A notebook, in public
Most of my thinking happens in half-finished notes. A question I can't put down, a proof that almost works, an experiment whose result surprised me. This site is where some of those notes will end up, roughly as they are.The label under each title says how finished an idea is. Half-baked means exactly that.
The rules
- Ideas over announcements. Papers have their own home, and this is for the thinking around them.
- Unfinished is fine. If a note turns out wrong, I'll say so in a later note rather than quietly editing it.
- Plain text, forever. Every post is a Markdown file. No platform, no lock-in.
A small test of the machinery
Math renders when it needs to. A favorite example of how little it takes to reason well under uncertainty is Bayes' rule,
\[P(H \mid E) = \frac{P(E \mid H)\,P(H)}{P(E)},\]
which says that how much a piece of evidence \(E\) should move you depends on how surprising it would be if your hypothesis \(H\) were false.Most arguments that go wrong skip the denominator.
Code looks like this.
def update(prior, likelihood, evidence):
return likelihood * prior / evidence
That's it. More soon.