Adam Zerner

I've been thinking about specificity recently and decided to re-read SotW: Be Specific. In that post Eliezer writes the following: > S. I. Hayakawa called this the ladder of abstraction. I'm not sure if understanding the following section will really help with the skill of Being Specific, or help anyone...

A wise woman once said: humans are not automatically strategic. I'd like to propose a way of being more strategic in the kitchen. I'd like to propose that you learn the reverse sear technique. But not just the technique. Not just the thing you do to cook a steak. I'd...

(Meta: This is largely a re-framing of Consider your appetite for disagreements.) Poker players get into arguments a lot. Back when I used to play I would review hands with a friend and we'd get into these passionate disagreements about what the right decision is. To keep it simple, suppose...

Ever since watching this clip of a Larry David interview, the phrase "social intercourse" has stuck with me. He uses it to describe things like dinner parties where people mix and mingle. I thought about it the other day. I was in Cancun on vacation and was texting with a...

In JavaScript there are[1] five primitive types: null, undefined, number, string, and boolean. I think it'd be fun to go through each of them and ask what it'd look like for a belief to have the associated type. Boolean In casual conversation, people often talk about beliefs as if they...

Suppose you have an empty plot of land and want to build a house. To someone without a civil engineering background, it may be tempting to just start building right on top of the bare soil. However, this isn't The Sims. If you build your house on top of bare...

I think that there is an important difference between sharing your beliefs and sharing what your model predicts. Let me explain. I'm a basketball fan. There's this guy named Ben Taylor who has a podcast called Thinking Basketball. He's currently doing a series of episodes on the top 25 peaks...