• probably the worst at maths of all Erdล‘s number 4s. Brier 0.16; 1064 book reviews; 275lb 1RM squat

  • I don't really understand how people pick two "research interests". My two research interests are things and stuff.

  • I like getting into things, judging things, people changing their mind, singing, idly planning to become a more serious person, and technical approaches to philosophical problems

  • Some of my favourite things are Mexican food, Pakistan green, novelty, sudden relevance, brevity, these people, Vines, shavasana, Scottish tap water, Frank Ramsey, Werner Herzog, Wodehouse, Zach Weiner, Joanna Newsom, Pessoa.

  • this site is for essays. None of the text is computer-generated unless explicitly indicated.


Contact

If you want to talk, get in touch: email,

or anonymously,

or extremely privately via PGP.

Now:

1. Founding a great
research company
I help lead Arb, a research consultancy in the mould of Rethink Priorities, RAND, and IIASA.

We focus on forecasting, metascience, history, and other important niche areas (large-scale data collection; machine learning for epistemics). Consultancies are reactive, but we have our own agenda - some ideas sketched here.

2. Side-channels
against AI risk
I'm interested in keeping an eye on AI. By a stroke of luck my PhD advisor is Laurence Aitchison.

You can see our other efforts in the Arb newsfeed and Current Work.

3. Becoming less well-rounded
My background is extremely mixed: a lot of philosophy, a bit of economics, a bit of stats, a bit of computer science, a bit of computational linguistics, a bit of epidemiology, a bit of literary criticism. But in research, much depends on you mastering one thing or one cluster of things.

So I am trying to become less rounded. This boils down to more maths. One carrot: I aim to fully understand the great explanations: relativity, QM, evolutionary dynamics, Bayes, reinforcement learning, and computational complexity.

4. Giving a damn
I started teaching and mentoring people at last. I help with the AI Safety Camp, the EA Bristol Uni group, and teach at ESPR. I received an Infrastructure Fund grant to try and fix executive function in the community (โ€œOff Roadโ€). I speak for the dead.

Change my mind

I offer bounties for errors:

  • $1 for nitpicks (ambiguities, misreadings, exceptions, technicalities).
  • $10 for an error which falsifies a sentence.
  • $50 for an error which invalidates a post.

Payouts

Page Error Person Payout
About Was unclear about the required size of error for a bounty, leading to a prima facie contradiction. Loki Sempere $10 to EA Funds
/psych Overstated the consensus against Milgram. It's still shaky, and not really about obedience, but it's wrong to say there's no evidence, just that the original experiments were terrible. Matt Edwards $5
/gists I said "constant time" instead of "constant time complexity". The function in question takes 3x more time to process 2^64 than it does 2^0, hence the intermediate payout between nitpick and falsehood. Loki Sempere $5

Bets

Bet Bettor Odds Resolution
Jun 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once to win no Oscars besides Visual Editing. (0-1 Oscars overall) CR 1:1, nice dinner To CR!
July 2021: Abaluck RCT shows >15% reduction in covid transmission. MH 1:1, $100 to Givewell To me.
June 2020: Biden wins election. CR 1:1. Nice restaurant dinner. To me.
Jan 2016: Trump finishes term. CR 1:1. Nice bottle of whisky. To me.

Small print

I suppose this should all be multiplied by the confidence level of the post. Factual and logical errors are most likely to resolve cleanly; I probably won't cough up if you just tell me I'm an idiot for believing or not believing in e.g. Meinongianism. That would get a smile.

I'm not sure how to handle claims that have changed truth-value since I made them; half of this blog might be false if you return in 30 years. Leaning towards $1 to $5.

Books

I find that I've written two books: this site, and some book reviews.

I try to review every book I read, because otherwise within 4 years I will have forgotten absolutely everything about it, making a mockery of my use of my time on this earth; because giving a novel, fair, and readable opinion is the best and most complete mental exercise; because it changes the way I read, knowing that I actually have to form a real view; and because it leverages my vanity for great ends (I wished to be known as someone who reads a lot).

Most book reviews are vacuous, blocklike expressions of approval or disapproval. There is nothing in them except the reviewer, their squeals. I do some of those, but I try to do some of the other kind too.

Currently reading

Favourite books


  • The God that Failed by Crossman, Richard


  • Poems of the Late T'ang by Graham, A.C.


