Backpropagation through graphical models for new year's resolutions and planning out priorities for the next year

Around New Year's every year, I take some time to reflect on the successes and failures of the past year and decide what I should prioritize for the next year. Usually I do this using a combination of paragraphs and bullet point lists.

I recently took a deep learning class where I learned about a technique called backpropagation, which is used to find optimal parameters for a predictive model. It occurred to me that an analogous thought process could be used to help guide New Year's planning.

This is the first time I have gone through this exercise, so I'm making it up as I go along. If you decide to try this (or if you have already tried something similar), I would be really delighted to hear any feedback (good or bad) or suggestions you might have for improving the method. 

Dreaming of Grandpa

memorial for grandma

Productivity through cycles of exploration and focus

I'm not a very good swimmer. I don't usually wear goggles, but I don't like getting water in my eyes. When I swim I start by looking around, noticing where obstacles points of interest are, and picking a destination. Then I close my eyes and swim towards that target for a while before stopping and repeating the cycle.

Isolating (peppermint) glandular trichomes by the bead-beater method

Sean Johnson

April 26, 2017

Simplified from: Gershenzon et al., ANALYTICAL BIOCHEMISTRY 200,130-138 (1992)

Zamenhof 1907 speech at the London guildhall

Zamenhof gave a lot of beautiful speeches. This one makes me cry every time I read it. It's a lot more eloquent in the original Esperanto, but here is a translation into English that I've made.

The speech was made during a period of intense nationalist violence in Zamenhof's home region. Also at the time of the speech, some members of the Esperanto community thought that Zamenhof's idealism was scaring people away from Esperanto. They wanted to advertise and use Esperanto solely as an instrument for international business and communication and to drop any discussion of world peace. A few years earlier Zamenhof had reluctantly endorsed some of their ideas.

In this speech Zamenhof clarifies that he still sees the pursuit of world peace as the primary goal of Esperanto and he makes a plea for people in the Esperanto community (and beyond) to not lose their idealism. For more about Zamenhof and his political ideas, see here, and here.

If the AI alignment problem is impossible, then unfriendly superintelligent AI might be still be self limiting

I thought of the following idea while trying to rationalize in-universe explanations for why evil AI in science fiction stories (specifically The Matrix) haven't reached the point of singularity and can still sometimes be outsmarted by humans.

It is possible that unfriendly AI would be self-limiting in the sense that it would voluntarily choose to not create an even more powerful unfriendly AI. For example, if an unfriendly AI were just smart enough to usurp humans as the dominant intelligence on Earth (and either destroy or subjugate humanity), then maybe that AI would want to avoid making the same mistake that people made and would retain its dominant status by choosing not to create something more intelligent than itself. It could be that the AI alignment problem is so hard that a superintelligence can't be aligned, but a superintelligence may be smart enough to realize that it (and more advanced superintelligences) can't be aligned.