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The Haircut/Chicken Ratio: My failed attempt to come up with something like the Big Mac Index
My intuition was that inflation for services has been faster than for commodities. This turns out to be mostly wrong. Indexing to the year 2000,…
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A More Concrete Metaphysics: Stephen Wolfram is on to something
Mathematician Stephen Wolfram is developing his own metaphysics, based on the insight that simple rules can lead to complex outcomes. Metaphysics has in the past…
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The American Experiment: Democracy isn’t going away
It’s impossible to predict how the American experiment will evolve, although some are trying. Drawing a parallel to the rise of Fascism in Europe in…
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An Old and Wild Absurdity: We keep making the wrong assumptions about evolution
Some ways of thinking about evolution and natural history don’t go away, no matter how forcefully they get refuted. In my dentist’s waiting room earlier…
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Snow Walk: My first attempt at snowshoes had a slapstick ending
I’ve never used snowshoes before. This is an account of my first attempt, which, despite ending with me feeling silly, got me wanting to try…
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Modular Ornament: An idea I’m not pursuing, but why isn’t anyone else?
I sometimes have business ideas that seem like someone should pursue them, but no-one is. In most cases, the reason will be that it’s a…
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Counting is Hard: You’d think we know how many people there are, but we don’t
One of the most basic ways to understand the world is to count something. Often, that’s easier said than done. A lot of my recent…
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Free Work: Why has no country opened its borders to anyone willing to work?
In the modern era, no state has ever unconditionally opened its borders to labor. Some have embraced free trade by removing obstacles such as tariffs,…
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More Fundamental Than Physics: Concepts have more explanatory power
Physicists have a reasonable claim to their discipline being fundamental to all of science. After all, they deal with elementary particles and laws which make…
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The Narrow Beam of Consciousness: Why don’t we have more mental bandwidth?
Why is the beam of our conscious attention so narrow? We can only consciously perceive very little at any given time, even though our senses…
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Anemones: They look like they’re from another planet
There are no better places than tide pools to find alien-like creatures. Sea anemones are predatory animals, but you wouldn’t know it looking at them.
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My Maximum Likelihood Solution to the Fermi Paradox: Not new but probably true
By far the most likely resolution to the Fermi Paradox is that there aren’t any aliens capable of interstellar travel or even interstellar communication (radio…
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AI Against Slop: LLMs may help the internet move on from chasing clicks
Hamilton Mann worries that AI makes monetizing content creation on the internet more difficult and less lucrative. It’s a valid concern, but there’s a more…
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Why Read? Don’t you have better things to do?
Is reading novels really a better use of time than watching clips on YouTube? I like to read, not because I think it makes me…
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The Portability of Concepts: Why do some ideas apply in some many situations?
The very best concepts apply in multiple domains. Often, they have different names in those domains, even though they’re about the same underlying idea. Here’s…
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History and Function: Both are hallmarks of life, but history may be more important
Why something exists, and what it’s good for, are two different things. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty…
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Even Chances: AI could be good or bad and we have no idea which one is more likely
This forecast on Metaculus gives a 49% chance that AI will result in broadly positive outcome (Futurama, Singularity) by 2050, a 42% chance that it…
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Peripheral Drinking: David Samuels goes to Polynesia
David Samuels has published an article about America, inspired by a recent visit to American Samoa. There, at the country’s extreme periphery, he sits in…
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Attention and Emotion: Can we love without paying attention?