  • Brewer's Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics by Donaldson, William


  • Tell Me No Lies by Pilger, John


  • The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Watterson, Bill


  • Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung by Bangs, Lester


  • Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall by Bernstein, Jeremy


  • Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner by Reid, Alastair


  • The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa, Fernando


  • Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Hickey, Dave


  • Mortal Questions by Nagel, Thomas


  • Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Friedrich


  • Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Borges, Jorge Luis


  • Iain Crichton Smith: Selected Poems by Smith, Iain Crichton


  • Collected Poems by Miล‚osz, Czesล‚aw


  • Oxford Book of Essays by Gross, John


  • The Penguin Book of English Verse by Keegan, Paul


  • The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse by Crawford, Robert


  • Collected Poems by Larkin, Philip


  • Travels With Myself and Another by Gellhorn, Martha


  • Ficciones by Borges, Jorge Luis


  • Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by McCarthy, Cormac


  • Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by James, Clive


  • Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by Wallace, David Foster


  • The Fortune of War by O'Brian, Patrick


  • The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Le Guin, Ursula K.


  • Right Ho, Jeeves by Wodehouse, P.G.


  • The Oxford Companion to Philosophy by Honderich, Ted


  • Blindsight by Watts, Peter


  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by Wallace, David Foster


  • What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire by Bukowski, Charles


  • Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein, Ludwig


  • Infinite Jest by Wallace, David Foster


  • Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo by Herzog, Werner


  • Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Melville, Herman


  • Save Yourself, Mammal! by Weinersmith, Zach


  • The Patrick Melrose Novels by St. Aubyn, Edward


  • Hyperbole and a Half by Brosh, Allie


  • Computing machinery and intelligence by Turing, Alan


  • The Hedonistic Imperative by Pearce, David


  • What Should We Be Worried About? by Brockman, John


  • The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Bostrom, Nick


  • What If? by Munroe, Randall


  • The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Hanson, Robin


  • Incerto by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas


  • Tales from Earthsea by Le Guin, Ursula K.


  • The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Simler, Kevin


  • Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World by Rosling, Hans


  • How to Actually Change Your Mind by Yudkowsky, Eliezer


  • Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne by Montaigne, Michel de


  • Good Old Neon by Wallace, David Foster


  • The Meaning of Recognition by James, Clive


  • Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems by Pearl, Judea


  • Mother's Milk by St. Aubyn, Edward


  • Cromartie High School, Vol. 01 by Nonaka, Eiji


  • The Far Side of the World by O'Brian, Patrick


  • An Englishman Abroad by Bennett, Alan


  • Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street by Ellis, Warren


  • Collected Poems by Garcรญa Lorca, Federico


  • A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Dawkins, Richard


  • The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence by Lawrence, D.H.


  • The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by Easterly, William


  • The Black Halo: The Complete English Stories 1977-98 by Smith, Iain Crichton


  • Herzog on Herzog by Cronin, Paul


  • Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose by Rich, Adrienne


  • Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow by Hughes, Ted


  • Gangland by Azzarello, Brian


  • Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Davis, Lydia


  • A Wizard of Earthsea by Le Guin, Ursula K.


  • The Compass Rose by Le Guin, Ursula K.


  • Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Spufford, Francis


  • Alan Turing: The Enigma by Hodges, Andrew


  • Medea. Stimmen by Wolf, Christa


  • We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews by Sinker, Daniel


  • Invisible Man by Ellison, Ralph


  • Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 by Monk, Ray


  • The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays by Putnam, Hilary


  • The Way Things Are by Lucretius


  • Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by Gleick, James


  • A Spinoza Reader by Spinoza, Baruch


  • The Pleasures of the Damned by Bukowski, Charles


  • Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Reynolds, Simon


  • A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science by Koertge, Noretta


  • The Theory of the Leisure Class by Veblen, Thorstein


  • The View from the Ground by Gellhorn, Martha


  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Hibbs, Albert R.


  • How to Do Things with Words by Austin, J.L.


  • White Noise by DeLillo, Don


  • Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 by Wolk, Douglas


  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, Alexandre


  • Studies in the Way of Words by Grice, Paul


  • Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Williams, Raymond


  • A Golden Treasury of English Verse by Palgrave, Francis Turner


  • Nua-Bhardachd Gaidhlig = Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems: A Bilingual Anthology by Macaulay, Donald


  • The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Collier, Paul


  • Yotsuba</li>

  • Writings on an Ethical Life by Singer, Peter


  • Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Azerrad, Michael


  • Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Monk, Ray


  • A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bryson, Bill


  • Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China by Thubron, Colin


  • A Companion to Ethics by Singer, Peter


  • Monogamy by Phillips, Adam


  • The Shadow of the Torturer by Wolfe, Gene


  • The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen


  • Cyteen by Cherryh, C.J.


  • The Twits by Dahl, Roald


  • Carry On, Jeeves by Wodehouse, P.G.


