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DYNOMIGHT

dynomight.net

science and existential angst

ScienceEssays / personalMathAI / MLSociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
233 from 12 Jun 2020 to 28 Oct 2026
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weekly (25 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 21

  1. Psychometrics, vaccines, meat, Kowloon, luggage destruction
  2. Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days
  3. Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?
  4. Thoughts I had while reading your comment
  5. Indirect lessons from human alignment
  6. So you want to use plants to reduce indoor CO₂
  7. Does every question mark deserve a Betteridge?
  8. Does creatine make you smarter?
  9. Pseudpocalypse
  10. Life with hazard ratios
  11. Blink if you’re human
  12. The worthlessness of vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
  13. Is “colorectal cancer” rising in “young people”?
  14. What’s with all the slide decks?
  15. You’re probably taking the wrong painkiller
  16. I quit drinking for a year
  17. LLMs predict my coffee
  18. The modern formatting addiction in writing
  19. Maybe there’s a pattern here?
  20. Heritability of human life span is about 50% when heritability is redefined to be something different
  21. Why read novels?

2025 48

  1. Good if make prior after data instead of before
  2. Why the chicken crossed the road, according to various entities
  3. Underrated reasons to be thankful V
  4. Make product worse, get money
  5. Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts
  6. Pointing machines, population pyramids, post office scandal, type species, and horse urine
  7. Will the explainer post go extinct?
  8. Y’all are over-complicating these AI-risk arguments
  9. Shoes, Algernon, Pangea, and Sea Peoples
  10. Dear PendingKetchup
  11. You can try to like stuff
  12. I guess I was wrong about AI persuasion
  13. Futarchy's fundamental flaw — the market — the blog post
  14. Heritability puzzlers
  15. New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes
  16. My 9-week unprocessed food self-experiment
  17. Links for July
  18. Do blue-blocking glasses improve sleep?
  19. Scribble-based forecasting and AI 2027
  20. The AI safety problem is wanting
  21. Thoughts on the AI 2027 discourse
  22. Moral puzzles: Man vs. machine
  23. Please take my weird moral puzzles quiz
  24. Futarchy's fundamental flaw
  25. Optimizing tea: An N=4 experiment
  26. My advice on (internet) writing, for what it's worth
  27. DumPy: NumPy except it's OK if you're dum
  28. The Heat Mirage: My least-favorite internet maneuver
  29. I don't like NumPy
  30. How to title your blog post or whatever
  31. How much information is in DNA?
  32. So much blood
  33. Trading stuff for money
  34. J'accuse
  35. My more-hardcore theanine self-experiment
  36. Links for April
  37. Paper
  38. Limits of smart
  39. Rewarding ideas
  40. My 16-month theanine self-experiment
  41. Bayes is not a phase
  42. The first RCT for GLP-1 drugs and alcoholism isn't what we hoped
  43. Do you need permission from the government to do independent research?
  44. Car trouble
  45. Algorithmic ranking is unfairly maligned
  46. I am offering mentoring
  47. Links for January
  48. Counterintuitive effects of minimum prices

2024 32

  1. Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics III
  2. Tactical parenting
  3. Underrated reasons to be thankful IV
  4. OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now
  5. Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
  6. Attitudes one can take towards people who have behaved badly
  7. Sloth was not the right answer
  8. Please show lots of digits
  9. Arithmetic is an underrated world-modeling technology
  10. Against dystopian views of high-speed audiobook listening
  11. The real data wall is billions of years of evolution
  12. Consciousness will slip through our fingers
  13. Thoughts while watching myself be automated
  14. Nursing doubts: Is breastfeeding good?
  15. It's probably just money: Why hosts do well at the Olympics
  16. Tactical typing
  17. Is there a homeless crisis?
  18. Why doesn't advice work?
  19. Let's stop counting centuries
  20. Datasets that change the odds you exist
  21. Obvious travel advice
  22. Fighting me and other survey results
  23. Dynomight internet survey
  24. Thoughts on seed oil
  25. Fahren-height
  26. Things that don't work
  27. Everything is espionage: Things I learned researching Assange
  28. Using axis lines for good or evil
  29. Taste games
  30. What if you just bought everyone air purifiers?
  31. Fancy math doesn't make simple math stop being true
  32. Shorts for January