Liel Leibovitz, in County Highway, draws a line between our decreasing attention spans and our lack of emotion: What we have here, then, is a…
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The Enemy is Numbness: It’s not just design that seems bland
There is a pervasive feeling that modernity is bland: Buildings, clothes, cars and interior design are minimalist and identical everywhere. Emotional blandness or numbness gets…
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Two Visions of the Future: Science fiction scenarios that aren’t stories
Scenario 1 We have extensively terraformed a planet circling a distant star. Its atmosphere is breathable and because of its low gravity, trees grow a…
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No Dangerous Knowledge: We can handle the truth
If belief in evolutionary theory made us demonstrably behave worse, should we protect people from learning about it? If a factually incorrect religious belief made…
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Elephant Seals: Men should try not to be like them
Animals don’t exist as cautionary tales for humans, but if they did, elephant seals would’ve clearly been created to tell men how not to behave.…
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Tastefully Painted Statues: In antiquity, they had taste after all
This is a thorough debunking of the claim that the ancient Romans and Greeks painted their statues in garish colors. Also, do yourself a favor…
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The EU-Mercosur Agreement: Free trade is doing well elsewhere
This week, the European Union decided to go ahead with an agreement with Mercosur, the South American common market. It’s a victory for free trade.…
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Plumbing, and Lack Thereof: Our ancestors’ sanitary arrangements were objectionable
If we invent a time machine, I predict that we’ll get temporal tourists returning from the past, horrified about how people used to do their…
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Shingles Vaccine and Dementia
Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a viral disease that causes a painful rash as well as pain and general malaise. There is a…
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Ecojargon: Think like an ecologist, but don’t talk like one, please
There’s something about the way ecologists talk that makes my eyes glaze over: Prairie plants sequester carbon, prevent erosion and provide key habitat for endangered…
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Mathematica
Mathematician David Bessis has written a book about what we do when we do mathematics. It’s one of the best books I’ve read recently. One…
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Another Utopia
It’s easy to think of the ways in which things may go badly, but a less familiar exercise is to imagine ways in which they…
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Feynman vs. The Abacus
This is an anecdote from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! It nicely shows what genius actually consists of: Not raw processing power (that’s what the…
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LLMs Are Not High IQ
Practicing for intelligence tests doesn’t improve performance much. IQ tests really seem to measure some innate ability that is relatively unresponsive to training. Processing speed…
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Many and Few
Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Jim Harrison wrote that our wounds…
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NY, NY: My first visit in New York was for the New Year, and I understood why people like that city
The first time I came to New York, I came for the New Year. My friend’s friend had gone back to Mexico for the holidays…
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Aspirations for 2026
I wish to you the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where…
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You Can’t Access Most Books
150 millions books have been published, according to the estimate I asked ChatGPT for. Around 70 million have been digitized, but 70% of those are…
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Aimless Reading
Reading fiction is fun, but interpreting fiction isn’t. Neither am I convinced that trying to interpret novels or poems in a structured way is to…
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Doing it Yourself
A few years back, before my wife and I had kids and when we still lived in a condo in San Francisco, we asked a…
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Santa
This time of the year makes me reflective and sentimental, so here’s my thought for today: My kids met Santa in front of the supermarket…
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Bad Faith Communication
Engaging in direct debate with those who communicate in bad faith is a waste of time and emotional energy. Similarly, following debates between bad faith…
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The Higher Cause Delusion
In the most recent episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks and Richard Dawkins talk about humorist P. G. Wodehouse. Towards the end, Brooks contrasts the…
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Silent Night, Silently
“Why would a chorus need a sign language interpreter?” I thought as the performance began. On the stage in front of me stood a hundred…
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AI Jaggedness
On One Weird Thing, Ethan Mollick argues that getting AI to be more powerful (both in the sense of more useful and more dangerous) is…
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The Best Books I Read in 2025
This year, I read 24 books. That averages two per month, which is a coincidence as I didn’t set myself a target. Most of them…
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Big in 2025
Here is a list of scientific and engineering news of 2025, ranked by potential impact. I like the idea of considering both the probability that a…
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Motivation
It seems obvious that to build effective organizations, incentives have to be aligned with the desired outcomes. For example, we should give big bonuses to…
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Pretty, Please
The gay community has resisted cultural blandness more and better than any other. Ryan Khurana on Palladium: By the early 20th century, dedication to aesthetic…
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The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research
This article was recommended to me by the PhD advisor of my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor, or, as I like to think of him, my…
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Aristocracy and Ability
We’re not smart. We don’t work hard. We’re just posh. President of a Viennese private bank catering to the aristocracy I dislike of the concept…
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Photo of an Exoplanet
Initially, it was only possible to infer the presence from exoplanets indirectly from the way they made their star wobble, or when they transited in…
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Can Pharma Scale?
