LESSWRONG

Edited for concreteness. Exactly one year ago, LessWrong helped me change my mind about something important.  Since then, my life has be

I'm reading this for fun -- tutorials and book recommendations on the Bayesian methods toolboox with a cognitive science/machine learning sl

This post grew out of a very long discussion with the New York Less Wrong meetup group.  The question was, should a group dedicated to ratio

Related: Science: do it yourself, Some Heuristics for Evaluating The Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields, The Neglecte

From the recent NIPS conference, here's a talk by MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum on what he calls "rich" machine learning.  Should b

I thought some people might like to see a free textbook on networks.  This is not a graph theory course; it covers an enormous breadth of to

Are there any occasions when it's a good idea to avoid exposing yourself to a certain piece of information?  As rationalists, we probably do

Ok, let's face facts.  The Internet has fried my brain.  I'm a terrible hedonist and procrastinator.  I have a very important test in May --

Harvard's undergraduate admission office will tell you "There is no typical Harvard student."  This platitude ticks me off.  Of course there

There's a concept (inspired by a Metafilter blog post) of ask culture vs. guess culture.  In "ask culture," it's socially acceptable to ask