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Flight From Perfection

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"AGI" considered harmful

The Open Way to Universal Peace and Prosperity

postrat philanthropy

GNX (teaser)

How much wealth do I need to retire early? (2024 refresh)

A new pledge of allegiance

Iceland's founding legend

On having kids

Make email great again

Han on rest

Getting started with tpot

Some thoughts on "AI could defeat all of us combined"

Fundamental AGI alignment problems

You are a janitor

Mitochondria and moral mazes

Cause area: jhana meditation

Herzog on wild animal suffering as a cause area

Sexualities finite and infinite 2

Sexualities finite and infinite

Make your tech work for you

"Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish!"

Books read Q3 and Q4 2020

Specific benefits of meditation

Books read Q1 and Q2 2020

The contemplative fitness revolution

The best explanation of Modern Monetary Theory

The common ownership self-assessed tax (COST)

Contemplative practices, optimal stopping, explore/exploit

Taoist vs. moralist

Brave

Books read Q4 2019

Prepping for bitcoiners

Cummings on mentality, education, and institutions

von Neumann on science

2019 reflections & 2020 aspirations

2019 in review: state of the blog

Books read Q2 and Q3 2019

Steamed guano – the real driver of our industrial prosperity

(a)

Mann's moral interlude

Borlaug overrated?

Inbox When Ready

What supplements do you use?

ITT in the wild

Magic(k)

Ego is a process

The jetliner

Who owns the park?

Excerpt 5 from "White Fragility"

The ambassador and the engineer

Achmiz on the drowning child

Excerpt 4 from "White Fragility"

Excerpt 3 from "White Fragility"

Huxley on mental arterio-sclerosis

Excerpt 2 from "White Fragility"

Excerpt from "White Fragility"

Krishnamurti on right livelihood 2

Rubenstein on wonder

Romeo on living in expensive places

Habryka on philosopher kings

Krishnamurti on right livelihood

Books read Q1 2019

Romer on the economics of objects vs. the economics of ideas

What's the point of Huxley's Island?

Framework: complex value & situational awareness

Constructed vs. constructive consciousness

Science: slowing down or tackling bigger problems?

The hard work of translation

Better words for happiness

Harden your browser

Surveillance capitalism: 1,000 contracts

Stegenga on medical nihilism

Surveillance capitalism: definitions

Altruistic action is dispassionate

Microcosmographia excerpt

China notes

Has your EA worldview changed over time?

"Moral Mazes" 3

Do the enlightened doubt?

More from "Moral Mazes"

Basic anxiety is happening all the time

Jordan Peterson on universities

Aphorisms for meditation

Naval twitter bombs

Excerpt from "Moral Mazes"

Who has the highest potential to change the world?

Traffic defector

Jordan Peterson on Exodus

Ray Dalio's advice to a 20-year-old

Four major tools

Being a bank

Choruses from The Rock

Greenberg on the placebo effect & healer-patient alliances

What we talk about when we talk about life satisfaction

The useless

When the shoe fits

Books read Q4 2018

If slow-takeoff AGI is somewhat likely, don't give now

Lorde on mythical norms

Watchmen trilemma

2018 reflections & 2019 aspirations

2018 in review: analytic

2018 in review: state of the blog

Giving more won't make you happier: distilled

Giving more won't make you happier

AI god scenario

Nye on order

Smartphones in popular 2018 movies

Dorsey does vipassana

Free Solo

Worth keeping

The tyranny of structurelessness

Prescient quote

Perfectly round circles

Synanon

Opioid deaths

Memetic tribes

Rumi: a children's game

Fear and resentment

De dicto and de re

Security mindset

The Great Brahma

A few drinks aren't that bad

Angry uncle bot

Beijing social credit

Penny universities & the European discovery of coffee

Email newsletters

Krishnamurti bomb

Jordan Peterson on hockey & iterated games

Explain Foucault to me

When laziness is optimal

Naval bombs 6

Naval bombs 5

Naval bombs 4

Naval bombs 3

Naval bombs 2

Coase's question

Naval bombs

Illustrated guide to a PhD

Kibbutz 2

World's longest sea bridge

Kibbutz

Supernormal stimuli

Books read Q3 2018

Daily aspirin increases risk of a bleeding event

Cynefin

Get lunch to defeat siloes (sometimes)

Casual sex differential

Nazis listening to Big Ben

Tribes to nations to something new

George Washington's slaves

Happiness

Free won't

Trolls in the grievance academy

Lying about your age, past and present

There's something good in coffee...

Marriage as a capstone

Harari on liberal humanism and life science

Bloom on cruelty & dehumanization

People are having less sex

Does knuckle cracking lead to arthritis of the fingers?

Hyperprolific

Finding work happy-making

Three things, interlinked

Hazony on the most effective indoctrination

College students have grown more narcissistic

Hazony on political rationalism

Fire discourse

Billionaire contingency plans

Life as herding cats

On measuring happiness

No amount of alcohol improves health

Office sharks

Help others to help yourself

Cowen on having independent opinions

Political correctness & success

Mao & Trump

Apologists vs. historians

The agricultural revolution: story #2

The agricultural revolution: story #1

Michelle Dawson's production function

The bad reason New York didn't crack down on money laundering

Michelle Dawson on autistic intelligence

Harari on myths

And yet...

