garrett Lisi: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/15-garrett-lisi-my-arch-nemesis-myself/id1469999563?i=1000458879827

Don Hoffman on Sam Harris’ podcast: https://samharris.org/subscriber-extras/178-reality-illusion/

Gianluca presents his much-requested three non-fiction and three fiction recommendations for 2020. Jared recommends a book so long and gripping that you should probably avoid it if you have anything productive to do in the next six months. 

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Shownotes:

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Jared (twitter.com/jnearestn) and Gianluca (twitter.com/QVagabond) on Twitter

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter (twitter.com/podtangent) and Instagram (www.instagram.com/podtangent/)

Last week’s episode: www.podtangent.com/e/021-the-top-19-ideas-from-2019/

Gianluca on Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/user/show/56535709-gianluca

Books Gianluca read in 2019: www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/14773941

Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths: www.goodreads.com/book/show/25666050-algorithms-to-live-by

80000 Hours podcast with one of the authors of Algorithms to Live By: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-algorithms-to-live-by/

Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://equilibriabook.com/

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

007 | Game Theory, Alignment, and Civilisational Inadequacy: https://www.podtangent.com/e/007-game-theory-alignment-and-civilisational-inadequacy/

Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

The Replacing Guilt Series by Nate Soares: http://mindingourway.com/guilt/

Half-assing it with everything you’ve got: http://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/

Discussions of Replacing Guilt on The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast: www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2019/08/92-replacing-guilt/

Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncertainty

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens

Neil Gaiman on the Tim Ferriss show: https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/

The Metropolitan Man by Alexander Wales: www.goodreads.com/book/show/22872436-the-metropolitan-man

Alexander Wales on the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast: www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2018/07/63-rational-fiction/

The Metropolitan Man audiobook (free podcast): www.hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=1705

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin: www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-problem

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu: www.goodreads.com/book/show/39803561-the-paper-menagerie

Worm (the webseries you should probably never read): https://parahumans.wordpress.com/