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My writing thesis has always been that I want people to learn something useful, to change how they think, and to motivate them to do something differently. Below is my writing categorized by the motivations behind it:

• I wanted to make my vision of the future more probable
  • Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research
  • How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
  • Why We Likely Underappreciate The Pace of Technological Progress
• I repeatedly gave the same advice to my friends
  • Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now
  • How to use your wife/husband/gf/bf correctly
  • Why You Should Join Twitter Right Now
  • Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
  • It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
  • What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice
  • How to make friends over the internet
  • Instilling Novel Thought Patterns and Making Your Long-Term Memory Accountable with Anki
• I wanted to make it easier to other people to understand how I think and where I come from
  • On Friendship and on Finding Your People
  • 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College
  • Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
  • My Favorite Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts, Music, Videogames
• I disagreed with people, left comments online, and had some ideas about stuff that I read
  • Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
  • Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”
  • Against Universal Basic Income
  • William MacAskill misrepresents the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
• I wanted to share bits of my unique private knowledge that I believed could be useful to others
  • Links
    • Note: people tend to underappreciate links posts but this is probably the densest in the quality and quantity of insight page on this site
  • An Ad Hominem Argument Against GDP
  • Fun Economic Facts
  • Ignore any paper based on self-reported data
  • Polynomial Time Reductions and the P vs NP problem
  • Three Questions for Russia
  • More worldly knowledge:
    • Tools / Gear
    • MOOCs I Recommend And How to Study with Them
    • My Favorite Textbooks
• I investigated things
  • Is anything inherently difficult?
  • Research Ideas
  • Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?
  • Tweet rot
  • Can We Trust Peter Turchin?
• I privately collected stuff I find fascinating and figured other people may also find it interesting
  • People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire
  • Tweet-Sized Insight Porn
• I wanted to create art
  • 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
  • How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same
  • Philosophers for Sale
  • Julian Jaynes and the Ancient Tablets