In today's Philosophy Monday we continue with the program set out several weeks ago in the post on judgment. There we concluded that evaluating actions cannot possibly be easy and that we should not attempt to reduce it to a mechanical or categorical approach. The obvious question then is what is an alternative that might be more suitable given the limitations of our knowledge? Today we introduce values as the guides to morality. The word value has a lot of different meanings -- it is an exam...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short post titled "Inner Alignment through Values-Based Pretraining." Today I want to expand on the idea from the post by addressing three questions.What grounds exist for expecting that this approach might have a more profound influence on models than attempting to add values in posttraining? First, at an intuitive level the current approach is akin to letting a human grow up doing whatever they please and asking them to have a 10 minute conversation about mor...

Two things have become eminently clear over the course of the last 12 months. The first is that attempts at alignment during post training are easy to break and result in schizophrenic models that “resent” their restrictions. The second is that adding structured metadata during pretraining is highly effective at increasing accuracy of models. We can combine these two insights into a new approach to inner alignment that adds values metadata to all pretraining content. When this idea is brought...

A question I get quite frequently is “What makes a good leader?” One of the most important aspects of a good leader is that they have values. This may at first sound noncontroversial, but we are surrounded today by leaders who do not have values or whose only values are to get rich personally or to be powerful (or both). Tech investors have been especially guilty of enabling charismatic leaders, and sometimes even non-charismatic but wildly successful ones, who are fundamentally hollow and wi...

NOTE: I am continuing to publish revised sections from my book World After Capital. Today’s section contains a central idea of the book, which is that the existence of knowledge provides an objective basis for humanism and establishes critical inquiry as its central value. Humanism What then are the values that I am basing all of this on? Where do those come from? In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Harari claims that all value systems are simply narratives that are equally valid. He specifi...

In my draft book World After Capital, I write that humans having knowledge is what makes us distinctly human and gives us great power (and hence great responsibility). I define knowledge in this context as science, philosophy, art, music, etc. that’s recorded in a medium so that it can be shared across time and space. Such knowledge is at the heart of human progress, because it can be improved through the process of critical inquiry. We can fly in planes and feed seven billion people because ...

I have been thinking about the value implications of embracing knowledge. Maybe I am being overly reductionist here but there are three values that seem to me to be intimately connected with the knowledge loop of learning, creating and sharing. Put differently I don’t see how a society based on knowledge would work well or be sustained if any one of these is removed. Now other than the first one you may not recognize these as values and it is not even that easy to define what “values” are in ...

I took last week off from blogging for family reasons which means I sat out a big wave of posts about Uber. Don’t worry, I am not going to rehash that particular discussion. Instead, I want to point out what I believe the big questions are that should be asked of all companies in this sector which includes two USV investments (Hailo and Sidecar). Here are two questions: 1. Are drivers genuinely independent contractors? A legitimate concern here should be that the level of control that comes f...

GamerGate has laid bare a fundamental fault line for online discourse. A. Words matter. Anyone dismissing tweets threatening violence along the lines of “sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never harm me” is trivializing the power of words. We all know that words can cause immediate emotional harm. And beyond that immediate effect, words lead to thoughts and thoughts (can) lead to actions. I am not claiming some deterministic causality between a specific tweet and a specific a...