thomascolthurst

Ezra Klein has a new podcast episode out discussing proportional representation (PR), so I thought I would point out that there is a little discussed variant of PR that doesn't require redrawing any districts and can even be used for singleton offices like the President. As the title of this...

[Epistemic status: Written in 2010. Possibly of historic interest only.] Goodhart's Law states that "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." "Control" here means "policy", such as conducted by a government or central bank. To give just one classic example,...

(Originally posted at https://plus.google.com/+ThomasColthurst/posts/5fcw5wgVrpj in 2013) I love the premise of Peter de Blanc's "Ontological Crises in Artificial Agents’ Value Systems": you are robot who used to think the universe was described by some set of states O1, only to wake up and find out that the universe is better...