Writing
2024
2022
- How to do theoretical research, a personal perspective Aug 19
- Facts from Essential Cell Biology CH5: DNA and chromosomes May 3
- On London Apr 21
- Comparing utilitarianism to deontology is a type error Feb 7
- Facts from Essential Cell Biology CH4: protein structure and function Jan 15
- Advice I commonly give people new to AI alignment Jan 7
- Facts from Essential Cell Biology CH3: energy, catalysis, and biosynthesis Jan 6
- Facts from Essential Cell Biology CH2: chemical components of cells Jan 4
- Facts from Essential Cell Biology CH1: cells, the fundamental units of life Jan 3
- Insights from Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance Jan 1
2021
- Notes on SMILE eye surgery Dec 4
- Coase's theorem means the customer doesn't have to always be right Nov 7
- Your time might be more valuable than you think Oct 17
- Review: A Really Short History of Nearly Everything Oct 12
- Quirks with the Solomonoff prior Oct 8
- Insights from Complications Oct 4
- The simulation hypothesis undercuts the SIA/Great Filter doomsday argument Oct 1
- Answering questions honestly in the Game of Life Sep 25
- Fractional progress estimates for AI timelines and implied resource requirements Jul 14
- Intermittent distillations #4 Jul 8
- Anthropic effects in estimating evolution difficulty Jul 4
- A rough perspective on strategy stealing Jun 24
- The wild world of policy debate Jun 12
- Rogue AGI embodies valuable intellectual property Jun 4
- An intuitive guide to Garrabrant induction Jun 3
- Intermittent distillations #3 May 15
- Pre-Training + fine-tuning favors deception May 8
- Agents over Cartesian world models Apr 26
- Intermittent distillations #2 Apr 13
- Transparency trichotomy Mar 28
- Intermittent distillations #1 Mar 16
- Strong evidence is common Mar 13
- Open problems in myopia Mar 10
- Towards a mechanistic understanding of goal-directedness Mar 9
- How simulacra levels increase Mar 3
- Coincidences are improbable Feb 23
- Definitions and examples of simulacra levels Feb 12
- Money can't (easily) buy talent Jan 21
2020
- Chain breaking Dec 24
- Defusing AGI danger Dec 24
- The first sample gives the most information Dec 24
- A math student's guide to options Dec 9
- Does SGD produce deceptive alignment? Nov 6
- The Solomonoff prior is malign Oct 13
- Flavors of choice Sep 4
- Fixed point theorems Sep 4
- Löb's theorem Sep 4
- Review: Against the Grain Aug 28
- Plans never err Aug 5
- Three things I've learned about Bayes' rule Aug 4
- Stop asking people to maximize Jul 30
- Contextualized norms Jul 15