How to Organize a Hackathon → edit and release after THLI event on Jan 11
Part 1 will just be a list of resources to check out; very good resources have been written by much more competent hackathon organizers than myself.
Part 2 will be the meat of it. It will focus on how to figure out the purpose of your hackathon and designing a hackathon around that based on first principles, rather than doing everything the default way.
The Tesla vs. Waymo comparison here nerd-sniped me. I want to read the relevant Tesla and Waymo research papers and learn a little more about sensor technology before writing about some of my thoughts.
Based purely on priors, though, I agree with Andrej Karpathy. It’s easy to say that Waymo is ahead based on what’s visible at a surface level, but Waymo has a hardware problem, which is probably going to be harder to solve than Tesla’s software problem unless the LiDAR issue just can’t be worked around (although apparently Tesla trains with LiDAR). Also, on priors, I agree with Ben Thompson that the history of AI so far has showed that you always want to bet on pure machine learning vs. encoding human knowledge if you’re looking at the long-term.
The explanatory power of not viewing large groups (like countries) in history as faceless entities with general motives and abstracted stories that attempt to explain their actions
This is nowhere near an original idea and something everybody knows, but I think it’s so easy for people to turn to general abstracted stories when thinking about history that it’s worth writing about
US works on hydrogen bomb because of competition between the different branches of the military (? I believe heard this on the Dwarkesh Podcast)
Soviet Union to Russia as a story of Yeltsin and Gorbachev hating each other
Weimar Republic to rise of Nazism as a highly contingent story filled with different factions trying to use the Nazis in their struggles against each other
Russia at the outbreak of WW1 as a story of Sazonov vs. Nicholas
A follow up to the education reform post with a story about why things are broken in schools right now and how to address them.
Can probably digress into a case study of service-providing public institutions in general, why they’re so hard to execute well, and how to make them execute decently well.