Viewing profile — Mattasher

The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, sup…

> At least for me, in many cases I have achieved a much better understanding of various things after I studied the historical development of the ideas related to them. Completely a…

Interesting document. Especially interesting compared to the Bourbaki movement from a century ago, which was much more focused on universality and correctness, and much less focuse…

I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems t…

The intuition here that helped me understand this is that, if you know the search strategy of another player in advance, your best best is to "front run" where they will look as mu…

In this definition an "observer" is anything whose path depends on some perceived outcome (as in state of the universe), correct? So that could be human or a rock tumbling down a h…

I think there's a case to be made that, if the simulation hypothesis is correct, we are god's dice[1]. We exist as agents to introduce randomness in the form of free will or enough…

The use of "some" here in the headline seems dishonest and diminishing of what was done. Like, "some people were effected by the car crash". Technically true, but effectively more …

There is an advantage of using pie charts when you have lots of categories, especially when some are tiny slivers. It's that you can see which items are negligible in terms of thei…

It's worth being very careful about these constructions. "no evidence of a difference" is fine so long as it's proceeded with "This study found", which when studies are translated …

This is most certainly true when it comes to investments. Yes, you could put 100% of your savings in an index fund and forget about it, but that seems extreme, and also you have to…

Good post I'm quite certain this is correct: > Meaning that if you go from 4 priorities to 3, you can get, say, 10 percent more done; but if you go from 4 to 1, you get 400 percent…

Will that work seamlessly overseas and with my iPhone? I've had issues in the past getting verification calls and SMSes with "virtual" carriers.

Agreed that emails aren't a good permanent identifier. Though using phone numbers as any part of identification is even worse. I've had the same email for almost two decades (throu…

You might want to check out Buena Vista Social Club.

Key quote: “The facts show clearly that this is being driven largely by an increase in deaths of despair, with fentanyl overdoses being the leading cause of death for Americans 18 …

Databases still have to be maintained and updated. You're better off setting up an Ethereum contract with proper economic incentives for others to act as an oracle and return the p…

There is no such thing as "universal health care" in a country, in any meaningful sense. Every country with government run health care rations with limits on availability, wait tim…

> They could reach new highs with alternate business models but only at the cost of short term reduction in revenue from ads. Yes. Long term, if you control peoples attention and t…

This tracks roughly with the 4 categories of unknown and know, as in the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns". To me the most interesting is the "unknown knowns", those ephemeral things …

Humans have a long history of comparing ourselves, and the universe, to our latest technological advancement. We used to be glorified clocks (as was the universe), then we were aut…

Confusion about the Monte Hall problem isn't an issue with people not understanding probability, it's that the problem is usually presented in a way that's under-explained and with…

Interesting idea, but you're not getting any entropy for free by going back in time. If you wanted to map every possible file of a set length to a specific time and location where …

Taking this comment at face value. Whether or not we should just let people do what they want, we most certainly do not. Our laws and our culture have a lot of rules about personal…

Interesting project. Though the sample conversations in the picture read like what someone thinks a human would sounds like in conversation. Or like those snippets you get in a lan…