2023 29

  1. Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics II
  2. Your tastes are a point in space
  3. Underrated reasons to be thankful III
  4. Bourdieu's theory of taste: a grumbling abrégé
  5. What's so great about tunnel man?
  6. Are language models good at making predictions?
  7. You’re Invited to a Colonoscopy!
  8. The midwit home
  9. Grug on diet soda and autism
  10. Can I take ducks home from the park?
  11. My heuristics for interacting with humans
  12. Contra four-wheeled suitcases, sort of
  13. Thoughts on high-stakes college admissions
  14. Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists
  15. Conspiracy theory: Electric cars make more air pollution than gas cars
  16. WHO aspartame brouhaha
  17. Notes on Lawrence of Arabia
  18. My stupid noise journey
  19. The second system problem
  20. I still think it's very unlikely we're observing alien aircraft
  21. Taxonomy of procrastination
  22. Numbers without which it's impossible to talk about weight loss
  23. Reasons after nonpersons
  24. The hard problem of feelings
  25. Why didn't we get GPT-2 in 2005?
  26. First-principles on AI scaling
  27. Your friend the language model
  28. Winner take all science
  29. Buy more copies

2022 55

  1. Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics
  2. Advice on being managed
  3. Historical analogies for large language models
  4. Valid arguments with invalid conclusions
  5. Underrated reasons to be thankful II
  6. A modest proposal: For preventing the heat in bathwater in Britain
  7. How much does a CT scan affect life expectancy?
  8. Prediction market does not imply causation
  9. The anxiety of the moderate
  10. The conspiratorial Monty Hall problem
  11. Why ‟controlling for a variable” doesn't (usually) work
  12. Effectiveness beats accuracy
  13. Does gratitude increase happiness?
  14. 358 games of puzzle storm
  15. Rules for weird ideas
  16. A model for journalistic copypasta
  17. Shorts for August
  18. Old jokes
  19. No soap radio
  20. Nobody optimizes happiness
  21. Litter and circles of internalization
  22. Notes on the Balkans
  23. What I learned trying to classify abortion access across the rich world
  24. Thoughts on the potato diet
  25. Shorts for July
  26. Blocked persons and letters of marque
  27. Candidate final bosses
  28. Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
  29. Aspartame: Once more unto the breach
  30. Diet Coke probably isn't a cognitive performance enhancer
  31. Why it's bad to kill Grandma
  32. Social dynamics of bluetooth speakers
  33. Shorts for June
  34. What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?
  35. Don't blame ethylene for bad tomatoes
  36. Why is it traitorous to understand the people you disagree with? Six models
  37. The madness of reduced medical diagnostics
  38. Why nuclear weapons aren't getting bigger
  39. So you want to invent a nuclear weapon
  40. Ethylene in the food supply chain
  41. Ethylene for fun and profit and produce
  42. My attempted cult recruitment
  43. Creative nonfiction training exercises
  44. Why I don't believe in long-term thinking
  45. Arguing without warning
  46. You, your parents, and the hotness of who you marry
  47. How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list
  48. Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate
  49. Do economies tend to converge or diverge?
  50. Warby Parker multiverse
  51. So you're thinking about writing on the internet
  52. A summary of the research on gas stoves and health
  53. Reasons and Persons: The case against the self
  54. How to use analogies for good not evil
  55. Things you're doing but don't want to be doing

