Max Niederman

It turns out that airlines largely do not make their money from selling tickets. Instead, airlines are primarily in the business of selling credit card rewards. Rewards programs are intangible assets, so the financial statements of major airlines do not generally give valuations for them. However, there are a couple...

Class discrimination is very real, and it is often useful to be able to feign a higher class than one was born into. Some of these class markers are obvious: graduating from an expensive private school, having lots of wealth but not flaunting it, knowing other wealthy/high-status people, etc. However,...

A popular topic on LessWrong is that much of science fails to replicate, because of bad incentives and increasingly complex statistics. I think most of us want more replication studies to be published, but it's of course very difficult to effect that change in mainstream science. For AI safety specifically,...

Fullrank is an interactive CLI tool for Bayesian inference of list rankings based on noisy comparisons. It takes a list of items, then efficiently prompts the user to compare pairs of items until the user decides that the posterior distribution is sufficiently low entropy. It can then sample from the...

You’ve probably come across a landing page which looks something like this: It is very hard to tell, from its landing page, what Twilio actually does. What exactly does it mean that they’ll “combine powerful communications APIs with AI and first-party data?” I certainly don’t know. In these situations, I...

One of the most common forms of schoolwork is the writing assignment. The idea is that, if a student understands the subject, they should be able to demonstrate that by writing about the subject. These kinds of assignments are widely considered to improve comprehension and writing skill in addition to...