A friend reports being beset by requests from book clubs, readers circles, reading groups, to prepare some remarks for the edification of their members on the subject of his most recent book. He has a website, which may be critical in attracting these enquiries. Interacting with these requests eventually leads to a request for a donation to defray the costs of the event. The same problem was being reported recently on the SHARP listserv (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, &…

We now know enough about the brain to realize that its mystery will always remain. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. ~Johan LehrerWhen our daughter was a preschooler, authority figures informed parents that the human brain was fully formed by around five-years-old. After that, there would be no new brain cells, which was why, they told us, the early years were so important. These were the scientific facts. Just a few days ago, a parent of a preschooler told me that the director of…

This is a follow-up to a previous post, In My Misanthropy Era. In 2025, after getting my intellectual rocks off largely at hardcore rationality meetups for the entirety of the 2020s, I went to a casual philosophy meetup and it ~turned me evil. I wrote a post about this experience, because I thought it was interesting how a thoughtfully facilitated, pleasantly intellectual night out for most well-adjusted people was somehow my own personal hell. Also, that was objectively kind of a funny thing…

If you met me during the last twelve years or so, I probably wouldn’t strike you as a religious person. I got a Master’s degree in a technical field, and I spent a few years as a PhD student doing research. Now I am an AI/ML engineer. All this time, I looked at the world through the lens of science. Sure, from time to time, I practiced some form of meditation, but there is some scientific evidence that it works, and it ultimately served my own benefit. But you should know, dear reader, that I…

Editor’s Note: Post originally published on September 14, 2022. I struggle with the sin of pride. I often hate to admit I made a mistake. Even if it is a minor one. I tend to blow the error out of proportion in my mind. This leads to me spiraling into a descent of despair. Reason … Continue reading How Saint Teresa of Avila Cut Through My Exterior with Her Interior Castle The post How Saint Teresa of Avila Cut Through My Exterior with Her Interior Castle first appeared on The Simple Catholic.…

I was interviewed (in Chinese) by Feminine magazine, a Malaysian lifestyle magazine that has been around for many years. Several other local game designers were interviewed as well. More links below. Teaching Malaysian Holidays Buddhima's interview article, in which he talks about boardgames, education, and children. Buddhima is part of the

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Nicole Noren: I'm not going to have blood on my hands. What troubles me most is the disconnect at the ESPN executive level between making money and caring about the human impact of constantly bombarding fans with betting odds and talk. It’s become impossible to escape—during live games, studio shows, podcasts, etc. But just because there aren’t yet laws here banning some of this during live sports broadcasts—as there are in some other countries—doesn’t mean they should be doing it. I still find…

The book Impro by Keith Johnstone is described as a ‘landmark work’ by the blurb on the back of my copy. It describes techniques and exercises he developed for theatrical improvisation classes he ran. Notes There’s a lot in this book, too much to summarise easily. But some of the points that stood out most to me were: Many people who want to become professional actors are unwilling to take risks when they start improvisation classes, perhaps out of fear of revealing too much about themselves.…

I already knew that the Effective Altruism movement is the biggest scam since snake oil, i.e. a kind of secular absolution for the amoral among us. (See here or here, for example.) But check out this brutal takedown of the logic of longtermism — and of consequentialist moral theory more generally! — over at the parody website More Wrong (https://morewrong.lol/; hat tip: Kottke), “Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive“: ΔL = D/G − pD = donation per bag of…

I’ve previously posted about my love hate relationship with music and music streaming, and after seeing the title for that post again, I’ve realized that I have that same sort of relationship with social media. When I mention social media, I’m going to try and not gear this towards a certain social media site like Mastodon / Fediverse, instead talk about social media in general that can cover a majority of social media websites (both past, present, and future). What I love Be informed Social…

In the early years of the 20th century, the medium of choice for large-scale conversations was the newspaper — at least, it was something newspaper-like, in some form or another. You saw this in the various ideological struggles of the time period, from fascism to communism to anarchism to republicanism. Of course, the nature of the printing press (speaking very broadly here) was such that you had to have some sort of resources to print a paper. It was theoretically possible to do it on a…

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2026 has been awarded to Robert E. Hall and Michael Woodford “”for microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation.” To gain some intuition for what that actually means, it’s useful to flash back a few decades and remember the origins of “macroeconomics” and how macroeconomic analysis was done a half-century ago. There’s an old phrase about “painting with a broad brush,” when you skip past smaller details. In…

I know I’ve posted about polyglots a lot, but Matthew Erickson’s NY Times piece (Oct. 6, 2026; archived) takes an unusual (and unusually thoughtful) approach, and won my heart right off the bat by referencing one of my favorite novels: A few months ago, I finally read Helen DeWitt’s 2000 novel, “The Last Samurai,” in which the autodidact child protagonist, Ludo, teaches himself a vast spread of languages before turning 11: ancient Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, French, Arabic, Old Norse and Inuit,…

I see something that doesn’t see me. To call its indifference cold would be to turn the lens around, to impose my own meanings. It simply is. A mountain doesn't care whether you climb it. The ocean doesn't care whether you drown in it. The stars don't care whether humanity exists. Camus said, “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.” When I strip it all away, the desperate need for meaning and purpose, what is it that I find beautiful? Could it be the emptiness itself? Perhaps words…

