https://yichabod.github.io/ Recent content on Max Langenkamp Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/institution/ Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/institution/ What is an institution? Introducing ‘A Grammar of Institutions’ This is part of my series on Ostrom. You can also find the root page here. ‘How should we define institutions?’1 This is a difficult but surprisingly important question; at its core, traditional political science is about the study of institutions. Also, if we want to talk about governance, we need also a vocabulary to discuss the setting where governance takes place. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/ostrom/ Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/ostrom/ This is a collection for the most important things I have learned from reading Elinor Ostrom. It is not comprehensive (for that you might turn to the Four Volume tome published by Lexington press). These are just some of the insights that I found most striking. My plan for the series: What is an institution? Introducing ‘A Grammar’ An overview of Institutional Analysis and Development Reflections on ‘Governing the Commons’ …(TBD) https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_governance/ Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_governance/ This is a live document. If you have any suggestions, please let me know at maxlangenkamp[at]me.com Questions about Governance: A Primer Earlier on, I collected some key questions about economic growth. This page is my attempt to gather the key questions about governance. As before, I found this exercise especially useful. I will also be using the descriptive/normative division to organize the questions. A brief note before I get to the questions: as David Levi-Faur points out in the Oxford Handbook of Governance, ‘governance’ has been introduced only very recently. https://yichabod.github.io/book_reviews/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/book_reviews/ Book Reviews Half of these are scribbles for my memory retention that I’ve been asked to share. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China Skunk Works * Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre The Disgrace https://yichabod.github.io/posts/2021_review/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/2021_review/ Gorgeous Chemical Fires Note: you are one of a small number of people getting this update. Perhaps it should go without out saying but I request that you please don’t share this without asking beforehand. (Subnote: the original version of this was hosted on substack and I’ve repasted it here so all the links are missing) As I start this letter, I am 10,000 meters above the ground, squeezed between two strangers with a polypropylene mask over my face. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/age_of_ambition/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/age_of_ambition/ Author: Evan Osnos Finished: April 7th, 2022 I want to use this as an example to implement Holden Karnofsky’s suggestion that you learn by refining hypotheses. Summary The book documents the complicated clash of aspiration and authoritarianism within China. The party “shed [socialism’s] scripture, but held onto its saints.” Notes The book is broken down into three sections Random notes: The diversity of Western influence in China is fascinating; Michael Sandel, the Harvard ethics prof, is a superstar in China, filling stadiums with his lectures Xi Jinping’s chief anticorruption czar is a big fan of Alexis de Tocqueville Perhaps the most important event that shaped the CCP’s consciousness was the fall of the Soviet Union Bobos were the aspiring middle class Questions for recall https://yichabod.github.io/posts/automation/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/automation/ Automation and institutional friction re Adam Marblestone’s ‘General automation, and Science’ Adam Marblestone has a thought-provoking post on how much he expects AI to speed up science. He suggests breaking down skills into three types (types 1, 2, and 3). Type 1 skills operate in ‘kind’1, game-like domains (Chess, Go, etc). Type 2 skills have lots of demonstration data but not obvious score (e.g. writing essays in response to prompts). Type 3 basically refers to everything else (‘wicked’ tasks like e. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/become_career/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/become_career/ Do what you want to become I was listening to a childhood friend talk about his business’ financials when I had a realization; the thing that is so insidious about many who orient their lives around a standardized career (I have in mind my father’s career as an investment banker) is not so much that it wastes the golden years of their lives, or that they per se lose the activities and hobbies that were so dear to them. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/dairik_zen_practice/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/dairik_zen_practice/ Dairik Amae on Zen and Practice I recently had the great privilege of visiting my friend JC and his Zen teacher Dairik in Montreal. After a series of matcha tea ceremonies, delectable Japanese breakfasts, and direct meditative instruction, we three along with my friend Mackenzie proceeded to have a dialogue on the nature of Zen and how Dairik conceives of practice. The transcript of our dialogue is below. Max 0:09 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decentralized_governance/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decentralized_governance/ Governing the Decentralized Commons Taking a digital constitutionalism lens to Web3 Enoshima in Sagami Province, from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景)” At the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868), there were several agrarian villages in the Yamanashi prefecture. During the civil wars that led to the overthrow of the Ashikaga shogunate, vast swathes of land became commons — the open fields belonged to no feudal lord1. Amid this free-for-all, some villagers began to take more than their due — reaping more rice crops than was sustainable, cutting down trees than could naturally regrow. