The Parable of the Scorpion and the Fox
In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, a scorpion was creepy-crawling along a riverbank, wondering how to get to the other side. It came across an animal that could swim: some versions of the...
View ArticleCoffee Is for Coders
No one cares if you're in pain; They only want results. Everywhere this law's the same, In startups, schools, and cults. A child can pull the heartstrings Of assorted moms and voters, But your dumb...
View ArticleScoring 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Predictions
I was curious to see how various prognosticators—specifically, FiveThirtyEight and The Economist's models, and the PredictIt prediction markets—did on predicting the state-by-state (plus the District...
View ArticleAnd You Take Me the Way I Am
Mark Twain wrote that honesty means you don't have to remember anything. But it also means you don't have to worry about making mistakes. If you said something terrible that made everyone decide that...
View ArticleBlogging on Less Wrong 2020 (Lower Half)
"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!" "Msg Len" "Message Length" "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" ("2020")
View ArticleJanuary Is Math and Wellness Month
(Previously) There is a time to tackle ambitious intellectual projects and go on grand political crusades, and tour the podcast circuit marketing both. That time is not January. January is for:...
View ArticleBeauty Is Truthiness, Truthiness Beauty?
Imagine reviewing Python code that looks something like this. has_items = items is not None and len(items) > 0 if has_items: ... ... do_stuff(has_items=has_items) You might look at the conditional,...
View ArticleBlogging on Less Wrong 2021
"Communication Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs" "Reply to Nate Soares on Dolphins" "Blood Is Thicker Than Water ?" "Feature Selection" "Comment on 'Deception as Cooperation'"
View ArticlePlea Bargaining
I wish people were better at—plea bargaining, rather than pretending to be innocent. You accuse someone of [negative-valence description of trait or behavior that they're totally doing], and they say,...
View Article"Deep Learning" Is Function Approximation
A Surprising Development in the Study of Multi-layer Parameterized Graphical Function Approximators As a programmer and epistemology enthusiast, I’ve been studying some statistical modeling techniques...
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