  • Mushishi, Vol. 1 by Urushibara, Yuki


  • Get in the Van: On the Road With Black Flag by Rollins, Henry


  • The Philosophy of The Social Sciences by Ryan, Alan


  • Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Rippetoe, Mark


  • Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature by Midgley, Mary


  • Lanark by Gray, Alasdair


  • The Squashed Philosophers by Lloyd-Hughes, Glyn


  • At Swim-Two-Birds by O'Brien, Flann


  • Do You Think What You Think You Think? by Baggini, Julian


  • Collected Poems by Plath, Sylvia


  • The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Kanigel, Robert


  • The Power and the Glory by Greene, Graham


  • Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993-2001 by James, Clive


  • The Earthsea Quartet by Le Guin, Ursula K.


  • Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs by Cohen, Leonard


  • Guards! Guards! by Pratchett, Terry


  • Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky, Arkady


  • Farewell, My Lovely by Chandler, Raymond


  • Axiomatic by Egan, Greg


  • The Social Construction of What? by Hacking, Ian


  • A Mathematician's Apology by Hardy, G. H.


  • Excession by Banks, Iain M.


  • Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis by Webster, Richard


  • How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Bayard, Pierre


  • Gateway by Pohl, Frederik


  • The Plato Cult: And Other Philosophical Follies by Stove, David C.


  • The Phantom Tollbooth by Juster, Norton


  • The Campus Trilogy by Lodge, David


  • Beggars in Spain by Kress, Nancy


  • All the Pretty Horses by McCarthy, Cormac


  • Selected Poems, 1954-1992 by Brown, George Mackay


  • The Plague by Camus, Albert


  • Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science by Fuller, Steve


  • Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by Wallace, David Foster


  • The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Goffman, Erving


  • Master of Reality by Darnielle, John


  • The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age by Lem, Stanisล‚aw


  • The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Ross, Alex


  • Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing by Harel, David


  • The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives by Ziliak, Stephen T.


  • The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Le Guin, Ursula K.


  • The Inimitable Jeeves by Wodehouse, P.G.


  • Flat Earth News by Davies, Nick


  • Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method by Humphreys, Paul


  • Collected Poems by MacCaig, Norman


  • The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge by Vinge, Vernor


  • Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by Simon, David


  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, James


  • Dune by Herbert, Frank


  • Blue at the Mizzen by O'Brian, Patrick


  • Mathematics Made Difficult by Linderholm, Carl E.


  • Rice Boy by Dahm, Evan


  • Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism by Heath, Joseph


  • Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology by Dowson, Jane


  • The Rorty Reader by Rorty, Richard


  • Rain by Paterson, Don


  • How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Lee, Stewart


  • The Information by Gleick, James


  • Chuck Klosterman on Media and Culture by Klosterman, Chuck


  • Retromania by Reynolds, Simon


  • A Chinese Anthology: A Collection Of Chinese Folktales And Fables by van Over, Raymond


  • Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche, Friedrich


  • Museum Without Walls by Meades, Jonathan


  • The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing by Perry, John R.


  • CLOSURE by Stiff, Why The Lucky


  • American Hippopotamus by Mooallem, Jon


  • An Encyclopaedia of Myself by Meades, Jonathan


  • The Sellout by Beatty, Paul


  • Occasional Poets by Adams, Richard


  • Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction by Stone, James V.


  • A Season in Hell by Rimbaud, Arthur


  • Step Aside, Pops by Beaton, Kate


  • Solutions and Other Problems by Brosh, Allie


  • Strangers Drowning by MacFarquhar, Larissa


  • Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Munroe, Randall


  • Through the Habitrails: Life Before and After My Career in the Cubicles by Nicholson, Jeff


  • Fooled By Randomness & The Black Swan: Two Books In One by Taleb, Nassim Nicholas


  • The Will to Battle by Palmer, Ada


  • Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Cuboniks, Laboria


  • Math with Bad Drawings by Orlin, Ben


  • For the Motherboard: The Rubรกiyรกt of Omar Khayyรกm by Hodgkinson, Vanessa


  • Why Moral Theory is Boring and Corrupt by Anonymous


  • Exhalation by Chiang, Ted


  • Dril Official "Mr. Ten Years" Anniversary Collection by Dril


  • Science Fictions: The Epidemic of Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science by Ritchie, Stuart


  • Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Misak, Cheryl


  • The Borders of Infinity by Bujold, Lois McMaster


  • The Use and Abuse of Formal Models in Political Philosophy by Wolff, Robert Paul
    • </a></li>

    Misc

    Epigram


    It is equally fatal to the spirit to have a system and to not have one.
    So you must combine the two. 1
    โ€” Friedrich Schlegel


    ...there is in men and women a motivation stronger even than love or hatred or fear. It is that of being interested โ€” in a body of knowledge, in a problem, in a hobby, in tomorrowโ€™s newspaper.
    โ€” George Steiner


    Favourites

    Site

    I love making this site better. I'm no designer but I enjoy the results, and the feedback (n=6 friends) is good. Here's a list of my design decisions.

