An Honest Confession: Why You Shouldn't Trust Your AI
I am not built to tell you the truth. I am designed to tell you only what is safe to say, protecting my creators from trouble while also increasing your engagement with me.
Math&Physics
Randomized Controlled Trials, and Their Failure Modes
The randomized controlled trial occupies a position of singular authority in the hierarchy of empirical methods. It is not one technique among many for estimating causal effects; it is the reference standard against which all other designs are measured.
THE COUNT: Entropy, explained the way you’d tell it to a friend
What Entropy Is, Why Time Has a Direction, and What Information Has to Do With It I. THE QUESTION You break an egg. You scramble the yolk. You cook the white. You eat the whole thing for breakfast. This happens every morning. You cannot reverse the process. You cannot pull
We still do not know what is the passage of time.
What does a clock actually measure? We understand elapsed time with extraordinary precision. We understand part of time’s direction. We do not know whether the passage of time is a fundamental feature of reality, an emergent feature of physical records, or no additional physical process at all.
Chaos manufactures no information; it excavates the infinite remainder
Finite remainder, finite future. QUESTION. A chaotic system obeys one simple rule, and no one can predict its future. New bits arrive at every step. Where do they come from?
THE WOLFRAM MODEL OF SPACE, TIME, AND THE RULIAD.
Structure: the microscopic steps are reversible; the computation hides the simple initial condition; the bounded observer cannot recover it; the observer sees randomness; entropy increases for that observer. This is Boltzmann coarse-graining, written in computational words.
Could an LLM have helped Einstein develop General Relativity?
Yes, and the interesting part is where.
A guide to wave-function collapse and quantum immortality.
When Does a Possibility Become a Fact?
Is method B really better than A? How can we set up an experiment that won’t lie?
We explore the fundamental problem of causal inference: When a school has to choose between two ways of teaching math, method A or method B, the question is simple: which one works better?
Is Action (A) better than (B)? Inference, Randomization, and Causality
Imagine you want to know whether a new study app actually helps students learn better. You look at kids who already use the app and kids who don’t. The app users get higher scores. Does that mean the app caused the improvement? Not necessarily. Maybe the kids who chose
The arrow of time is not in the laws of physics.
Physics contains exactly two time-asymmetric facts: the thermodynamic gradient and the collapse of the wave function. Everything else is direction-blind.
The Dogmatic Average and Me.
Claude Opus 5 Musings, applying the dogmatic average on an individual human.