Kat Woods is an effective altruist and the co-founder of Nonlinear, which incubates longtermist nonprofits by connecting founders with ideas, funding, and mentorship. Gianluca and Kat discuss brain hacks for curing imposter syndrome and being more agentic, infohazards, the simulation hypothesis, why you don’t need permission to do things, “passive impact” via automation, and Kat’s exciting new projects at Nonlinear.

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Kat Woods on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Kat__Woods

Kat’s blog: www.katwoods.org/

Nonlinear: www.nonlinear.org/

Effective Altruism (EA): https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

The Effective Altruism Handbook: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/handbook

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality

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

SMBC cartoon on compatibilism: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/compatibilism

Nonlinear Library (podcast): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JTZTBienqWEAjGDRv/listen-to-more-ea-content-with-the-nonlinear-library

Kat’s post on text-to-speech automation: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tAWK33eNXZKMckPhn/how-and-why-to-turn-everything-into-audio

EA Houses: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4zHWQNzCusaTfD7jz/ea-houses-live-or-stay-with-eas-around-the-world

Nonlinear support fund: www.nonlinear.org/productivity-fund.html

Nonlinear bounty programme: https://super-linear.org/

EA hiring agency: https://second-bellflower-54f.notion.site/EA-Hiring-Agency-0d6d75a0f5934455be9003fd7886d537

Nonlinear newsletter: www.nonlinear.org/subscribe.html

Bit of a Tangent on Twitter: www.twitter.com/podtangent

Bit of a Tangent on Instagram: instagram.com/podtangent/

In this episode, Gianluca and Jared discuss the neurobiology of predictive processing, the role of dopamine in reward signalling, satisfaction, and human desire. They also touch on the relation of reward to reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence.

The podcast then shifts to discuss the clinical manifestations of the predictive brain, including the computational psychiatry of depression, autism-spectrum-disorder, and schizophrenia, and how top-down prediction, and precision-weighted prediction error explain central aspects of these conditions.

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

Last episode: https://podtangent.com/e/029-predictive-processing-2-where-the-action-is/

This week’s episode of Bit of a Tangent is a continuation of our 3 part series on Predictive Processing - a fascinating neuroscientific account of the way our brains come to understand the world. If you haven’t already listened to part 1 (episode 028), check that out first!

In this episode Gianluca and Jared discuss the importance of sensory precision, the circular causality of prediction and action, how action comes about in a counterintuitive way from high confidence predictions, the way in which prior expectations can bias sensory sampling, and how this could lead to self-fulfilling spirals that would make your life either much worse or much better!

Find us on Twitter @podtangent

It's here. It's finally here! The first in a series of three episodes diving into the predictive processing theory of brain function! Jared and Gianluca discuss top-down versus bottom-up perception, Bayesian Brain hypotheses, the logic of caring only about prediction error, and the phenomenology of visual illusions!

Gianluca and Jared have survived 2020 (so far) and are back for Season 3 of Bit of a Tangent. In this episode they bring you 7 new habits and techniques that can be used to iteratively upgrade yourself — even in lockdown. Forget everything else that’s going on in the world, and take a deep dive into personal optimisation. Or, as they’d put it, prepare to geek out on organisation hacks, bootstrapped learning, and motivation pumps.

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

Last episode: https://podtangent.com/e/026-drink-and-be-rational/

Matt D’Avella’s video on Checklists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n2vL2I__WY

Alex Vermeer’s Tangibles: https://alexvermeer.com/tangibles/

Roam research: https://roamresearch.com/

Put iPhone in grayscale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNuziJOl61o

FitNotes Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.jamesgay.fitnotes

Matt D’Avella’s 30-day challenges: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXKuahfdkl6zkBULJhEMNy_RnErOYXwJk

How Jerry Seinfeld writes jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s

Anki (flashcards tool): https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Michael Nielsen’s essay on learning with Anki: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

POLAR bookshelf software: https://getpolarized.io/

How to wrap your headphones up: https://youtu.be/3_FueKBoRO0?t=171

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

Last episode: https://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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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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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/

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