the world is big
“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.” – Arthur Schopenhauer “Your personal experiences make up <0.0001% of what’s happened in the world but 80% of how you think the world works. When experiencing a fraction of what’s out there but using that to explain everything […]
greatness is deviance
“Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.” — Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) If […]
it’s just math
when I was at 50 or 500 followers if I said I was going to have 50,000, people wouldve said I’m arrogant. (I didn’t say exactly that, but I’ve had enough similar conversations to be sure.) it’s not arrogance it’s just simple math, managing psychology & solving for distribution ✱ Sometimes ppl who interpret me […]
when “women are people” doesn’t work
(original thread, Mar2023) Sometimes guys say “idk how to talk to girls” and the ladies respond (understandably, but unhelpfully) “you know girls are people, right…?” – this is an eg of cultural confusion. Because what the guy is conveying is “my model of people is overtrained on male-male interactions” there are charitable and uncharitable ways […]
advice for people in their 20s
Transcript: “I asked people a while ago what content I should make on YouTube and somebody said talk about your 20s. And sure, why not? I turned 30 in June this year (2020). 30 years old – an adult, a man, right? I have felt like an adult man for some time, but there is […]
take baby steps
this is section 2.5 of introspect. “I always love it when people say ‘baby steps!’ to imply they’re being tentative, when actually baby steps are a great unbalanced, wholehearted, enthusiastic lurch into the unknown.” – @OliveFSmith It can be useful to compare and contrast different domains in your life, particularly ones where you are successful […]
the Losev problem
Born in 1903, Oleg Vladimirovich Losev invented LEDs decades before everybody else (in the 1920s). “Unknown and uncelebrated, this should’ve been the beginning of the photonic telecommunications revolution.” But nobody cared. He was a lonely, broke self-taught nerd with no co-authors. He wrote to Einstein but didn’t get a reply. He died of starvation at […]
culture
Nov 2024: what is culture? There are lots of ways to approach talking about it, but I particularly want to focus on what I think can be meaningfully affected in a way that promotes human flourishing. Culture is… a collection of beliefs, assumptions, ideas, understandings. It’s a frame of reference that can be hard to […]
Mint 100 Erasmuses
I’m shocked at how recently I learned about Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466-1536), who according to Wikipedia is considered one of the greatest scholars of the northern Renaissance. He corresponded with literally hundreds of people in the 1500s. He was born out of wedlock in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Both of his parents died in a plague. He […]
civilization is potty training
Civilization is a kind of recursive, iterated potty training. See, the great thing about being an uncivilised barbarian is that you can shit wherever you like, whenever you like. This works out fine in the open wilderness, but it doesn’t work when you have lots of people in a small amount of space. Then shit […]
encourage your friends to ship their ideas
(original thread) friendly subtweet: sometimes when someone has an idea to do something, the best thing you can do is not to suggest ways to expand and broaden the idea into something more complex than they can handle, but to cheerfully tell them to just fucken do the thing they said they wanted. (If I […]
status quo soldiers lose in the long run
Here’s a tiresome thing when some bad shit happens: when people unaffected by it actually spend their precious time and energy to voluntarily discourage anybody who speaks up about it– saying things are worse elsewhere, that you should be grateful, be quiet, or take heroic action. this is a highly predictable response from people who […]
seek excellent peers
Whenever people ask things like “your best advice in 3-4 words” etc, I always go with “seek excellent peers”. Because when you surround yourself with good people, they have a positive effect on everything else in your life. Some people find this directive too vague. “How?” Well the first thing is to evaluate what you […]
Pericles
Pericles (495–429 BCE) was a prominent Athenian general and statesman. He died aged 66, of plague. I find him to be a fascinating historical figure – he’s arguably one of the most important individuals in influencing what some people call The Golden Age Of Athens. If we want to recreate a Golden Age in our […]
feral free agents
I’m not a fan of the word “unemployed”. First of all, it’s come to imply that the default state is “employed”, meaning to be an employee, meaning to have an employer. I am not a fan of the conventional employer-employee relationship – I don’t think it’s good for me, even when I have a great […]
the death and life of great scenius
The Death And Life Of Great American Cities is a book by 1961 by Jane Jacobs. It’s criminally underrated. Scenius is a phrase coined by Brian Eno, first mentioned roughly around 1993 at a business conference in London, and then quoted again in his 1996 book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. I have a public […]
coordination does not require conspiracy
Coordination does not require conspiracy. I think it’s great that the word “conspire” literally means “to breath together”. I find it to be very evocative. Even if we’re conspiring to do something together over a video chat, we are still sort of “breathing in unison”, in a sense. We are having a conversation, we are […]
dominoes
I reference and revisit and reuse this tweet a lot so I figured I might as well do a blogpost about it. It’s been surprising to me how popular it is with people. I could say that “it’s because it communicates a vision as a series of progressive steps”, which is technically true, but doesn’t […]
