I took a week off from my day job of aligning AI to visit Forethought and think about the question: if we can align AI, what should we do with it? This post summarizes the state of my thinking at t…| Unexpected Values
Constrained writing is fun; moreover, sometimes it’s seriously impressive. This post is a tour of some of my favorite examples of constrained writing and wordplay. Mots d’Heures: Gousse…| Unexpected Values
In middle school I participated in a competition called Mathcounts. In this contest, each state held a competition to determine four people who go on to represent the state at Nationals. I grew up …| Unexpected Values
Do you miss the pre-COVID excitement of watching sports? Are you bored right now, looking for some way to entertain yourself? Welcome to the world of Jelle’s Marble Runs. Round 1 of the 2020 …| Unexpected Values
Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The market traded as high as 5%, and is now stably trading at 3%. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet … Continue reading Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?→| Unexpected Values
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→| Unexpected Values
In January, I defended my PhD thesis. My thesis is called Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology, and it’s about predicting the future. In many ways, the last five years of my life have been unpredictable. I did not predict that a novel bat virus would ravage the world, causing me to leave New York for a year. … Continue reading Algorithmic Bayesian Epistemology→| Unexpected Values
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious during the surgery, the hour after surgery turned out to be a fascinating experience, because I was completely lucid but had … Continue reading My hour of memoryless lucidity→| Unexpected Values
[Note: images may not load if you’re using the WordPress app. Try opening this post in a browser, or reading it on LessWrong.] Thanks to Drake Thomas for feedback. I. Here’s a fun scatter plot. It has two thousand points, which I generated as follows: first, I drew two thousand x-values from a normal distribution … Continue reading How much do you believe your results?→| Unexpected Values
In December 2020, I made 100 probabilistic predictions for 2021. As promised, I’ve come back to evaluate them on two criteria: calibration and personal optimism/pessimism. I also challenged readers to compete with me. More on this later, but first, here are my predictions, color-coded black if they happened and red if they didn’t. I. US … Continue reading Grading my 2021 predictions→| Unexpected Values
[Originally posted on the EA Forum] When I ask effective altruists who their hero is, it’s always the same names. Peter Singer. Stanislav Petrov. Jonas Salk. No one ever mentions Ea-nasir, the ancient Sumerian coppersmith and businessman. Which is a shame, really. I guess it makes sense. Most people haven’t heard of him, and those … Continue reading Introducing EA-nasir→| Unexpected Values
This is a re-post of a puzzle I wrote for the 2021 Mathcamp Puzzle Hunt. The difficulty is 5/10 or so (easier than the first puzzle I wrote for this blog, but harder than the second). If you haven’t done these sorts of puzzles before, I recommend starting with e.g. this one or this one … Continue reading Puzzle: A More Earthly Calendar→| Unexpected Values
Between my posts on marble sports and beauty pageants, luck versus skill in sports seems to be something of a theme of this blog. Today I want to talk about tennis — but instead of writing de…| Unexpected Values
A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.| Unexpected Values
4 posts published by Eric Neyman during November 2019| Unexpected Values
In this day and age, celebrities have a lot of influence over our politics. Garthwaite and Moore estimated that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 netted him an extra 1 milli…| Unexpected Values
