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First, do no harm - how the FDA crippled America's response to COVID-19
This is a partial account of how the FDA and the medical establishment failed America in fighting COVID-19, and how the inherent structure of the FDA made the pandemic worse. They prevented individ...
Voice Memos
I received great suggestions for taking voice memos and turning them into text. The two solutions: Otter.ai Approach Sign up for http://otter.ai/ - you get 600 minutes free. It's really high ...
Newsletters
Last updated March 24th, 2021 If you've already subscribed to the BenGoldhaber(.com) newsletter, that's probably all you need, but just in case here are other newsletters I read: Money...
March 2021 Updates
Hello! It's spring in Southern California and I feel markedly more optimistic about the world. My parents were vaccinated, I'm optimistic I'll get one in 1-2 months, and I'm startin...
Bounties
Things I'll pay for! You can contact me to request more information about any of these tasks. Meta 10% of any of those bounties for connecting me with someone that solves the bounty. 10%...
Vaccine Distribution Simulation
Originally published on the HASH blog Optimizing vaccine allocation is a critical task - improving the distribution of vaccines could save tens of thousands of lives over the coming months. In par...
February 2021 Updates
Hi all, February is my birthday month. I have a mixed relationship with birthday's - it is a reminder of the relentless march of time, and yet I also like celebrating myself. But that was prob...
To improve, make fewer mistakes
One of the unexpected delights of COVID has been reconnecting with childhood friends over online boardgames. When our IRL social lives shut down last March we started gaming, playing Nemesis, Gloom...
Simulating Short Squeezes
Originally published on the HASH blog We wanted to demonstrate the dynamics of the Battle of GameStop™ so we put together a simulation of the sharp escalation of price that can occur when an irres...
January 2021 Updates
Hello from 2021 - hope you had a lovely New Year's celebration, and are as excited/terrified as I am that the writer's of this season started out with a visigoths-sacking-the-new-rome episo...
Wayfinding Meditation
Wayfinding meditation is a free form style of meditation I've been practicing. I've found it to be surprisingly powerful practice. I start by settling into the space, closing my eyes, and n...
Bitcoin Ossification
I'm interested in whether [[Bitcoin]]'s protocol has ossified, and whether that is good or bad for Bitcoin's long term value. Ossified would mean that there was no potential for impleme...
December 2020 Updates
Hey Friends, Hope you're doing well and found a fun and safe way to celebrate Thanksgiving! As the year draws to a close I'm getting reflective; how have I been doing, what should I do mo...
Uniswap Simulation
Originally posted on the HASH blog This is the first in a series of cryptocurrency simulations. View the simulation. https://uniswap.org/docs/v2/protocol-overview/how-uniswap-works/ One of simu...
Outside View ETF - Creating indexes of forecastable questions
Prediction aggregation sites like the Good Judgement Open, Metaculus, and others have had success incentizing 'powerusers' to predict on well operationalized questions. The tournaments have...
October 2020 Updates
Hi Friends, Happy election day eve! My election predictions: Biden will be elected the next president. 80% There will be minimal election related violence. 90% The win...
Change++ Presentation
I was excited to be invited to the Change++ speaker series and speak on ML and simulations.
Actions Towards Progress Presentation
Related Papers: Bloom et al. (2017) Management as Technology Bakija et al. (2012) Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Ret...
September 2020 Updates
Hey! #writing Peak Experiences List: Spencer Greenberg had a Facebook thread where he asked what, besides sex, was your most pleasurable experience. There were some great responses, and since I’d...
Recommended Essays
This is an in-progress collection of some of my favorite online essays. These tend to either be motivational or contain ideas I return to frequently - I compiled it by setting a five minute timer a...
August 2020 Updates
Sign up for these updates through email Hello and happy September! Here's what happened last month and what I was reading, watching, and thinking about. Highlights from August Work-wise I sp...
Rapid Tests
Visit the accompanying simulation to explore the model Introduction With all of the controversy around lockdowns and mask wearing, it feels as if attention has fallen away from scientific and tec...
July 2020 Review
Some personal highlights from the past month: I decided, after polling friends and family, to move to a place where I've been assured summer never ends - San Diego. Recommendations for...
Results from the Where Should we Move Poll
The results are in!
Solving Math Problems by Relay
Posted on LessWrong From September to November 2018 we ran an experiment where people did programming in relay. Each player spent ten minutes on a programming problem before passing on their code ...
June 2020 Review
I feel like the theme of June was volatility. We're in a different world where institutions that have existed for decades suddenly feel like they're on their last legs. Excerpts from my Ju...
Build a SIR Model
I wrote a short tutorial on creating a SIR model with HASH. In it I detail how to create the initial agents, add contagion behaviors, and how to extend it with “policy” options like isolation and t...
May 2020 Review
Overall this was a pretty great month. I feel a little weird writing that while still under Coronavirus lockdown and with protests and riots consuming the American body politic, but on a personal f...
AI Vignette - Terms of Service
An AI Vignette One of the obvious ways in which the market is not actually Efficient is it’s failure to take advantage of all the talented video game players in the world. These are people who hav...
AI Vignette - Skin Deep
An AI Vignette I think the most depressing part isn't that we've become playthings for god like entities, it's that we're play things for god like entities who mostly care that we ...
AI Vignettes
It's difficult to imagine what the world would look like if we do achieve extra-ordinary AI tech. For instance when we say AI in the next ten years will be able to drive a truck cross-country, ...
Recommended Things
Last Updated May 17th, 2020 Software Roam Research: The bi-directional links, daily notes page, and graph structure of Roam really fit my brain. I've been a much more active notetaker and jou...
Winograd Schema Challenge
The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) is one of the hardest benchmarks for language models to beat. It's an unusual structure that tests "common sense" reasoning. Example (from Wikiped...
Grant Making
Problem: How do you scale grantmaking and investing? The process of evaluating applications is very difficult and often relies upon a single individual with good judgement investing lots of time. T...
The Wall Street Bets Buyout Fund
The Wall Street Bets Buyout Fund Moviepass, the erstwhile company selling dimes for nickels, was at one point worth less than $45,000. The top investors in the world came together with an idea - b...
Why aren't there more hacks?
Web security is terrible. It's extremely hard to secure computers from motivated and competent adversaries. So why aren't there more hacks? I look out in the world and there's tons of...
Moderation ML
Executive Summary Active Learning ML moderation system for online forums. The moderation system flags content for human review when below a threshold of confidence, the moderator classifies it, an...
VRChat and Play
VRChat is amazing. VRChat is Second Life meets Oculus - a totally open environment with no rules and total freedom to wear any character and face you want. The structures and avatars are construct...
Soft Eyes
A teacher of mine, when describing how to solve an Algorithms problem, stresses the importance of making sure you understand the problem in it's entirety, taking it all in. In the inner game o...
Crowd Med
Looking through my old blog posts I found this post on the DARPA Red Balloon challenge I wrote in 2015 for CrowdMed. Still a very relevant look at a cool project in crowdsourcing. What Balloons Ca...