Zack M. Davis
Dateline SAN FRANCISCO, Ca., 24 March 2026— A hearing was held on a motion for a preliminary injunction in the case of Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War et al. in Courtroom 12 on the 19th floor of the Phillip Burton Federal Building, the Hon. Judge Rita F …
Zack M. Davis
In a busy, busy world, there's so much to read that no one could possibly keep up with it all. You can't not prioritize what you pay attention to and (even more so) what you respond to. Everyone and her dog tells herself a story that she wants to pay …
Zack M. Davis
Previously, I wrote about how I was considering going back to San Francisco State University for two semesters to finish up my Bachelor's degree in math. So, I did that. I think it was a good decision! I got more out of it than I expected. To be clear, "better …
Zack M. Davis
Scott Garrabrant gives a number of examples to illustrate that "Yes Requires the Possibility of No". We can understand the principle in terms of information theory. Consider the answer to a yes-or-no question as a binary random variable. The "amount of information" associated with a random...
Zack M. Davis
A punishment is when one agent (the punisher) imposes costs on another (the punished) in order to affect the punished's behavior. In a Society where thieves are predictably imprisoned and lashed, people will predictably steal less than they otherwise would, for fear of being imprisoned and lashed....
Zack M. Davis
To some, it might seem like a strange question. If you think of being college-educated as a marker of class (or personhood), the fact that I don't have a degree at age of thirty-six (!!) probably looks like a scandalous anomaly, which it would be only natural for me to want …
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Scott Alexander once wrote about the difference between "mistake theorists" who treat politics as an engineering discipline (a symmetrical collaboration in which everyone ultimately just wants the best ideas to win) and "conflict theorists" who treat politics...
Zack M. Davis
I was curious to see how various prognosticators—specifically, FiveThirtyEight and The Economist's models, and the PredictIt prediction markets—did on predicting the state-by-state (plus the District of Columbia) results of the recent U.S. presidential election. Mathematical Sidebar There are...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Derek Powell, Kara Weisman, and Ellen M. Markman's "Articulating Lay Theories Through Graphical Models: A Study of Beliefs Surrounding Vaccination Decisions" (a conference paper from CogSci 2018) represents an exciting advance in marketing research, showing how...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) In "Endogenous Epistemic Factionalization" (due in a forthcoming issue of the philosophy-of-science journal Synthese), James Owen Weatherall and Cailin O'Connor propose a possible answer to the question of why people form factions that disagree on multiple...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) The efficient markets hypothesis (or EMH for short) is the idea "that asset prices reflect all available information". Price changes in a liquid market are understood to be unpredictable—anti-inductive. Suppose some stock has the ticker symbol LW. If you want...