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April 13, 2025
Read it on this page or on Substack.
April 2, 2025
March 27, 2025
March 25, 2025
AI becoming autonomous and stubborn
March 21, 2025
Averaging multiple independent guesses tends to produce more accurate results than individual estimates. This applies both to groups of different people and, to a lesser extent, to multiple guesses from the same person.
March 14, 2025
Mistaken believe that past random events affect future probabilities
March 14, 2025
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I've made a small change: this page, previously called "Notes," has been renamed to "Stream." Now all new and noteworthy content on this website can now be found in this single location (except )
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March 3, 2025
Do you tend to overfit or underfit? It’s a valuable self-calibration question. Asking it myself I realized I have a habit of overfitting—I tend to apply a theory to a wide range of observations, sometimes too generously. I let the idea frame stretch too far, allowing it to absorb more than it probably should. If I have a theory, I’ll just keep shoving different inputs into it, without being critical enough about how specific or distinct their properties actually are.
Asking this question can also help calibrate thinking on any specific topic. For example if you try to teach me a concept of emergence
Overfitting is assuming all biological processes must involve emergence - like claiming cell division is emergent when it's actually a well-defined mechanical process. Treating any collective behavior as emergence (misses that emergence requires new properties not present in individual components)
Underfitting is assuming emergence only occurs in specific phenomena like consciousness emerging from neural connections. This view fails to recognize that emergence is a broader concept that can occur across many different types of systems
Idea via reading https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-canal-papers
December 30, 2024