If you haven’t seen this DJ set they did a few years ago, it is worth a watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NWH...

Science will take a huge hit; academic stars will leave; university reputations will crumble, and homegrown talent will be even harder to find.

Asia and Europe will profit.

Epic unforced errors, all in the overly narrow pursuit of cutting costs.

Fellow THOU fan here. Converge—Jane Doe will forever be my go-to paper writing album though. Something about that record puts my fingers on automatic. Although this morning I’m ICMLing to this jazz-punk classic and highly recommend: youtu.be/rl4DnYwjjuU?...

Yeah, but on the other hand I might be wrong and underestimating how many people even Yarvin might convince. I’ve previously been annoyed at NYT platforming certain people for op-eds and I’m having trouble reconciling that with my feelings on this. Maybe interview at least pushes back slightly?

Concretely, when I imagine the population that would fall for the Vance version, I assume that some subset would reject his ideas if they had heard Yarvin's version first, came up with a refutation, and knew how to recognize more sneaky versions due to their prior experience with the rougher version

I think it can be a mistake to platform bad actors for reasons you mentioned. But once you have someone like a VP citing this stuff, it can be good to let a representative show off their own weakest ideas (and maybe even more effective when you are semi neutral and let the listener do the thinking)

The arguments were so wildly broken (governance shares no meaningful properties with a laptop!) that I hope it would be self evident to many. But with versions of these ideas hitting the mainstream via Thiel, Vance, etc., there’s no hiding from it, and I’d rather people see this unvarnished version

I still think it is good on balance that the interview happened. These are ideas that are now being pushed by more sophisticated, savvy, and powerful people than Yarvin. Hearing them in raw form helps to inoculate people against them before they get repackaged in sneakier, more palatable forms IMO.

Further details and a call for workshops will be posted soon. We hope to see you all in Amherst this August!

RLC is organized by @yayitsAmyZhang (UT Austin), @GlenBerseth (MILA), @EugeneVinitsky (NYU), @ScottNiekum (UMass Amherst), Philip Thomas (UMass Amherst), and @BrunoSilvaUMass (UMass Amherst)

We have a fantastic advisory board helping to guide us, including @PeterStone_TX, Satinder Singh, @EmmaBrunskill, @mlittmancs, @MannorShie, Michael Bowling, @svlevine, @ravi_iitm, @ShamKakade6, @BenjaminRosman, Marc Deisenroth, and Andrew Barto.

How will @RL_Conference be different from other ML conferences? Besides focusing on RL, peer review will primarily evaluate the correctness and support of claims, rather than subjective perceptions of importance.

Reinforcement Learning as a field has been growing significantly in the past 10 years but lacks a central archival venue. Other communities (CV, NLP, robotics) have benefited from having their own top-tier venues and RL is past due for the same.