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decision_theory/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decision_theory/ Objecting to Decision Theory Two years ago, my friend Tuomas and I took a seminar on decision theory taught by Caspar Hare. I was hoping to learn how to make better decisions, or else see what all the rationalist hype was about1. Tuomas was interested in its applications to AI safety. As the zealous intellectuals, Tuomas and I were allured by the taste of abstract thought experiments that grew more bizarre and dizzying as we read onwards. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/disgrace/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/disgrace/ Read February 12th, 2021 Beautifully written. An excellent example of spare yet striking prose. The book is about a professor, David Lurie, who has an affair with a student of his and leaves his city life in South Africa to go to live with his daughter in the countryside. Some men break into the farm, rape Lucy and set David on fire. The second half of the novel deals with the aftermath. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/energy_longevity/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/energy_longevity/ Energy practice as longevity intervention Cultivating energy capacity can increase your subjective lifespan. Longevity researchers talk about extending the human lifespan1. People immersed in the ‘productivity subculture’ talk about carefully managing time or attention to get more things done2. I claim they share an underlying desire; to bring forth more from life, to have more vividness, richness, satisfaction. One factor that hugely mediates how much you can make of life is energy. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/impro/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/impro/ Source/Author (year):: Keith Johnstone (1981) This is one of my favorite books of all time. Below are some excerpts Big points Education Education is often a destructive force “People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/love_lxm/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/love_lxm/ A love letter to LXM: or why you should run demo nights Dear Raffi, Marley, and Aayush, Back in March when I arrived back to Cambridge from New Zealand it was cold and I was lonely. I didn’t have a place to live. Aayush, in suggesting I can stay at LXM as long as I wanted, gave me the confidence necessary to arrive here in the first place without a real living plan. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mit_legacy/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mit_legacy/ MIT’s Legacy, the Professional Managerial Class, and Safetyism with Luke Igel We talk about our experience and the history of MIT. The Legacy and Experience of MIT: safetyism, the Nixon enemy list, and the loss of innocence Content Excerpts Transcript Personal reflection on coming to MIT Hacks at MIT The feeling of apocalypse as COVID arrives On current hope for preserving MIT culture On MIT’s loss of innocence On cybernetics, Cybersyn, and von Neumann https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mloss_essay/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mloss_essay/ How Open Source Machine Learning Software Shapes AI Acknowledgements We would like to thank many different people for contributing to the research that comprised this post. Tim Hwang and Teddy Collins at CSET for originally sparking this research question, Helen Toner for her early encouragement and feedback on research framing, Tuomas Oikarinen for sharpening our arguments, Tan Zhi Xuan and Serena Booth for providing several helpful resources. Summary This post is authored by Max Langenkamp, who did this research during his MEng at MIT’s Algorithmic Alignment Group, and by Dylan Hadfield-Menell, associate professor and Max’s supervisor. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/names/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/names/ Names and nebulosity Names are hard to systematize. My friend’s father, who worked for a long time at a certain aerospace manufacturer told me an anecdote about this that stuck with me: “Engine 1 and engine 2? That’s ridiculous! How is a mechanic on the runway supposed to know which wing to service without an entire blueprint? Left engine and right engine is so much more logical.” “What about the legacy system? https://yichabod.github.io/posts/nondual/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/nondual/ Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness-as-such On Zoran Josipovic’s Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness-as-such. This is just an explanation of a paper that I found very provocative: 1) it provides a theory of nonduality grounded loosely in neuroscience and 2) it relates in a deep way to some of the core claims of Heidegger, which are important for understanding the grand mistake within analytic philosophy. Nondual awareness is emphasized mostly in Himalayan Buddhism. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/sartorial_display/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/sartorial_display/ Sartorial display In the renunciative view of Buddhism I was first introduced to, which bears significant similarity to Protestant Christianity, ostentatious clothes were seen as vain, even arrogant. That comes from a view whereby the material world is seen as a tempting seductress one must kick in the face. To be pure, one needs to climb out of the muck of sin samsara. Yet we can also see clothing as a gift. