So. I'm 22 now. Wow, well, my 21st year went by pretty fast. Subjectively. This year has been one of monumental mistakes, high stakes, and incredible ...
Something obvious that I don't think I'd fully considered or written down: quality curation becomes more valuable as our collective output increases. ...
# Intro If you haven't already, you probably want to read my short piece about [Dynamic NFTs](https://mlu.red/muse/53028466310.html) for some context...
So NFTs are really hot right now in the crypto-sphere. If you aren't aware, NFT are non-fungible tokens, which mean that they aren't denominated, like...
In interpretable machine learning, I think one important question we should be able to ask of our models is “What is something useful you can tell me ...
I had a nice chat with Alex Flint today, and here are some things that came up, which seem worth writing down: One view of interpretability is about ...
This blog post is my attempt to give an overview of the sub-field of machine learning interpretability. This post isn't comprehensive, but my goal is ...
[Post-hoc intepretability](https://mlu.red/muse/52906366310.html) in machine learning is about extracting explanations after the model has already bee...
Frequentists: if things are not exciting, then how likely is it to see my results? Bayesians: what do my results say about whether or not anything is...
Cue [meta-contrarianism](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism) for criticism. It looks so...
I'm pretty wary of watching movies because I think they're too immersive. I'm also wary of reading good books for the same reason. Doing so is like ag...
One incredibly useful razor that I use when thinking about philosophical questions is to ask myself what shape I expect the answer to look like, *cond...
Sometimes the right thing to do is to not worry about optimizing for the best way to do X. Sometimes the right thing to do is to just find a strategy ...
### Types of financial derivatives Forward contracts are just agreements to buy/sell an asset at a certain price in the future. They don't cost anyth...
I'm usually a big fan of explicating. Uncertainty can give a false sense of security, and forcing things to be specific can expose those flaws. It's a...
* When you have a set of ideas, one natural human thing to do is to try and find an overarching theme that can hold them together * e.g. a model abo...
Something that I've gotten a lot of value out of, when learning many different things, is to deliberately overcorrect, when I notice I'm doing somethi...
### Motivation I've been writing some papers lately, and one thing that has bugged me is how many different formatting styles have resorted to (LastN...
I like it when my apps or software have longer latency and lag if the goal is to afford me more time to think. Having to wait a little while for Windo...
[Cross-posted from the [EA Forum](https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/YtdhHQrQmgqoKGGDM/interactive-graph-of-climate-change-intervention-effects)] A li...
I don't know if this will end up being a frequently updated list, but there are at least two things which are on my to-do list, to be done eventually:...
Just getting my thoughts out here. So it's been a week since I finished my winter quarter at school, and I've finally largely recuperated. COVID-19 is...
Since coming to college, I feel like I have been browsing the net a lot more. It's been nice these past few weeks because, for a variety of reasons, I...
For the past few years, my default example of a weird thing you can learn to observe skill development (and thus potentially abstract general principl...
The New Year has come and gone, and I'm sure people have had their resolutions either continue or fail. I don't think I've explored this view here on ...
Something I've seen other people do, which seemed cool was using GANs to create Pokemon sprites. I decided to give this a go today. I pulled up the bo...
So I've been holding my pen roughly the same way for around 15 years now. It looks like this: ![my default hand holding an image](../images/handwrite...
It just occurred to me that I would probably benefit from placing my bookmarks a little before where I actually stop reading. Oftentimes, when I retur...
1. Stop going on Reddit. 2. Stop playing games. 3. Journal more regularly. 4. Do back exercises every day. 5. Spend 1 hour thinking every day. 6. Spen...
When I have free time, I feel like I could go read something or go write something. Writing stuff is more effortful. Reading stuff is fun. There are t...
I think that, as humans, we collectively underestimate how BIG a "small" number of things can feel. There's a few things here. One is that we ruminate...
Thinking about why the Voted Perceptron works well. It works because if you have data that's generally linearly separable, then the weights which have...
In the vein of TDT, the [Sliding Window of Experience](https://mlu.red/muse/55073266310.html), and Being The Sort of Person You Want To Be, I think th...
Oh snap, now I'm 21 years old. That's pretty scary; humans just keep getting older. I think I've basically sucked quite a bit at life these past two y...
I used to better at just doing the thing I needed to do. Lately, I've been needing to resort to effort. I don't think this is the optimal ontology. Id...
I'm confused about how to order second order effects, compared to first order ones. Both of these are things that happen after you take an action. Fir...
I've been feeling confused about how to weigh second order effects. This essay is an attempt to tease out when it makes sense to over or underweigh th...
I was talking with RJ earlier, and I think I finally articulated what I think is a core feature of my philosophy. I value the production of work much ...
It seems like affordances are really important when talking about my ability to get stuff one. One part of it is paying attention to what sorts of thi...
I've noticed myself getting more and more critical lately. As in, when people say things or when I hear new ideas (or maybe ideas in general? or ideas...
I expect to update this over time, as a reference for things I've really enjoyed reading, that are vaguely book-shaped. ### Fiction 1. Harry Potter ...
