willbradshaw

Lately, I've been trying to get my hands on a PlayStation 5. These are in pretty short supply in the UK these days – thanks to the chip shortage, and exacerbated by Ever Given, demand currently far outstrips supply. To get a PS5 from any retailer, you need to subscribe...

TLDR Exploration – trying new things, even when there are safe, familiar things within reach – is hard. Risky. Stressful. It’s also essential to a rich and vibrant life well lived. Like most other hard, stressful, important things, it’s better done together than apart. With our unique mixtures of shared...

TLDR * Final Version Perfected (FVP) is a highly effective algorithm for deciding which tasks from your To-Do lists to do in what order. * The design of the algorithm makes it far more efficient than exhaustive ranking, while (in my experience) far more effective than just reading through the...

Follows from: Why We Age, Part 1; Evolution is Sampling Error; An addendum on effective population size Partially redundant with Highlights of Comparative and Evolutionary Aging. Last time, I introduced three puzzles in the evolution of ageing: > This, then, is the threefold puzzle of ageing. Why should a process...

Follows from: Evolution is Sampling Error A lot of people commenting on my previous post (mainly on Facebook) were confused about the difference between effective and census population size. I think the second response is reasonable; for non-experts, the concept of effective population size is legitimately fairly confusing. So I...

At the LessWrong European Community Weekend 2018, I gave a talk explaining the intuition behind non-adaptive theories of the evolution of ageing. This blog post and its followup are adapted from that presentation. When people find out that I did my PhD in the biology of ageing, they tend to...

This is a linkpost for a (somewhat old) post on my blog apomorphic.com. I'm posting this and other old posts here to get feedback and in hopeful preparation for some follow-on work[1]. See also: An addendum on effective population size A common mistake people make about evolution is to think...