I've decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the third of five. I'm posting these here because Blogspot's comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise.

15. On Confabulation

...It's flailing with words, trying to provide some good-looking answer or account that's ultimately indifferent to ground truth. Crucially, it's possible for an utterance to be only partially confabulation.

16. A Short Meditation on Upton's Law and Selection Effects

I leave as an exercise to the reader the full story of how this maps onto the plight of any given researcher at a scaling lab, especially the kind of researcher who joined up with the expressed hopes of changing it from within.

17. A Brief Note On My Weird Choices of Probability Figures

The weird thing about my estimates is, they don't tend to be round tens of percents. Often, they aren't even simple ratios of small whole numbers - 3s and 93s and 35s abound. So what's up with that? Am I just posing? Wonderfully, no! I like to think about probabilities in terms of successive coin flips - that is, something like surprisal, or log-probability.

18. A Partial Theory of Flavor Pairing in Foodcraft

As with any art, the rules are not ironclad, and they can be broken to good effect. Neither are they universal: a combination of shrimp paste and pears might disgust you, but to the Indonesian palate, it evokes delicious rojak.

19. ...And We Stare At The Sun, But We Never See Anything There

You're having trouble with, can't quite, peel your mental focus away from this thing, this exceptionally appealing concept or fantasy or goal; it hurts so very sweetly. You can't look at it directly, but you can't help but look at it directly; this thing which overstimulates parts of you that have atrophied or slept insensate for so long that they scream like pinched or awakening nerves; this thing which jangles against the sharp broken bits of your soul.

20. The Ultimate Sylow Theorem Guide for Algebra Quals

Something I wish I'd had when I was a tiny undergraduate and then a yearling graduate creature, so I'm doing it for them now.

21. Why Infrabayesian Epistemics Should Permit Winning At Causally-Weird Decision Theory Puzzles

According to ncatlab, this is equivalent to both the fact that classically, all probabilities sum to 1, and also that information-theoretically, reading an input, processing it, and destroying the output is equivalent to destroying the input.