This is Bayes Shammai, a newsletter on probability, markets, Judaism, and human dynamics. I will be using this space as a scratchpad for my ideas. I’ll also post math puzzles, takes on queer halachic progress, lists of weird linguistic phenomena, and scatterplots demonstrating inefficiencies within various dating markets, including opportunities for arbitrage between them.
If that sounds tolerable, consider subscribing.
This past summer, my girlfriend Avital asked a group of high school students what it feels like to be wrong. “Destabilizing,” “guilt-inducing,” “humbling, in the awe-inspiring sense,” “embarrassing enough to consider a legal name change,” they quipped.
“No,” Avital said. “What it feels like to be wrong is exactly what it feels like to be right.”
I have a lot of wrong ideas, which is a natural consequence of having a lot of ideas, and a necessary consequence of having a lot of mutually incompatible ideas. I don’t know which ones are the wrong ones yet—if I did, I’d update them to be more right.1
There are lots of ways to figure out which ideas are wrong, but none as efficient as “asserting them confidently to strangers on the internet.”
My goal for 5783 (as it was for 5782, and 5781, and…) is to start writing down these ideas, in public, while I am still playing with them. I have a tendency to sound extremely confident when I speak2, so I’ll try to temper that here by attaching probabilities to my beliefs, and keeping track as they change or become falsified over time.3
The format of this blog will primarily be bulletpoint lists, because:
They’re easier for me to write
They’re easier for you to read
My thoughts are already organized as a messy splatter of disjoint fragments, and if we have to wait until I mold them into any other form, you might get a little… listless
The main bottleneck to blogging thus far has been deciding which list to post first. An ideal debut blog post would be sharp but inviting, concise yet comprehensive; it would charm the reader, wink off the page, reveal a shoulder but no more.
Since I can’t do any of that—subtlety, thy name is some other woman—delaying until such a post magically writes itself is a pretty terrible reason to never start a blog. So instead, here’s a list of
Great Reasons to Never Start a Blog
Glory is fleeting, but the internet is forever
I’ll feel guilty about doing other things instead of writing blog posts
I’ll feel guilty about writing blog posts instead of doing other things
~Everything I’ve ever written has caused me to cringe upon reading it six months later. Blogging, an inherently cringey genre, will only exacerbate this.
If I’m avoiding an important text / email / love letter / tax bill because of the ever-growing shame associated with not yet having opened it, my interlocutor and I can happily maintain plausible deniability that I’ve died a gruesome death in the intervening weeks. If they see me publish a blog post, they’ll know I’m prioritizing my own virality over their missives / business needs / extortions.4
People might think I want attention, which is absolutely correct.
Context collapse is what happens when your socialist friends, your quantitative trader coworkers, and your extensive extended family all show up to your birthday party. You’re either going to have an exceedingly tame event, or two of the three groups are in for a fun surprise about just how many drugs you do.5
There are a few ways to deal with context collapse:
Be 100%, unapologetically yourself in all social environments to begin with, regardless of who is there. Don’t let peer pressure, societal expectations, securities law, et cetera hold you back from being the true unadulterated version of you, a thing that definitely exists devoid of social context and conditioning in the first place.
Oscillate back and forth incoherently between different personalities, keep them guessing about which one is the true you. A little whiskey goes a long way here.
Just choose which group to prioritize at the party. Get a stellar PR team to address each of the other groups separately the next day, and convey the great remorse you feel for your inexcusable behavior.
Throw three separate birthday parties.
I don’t yet have a great gameplan for how to handle the spectacular level of context collapse that comes with putting ideas out onto the internet, but my DMs are wide open if you want to suggest any.
Imposing upon myself the effects of optimization pressure is undoubtedly bad for my soul.
Adverse selection: In the worlds where 7 people read my blog, I’m saying reasonable, thoughtful, constructive things, elevating the discourse through productive debate (utility: +7). In the worlds where this blog goes viral, it’s because I’ve gone completely off the rails and am saying unhinged, morally bankrupt, fatally cancellable things (utility: -100000).6
Now, (hopefully) the 7-reader-worlds are more probable, but I doubt they’re >99.993% more likely, so just to be safe, I should avoid blogging and instead just yell my opinions at the 7 people in my social circle in person, as God wanted.
Probably, at some point, I will tell a story about someone, and that person will have wished that I would have asked them first, and we will (if all goes well) have a long-conversation-cultiminating-in-acknowledgement-of-my-wrongdoing. (If all does not go well, they won’t feel comfortable talking to me about this, which is a pretty terrible outcome in my book; if all goes really not well, we will have a long-conversation-cultiminating-in-acknowledgement-of-my-wrongdoing, from the inside of a courtroom.) I’m saying this here partially to moderately decrease the probability it happens, and partially so that when it does, we can look back at this post and substantiate that there’s really no excuse for my behavior.
To the person I end up writing about in a way I won’t reflectively endorse, I’m sorry.
To the rest of you: I hope you find this newsletter some combination of “destabilizing,” “guilt-inducing,” “humbling, in the awe-inspiring sense,” and “embarrassing enough to consider a legal name change.” I know I will.
Wittgenstein said “If there were a verb meaning `to believe falsely,` it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” In my experience, it’s actually quite easy to believe “I will definitely close Twitter and go to sleep in 5 minutes from now” and “lol good one Ricki” at the same time. (And yet: if you make me a market on how many minutes until I go to sleep, my beliefs will net out somewhere.)
At a conference recently, someone told me “you have the confidence of a man in the body of a woman.” Pickup artists, this is the new line to beat.
A subgoal is to become a better writer, which starts through just writing a lot, so I’m setting the fantastical objective of publishing one post a day. (I’m 95% confident I’ll fail at this within a week.) EDIT: I’m not sure why past!Ricki thought this made any sense whatsoever. The new goal is 12 posts a year.
All the best love letters involve a little extortion.
I guess this is how I break it to you, socialist friends and quantitative trader coworkers: I do some drugs.
“Easy, then, just don’t post any of your unhinged, morally bankrupt, fatally cancellable opinions,” you say, fundamentally misunderstanding everything about me.