A restatement of definite optimism

College as an incubator of Girardian terror

Why we should radically scale genius grants

Talent spotting, Berkson's paradox and enabling luck

Why we might need something like tenure for many more people, to cultivate more thinkers in a doer's world

Examining the social networks essential to innovation

Creating mini worlds

Should we look more deeply into the nature of suffering?

On nominative determinism and the power of names

Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored

A new explanation for dreaming suggests it does something far more profound than reinforcing learning as we sleep. It might even explain our love of stories.

How today’s novelists cope with their HBO anxiety

A proposal to ban AI research by treating it like human-animal hybrids

A trip to the hospital is more real than your politics

What holds scientific discourses together?

Shared relative differences as foundational linguistic reference points

Easily defensible claims are for Wikipedia and losers

How many of our greatest minds have we lost?

There’s a persistent myth among unhappily employed people that “if I could just quit my day job and pursue my passion full time, I would finally be satisfied”. It’s me, I’m the unhappy person.

Think hard, write words, get an audience, find out for yourself.

It’s been 13 years since Yudkowsky wrote “Rationality is Systematized Winning”. So where are all the winners?

This post is about how little work people do, but it starts with stories of unusually high output.

The world is a very malleable place.

What the Rationalistic World Forgot

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

The knowledge of a carpenter is in his hands. The apprentice must work with his own to discover it.

If we want the forest, we must continue to garden and sow.

The new paradigm we've all been waiting for

A preparatory history and epistemology, as groundwork for a re-establishment of a human culture

winter depression essay

What you call "identity" and "consciousness" was invented in 5000 BC by guys like me, to sell copper

Dating App “just the tip”s & tricks

hey man there’s a hole in my head where information goes

So please take this in the gentlest possible way: you were never that great.

i’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / that i almost confused map and territory

Without abstraction, there is only one truth: something exists. I suppose it’s better than nothing.

i waited 75 years and all i got was this lousy t-shirt

Stupid lyrics are good for you. Bad lyrics are just bad.

It's not a technique problem, it's a sincerity problem

He always maintained that he loved making his music, even as his music usually claimed that he didn’t love much at all.

some maundering about why i go to fewer parties

seduction in a future world of sexbots and augmented reality

a horror of blockchains and microjobs.

the quantified self in the world of direct-to-brain interfaces

An essay on science fiction, Seraphim Rose, Peter Thiel, and the possibility of optimistic futurism.

A meditation on tool-assisted composition.