Nth Order

Magnus Carlsen claims that one or two signals per match from a chess AI indicating when he should think hardest would make him “almost invincible”. IMO you could boost researchers similarly with just one or two signals a year saying “think hard about the paper you just read”. — Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) June 1, 2025 I wonder how generalizable this concept is to other fields. “Think extra hard now” Most things have 80-20 (Pareto) returns....

When I led PM teams, I often had to help PMs frustrated by a lack of alignment with PMs in other orgs. Sometimes, I’d suggest a simple fix: send an engineer or a designer to talk to the other team instead. Worked like magic. PM-to-PM ego is a problem that no one talks about, but it is common in top companies. In fact, product managers are often most difficult with each other....

Word dimensionality expansion: trust There is a suprising amount of variation present in the statement: “I trust them”. I particularly notice this tension in regards to certain politicians. I frequently hear people utter the refrain: “they are someone we can trust”. And on one hand, I can actually empathize with that statement. There’s a certain resonant quality to it that is hard to deny (which is why it’s sticky). In some sense you can trust them....

There is this scene from The Office that I’m thinking about a lot lately. It’s from the later seasons. The CEO, Robert California, is searching for game-breaking ideas to turn the business around. Kevin Malone, the office simpleton, makes an observation about the layout of cookies in the break-room vending machine. [paraphrasing] - “The best spot in the machine is being taken up by cookies 🍪 that nobody likes.” Robert hears (without really hearing) what Kevin said....

“Is your red the same as my red?” A question that middle-schoolers and high-schoolers ponder in jest actually has some profound applications to perception. “Is your red the same as my red?” Perception is this in-betweeny thing that exists between reality, in this case the color red, and your interpretation of reality, what you perceive as red. Now, we can make all sorts of measurements and claims to try to circle around a definition for reality-red....

Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.” Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me....

Kernighan’s Law - Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Tuld: Oh, Mr. Sullivan, you’re here. Good morning. Maybe you could tell me what you think is going on here. And please, speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever....

Was a remarkably fun conversation getting ChatGPT to write in the style of the Screwtape Letters. The elder demon, Screwtape, is writing letters to coach the younger Wormwood. At one point it even added (without prompting) a closing of “your affectionate uncle”, even though I think none of the prior prompts included anything about a familial relationship between Screwtape and Wormwood. It took some back and forth to get the prompting right....

Sticky-ing this post I often don’t know what I’m talking about. I hold ideas loosely. My thoughts change over time. If something I said can be interpreted in 1 of 2 ways, and 1 of them is offensive, then I meant the other one.

There is a surprisingly large degree of variation between knowing something and knowing something. Unfortunately, the english verb “to know” doesn’t have enough dimensionsality to express all this variation. Knowing is simple awareness. While knowing is something deeper. A couple terms I enjoy that express the degrees in this variation: qualia is kind of an experiential knowledge. I can tell you that a particular strawberry is sweet, but qualia is tasting that sweetness for yourself....