Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 14hThe AI slop also seems promising, but the level of human-generated kitschiness in halloween decorations is an extraordinarily high bar. 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 14hOooh, that last complaint has legs. Notes of Berlin has the goods www.notesofberlin.com?s=Halloween with a classic of the genre below. 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 14hnot so spooky for kids who can't walk due to a tragic ladder accident (we're doing archetypical bluesky responses, right?) 110
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 02/10/2026So, for those busy making claims about the interests, well-being and basilisk collections of far future generations, uncertainties compound uncertainties, and you should remember that, in the absence of more information about those people, marginalization works like a steamroller on your posterior. 050
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 02/10/2026Periodic reminder that what really identifies a Bayesian is their fondness for integrating out uncertainty, i.e. marginalization, not wedging things into Bayes theorem. Even Fisher did that from time to time. 1112
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 02/10/2026One perhaps less-noticed implication of Benderite semantics seems to be that every claim about functions, goals, telē, or meanings being derived from "natural selection [and] other reinforcement and selective stabilization processes" is false. I take this as a reductio, though ymmv. 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 02/10/2026A question to which the response "in your dreams" is not sarcastic and also correct. 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026Always happy to see push back against polarization as an analytical concept. Here's some more from @lilymasonphd.bsky.social 020
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026If I recall the polisci literature this one of the more plausible theories of lobbying generally: lobbyists aren't there to change minds and generally don't. They're there to provide arguments and data to motivate doing you wanted to do to start with. 061
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026the existence of prime ministers implies the existence of hat ministers, bar ministers and squiggle ministers 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026That is by far the most family-friendly of the alternatives I considered. 020
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026Interesting seating arrangements; audience dude with the third leg is just showing off though. 150
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026Yes, the engine is unfortunate. Still, I'm mostly enjoying the intense configurability and the fact that it does not yet look like the rest of my OS (which is macOS, so Liquid Arse now builds all my windows out of little puddles) 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026"Why do you want a pandemic? We have epidemics at home" 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026Just realized that the best summary of Dawid (1982) 'The well-calibrated Bayesian' JASA is "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is" 040
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026As it says on my slides: What is your estimand? We are no longer asking. 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026"Today, at my direction, I'm establishing an office. It will report straight to the top, which is also me" [freelancers nod] 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 01/10/2026"All the corners rounded and transparent gradients for scrollable overflow" sounds like you've already got a browser with windows and widgets that are OS-style. The only problem is that it's somebody else's OS. (written from Vivaldi 😛) 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/09/2026So the big problem with metaphysics is that it's epistemology? Awkward if true. But to be honest, if I was faced with a Space Squid asking about René Descartes, cognitive dissonance would not be my biggest concern. 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/09/2026Saying them often enough will have all your colleagues trying to avoid you, so I think you're set. 020
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/09/2026Just as some meetings could have been an email, some social networks could have been a mastodon server. 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/09/2026😳 Won't someone think of the chi[checks notes] asymptotics? 020
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/09/2026"debiasing by adding a bit" is my favourite small sample correction 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 30/09/2026maximum likelihood estimation is biased in small samples, you say? 111
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026Jonn Elledge, writing in @thequietus.com doesn't go _quite_ this far, but I would make the case for Tom Good in The Good Life (1975). It's quite realistic; his quest is apparently amiable & aspirational, entirely dependent on the indulgence of others, and limitlessly destructive of society at scale. 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026I suppose the clearances thing might make it harder to do the same 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026The only way to get a former genius coworker out of my brain was to write up the (100% real) highlights of our interactions. He's 'officemate' in the posts I ported over here from Twitter. 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026It does sound like their red flags had red flags on them 100
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026No idea about the old world part, but S/SE Asia meet chillis (already spicy?) afaik in the 1500s, when the Portugese start shipping them through Goa. Last I was in IN there were moves to use less capsaicin for loosely nationalistic reasons. It's not like there's a spice shortage if you tone it down 020
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026Everyone always says to keep your CV up to date, but this tends towards go-bag and spare passport territory. 110
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026And when you see someone confuse a statement of how a thing ought to be with a statement of it is, keep in mind that it probably isn't their fault. They just have ism. 030
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 28/09/2026TFW you ask an LLM about how to derive the key result in a paper you've just read the abstract for, it seems to do so, but you can't check it because you can't access the paper. Well done to everyone involved in this farce. 060
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 27/09/2026Every philosophy use gets a brisk Miller 1987 'Critique of Good Reasons' from me. Not just because that takes the right approach to the fallacy, or because it's clearly insane, but because it exhibits the careful mix of seriousness, absurdity and pedantry that the 'begging the question' demands. 000
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 27/09/2026"intensive porpoises", please. We have standards here. 1120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 26/09/2026Fair enough. All I want is for 'AI alignment' to be understood as a rule of law / execution problem that we at least in principle know how to deal with, not the combination of campfire horror story, philosophical head scratcher and portrait of the technological sublime we are currently being pitched 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 26/09/2026We're going to be doing "Begriffe ohne Anschauung sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind" for ever, aren't we? 030
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 26/09/2026I think so too. I'm a boring kind of guy but I always appreciate the same points being put more sharply. 010
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 26/09/2026Some implementations of this idea are spicier than others: 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 25/09/2026It's a sweet counterpoint to the traditional 'the military won't want a bunch of disaffected youngsters' line. Quite so, one may reply, they want the wisdom of age, some leadership experience, and a good education, all of which you claim to have on this here CV. And I see you're free at the moment 020
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 25/09/2026Unironically, very reasonable. There's a wider question of how to motivate 'whole of society defense', which is a lot more than compulsory military service, but the deal with both is how to get skin in the game for people who will decide what their nation is and does. This is consistent with that. 120
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 25/09/2026That said, PDP vol. 1 (1986) has a Michael Jordan tutorial on linear algebra, so we all kinda knew where it was going. 020