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    <title>Hot &amp; Dongerous</title>
    <link>https://dongerous.com/</link>
    <description>Essays on thinking, self-development, and practical philosophy.</description>
    <language>en</language>
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      <title><![CDATA[Building a Better Brain]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/building-a-better-brain</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/building-a-better-brain</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Most people give more thought to their career and finances than to the mind itself. This is the wrong order of operations.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Computation]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/computation</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/computation</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[What computation actually is — and why it might be the most fundamental concept in science, from physics to biology to mind.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Computer Science]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/computer-science</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/computer-science</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[What it actually means to learn programming — and why the standard reactions to that question both miss the point.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Convergence]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/convergence</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/convergence</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Old wisdom and new science keep arriving at the same place from different directions. This is not coincidence.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Critical Thinking]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/critical-thinking</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/critical-thinking</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Critical thinking has become a corporate buzzword. Almost no one can define it. This is a painful irony.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Descriptions]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/descriptions</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/descriptions</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[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.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Doing Good]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/doing-good</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/doing-good</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Peter Singer's thought experiment: you would save the drowning child. You make the opposite decision almost every day.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Epistemology]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/epistemology</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/epistemology</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Epistemology is the study of knowledge — what we think we know, and why. You cannot reason about anything else without committing to this first.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How to Concentrate]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/how-to-concentrate</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/how-to-concentrate</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Concentration is not a muscle you strengthen. It is a state you protect. The frame changes everything.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How to Learn]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/how-to-learn</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/how-to-learn</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[The brain adapts like every other system in the body. Effective learning requires the same progressive difficulty that effective training does.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[How to Read]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/how-to-read</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/how-to-read</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Reading a lot of books is not the goal. Reading the right books, deeply enough that they change how you think, is.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Knowledge and Perception]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/knowledge-and-perception</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/knowledge-and-perception</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[We can only perceive what we have the conceptual tools to see. The doors of perception are built from acquired concepts.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Logic]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/logic</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/logic</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Logic is about validity, not truth. An argument can be perfectly valid and entirely false. The distinction matters.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Metacognition vs. Intelligence]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/metacognition-vs-intelligence</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/metacognition-vs-intelligence</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Most people who have struggled were not undone by lack of intelligence. They were undone by an inability to see their own thinking clearly.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Probability]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/probability</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/probability</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Expected utility tells you what happens in the long run, not what happens next. Most people have not fully internalized this.]]></description>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Rationality]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/rationality</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/rationality</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Most people have a rough idea of what rationality means. Most of those ideas are wrong.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Brain Is Not a Spectator]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-brain-is-not-a-spectator</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-brain-is-not-a-spectator</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[The boundary between self and environment is porous, possibly illusory. You are not a mind looking out at reality from behind glass.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Command Line]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-command-line</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-command-line</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Every GUI is a layer of abstraction over what is actually happening. The command line strips it away.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Decisions That Determine Everything]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-decisions-that-determine-everything</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-decisions-that-determine-everything</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Most decisions are noise. A small subset determine most of the outcome — and unlike routine decisions, they cannot be revised cheaply.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The First Stitch]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-first-stitch</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-first-stitch</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Identity politics is a disease. The people infected are patients. The distinction between the pathogen and its carrier matters.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Mind Projection Fallacy]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-mind-projection-fallacy</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-mind-projection-fallacy</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[The mistake of treating your representation of the world as a property of the world itself — projecting the map onto the territory.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Programming Mindset]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-programming-mindset</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-programming-mindset</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[What programming teaches you about thinking — and why the most important thing to understand about computers is that they are dumb.]]></description>
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    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[The Typical Mind Fallacy]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-typical-mind-fallacy</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/the-typical-mind-fallacy</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Assuming other people's minds work more like yours than they actually do. One of the most consistent errors in human reasoning.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tides and Waves]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/tides-and-waves</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/tides-and-waves</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Worry less about each wave, and more about which direction the tide is going.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Tribalism]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/tribalism</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/tribalism</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[The problem is not that we disagree. It's how we disagree — and how tribal instincts corrupt the mechanisms that should resolve disagreement.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Truth]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/truth</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/truth</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[To deny truth is to make a claim you treat as true. The self-refuting quality of thoroughgoing subjectivism — and why truth matters.]]></description>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title><![CDATA[Why Learn]]></title>
      <link>https://dongerous.com/posts/why-learn</link>
      <guid>https://dongerous.com/posts/why-learn</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[Knowledge compounds. Learnability decays. Two facts that make the case for learning urgently, not just eventually.]]></description>
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