Hello!
Last week I flew to California, made new friends, danced in a forest, and told an emotional story. That meant there was less time than I’d hoped for writing. Ah, there will be time, there will be time.
Writing
Essays
What repositories do ML practitioners use most? I look at surveys to figure out what repos researchers say they use. I leave wanting more.
Notes
What if we had a more granular hierarchy of coordination challenges? What are harder and easier versions of common-pool resource challenges? What are the meaningful dimensions they can differ along? A better ontology would be useful not only for stress-testing governance schemes, but maybe also for classifying civilizations. More complex civilizations can solve harder coordination problems. Are more complex civilizations also more worthy of moral sympathy?
Questions are heavily undertheorized. What is a question? A request for information? A bridge between knowledge and the unknown? The mysterious aha at a beautiful question is so elusive.External Links
Building a grammar of blockchain governance. About Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework in the context of blockchains (Their project: Ostrom-complete Governance). A caution against naively using Ostrom’s commons design principles for things that are not common-pool resources (see e.g. blockchains).
Scaring People into Supporting Backdoors. “Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.” From the excellent Bruce Schneier, most recently in response to Apple breaking their end-to-end encryption.
Books
Storyworthy, Dicks. This book was what inspired me to tell a story to 200 people last weekend. A core concept is the ‘five second moment of transformation’ that every good story must have. Highly recommended. Venkatesh Rao’s review is what first got me to buy the book.
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Henrich. I was initially inspired by the Tyler Cowen interview, and now I’m reading it for a book club. So far, though, I’m a little disappointed by the uncritical references to experiments that have failed to replicate (Marshmellow test, other priming experiments). This is especially troubling because it seems to form a big part of Henrich’s (lowercase) weird thesis. We shall see how I feel at the end of the book.
Planning
Review
Finish and write up user survey of most typically used/impactful ML tools (done)
Get descriptive statistics and do simple analysis of the repos (pushed back - blocked by external delay)
(Stretch) write up short essay with results (pushed back - external delay)
Fill out form for MIT IRB (done)
Also half done with the ‘Questions about Governance’ essay
Next Two Weeks
Get statistics from awesome-ml + LFAI repos. Do analysis. Write up analysis.
Construct dependency graph using statistics
Collect literature review into spreadsheet