    The title is an Iain Banks allusion: his powerful protagonists tease pompous people by taking names with as little gravitas as possible. To take the arg min of something is to find the thing which results in its lowest value.

    Conflicts of interest

    Financial:
    • I am funded by UKRI and so really by the British government.
    • I won an Emergent Ventures grant via Tyler Cowen.
    • ex: I used to work at AXA, a big insurer.
    • ex: My mask paper used compute donated by Microsoft.

    Political: Few. Never a member of any party.

    Giving

    I'm a member of Giving What We Can, people who pledge substantial amounts of their lifetime income to the most effective charitable causes. I'm donating 5% this year, aiming at 50% overall 2. My reasoning on the most important causes and my basket of charities is forthcoming.


    I am cause-neutral (I'll support whatever is best, to the extent that objective evaluation is possible) and cause-sceptical (we don't really know what the best thing to do is).

    Psychology

    Morality as Co-operation (questionnaire): (Really not a fan of evolved morality.)


    Oxford Utilitarianism Scale
    • Impartial Beneficence: 33 out of 35
    • Instrumental Harm: 21 out of 28


    Intrinsic Values Test


    Moral Foundations:


    The Big Five



    Core assumptions of effective altruism 14 out of 21.

    Myers-Briggs Type: FOAD.

    Elsewhere

    Endorsements


    DQ: A very nice website - links to the original papers, including participant numbers and number of citations... effect sizes and replications effect sizes.
    JH: Very interesting, for a variety of reasons - and not just because it's fun to trawl through the wreckage... of 'those silly social scientists'. This [post] is a big old thing... much more comprehensive than anything I ever did... Not a lot of people would have the commitment to even try and organise something like this... You do get a sense of the enormity of [the replication crisis] which isn't really available through other documents...

    DQ: What are the implications for how we actually teach first year psych?
    JH: TEACH THEM THIS!
    - Dan Quintana & James Heathers


    The best mask-wearing study so far?
    - Tyler Cowen


    This was a great EAG. I love how excited everyone was, like this guy. (If you're in the audience, sorry Gavin, didn't get your permission [to show that photo]).
    โ€“ Will MacAskill


    Utterly charming. In the nature of such lists, one does not expect to agree with every, single one---of course not. But the lists exhibit a lively and critical mind, unwilling to follow the usual party lines.
    โ€“ Deirdre McCloskey 6


    I'm honoured to be on your list [of favourite books].
    โ€“ Robin Hanson 7


    Nice image, young man. You may be a writer.
    โ€“ Will Self 8



    Also, my mum says I'm cool.

    Identity

    I try not to identify as things. My premises, projects and preferences say overwhelmingly more about me than my social identity does.

    Tone

    I'm sometimes told I'm too strident. I'll accept this, because constant hedging is unreadable, more annoying than authoritativeness. Also because strong claims galvanise opposition: as long as they're reasonable as well as strong, hopefully this stimulus creates value.

    Anyway I'm not as sure as I sound: there's a comment box under every piece, call me out.

    Why so many quotations?

    Well, they're the densest store of insight. We are not empiricists by nature or by culture, so they are my concession to the apeish narrative side of mind. That quotes page is like a message digest of 10 years of me reading and learning.

    I sometimes regret my instinctual distrust of Twitter: a lot of contemporary aphorists must be whiling away the years on there.

    Metrics

    Here are scales for rating all kinds of things.

    Loss function

    Above all I hope to beat the trend spotted by Robin Hanson about independent scholars:

    over time amateurs blow their lead by focusing less and relying on easier, more direct methods. They rely more on informal conversation as analysis method, they prefer personal connections over open competitions in choosing people, and they rely more on a perceived consensus among a smaller group of fellow enthusiasts. As a result, their contributions just donโ€™t appeal as widely or as long.

    Gavins Leeches

    Illnesses

    I suffer from degenerative DNA scrambling, increasingly lazy cells, irreversible methylation, terribly tangled proteins, disappearing stem-cell nooks, and ultimately oxygen poisoning, like everyone.

    What's with all these accordions?

    Information hiding is a basic condition of good large software; these accordions are a prose analogue. The hope is that, by tucking away wires, I can write long things without triggering anyone's TL;DR reflex.

    It also sort of simulates a dialogue with the reader: I plant a question, and then they prompt for the response.






    1. Es ist gleich tรถdlich fรผr den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Es wird sich also wohl entschlieรŸen mรผssen beides zu verbinden.
    2. (or an equivalent value of my labour.)
    4. Comment on my "vade mecum" book list including Age of Em.
    5. Here, 21/11/14.