I spend most of my time thinking about tools that expand our ability to think and to imagine.
A pencil and a piece of paper is one. A computer is another. A chat with ChatGPT is yet another one. Is anything inherently difficult? very relevant.
It seems that these kinds of tools & interfaces both:
- Very literally determine how and what we think and what we are capable of thinking (think about the kinds of numbers you can multimply in your head vs on a piece of paper; images you can create in your head vs on a piece of paper vs in MS Paint vs Photoshop).
- Are very sticky (think about Romans stuck with Roman numerals for a thousand years unable to do any math; Europeans stuck with Latin alphabet and East Asians stuck with hierogliphs for thousands of years – both determing who is able to think in writing and how they think).
What interfaces are to be created now and which civilizational paths they will they guide us towards (and away from)? Always happy to chat about this.
Recent essays
Mar 31, College Q&A
Mar 13, Rare omens of exceptional talent
January 31, Napoleon: a Cautionary Tale for Young Idealists
Nov 20, (unauthorized) advice from guest 04
Oct 20, Is AI alignment on track? Is it progressing… too fast?
Oct 11, Ramanujan, Einstein, Tolstoy, Napoleon, Richard Muller, and Michael Jackson on God
Sep 13, Omens of exceptional talent
personal favorites
- My 2022 self (I don’t know them) was very wrong about meditation, huge monitors, and… sleep.
- Omens of exceptional talent & Rare omens of exceptional talent
- Is anything inherently difficult?
- Intelligence killed genius
Advice
- What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice
- Advice from Tyler Cowen & (unauthorized) advice from guest 04
- College Q&A
- lifehacks
- Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
- How to make friends over the internet
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
most notable
- Ideas not mattering is a psyop
- (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders
- Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
- questions
- Napoleon: a Cautionary Tale for Young Idealists
- A Two sentence Jailbreak for GPT-4 and Claude & Why Nobody Knows How to Fix It
- How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
- AI Alignment Is Turning from Alchemy Into Chemistry
- The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment
- Theses on Sleep
- Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit?
- Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research
- What is the alternative to utilitarianism?
- Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design
- Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- Forecasting humans becoming generally intelligent with biological anchors: year 10,000,000,000,002,2022
- You are a morale-driven machine
- Tools / Gear
- My low-demand, worry-free, and healthy diet
- Links
- Issues with Bloom et al’s “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation
- Research Ideas
- Best of Holden Karnofsky and Sam Altman
- Gwern’s Most Important Writing (in essays, tweets, book reviews, and other forms
- Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
- Don’t believe self-reported data
- Why You Should Join Twitter Right Now
- William MacAskill misrepresents the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
Personal
- Q&A with my high school self: helping 14-16 year old Alexey to deal with his emotions, to ask for help, to talk to people (and his dad), to learn, to get things done.
- On Friendship and on Finding Your People
- 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College
- My journal: years of depression and self-loathing; learning to accept myself and others; overcoming video game addiction
- My Favorite Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts, Music, Video games
- People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire
- My 4-monitor computer setup (16-inches + 49-inches + 34-inches + 24-inches
Fiction & Art
- How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same
- Why You Should Not Go on a Tinder Date with Me
- Dating
- RAPIDLY PRESS X TO REFUSE TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN MORTALITY
- A dying snake
- Poems
notable
- Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
- Ramanujan, Einstein, Tolstoy, Napoleon, Richard Muller, and Michael Jackson on God
- If the moon doesn’t need gravity, why do we? The necessity of understanding for general intelligence
- Why AI experts' jobs are always decades from being automated
- 16 questions posed & answered by Leslie Berlin’s book “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age”
- Why We Likely Underappreciate the Pace of Technological Progress
- Instilling Novel Thought Patterns and Making Your Long-Term Memory Accountable with Anki
- Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”
- Fun Economic Facts
- Interview with Ben Kuhn about productivity, his college experience, job choice, the value of an inside view, the EA community #interview
- Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
- Polynomial Time Reductions and the P vs NP problem
- Three Questions for Russia
- Online courses and textbooks I recommend
- Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?
- Tweet rot
- Low tech stuff I recommend
- Can We Trust Peter Turchin?
- Scientific experiments I want to fund
- Tweet-Sized Insight Porn
- Philosophers for Sale
- Julian Jaynes and the Ancient Tablets
- The most we can say about earnings of Substack’s top writers
- Who is the real prophet of longtermism: Will MacAskill or Sam Altman?
LaTeX
- Matec Notes – a multivariable calculus coursebook
- How Our Commitments Slip Away From Us (pdf, my bachelor’s thesis)