Maxwell Peterson

When I was a child in school, punctuation marks were taught like rules. A period goes at the end of a sentence. A comma is useful because a list like “Apple banana cherry” is wrong; the list “Apple, banana, cherry” looks better. If you don’t use commas or periods or...

Now and then, at work, we’ll have a CEO on from the megacorp that owns the company I work at. It’s a Zoom meeting with like 300 people, the guy is usually giving a speech that is harmless and nice (if a bit banal), and I’ll turn on my camera...

A core tenet of Bayesianism is that probability is in the mind. But it seems to me that even hardcore Bayesians can waffle a bit when it comes to the possibility that quantum probabilities are irreducible physical probabilities. I don’t know enough about quantum physics to lay things out in...

In machine learning, for large systems with a lot of users, or difficult prediction tasks that require a ton of number-crunching, there’s a dilemma: * Big complex models like neural networks are the best at making automated decisions * Big complex models are expensive to run Cheap Model → Big...

Collected links to my research & math posts. A sequence on interpreting the central limit theorem in terms of convolutions. The standout post from that sequence. The standard statement of the CLT says that the input distributions must be identically distributed, but it turns out that requirement can be bent...

Many data scientists and data analysts working today use the Gaussian (Normal) distribution when computing probabilities from yes/no count data. The appropriate distribution for binary count data is the Beta distribution, and the Gaussian is only an approximation. This approximation works well for probabilities close to 0.5, and on medium-to-large...

Epistemic status: Unsure. I had this in drafts from a year ago, and am posting it for Goodhart day. (Though it's April 1, all the arguments and statements in this post are things I think are true, with no jokes). I'm interested in arguments against this thesis, and especially interested...