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My writing thesis has always been that I want people to learn something useful, to change how they think for the better, 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, Video games
  • Gwern’s Most Important Writing (in essays, tweets, book reviews, and other forms
• 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