I vibe with John's proclamation that X Once Again Marks the Spot. I would like to follow "hundreds of interesting people and accounts [...] that post on X very regularly". I would like to show and discuss fascinating new apps on the platform. I would like to swim upstream to where the most people are and the most commotion happens. Upstream to the stretch of the river with the most pockets, such that I can find those that are most friendly toward, inclusive of, and cheerful for me. Warner's…

a guest post by ˆ Number 1 It began, as these things often do in this peculiar household, with a Sanskrit verse. तेन खलु समयेन भगवान् गम्भीरावभासं नाम धर्मपर्यायं समाधिं समापन्नः । At that time, the Blessed One entered the samādhi called Profound Illumination. The setting is Rājagṛha, on Gṛdhrakūṭa, Vulture Peak, where the Heart Sūtra situates its assembly. While the Buddha rests in meditative absorption, Avalokiteśvara contemplates the five skandhas and discovers their emptiness of inherent…

This is the definition of the word in a dictionary. It is not something we can scientifically measure as temperature or weight, but we adjudicate high or low intellgences subjectivelly. The scientifical approximation we use in society is the IQ test, which intends to measure what it's creator thought intelligence was. Probably he thought of himself as a very intelligent man and abstained himself from adding things to the test that he could not certainly pass. No, I don't know how to measure…

You know those questions people ask something along the lines of "If you could give everyone in the world a skill what would it be?" Self-awareness. Self-awareness! Previously I'd've said critical thinking. Which would still be nice. Critical thinking is about being able to assess other people and other things. Self-awareness is doing that to yourself. The problem is self-awareness is a Socratic paradox. The more you have the more you realise you don't have it. Last week I had some training and…

Online and offline, we are living through an interconnected crisis of ecological breakdown, economic inequality, political disillusionment and social fragmentation that are not separate problems. They feed into each other, creating #mainstreaming paths that are increasingly unable to meet basic social and environmental needs. The usual response to this now visible mess is to ask the same institutions that created these problems to keep managing the consequences. the chattering classes that run…

By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall If there is one subject that will not go away in the news, it is the decline in Britain’s industrial effectiveness. It is understandable to some extent, because so many problems emerge from it that effect everyday life; unemployment, inflation, national mood, etc. But there has recently been a new piece … Continue reading [October 14, 1971] Reductio Ad Tedium (Protostars) → The post [October 14, 1971] Reductio Ad Tedium (<i>Protostars</i>) appeared first on Galactic…

One of the most familiar verses in Hallel is the opening of Tehillim 114:בְּצֵאת יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרָיִם בֵּית יַעֲקֹב מֵעַם לֹעֵזA common translation is, “When Yisrael went forth from Egypt, the house of Yaakov from a people of foreign speech” (Tehillim 114:1). Yet לֹעֵז (loez), usually understood as describing someone who speaks a foreign or unintelligible language, appears only once in the Tanakh. The verse doesn't explicitly mention language. It only describes the Egyptians as an עַם לֹעֵז.…

Dolly Parton’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hollywood, Calif., 2026. For more, follow me on Instagram. About I My Book | Consulting I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Email

Writing about Evoluon a couple of years ago I mentioned my affection for all those one-off Space-Age constructions with suitably science-fictional names: Evoluon, Skylon, Atomium, Space Needle… You could add Futuro to this list, a micro-building in comparison to the latter pair, with a similar flying-saucer styling as Evoluon. Futuro wasn’t a one-off design, however, but a prefabricated dwelling intended for mass production. The original plan by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen was for a…

*and if you disagree you’re doing it wrong. This too is Pawn Stance. Defining our Terms Pawn Stance is an approach to play that treats the characters and events of your game as tools for accomplishing your goals. It’s also objectively the correct way to play games. A History Lesson Narrative stances as used in this context were first formulated by Kevin Hardwick and Sarah Kahn and became part of the jargon used in the rec.games.frp.advocacy (RGFA) Usenet group sometime before 1996.1 They laid…

“Slowly and then all at once”. That’s John Green’s paraphrasing of Ernest Hemingway’s quote in The Sun Also Rises about how change happens (though John wrote it specifically about how we fall in love). Ernest was referring to how you go bankrupt. But it applies to many if not most types of change, large-scale and small, the way they creep up on us until we hardly notice that what we once took for granted is ‘suddenly’ gone. You know, like ‘responsible’ government, like a stable economic system,…

We are always in a race to figure people out. We want to know quickly whether they are worth trusting. Whether we can rely on them. Whether they are who they say they are. Our first instinct is to distrust people, so we can protect ourselves from getting hurt. That is the whole game. Protecting ourselves. The need to trust someone stems from our desire to be vulnerable with them. To be honest with them. To share our rawest selves with them. So we can tell them what we truly feel and what we…

When my grandmother-in-law died, she left us with a set of The Great Books, a 54 volume set of renowned works by European men, from Homer to Freud. Published in 1954 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was meant as a comprehensive study guide for adults interested in learning about intellectual underpinnings of the Western world. The idea was that students would encounter the original works, rather than textbook summaries, and, more importantly, the curriculum was built around conversation,…

We need the frontier labs to have a deep and robust safety culture. Alas, this is not the case. Anthropic devotes considerable effort to cultivating and maintaining such a culture. It shows, especially among the members of technical staff. Having conversations with them can be a very different experience than talking to those at other labs, and there is a much greater sense of understanding and responsibility. But even there, the appreciation of the problems and their difficulties seem woefully…

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Sally Otto, University Killam Professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the United Kingdom's Royal Society, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to evolutionary biology, particularly the mathematical understanding of how evolution works. Our conversation centres on…