Notes longer

Newest notes

<aside> 💡

Visible on the home page

</aside>

Unkindness bias

April 13, 2025

Questions (big update)

Read it on this page or on Substack.

Question on questions

April 2, 2025

Agency

March 27, 2025

The strength of weak ties

March 25, 2025

AI becoming autonomous and stubborn

AI becoming autonomous and stubborn

March 21, 2025

Wisdom of crowds

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

Older notes


The Gambler Fallacy

Mistaken believe that past random events affect future probabilities

March 14, 2025

A stream change

<aside> 💡

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 )

</aside>

March 3, 2025

Overfitting or underfitting – as a useful self-calibration question?

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