👑 you are already the monarch of your life
— 1. talismans — A talisman is simply an object that is meaningful to you. Wedding rings are the most widely appreciated talismans. (One of the most haunting images from the Holocaust – which I won’t post here, but you can look it up – is a big pile of wedding rings taken from victims […]
play long games
This is an “aggregate” blogpost where I dump stuff from my tweets and notes. — What do I mean by long game? One way of thinking about it is to think backwards from the life you want to lead. — Change is possible. it will seem improbable until it becomes inevitable. persist. figure out what […]
kids in shitty social graphs
The following is a riff from a twitter thread I once wrote that I reference fairly often. I’m choosing to reproduce some of it here because I realize it’s a core part of my motivations. People who are really knowledgeable about the world are often publicly silent about the juiciest stuff, probably because the upside […]
⚔️ optimize for survival
The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor. You can’t win if you lose – so learn to not lose. Most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study and so on. Analyze failures and take conscientious steps to avoid them. From my […]
❌ when and why I block people
(I’m thinking about this mainly in the context of Twitter, but there are some general principles here too.) I don’t like blocking people. I’m personally a big fan of public spaces and public commons. I like the idea of being accessible to people, and I feel like generally people should have the right of reply. […]
🏛 the prestige trap
I’ve had several conversations with friends who’ve been incapacitated by the burdensome bullshit obligation to Have A Meaningful Life / Be Remembered / Do Important Work. It strikes me as socially inherited bloatware that causes tedious lag, which ironically prevents you from being awesome. When people say things like “just be yourself”, I think often […]
masculinity
I’m not sure when I first started really thinking about what it even means to be a man, what masculinity is. I think it’s something that begins in a very intangible, subtle way almost from birth – it’s in the culture around you, almost imperceptible because it’s so “normal”. Straight, cis-gendered men definitely notice it […]
💬 practice good reply game
There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly. Every “utterance” (status, tweet, […]
⚔️ twitter_rpg_strategy_guide.txt
twitter_rpg_strategy_guide.txt Twitter is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, primarily text-based with limited multimedia support. It combines elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read, view and contribute descriptions of objects, other players, non-player characters, and actions performed in the virtual world, as well as the […]
👩🏾🚀 representation matters
a recurring point I find myself making in private conversations is that I believe that representation might possibly be the #1 most powerful force for social change. it’s the tip of the spear. if you want to help a marginalized person or group, create media that centers them I’m revealing my own media bias & […]
🤡 the world is not kind to those who are tacky
Late night thought: “Don’t be tacky (unless you know why you’re doing it)” is a surprisingly powerful heuristic for me. Idk if anybody else will relate to it. It’s an aesthetic-grounded approach to peopling, related to “people are forgiving of most things if you’re classy” It’s kind of circular reasoning though. How do you even […]
✋🏾 we need to get better at dealing with assholes if we are to progress as a species
— 1 — As I get older I feel this subtle-but-strong pressure to become more “professional” – more “civil”, more “mature”, more even-handed. Most of the time this is a good thing. But I’ve also discovered that sometimes this impulse can mean tolerating things we shouldn’t tolerate. There’s no nice way to say it: some […]
🗣 mansplaining is sometimes (but not always) innocuous
If I had to do a “the difference between men and women” type of standup set, I think I would focus on the phenomenon of mansplaining, which to me is significantly (but not completely!) an eg of big misunderstanding + language/communication breakdown The first thing to appreciate about mansplaining is that to some degree it’s […]
👘 cultural cosplay: a broader framework for thinking about cultural appropriation
I’ve never quite been satisfied with the overuse of the phrase “cultural appropriation” in all sorts of contexts, or “cultural appreciation” as the (only?) alternative way of thinking about it – and I’ve been thinking that both fit within a larger framework of “cultural cosplay” I like the phrase “cultural cosplay” because it’s value-neutral. Cosplay […]
💋 Narcissist PR works because we can’t shut up about it
WIP I tweeted a more cautious version of this blogpost in July, and it’s been on my mind so I wanted to take some time to think out loud about it. “Paris Hilton is a hustler. Kim Kardashian is a hustler. And you mother fuckers are the johns. Every time you complained about Paris or […]
👀 when arguing, strive to understand context
— 1. When arguing, seek to understand context — [Published 2016] Roughly between ages 13 and 23 I was thoroughly convinced that best thing an intelligent person could do is to get obsessively good at evaluating and crafting sound arguments. Rationality! Debate! Wisdom! I rearranged a lot of my life around that wishful ideal: that […]
🤝 how to build and maintain communities
This blogpost started out as a bunch of notes and links, and I found myself sharing it with people over and over again so much. Here are a list of things that I recommend reading if you’re interested in communities. Read about the evaporative-cooling effect by Xianhang Zhang – “If anyone can join your community, […]