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All of casualphysicsenjoyer's Comments + Replies

Doing Research Part-Time is Great
casualphysicsenjoyer50

I would just spend more time emailing potential supervisors, with a higher frequency. There doesn't really seem to be a minimum threshold level that I needed to hit, other than finishing my master's 

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Doing Research Part-Time is Great
casualphysicsenjoyer70

Did you email supervisors in the areas you were publishing in? 

No. But even if I did, my one publication that I somehow managed to do on my own was trash. So I wouldn't put much weight on that. 

How often did you email them?

I probably tried to email a new person every couple of weeks. The first person that seriously responded is the person I am working with now!

Why'd it take so long for them to accept free high-skilled labour?

I think taking on part time students is really time consuming. A lot of institutions flat out don't do it. And providing th... (read more)

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6Algon
That makes sense. If you had to re-do the whole process from scratch, what would you do differently this time?
An Unexpected GPT-3 Decision in a Simple Gamble
casualphysicsenjoyer20

text-davinci-002, updated with a link to github 

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2janus
text-davinci-002 is often extremely confident about its "predictions" for no apparent good reason (e.g. when generating "open-ended" text being ~99% confident about the exact phrasing) This is almost certainly due to the RLHF "Instruct" tuning text-davinci-002 has been subjected to. To whatever extent probabilities output by models trained with pure SSL can be assigned an epistemic interpretation (the model's credence for the next token in a hypothetical training sample), that interpretation no longer holds for models modified by RLHF.
The Economics of a New Energy Source
casualphysicsenjoyer20

Sorry, I might be missing something here but

  • Isn't price of energy typically measured in kW hours. Energy = Power x Time. 
  • If a space solar system can output more energy since it stays on for longer, wouldn't this mean that the cost per watt hour would naturally decrease? This would be because the price of a watt hour I imagine would be Energy / price. So, if our launch cost is a fixed cost, then we would find that E / price decreases. 
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1Caridorc Tergilti
* Very good point: I think the website I linked to refers to peak power, so the Kilowatthours would be lower. (not sure on this, sorry) * If the panels on orbit last double the time and produce double the energy that is only a factor of 4, while the system is about 300 times more expensive. (but again you have transmission losses that I did not consider)
Call For Distillers
casualphysicsenjoyer30

Should the role of a distiller include spotting mistakes? I assume that you'd only want distillers to get to work once you have some confidence that the original claims are correct. 

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What recent academic areas of study have a sample size that is 'too small'?
casualphysicsenjoyer10

Thanks Derek. I'm writing a blog post on results from small samples - may I cite your answer? 

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1Derek M. Jones
I'm always happy to be cited :-) Sample size is one major issue, the other is who/what gets to be in the sample. Psychology has its issues with using WEIRD subjects. Software engineering has issues with the use of student subjects, because most of them have relatively little experience. It all revolves around convenience sampling.