A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.
Composed together with Mia Taylor, for America's 250th birthday. Her copper coat now weathered by the rains,By dreams deferred and promises half-kept,Above the isle where weary millions stepped,The mighty woman with the torch remains.She cannot sway those weighty sunset gatesThat barred the way and forced St. Louis on,Yet parted for the ships that fled Saigon,And … Continue reading The Newer Colossus
Written in my personal capacity. Thanks to many people for conversations and comments. Written in less than 24 hours; sorry for any sloppiness. [Link to donate here -- please use this link rather than going to his website -- but please read at least the first few paragraphs!] Itās an uncanny, weird coincidence that the two … Continue reading Consider donating to AI safety champion Scott Wiener
Written in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are my own. Thanks to Zach Stein-Perlman, Jesse Richardson, and many others for comments. [Link to donate here -- please use this link rather than going to his website -- but please read at least the first few paragraphs!] Over the last several years, Iāve written a … Continue reading Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act
Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The market traded as high as 5%, and is now stably trading at 3%. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet … Continue reading Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?
I spent most of my election day -- 3pm to 11pm Pacific time -- trading on Manifold Markets. That went about as well as it could have gone. I doubled the money I was trading with, jumping to 10th place on Manifold's all-time leaderboard. Spending my time trading instead of just nervously watching results come … Continue reading Seven lessons I didn’t learn from election day
A couple weeks ago, the LessWrong team threw a 400-person festival called LessOnline for rationalist-adjacent bloggers and their readers. The festival featured a puzzle hunt, which I helped write! The puzzle hunt had two rounds with a somewhat unusual structure: all participants who completed the first round were thrown onto one team to solve the … Continue reading My puzzles for the 2024 LessOnline puzzle hunt
In January, I defended my PhD thesis. My thesis is called Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology, and itās about predicting the future. In many ways, the last five years of my life have been unpredictable. I did not predict that a novel bat virus would ravage the world, causing me to leave New York for a year. … Continue reading Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn't know what to expect. While I was unconscious during the surgery, the hour after surgery turned out to be a fascinating experience, because I was completely lucid but had … Continue reading My hour of memoryless lucidity
[Note: images may not load if you're using the WordPress app. Try opening this post in a browser, or reading it on LessWrong.] Thanks to Drake Thomas for feedback. I. Hereās a fun scatter plot. It has two thousand points, which I generated as follows: first, I drew two thousand x-values from a normal distribution … Continue reading How much do you believe your results?
In December 2020, I made 100 probabilistic predictions for 2021. As promised, Iāve come back to evaluate them on two criteria: calibration and personal optimism/pessimism. I also challenged readers to compete with me. More on this later, but first, here are my predictions, color-coded black if they happened and red if they didn't. I. US … Continue reading Grading my 2021 predictions
Unexpected Values 