What is this about?
Topics will be fairly wide-ranging, but there’ll be an emphasis on:
Language and cognition
Statistics and the practice of science
Neural language models
Framing/messaging around policies I find interesting and important
Check out this post on how language models could change language for an example.
My goal is to post ≥3 articles per month.
Why “the counterfactual”?
One of the themes I’ll be exploring in this newsletter is the notion of thinking with baselines: given a claim––a number, a statistic––what should we compare it to? I think this connects more generally to counterfactual reasoning: what might have happened otherwise? I find both ways of thinking really helpful for enumerating a space of possible arguments or beliefs.
Does this cost money?
At the moment, no. I might add an optional subscription sometime in the future (which would come with additional articles/benefits for paid subscribers), but my primary goal really is just to reach a broader audience.
