All posts — 45
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AI Alignment
Alignment means building AI systems that actually achieve what we value — not systems that appear to achieve it, and not systems that execute instructions too literally.
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Building a Better Brain
Most people give more thought to their career and finances than to the mind both depend on.
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Competition Is for Losers
Peter Thiel's sharpest insight: competition is not for the strong. It's for the weak and uncreative.
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Computation
What computation actually is — and why it might be the most fundamental concept in science, from physics to biology to mind.
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Computer Science
What it actually means to learn programming — and why the standard reactions to that question both miss the point.
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Consistency
The measure that matters for a habit isn't today's session — it's the total accumulated over months and years.
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Convergence
Old wisdom and new science keep arriving at the same place from different directions. The tools differ. The findings converge.
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Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has become a corporate buzzword. Almost no one can define it.
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Descriptions
We do not have direct access to reality. What we have is descriptions — and the gap between pursuing truth and pursuing accurate descriptions is large enough to fall into.
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Doing Good
Peter Singer's thought experiment: you would save the drowning child. You make the opposite decision almost every day.
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Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge — what we think we know, and why. You cannot reason about anything else without committing to this first.
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Goodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure.
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How to Concentrate
Concentration is not a muscle you strengthen. It is a state you protect.
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How to Learn
The brain adapts like every other system in the body. Effective learning requires the same progressive difficulty that effective training does.
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How to Read
Reading a lot of books is not the goal. Reading the right books, deeply enough that they change how you think, is.
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King, Warrior, Magician, Lover
Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette mapped four archetypes of mature masculinity. The job of a man is to take the framework and apply it to his own life.
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Knowledge and Perception
We can only perceive what we have the conceptual tools to see. The doors of perception are built from acquired concepts.
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Locating Valuable Problems
The bottleneck isn't intelligence. For most people, most of the time, it's what they aim their intelligence at.
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Logic
Logic is about validity, not truth. An argument can be perfectly valid and entirely false.
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Mental Health
Popular mental health advice and professional practice diverge. The difference is incentives.
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Metacognition vs. Intelligence
Most people who have struggled were not undone by lack of intelligence. They were undone by an inability to see their own thinking clearly.
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Mistakes
Mistakes are bad. Modern sensibility has conditioned us against saying this plainly. That conditioning is itself a mistake.
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Need Masquerades as Love
Need and love feel identical from the inside. The difference is what they're oriented toward.
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On Ideas
Ideas are the only thing that scales. And ideas have consequences — the best and worst things humans have ever done were caused by them.
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Probability
Expected utility tells you what happens in the long run, not what happens next. Any individual instance is highly volatile.
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Rationality
The dominant image of rationality is Spock: emotionless, data-driven, baffled by human behaviour. Every one of those traits is irrational.
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Scarcity
The psychology of not having enough follows the same patterns regardless of what you lack. The resource changes; the cognitive signature does not.
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Science & Art
Science and art are not opposites. Strip away the lab coats and what remains is the same underlying process.
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Science and Society
The pushback against science is some of the most misguided disagreement in modern society — and the most damaging.
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Someone's Feelings Are Their Own
The impulse to fix someone's negative feelings looks like care. It is usually about your own discomfort.
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Spirituality
Dismissing spirituality discards real signal with the noise. The question is which components actually contribute to wellbeing.
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The Brain Is Not a Spectator
The boundary between self and environment is porous, possibly illusory. You are not a mind looking out at reality from behind glass.
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The Command Line
Every GUI is a layer of abstraction over what is actually happening. The command line strips it away.
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The Decisions That Determine Everything
Most decisions are noise. A small subset determine most of the outcome — and unlike routine decisions, they cannot be revised cheaply.
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The Efficiency Error
Most productivity advice misses the target. Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. Effectiveness comes first.
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The First Stitch
Identity politics is a disease. The people infected are patients. The distinction between the pathogen and its carrier matters.
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The Mind Projection Fallacy
The mistake of treating your representation of the world as a property of the world itself — projecting the map onto the territory.
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The Nuisance of Nuance
A mind that sees only grey is not more sophisticated than one that sees only black and white. Nuance has become a virtue signal.
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The Programming Mindset
What programming teaches you about thinking — and why the most important thing to understand about computers is that they are dumb.
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The Typical Mind Fallacy
You reason about how others will feel, what they want, how they'll respond. The model you're using is yourself.
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Tides and Waves
Worry less about each wave, and more about which direction the tide is going.
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Tribalism
The problem is not that we disagree. It's how we disagree — and how tribal instincts corrupt the mechanisms that should resolve disagreement.
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Truth
To deny truth is to make a claim you treat as true. The self-refuting quality of thoroughgoing subjectivism — and why truth matters.
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Why Learn
Knowledge compounds. Learnability decays. Two facts that make the case for learning urgently, not just eventually.
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Writing
Writing is how you find out what you think. Reading brings in other people's thoughts; writing forces yours into a form clear enough to examine.