2021 31

  1. Homosexuality and evolution
  2. Plans you're not supposed to talk about
  3. Reasons and Persons: Watch theories eat themselves
  4. How many extra days of life do you get from taking statins?
  5. Effective selfishness
  6. How the United States didn't ban the death penalty
  7. Underrated reasons to be thankful
  8. How France banned the death penalty
  9. How the United Kingdom banned the death penalty
  10. The death penalty as a lens on democracy
  11. How Germany banned the death penalty
  12. A breakdown of the data on the homeless crisis across the U.S.
  13. The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it
  14. Two conspiracy theories about cola
  15. The big alcohol study that didn't happen: My primal scream of rage
  16. Statistical nihilism and culture-war island hopping
  17. Political polarization is partly a sample bias illusion
  18. General factors of intelligence and physical fitness
  19. It’s perfectly valid for a trait to be more than 100% heritable
  20. Does the gender-equality paradox actually exist?
  21. A review of early split-brain experiments
  22. Alcohol, health, and the ruthless logic of the Asian flush
  23. Are some personalities just better?
  24. The case against ultrasonic humidifiers
  25. The irrelevance of test scores is greatly exaggerated
  26. Better air quality is the easiest way not to die
  27. The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box-fan
  28. Have a consistent ruleset. Titles are a black art. Have empathy for the brain’s parser. It’s impossible to follow all the conventions. Write a thesis statement even if you hate it
  29. Some people claim ethics aren’t practical. Others make a grim philosophical argument:
  30. I used to think the people I saw running were insane. They were confused about life. Whatever the benefits of running, nothing could justify that much suffering. Runners were cut from a different cloth. They had a strength of will I lacked. I would never be one of them.
  31. If you ever joined a large organization in the US, you filled out an ethnicity form. Here’s a typical one:

2020 17

  1. In June of 1812 Napoleon assembled the largest European army in history and invaded Russia. After months of bloody fighting, the French finally arrived in Moscow in September, surprised to find the city mostly abandoned. That night, remaining Russians set fires across the city, eventually burning mo
  2. Bad air is bad for you. The air purifier market, though, is a mess. Every purifier uses incompatible proprietary filters, presumably to lock you into buying replacements. How do we know these actually work? Few seem to publish lab tests. And why does it cost $100-$300 for a big plastic...
  3. It turns out that sales tax has a huge, gigantic, terrible flaw: It punishes specialized businesses. A value added tax (VAT) has no such problems.
  4. Universal basic income (UBI) is an odd duck. Proponents range from futurists to libertarians to social democrats. Why this weird range of people?
  5. We want to know if things are fair. Do some groups of people tend to get a raw deal in company hiring or university admissions or court sentences?
  6. You can’t measure police bias using simple population ratios. A better idea is to check if police behave differently when it’s dark, but this doesn’t give any firm conclusions either. What else can we do?
  7. Simpson's paradox all the way down
  8. This is a new way to convert temperatures between Celsius and Fahrenheit. It’s not the most accurate method, but it’s surely the easiest.
  9. Here’s a “low-brow” take on ethics that’s worth taking seriously:
  10. Cedric and Bertrand want to see a movie. Bertrand wants to see Muscled Duded Blow Stuff Up. Cedric wants to see Quiet Remembrances: Time as Allegory. There’s also Middlebrow Space Fantasy. They are rational but not selfish - they care about the other’s happiness as much as their own. What...
  11. Measuring police bias using simple ratios doesn’t work. You can never cleanly separate the impact of race from other associated factors.
  12. Watching people discuss police bias statistics, I despair. Some claim simple calculations prove police bias, some claim the opposite. Who is right?
  13. Talking about sugar Nick and Maria want to talk about sugar. Does it reduce lifespan? They disagree, but are honest and principled. They want to find the truth and agree on it. How should they talk? Take turns? Try hard to be polite and respectful? Allow interruptions? Search for origins...
  14. Here’s an Obvious Problem: There are 10 doors. A car is behind a random door, goats behind the others. Do you want what’s behind door 1, or what’s behind all the other doors? That’s easy, right? Well, how about the Monty Hall problem? There are three doors. A car is...
  15. Question: Should you drink acetone?
  16. Economists say free trade is good because of “comparative advantage”. But what is comparative advantage? Why is it good? This is sometimes considered an arcane part of economics. (Wikipedia defines it using “autarky”.) But it’s really a very simple idea. Anyone can use it to understand the world and
  17. In defense of Myers-Briggs