When people ask me questions, I sometimes think about how my response will be received. For example, if I have strong views on a subject, I might want...
I think I've been jumping the gun too quickly when it comes to "helping people figure things out". To reiterate: it's much better to have people figur...
I think that if I were to go back in time and give my freshman college self some good advice, it'd be "work on what you really want". I am still inter...
Ben Pace has a new post up on LessWrong that's asking about good exercises for rationality / general LW-adjacent stuff. I think this is a good thing t...
It's now my second year of college. I suppose that Muse works more as a place for me to be far more casual about what's been up with my life. I'm not ...
A few years ago, I was viscerally scared by the thought of the world ending. It felt a lot closer than it does now. Also, since a few years ago, I've ...
Two concepts: Stockholm Syndrome: - A bunch of classes / requirements are probably only perpetuated because of Stockholm-Syndrome-esque reasons, whe...
It's been a while now, but I've found that I really enjoy writing my dates in terms of year, month, day. This is like how numbers work, with the most ...
I often think about activities we can engage in as one of two types: activities in which we're directing our attention and activities where our attent...
One common theme that I return to, time and time again, is that of addictiveness. More specifically, what makes something habit-forming in a bad way? ...
So I've been using Todoist as my to-do list of choice for over a year now. This feels pretty good and great. I don't think it's the optimal to-do list...
I have this gut feeling that games should have some degree of *depth* to them. There should be lots of options, menus, customization, and variety. Whe...
Here's something that feels like another instance of the deontologist vs consequentialist abstraction, except that the particulars of the situation ar...
Sometimes, when I'm on Facebook, I'll get a notification. I'll click on it, and then someone has sent me a message. I'll respond to the message, and t...
You know how sometimes you're staring at a problem or a math proof, and you know that you *could* find the solution? But maybe you don't go all the wa...
I used to think that happiness was pretty important. Now, though, it looks like I didn't do a good job of figuring out exactly what 'happiness' was ab...
So it's been a while since my last blog post. It still feels weird writing all of my insecurities out into this weird internet void. But I figure it's...
This is similar to my previous post on Consumers and Creators. Except this time, instead of thinking about roles that people play, I'm thinking about ...
[Malcolm Ocean gets it](https://malcolmocean.com/2016/02/sparkly-pink-purple-ball-thing/). There's a terrible thing that happens when you try to encap...
Mornings Pages were this thing I used to do. I feel like my mornings have been significantly out of whack, so I'd like to get more into a habit of doi...
Everyone kinda knows that some mixture of love and affection doesn't cut it in relationships. I've been reading Attached on attachment theory. (Yes, I...
Three concepts that I seem to be using a lot lately are acceptance, analogies, and asymmetries. They feel like important building blocks that I use fo...
I'm currently at Microsoft. We're really big on growth mindset. It feels fake when corporate people try to espouse it. It also feels fake when we try ...
In [Normative vs Descriptive Confusions](https://mindlevelup.wordpress.com/2018/08/31/normative-vs-descriptive-confusions/) I touch upon a key distinc...
It's been a while since I have written in my journal. This is quite odd, actually, as I have previously written in journals daily for 4-ish years. So ...
One thing I've been thinking about is why self-help works at all. In conjunction with the blog right below this one, why *is it* the case that doing a...
There's this weird thing that's been happening lately where I generally feel okay, and I'm noting that my state of mind is "y'know, pretty good". And ...
I think I missed the memo on this, but apparently 2x2 squares have been the sexy thing to do when talking about concepts for a while now, re: Ribbonfa...
In this post, I'll try to bring together two things I enjoy: rationality and magic. Like [Hazard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctBCPaD3yYimEHXPu/ma...
I have a Mood or a Feel that I care a lot about. It's a little like minimalism. It's a little like praising deprivation. It's a little like mindfulnes...
I'm taking some classes this quarter, and they are all sort of okay. What I'm annoyed by is how much better the assignments and lectures could be. Bei...
There are lots of famous people in the world, and I don't know most of them. That's a little weird for me to think about. By "famous", there are two d...
It's a little weird. I haven't been really doing lots of rationality stuff or introspection. And I think this correlates with enjoying life a lot less...
I've been worried lately at my ability to do work and to focus and do work. Not Deep Work in the Cal Newport sense, of putting in several hours, mind ...
(A lot of ink has been shed on the topic of how to rationally update your beliefs with respect to other sources. I don't mean for this little essay to...
So I finally got around to updating my site. It's been my goal for a while ot have a nice place where I can port over all of my blog posts, and I'm ex...
Maybe because it's one of the algorithms that's been showing up lately, but I've been thinking about sliding windows as an analogy. Specifically, as a...
Hey, yo, so I'm back to writing stuff for now. Or, sort of. I mentioned that I'd be taking a break for about three to four months. And now I'm back. I...
It feels like there's been a push towards getting people to start creating their own content. Platforms like YouTube + the Internet make it a lot easi...
I've been on a real not-learning kick lately. By that, I mean a long stretch of not feeling like I've changed much as a person. See also [Learning fro...