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/skunk_works/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/skunk_works/ Source/Author (year): Ben Rich (1996) Overview A biography of one of the most innovative organizations in the world; the Skunk Works branch of Lockheed. A great treatise on the aerospace industry, how military contracting works, the difficulties of bureaucracy, and how to manage people. Notes Kelly Johnson: a top secret classification increases costs 25% and vastly decreases efficiency Trusting a small team was key to Skunk Works success Quality control happened daily, in the form of self-checking, rather than at the end of the project as was standard elsewhere in the industry The Navy is far more stringent than the Air Force Kelly’s most important principles of operation: Program manager needs full control of his project in all respects Number of people involved in any given project must be viciously restricted. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/social_energy/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/social_energy/ On social energy what makes an interaction energizing? 陳少梅 Chen Shao-Mei (1909-1954), From Twenty-Four Stories of Filial Piety Back as a student doing cognitive science research, my advisor was a ridiculously productive accomplished academic. The moment of peak stress each week was our weekly discussion. Every time after our meetings, I noticed the world relax. My whole being sighed in relief. Why does it take different amounts of energy to be around different people? https://yichabod.github.io/posts/taiwan/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/taiwan/ Notes on Taiwan Taiwan is young In bullet points: Around 6,000 years ago, Taiwan seems to have been settled by the ancestors of modern Taiwanese indigenous peoples. They are also the ancestors of the various indigenous peoples in Oceania (e.g. Maori, Samoans)1. The first Han presence seems to have been Chinese fishermen in the islands off of Taiwan. Under the Yuan dynasty, Penghu (a small island off of Taiwan), was incorporated in 1218 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/tech_debt/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/tech_debt/ We are individually and collectively amassing technical debt We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. - Crisis of the Mind, Paul Valery From Jodorowsky’s Panic Fables We are all amassing personal and collective technical debt1. Technical debt is what happens when a pattern is established that is adaptive for one situation, but where the world has changed, and the pattern is no longer adaptive. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/tech_not_inevitable/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/tech_not_inevitable/ Technology is not inevitable When talking to certain technologist friends about brain-computer interfaces and artificial general intelligence, I’m struck by how often I hear that such idea-complexes1 are referred to as ‘inevitable’. In this example, my friend (who I’ll use to represent the various people2 who’ve held this stance) basically says: ‘if it is physically possible, and there is economic incentive, it’ll happen’. Let’s put aside the initial question about the ambiguity of what counts as BCI/AGI. https://yichabod.github.io/posts/therapy/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/therapy/ Choosing a therapy There are dozens of different therapeutic modalities. I provide my opinion on a small subset of modalities, informed by two years of (nonprofessional) exploration. This may be helpful for people trying to navigate therapy or ‘self-healing’ more generally. Context Two years ago, in the midst of a personal crisis, I started taking ‘self-healing’ as a goal very seriously. I spent hundreds of hours reading about different approaches to therapy, trying techniques and taking notes on my experience. https://yichabod.github.io/projects/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/projects/ Professional I graduated in 2022 from MIT with a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in computer science. I’ve also dabbled in economics and philosophy. You can find my complete thesis here, the thesis-based paper I submitted to AI Ethics and Society here, and a blog post I wrote summarizing both here. Selected past jobs: Data analysis and policy at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology ███████ at In-Q-Tel 5G and AI Policy at White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Reinforcement learning to model human behavior at the MIT Computational Cognitive Science group Playing around with TensorFlow at Cerebras Projects plugging in a USB: what’s the worst that can happen? https://yichabod.github.io/writing/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/writing/ Essays See also my Book Reviews. On predictions March 5th, 2024 People as prediction engines, how I got better. On meaning #3: We who glimpse icebergs March 3rd, 2024 Invisible entities and how they can help us see more whole. On meaning #2: In the world like lovers in love February 26th, 2024 About the two senses of the word ‘in’. On meaning #1: We thinking animals February 18th, 2024 The first in a series exploring meaning as inspired by Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ https://yichabod.github.io/posts/telescopic_poem/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/telescopic_poem/ https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_growth/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_growth/ This is a live document. If you have any suggestions, please let me know at maxlangenkamp[at]me.com Questions about Growth There is much ado about economic growth1. I wanted to better understand the debate, so I decided to collect the key questions. This essay is a breadth-first examination of growth and governance using questions Why questioning instead of summarizing? Questioning requires understanding the intention of research in a way that summarizing does not.