Posts

This is the second post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, you can subscribe to my Substack. It’s quite late in the night, but I feel excited about the fact that I’m actually writing and publishing something for the second day in a row. I have a feeling that many of these posts will be about writing itself, which I’m always hesitant to talk about, because I have an implicit belief that writing about writing is boring and self-indulgent....

I’m trying out an experiment where I write and publish every day for the month of April. This is the first post. I’m doing this for a few reasons. First, I want to get back to enjoying writing more, and I can only do that if I overcome some of my fears around it. Fears of writing? you might ask, what fears do you have if you’ve already been writing for two years?...

Below I’ve copied over rough notes on my psychology research as of mid-March. I’ve written it to be fairly readable, so I’ve avoided use of jargon wherever I can. therapy is this interesting profession where, in the course of merely having a conversation with somebody, you change things in their brain, in an occasionally dramatic fashion. Bruce Ecker and others propose the idea that memory reconsolidation is the common mechanism that underlies all the various mechanisms of therapy that exists....

Do abstractions exist? Here we go for the 641st time… This piece is largely a response to silenceinbetween’s excellent post A Case For the Reality of Abstractions. (For brevity I will refer to the author as S going forward.) S frames the problem as such: The central tension here is that physics, as we currently understand it, operates like so: there was an initial set of conditions and laws which operate on those conditions....

Growing up I internalized ideas about self-discipline that, in retrospect, were rather unhealthy. Like: You should be very hard on yourself. If you don’t do “enough”, you should yell at yourself. Hard work will be effortful, it will be a grind. You should be gritting your teeth and tensing your neck and shoulders until you’re done. If you have a goal, you should work towards it at all costs, even if it doesn’t feel good....

In Why I am not an effective altruist, Erik Hoel criticizes the philosophical core of the EA movement. The problem with effective altruism—which is basically utilitarianism—is that it leads to repugnant conclusions (coined by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons): Example: strict utilitarianism would claim that a surgeon, trying to save ten patients with organ failure, should find someone in a back alley, murder them, and harvest all their organs. Example: utilitarianism would claim that there there is some number of “hiccups eliminated” that would justify feeding a little girl to sharks....

This piece is about why I think the Deutschian definition of rationalism is wrong, and what I would propose as an alternative (but admittedly more vague) definition. I’m posting this first draft without edits as part of an attempt to get feedback while working on a longer piece about what I think is missing in the Deutschian worldview. Any feedback, especially from critical rationalists about what I’m missing, would be appreciated!...

Just reproducing this brief tweet thread as a blog post. something you realize after sharing things on social media for a while is that the number of people who are impacted by your stuff is a lot bigger than strictly the number of people who actively engage with it (likes, replies, DMs) e.g. I had a friend randomly make a remark about a post of mine that they’d read 8 months ago, and I had no idea this person had ever seen any of my writing!...

(Originally written in December 2021.) In a previous post I explored some arguments about whether we have direct access to qualia. I was trying to figure out whether there are entities within our direct experience, and whether that undermines aspects of Deutsch and Popper’s philosophy, as well as whether it has implications for which beings are conscious. After writing that post, a remark by Jake Orthwein gave me a subtle but important shift in perspective....

There are many things that are uncomfortable about writing on the internet. You’re showing vulnerability to anonymous strangers, exposing yourself to criticism, mockery, scorn, or mere silent judgement. But there’s one part of it that you would expect to be nothing but pleasant: when people tell you that they really like your work. It took me a while to even realize that I felt uncomfortable being praised for my writing, because it still is, on the whole, a great feeling....