Pharma and tech are different industries. For example, tech benefits from network effects (if everyone uses LinkedIn it makes more sense to join), pharma doesn’t.…
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Overfitting Towards Blandness
Our culture has become bland, as evidenced by fashion, building, cars, book covers, and household objects all looking the same. Even people seem to be…
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Alcatraz
Here is one idea for Alcatraz and here‘s another one. Here are some older designs for the island. Any of them would elevate San Francisco…
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Lifelike Portraits from the Roman Empire
We don’t have lifelike portraits of anyone until at least the Renaissance. Even the best sculptures and paintings from ancient Rome, Greece or China are…
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Insider Attacks
In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes a massacre of French colonial soldiers in North Africa, carried out by a local chieftain by…
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Wind, Sand and Stars
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French pilot in the early years of aviation. He flew military and civilian aircraft in the 1920s and 1940s before…
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Performative Xenophobia
Denmark has more restrictive immigration policies than other Western countries. This is a good article without the hyperventilation that usually comes with the topic.
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From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe
Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that…
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Little Tigers
“What you’re doing is as extravagant as keeping a pet tiger,” said my brother. “Having three kids is unheard of here.” My wife, our kids…
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The Malleability of Intuition
Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand…
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Isotopes, Fast or Strong
Dynomight has a list of things to be thankful for. My favorite: That radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy but also quickly stop…
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Pyromaniac
Trying to light a camp fire when it’s raining and everything is wet is a humbling experience, and not one that practicing in dry conditions…
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Economic Policy Won’t Fix It
How much of variance in economic performance is due to a country’s economic policy? This is an important question because our political discourse assumes that…
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The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
Thinking about forecasting and AI, I sometimes remember this story by Greg Egan. It was published as part of his collection Axiomatic. Here is my…
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Arctic Facts
Here are the facts I found surprising enough to highlight in my copy of Arctic Dreams: Most animals live lives in biological keeping with the…
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Arctic Dreams
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez still shows the Soviet Union on its maps of the Arctic. There is no mention of global warming, unthinkable for…
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Literary Voyeurism
This essay by Scott McClanahan is a hole through which I can peek inside a world that is closed to me but that I have…
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Genome Counter
The Human Genome project took 13 years and cost $3 billion. It was completed in 2003, although some gaps took until 2022 to be filled.…
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My Second Day At Work
Like so many minds of my generation, best or otherwise, I came to California for work. The biotech company that hired me paid for my…
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Revenge
The worst job I’ve ever had was also my first. This helped me later in life, with every job I’ve had since having been an…
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Causation Does Not Imply Variation
As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that…
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Data Archival
You don’t have a lot of options if you want to preserve sure your data (your photos for example) for many years without any maintenance.…
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Pharma Ads
My wive and I had dinner at a noisy hot pot restaurant on Geary Boulevard. The restaurant was packed. When my wive went to get…
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Kári Stefánsson
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when…
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Wrangel Island Mammoths
For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the…
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Disappearing Polymorphs
Some chemical substances assemble in different crystal structures without changing their composition. Those alternative structures are called polymorphs. Polymorphs can act as seed crystals, causing…
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New Mexico
Santa Fe was less interesting than I had thought. The place has a lot of history but it doesn’t feel alive. Too many art galleries…
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Politics Won’t Fix It
For a long time now, Americans have felt that the country is moving in the wrong direction without anyone clearly articulating what the right direction…
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Lack of Desperation
I recently discovered Sam Kriss’ Substack, Numb at the Lodge. I wish I could write like that. At the same time, I don’t envy Kriss.…
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Child of Freedom, Parent of Prosperity
How much should the government spend on science? One view is that it should spend a lot, since every dollar pays back many times over.…
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Corporate Email
Here are two emails from my workplace, normally notable for its lack of quirkiness. Good morning Hope you are all well. Just in case you…
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Viscerality
First: The modern world is in fact very pleasant. We have a thousand labor-saving devices. We are thoroughly accustomed to instant heat, cold, transportation, water,…
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One Argument is Better than Two
People have to eat, and some of what they eat is meat. As with everything, there’s a tradeoff, in this case between animal welfare and…
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Ambivert
I’ve never felt solidarity except while making love, or with a tree or animal or while utterly alone on a river or in a swamp…
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