Large swathes of north St. Louis still look like a bomb was dropped on them after a tornado in may.

Time for my extremely pedantic thing. “Football” means a game played on a field *on foot*, as opposed to on horseback. So you have association football, rugby football, American football, Aussie rules football, and so on. Kicking has nothing to do with the etymology.

On a very nervy and scary day, I'm posting something I just wrote for my formal methods class that makes me happy.

‪"The left considers the collective, the right considers each separate individual" is a surprisingly helpful nemonic for sequent calculi.

lfg

Yeah I was in one in 3rd grade and it was great. The teacher taught us about Greek mythology and told us that Zeus was like Bill Clinton. It went a little over my head but it felt like cool adult knowledge that was empowering. Obviously I still remember it.

Ten years ago I tried to pitch a friend who worked in Hollywood on a movie about the gawker saga where hogan would play himself, with Christian Bale as Thiel. I thought it could hulk hogan a best supporting actor Oscar.

Good morning! I'm in Uganda to visit family and friends.

But depending on your perspective, don't worry or I'm sorry: I'll be back by the end of the month.

See you soon, NYC.

He’s got the same sauce as young Bill Clinton.

New paper forthcoming in Mind. I argue that outright beliefs can meaningfully simplify credal updating if the objects of those beliefs are dependence relations between propositions and the DAG formed by these relations has bounded treewidth. Preprint: philarchive.org/rec/KINHRB.

One of my wilder belief updates lately, really finding those deep grooves in possibility space.

I was today years old when I learned that Nick Adams is not a satirical character being played on twitter by a comedian. I learned this because he will be ambassador to Malaysia.

I love the idea that there is anything but a negligible number of NYers who would vote for Mamdani (or, indeed, any Democrat) if not for his failure to uphold Columbus as an Italian-American hero. People who like and care about Columbus are Republicans.

They look they’re about to drop the hottest adult contemporary album of 1994.

A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...

Centaur is really exciting. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been made possible in large part by German federal funding. Once again, public funding of science gets the goods: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

His ability to rattle off facts and figures with a breezy confidence that makes him seem smart and cool at the same time reminds me of (don't get mad) Bill Clinton in his prime. If the NYC mayoralty wasn't the graveyard of US politics, I'd say rhere's some juice here.

You mean it didn’t autocorrect to MIT?

Everybody wants to be a formal epistemologist, but nobody wants to make these ugly-ass beamer slides.

Paper forthcoming in the 2025 FAccT proceedings! When evaluating algorithms, we often manage a trade-off between accuracy and fairness. I argue that this should be done by via a linear combination of accuracy and fairness measures, for Harsanyi-style reasons: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08829.

Walt Frazier uses this phrase all the time on the local broadcasts and it’s so weird.

Trump Asks Stefanik to Withdraw Bid to Be U.N. Ambassador The president said he wanted the New York Republican to stay in Congress to bolster the party’s slim House margin and protect her seat.

Probably not a total coincidence that Stefanik's upstate NY district, while pretty Trumpy, borders Canada and it wouldn't be hard for Dems to make a special election all about tarrifs.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/u...

To be fair to Liam, Kim is, of course, going to defend reductionism, so in this case it's good to be naive and doctrinaire.

Jaegwon Kim on @lastpositivist.bsky.social in 1989.

There is a picture of me from like 1997 in my Little League uniform marching with Schumer in the Forest Hills memorial day parade. We likely have ancestors from nearby villages in Galicia. I have a lot of warm feelings for him. Put his name on an expressway or tunnel and get him out of leadership.

‘The Interview’: Chuck Schumer on Democrats, Antisemitism and His Shutdown Retreat The Senate minority leader discusses the backlash to his vote on the Republican spending bill, how he sees his role within the party and his new book.

There needs to be a political movement against Donald Trump. It's hard to read this and still think that one of the leaders of that movement should be Chuck Schumer. His deep institutionalism just doesn't meet the moment. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/m....

New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...

This is a big output of my time as a visitor at Google research, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here!

this strategy either denigrates performance or has no effect on measures of cultural fluency like stereotype avoidance or human evals. We conclude that there is more to cultural awareness than propositional knowledge, and that this matters when trying to make LLMs more culturally aware.

New pre-print: "Toward Geo-Culturally Grounded LLM Generations." arxiv.org/pdf/2502.134.... We investigate different RAG techniques for improving LLMs' familiarity with a range of national cultures. For multiple-choice QA benchmarks, the best strategy is to connect an LLM to the web. However...

Interesting example of a task that GPT-4o fails at unless you turn on reasoning mode: assigning numbers to sentences such that sentence A gets a lower number than sentence B if and only if A implies B (as in a Heyting algebra).