About
Whether you consider him a genius or an insufferable know-it-all, Richard Feynman had a point when he said:
Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
With this in mind, I try to maintain interests in a fairly wide range of fields. This often leads me to consider alternative perspectives, or how things could be done differently. Some time ago, I started writing down these thoughts, and although they started out as inpenetrable lists or streams of consciousness, I have finally reached the point where some of them are fleshed out sufficiently that they can be shared.
Inspired by such blogs as Slate Star Codex, Putanumonit and Everything Studies, this blog is for my musings on a variety of subjects, including, but not limited to philosophy, politics, science, mathematics and cartography. I hope to be able to raise some interesting ideas and questions – anything more than that is a bonus.
Other interests aside, I am based in the UK, with a background in mathematics, so if you perceive a slight tendency for me to dwell on such topics, that may be the reason why.
Epistemic Status
Using these categories, I aim to give a rough indication of how confident I am in my assertions:
1/4 – Flight of Fancy: A post that whilst not fictitious, is not overly concerned with practicalities or implementation details.
2/4 – Speculative: A post containing opinions, views or concepts that I have not necessarily honed to a great degree. More careful consideration may yet ensue.
3/4 – Considered Opinion: A post that I have put significant thought into. Still just an opinion, but a fairly well considered one.
4/4 – Maximum Effort: A post backed up by sufficient research, that I am comfortable to consider it relatively objective.
Top Posts
The sequence of posts on Universal Basic Income have been sufficiently popular that I have collated them all into a single article and linked to it in the top-bar for easy access.
My most read stand-alone post has been Bayesian Updating, which is a post on mathematics. Whilst there are many articles out there explaining how to update a single prior probability, this attempts to demystify the process of updating a prior distribution.
Optimising Federalism and its follow-on post A United Federal Britain have also had a significant number of hits recently.
Other Links
Curated lists of Scott Alexander’s writings:
Curated list of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writings:
Other blogs I particularly enjoy: