Essays on thinking clearly, learning well, and living intentionally. The writing spans rationality, philosophy, practical self-development, technology, and the occasional short piece that resists categorisation.
If you're new, the posts below are good entry points. The sequences are collections of related pieces meant to be read in order.
Start with these
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Worry less about each wave, and more about which direction the tide is going.
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Most people have a rough idea of what rationality means. Most of those ideas are wrong.
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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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Peter Singer's thought experiment: you would save the drowning child. You make the opposite decision almost every day.
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We can only perceive what we have the conceptual tools to see. The doors of perception are built from acquired concepts.
Recommended sequences
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A sequence on rationality, epistemology, and the tools of clear thought — from the basics of rational belief-formation through logic, truth, and probabilistic reasoning.
6 posts
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How to learn effectively, build knowledge that compounds, and develop the mind as a serious instrument. From motivation and method to concentration and reading.
6 posts
All sequences
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A two-part sequence on the structure of knowledge and the limits of perception — what it means that we can only see what we have concepts to see, and what happens when we mistake the map for the territory.
4 posts
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How to learn effectively, build knowledge that compounds, and develop the mind as a serious instrument. From motivation and method to concentration and reading.
6 posts
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On how individual cognitive tendencies — tribalism, the typical mind fallacy, identity — scale into social dysfunction, and what convergence between ancient wisdom and modern science suggests about human nature.
4 posts
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Computing as a way of thinking — from the foundations of computer science and the concept of computation through the programming mindset and the command line.
4 posts
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A sequence on rationality, epistemology, and the tools of clear thought — from the basics of rational belief-formation through logic, truth, and probabilistic reasoning.
6 posts