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Stories of my Life
| 392 wordsYesterday was my 22nd birthday, marking the end of my 22nd year on Earth. In honor of this, here are 22 stories of my life: When I was one, I locked myself inside the bathroom. My mother once took me shopping and I hid inside a circular clothes rack. Afterwards,...
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How to Construct Bets
| 484 wordsSuppose I think event \(E\) is going to happen with 50% chance and my friend thinks that it’s going to happen with 70% chance. Clearly, we should bet on it, but how do we do that? Simple algebraic manipulations suffice to show that a fair bet assuming \(E\) happens at...
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How to Buy Things
| 823 words“Money doesn’t buy happiness.” This proverb is spoken by people who prioritize other things over money. Sometimes this proverb is also spoken as slight upon people with a lot of money. Are people wrong to prioritize things over money? Probably not. Is the proverb true? Probably not. It seems a...
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These Legal Systems Do Not Exist
| 842 wordsInspired by Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, Because I Just Made Them Up I The people of Edent do not know if they are good. This is not unusual; many people do not know if they are good people or not. However, the people of Edent also believe in...
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AI Safety FAQs
| 3073 wordsDisclaimer: This represents nothing more and nothing less than what a single person thinks about a complicated topic. What is AI Safety? To help frame this question, we’re going to first answer the dual question of “what is Cybersecurity?” As a concept, Cybersecurity is the idea that questions like “is...
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Be Stupid
| 432 wordsThere is a type of person that is very concerned with the appearance of intelligence. This person might use a lot of large words that people don’t understand, talk a lot about complicated philosophical theories, and be overly concerned with injecting nuance. For example, when asked to give opinions about...
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100 Opinions About Emotions
| 1122 wordsI was inspired by Jeffrey Ladish’s 100 Opinions on Nuclear War to write 100 opinions about emotions. This task was less interesting than I thought it would be, but introduced me to new ways of probing my opinions about things. I am also now relatively confident I can come up...
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Be Perfect
| 607 words(The law of equal and opposite advice applies in droves.) Caltech has a couple of strange traditions. One such the tradition are the houses, which are sort of like a mix of dorms and fraternities/sororities. New students spend their first two weeks “rotating” through the eight houses and getting a...
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Review: Against the Grain
| 2834 wordsThe original goal was to review Against the Grain by James Scott in the style of Scott Alexander (who has already reviewed this particular book). However, I soon found myself unequal to the task. Turns out writing is harder than I thought and that I’m not as good at writing...
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These Are a Few of My Favorite Questions
| 870 wordsMuch of my progression as a thinking thing can be traced to internalizing questions that force rigor and care in thought and action. These are some that serve me well. Would this be a mistake? Sometimes, my bedtime approaches and I feel the urge to delay sleep to watch television....