超文本文学
Classic One-offs
Books
To reject gods and spirits is easy: just bully them away in the name of science.
People often conceptualize status as space — more specifically, as territory — and that this helps explain a wide range of phenomena.
A Tale of Dominance, Submission, and Friendship on the Cheap.
Philosophy's functions & benefits, and why they aren't real(?)
The philosopher's philosopher, the economist's economist, ...
Trying to take maxims and wisdom from the dismal science
Why in general is it harder to do things well than badly?
For and against Iain Banks' utopia.
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in Death Note and considering fixes
What are the true limits to motivation?
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
In typography/design, ‘sidenotes’ place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their pros/cons.
Search your heart. What are you serious about? How far will you go?
crackle, crackle, crackle, BOOM
me: [to myself] fuck you, i won't do what you tell me!!
This blogpost is basically a “cleaned-up” or “unrolled” post of 5 of my Twitter threads. I put this together because I think it’s a useful thing to share with friends who are engaged, or newly wed. I am not an expert, I am just a dumbass with experience. I hope my experience is useful to you.
Here’s a story that I often tell people, and it’s useful enough that it’s worth writing up to share with more people.
A systematic approach to interactive visualization.
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
A treatise on a new approach to UI design. Interaction considered harmful.
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives
A response to a reader's question
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
You can still discover stuff, I promise
A brief primer of nearly everything I've written on career moats.
Look for aberrations in typical behaviour, and then treat those aberrations as signals to dig into the incentives that motivated these companies to do as they do
Internet writers optimise for attention, not truth.
This is a series of posts that attempts to make sense of the traditional Chinese businessmen I dealt with.
Why free cash flow is the metric traditional Chinese businessmen intuitively focus on.
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
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
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
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
Dating App “just the tip”s & tricks
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.
What is the point of this site?
I don't know man, I build websites. It's just what I do. It pays my bills and makes other people happy. Sometimes they look really good too.
One day I woke up and thought "I wish there was a site that had all the writing that I send to people most often, all in one place". So I put it all together and hoisted it onto the internet.
Some people make lists of every single thing they've read recently. Other make blogrolls and Pinboard pages. I made a custom web page, because I felt like it.
Posts within each writer's card are organised in descending order of popularity/quality; the first post is almost always their most popular one. But the fifth and final one is always a personal favourite.
They might be really intense distillations of the writer's worldview. They might be explanations for a thing I don't want to bother explaining myself. All of them are here because I once wanted them to be, and couldn't be bothered to remove them if I don't anymore.