Consider longboarding

Now is all you have

Arthur Brooks recommends taking a politics cleanse

Arthur Brooks on four jobs of the CEO

Puritans didn't like wasting time

Don't take the existence of wealth for granted

"Existential risk" in Chinese

Are you Thrasymachus?

Comment thread about cost-effect skepticism

Bug-out bag refresh

Jaron Lanier on wolf mentalities in social media

Tension between autonomy & care in modernity

Books read Q2 2018

Why I'm skeptical of cost-effectiveness analysis

What's important is what you're reading

Puritan marriages were surprisingly liberal

On deciding what to do

Theranos: the religion

Big firm life

Caplan on the autodidact's curse

Some things I've learned

Jonah Goldberg on capitalism

Dr. Gabor Maté on the opioid crisis

Can you pay for unconditional love?

Books read Q1 2018

Rehabilitating Khrushchev

Tim Ferriss on lovingkindness meditation

Delayed Gratification

War with Russia means war with China

00000000

But where are the bones?

One good man at the Phnom Pehn Water Authority

A life you will want to wake up to

Jerry Brown at the gates of Tassajara

Harari on meditation

Andrew Sullivan on the opioid crisis

Shunryu Suzuki on life as a movie

Jeff Warren on "Expanding Mind"

Doing good while clueless

Charles Mann's production function

Books read Q4 2017

Hubspot's diversity data

Kabat-Zinn on stepping out of time

Excerpts from the introduction of "not always so"

Shunryu Suzuki on evil desires

Still Drinking's job advice

Ross Douthat's production function

Thiel on retaining employees

A strong claim in "Never Split the Difference"

David Foster Wallace on 3

Excerpts from a David Foster Wallace television interview

Shuffering and shmiling

9/9/6

Two lenses on working in tech

BART as a tool for focus

Reality Winner and the surveillance state

How tractable is cluelessness?

2017 in review: narrative (sorta)

2017 in review: analytic

“Just take the expected value” – a possible reply to concerns about cluelessness

The Social Security Trust Fund

Someone still receives a soldier's pension from the Civil War

Buddha epigraph misattribution

Definitional example of a Schelling point

Bitcoin 2025

Cowen on reducing complacency in your children

Salzberg's spoon of salt

What consequences?

Gopnik on Buddhism

Scott Adams' persuasion tips

Try your phone on grayscale

What to do about consequentialist cluelessness?

Good article on male loneliness

Eliezer on epistemic modesty

Excerpts from "The Gulag Archipelago"

A terrifying sample of nuclear close calls

Skopje statue

The Italo-Nigerian sex fashion pipeline

Books read Q3 2017

Hoffman on Quakers

The Larry Summers production function

Nu

Vegas dispatch

Solnit on negative capability

Gawande & Sasse on hiring

Scholarly production functions

Books read Q2 2017

Why I am not a Christian

Excerpt from "Strangers in Their Own Land"

Books read Q1 2017

80% of the S&P 500 is intangible

Excerpts from "The End of the Tour"

Online dating is frustrating

Books read Q4 2016

Freewrite rescued from my email drafts: 4

Freewrite rescued from my email drafts: 3

Freewrite rescued from my email drafts: 2

Freewrite rescued from my email drafts: 1

Second half of 2016 in review: analytic

Second half of 2016 in review: narrative

Joint statement from California legislative leaders on result of presidential election

President Trump

Should we give now or later? (continued)

Should we give now or later?

Misalignment of consequentialism and intuition

Black Mirror: Nosedive

Books read Q3 2016

How much do I need to save to retire early?

Motorcycling: is it worth the risk?

Passages I particularly enjoyed in "The Seven Storey Mountain"

Lifehack

When akrasia crosses with depression

Reflection on my time at GiveWell

Nanodegree postmortem

Excerpt from "One Man's Wilderness"

On spending money freely

Books read Q2 2016

2015-2016 year in review

Excerpt from Schlosser's "Command and Control"

"Trump overvalued" postmortem

Revisions to "Trump overvalued"

Trump overvalued

Longform read Q1 2016

Books read Q1 2016

Another prediction market oddity

A bet against Sanders, II

A new daily schedule

A more serious commitment to mindfulness, and a relevant paradox

A prediction market bet against Sanders

Putting a bug-out bag together

Review of "The Hateful Eight"

Longform read Q4 2015

Books read Q4 2015

Heuristics for evaluating performance

Two quotes from "The House I Live In"

Lost time

Migrating to Pelican

Reading list Q3 2015

The fading of older relatives

Navigating the death of older relatives, II

Navigating the death of older relatives

Framework for thinking about performance

Research methodology for a pseudostatistical analysis of Understanding Power

Radical open period

Reading list Q2 2015

2014-2015 year in review

You should read this

How to get started as a Bay Area motorcyclist

How many productive hours do I have remaining?

Min Kamp

In which repugnancy functions as the catalyst of an agenda for further ethical investigation

Godless humility

Music from "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night"

Reading List Q1 2015

Allowance

Ode to the Caffe Mediterraneum

Reading for quantity

Couple thoughts on organics

Untitled, by D'Angelo

Understanding Power

Maps

Things I found on the internet

The problem with meaning

(latter part of) 2014 reading list

Crash course to the current world

Seasons greetings

Abridged, dramatized account of a car ride conversation

Another bit from the internet

Overheard in Maseru

Tinder

True Detective, ep. 1

Computer?

Where blogging falls

citizenfour

Form follows function