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I can’t stand it when people criticize Scott Alexander, whose knowledge of all things is unimpeded, deity of deities, excelling the Ruler of Gods, excelling Brahmā, fearless in the possession of the four kinds of perfect confidence, wielder of the ten powers, and all-seer with unobstructed knowledge.

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TIL that there’s no flag emoji, there are “regional indicator symbols”, which are basically letters that are combined into two-letter codes for countries.

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For me, it always makes me feel better to look at the CVs of similar bloggers and see how little they’ve accomplished in comparison. I’m proud of my posts and my accomplishments, and I’m not going to h

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the name Allosaurus is really funny to me for some reason. I imagine two biologists standing over a set of giant bones, and one saying to the other “Yeah, I think this is a different kind of lizard than what we usually have to deal with.”

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i think that every language should have a unary - and + operator, and that those should be idempotent. sign flipping should be done by multiplication with -1.

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I need to find evidence for/against the claim that there was a training run of GPT-2 that maximized negative log-loss – I’ve heard it a couple of times on the internet and already spread the meme myself, but I haven’t seen it in a paper or blogpost

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de “How does one interpret those numbers? Does it mean that people usually died at about 30 years or is that really an average, meaning lots of children died but those who survived still reached something like 70 years?” -> It’s the mean, so there is a lot of bias in there w/r to infant mortality. I don’t know about median age of death.

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alternative formulation of orthogonality hypothesis: the size of the space of possible goals for an agent correlates positively, rather than negatively, with an agent’s optimization power

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The Orthogonality Hypothesis is obviously true, the Factored Cognition hypothesis is obviously false, and who can tell about the Fundamental Theorem of Finite Factored Sets?

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kind of insane that the average life expectancy in 1800 was nearly half as much as the one in the country with the lowest life expectancy today (28.5 years then, 50.7 years today in Lesotho)

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one might argue that we have huge amounts of uranium and other radioactive elements in the earth’s crust already, and since we only extract energy from nuclear energy, putting the waste back should make the earth less dangerous, not more. but the isotopes produced in nuclear energy have shorter half-life and are probably more poisonous than the uranium that was there before, even if they produce less radioactivity over the long run

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