A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.
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!] It’s 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, I’ve written a … Continue reading Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act
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
The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City is coming up. Whoever wins the primary will almost certainly be the next mayor. Elections in New York City use instant runoff voting (more commonly called ranked-choice voting by non-nerds). To spell out what this means: Voters rank their choices (in this case, their top 5 … Continue reading My NYC mayoral ballot
Nate Silver's model at FiveThirtyEight gave Biden an 89% chance to win the presidential election. He gave Democrats a 75% chance of taking back the Senate and a 97% chance of keeping the House. Then the election happened. Biden won -- though by a somewhat smaller margin than the model expected: Trump's 232 electoral votes … Continue reading Was Nate Silver’s model wrong?
In this post I won't wax poetically about the importance of voting. Instead I'll tell you the most important things to know about voting in this election as efficiently as I can, and then talk a bit about what else you can do besides voting. Part A: The most important thing to know. Tell your … Continue reading A pragmatic guide to voting in the 2020 election
(This post is meant to persuade you to vote. If you already want to vote but don't have a concrete voting plan, check out this post.) In 10th grade civics class I learned about two moral arguments in favor of voting in elections. The first of these appeals to a notion of civic duty: as … Continue reading Your vote matters — probably more than you think
This post is an endorsement of a Democratic candidate for president, but it is not a typical endorsement. When I set out to write this post, I didn't have a particular conclusion in mind. Instead, I figured out how I wanted to think about the primary, then did research on the underlying facts, and finally … Continue reading Thoughts on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
FiveThirtyEight just published an impressive, sophisticated model of the 2020 Democratic primaries. If you're at all interested in the primaries, take a look -- there's a lot of cool stuff there (they also published a pretty detailed methodology which I also recommend reading). Conveniently, if you scroll down to the bottom of their forecast and … Continue reading My 2020 Democratic primary predictions pass the smell test
In the spirit of Slate Star Codex, I will be offering some of my predictions for 2020. In January 2021 I will return to these and grade them. The predictions fall into three categories: US Politics (there are many of these since it's an election year), Personal (predictions about what I will do next year), … Continue reading Predictions for 2020
Unexpected Values 