This post was written as part of MATS 9.1 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. This post is the first of several I will be writing on using natural selection to understand artificial intelligence and agency. This post will show how noisy selection on genome structure can make evolution effectively...
I got an enormous amount of personal and intellectual value from my 1.5 years in the TU Delft Debate Club. I did British Parliamentary debate in the Netherlands in 2022-2023, about twice a week. I went to ~5 external tournaments. It made me wiser, more personable, more open-minded, and, I...
(Note: Edited 26 Feb. 2026 to include the whole text, rather than a blurb) This post was written during MATS 9.0 under the mentorship of Richard Ngo. The argument in brief: Neural scaling laws — the power-law improvement of loss with model size, data, and compute — can be derived...
(Note: Edited 26 Feb. 2026 to include the whole text, rather than a blurb) In this post I will try to outline an idea which I have imbibed by studying physics, but which I think is generally applicable as a tool for thinking. This is the idea: because we can...
This is my attempt to summarize Infra-Bayesianism probability theory at a level approaching "high school class in probability", as opposed to the "math-major class in probability theory" of the original. I aimed to focus on including simple exercises (with answers given in 'the back of the book') of the kind...