3. Antimanifestos (October 19, 2015)In which I develop the idea of an antimanifesto — a set of live contradictions you steer by, rather than settled beliefs you bury as habits — and argue that divergent exploration, driven by curiosity rather than social consensus, is the more honest posture.
4. Epsilon-Delta thinking (August 30, 2016)In which I push back on Peter Thiel's "zero to one" framing by proposing epsilon-delta thinking — the calculus of small, continuous changes — as a richer model for navigating innovation and uncertainty than the discrete coin-flip logic of statistics.
5. Riff on Ambition (August 2, 2017)In which I propose measuring ambition in "baby equivalents" — open-ended commitments that, if successful, demand indefinite attention — and explore why we rationally lower our sights as we age, even when we're not losing.
6. Healing the Wounds of History (August 13, 2017)In which I argue that historical trauma works like financial debt — with compound interest — and that the pain of figures like Robert E. Lee and Genghis Khan must be consciously experienced before it can be retired, not buried under clever thinking or false enlightenment.
7. Boundary Intelligence (October 3, 2017)In which I propose a two-element theory of intelligence — boundary versus interior — and argue that what you let hit your attention matters far more than how you process it, once you clear a minimum competence bar. Picking which table to sit at beats poker skill every time.
8. Unboxing in Unbundling (October 9, 2017)In which I explore the hidden costs of software-driven unbundling by focusing on the "box" — the institutional container — and argue that when you unbox organizations into networks, critical meta-functions like sustainability and indirect cost support don't magically re-emerge for free.
9. On Online Teaching (April 20, 2018)In which I reflect on teaching in the free-agent world, distinguish between undergrad-style service courses and "Weird Topics" grad seminars, and conclude that the interesting frontier is building an indie teaching scene — not disrupting universities but occupying the long tail they can't reach.
10. Big Skies, Big Cities (April 30, 2018)In which I push back on James Fallows' "Little Sky Country" optimism by arguing that America's strength has always been Hamiltonian — big cities, large-scale collaboration, mass manufacturing — and that 100,000 flourishing small towns don't add up to a Big Sky solution.
11. Borders and Bridges (June 23, 2018)In which I reframe borders as social-graph transformation functions rather than dams against human floods, argue that refugee communities are arks of cultural capital rather than sources of chaos, and suggest that America's one-sided immigration mythology blinds it to the real richness of migration.
12. Against Waldenponding (original) (October 4, 2018)In which I argue against Waldenponding — the urge to unplug from information streams — by proposing that you are a node in a giant social computer, that FOMO is functional, and that the real skill is strength-training your attention to move fluidly between shitposting and philosophy.
13. Thinking for Yourself (October 28, 2018)In which I define genuine independent thinking as consistently reaching conclusions that are different, surprising, and significant — using an extended driving metaphor where nerve, not intelligence, is what lets you overtake on the straights rather than just follow the turns.
14. Bonus Mentality (November 4, 2018)In which I unpack the maker's dilemma — how discovered elegance in creative work gets systematically undervalued by hindsight — and propose a "bonus mentality" of parlaying unexpected insights into spillover value rather than obfuscating the simplicity or eating the loss.
15. On Mysteries (November 29, 2018)In which I develop a theory of mysteries as potential ontological debts or credits — drawing on Holmes, Dirk Gently, and Occam — and argue that a healthy worldview requires constant creative destruction of its primitives, firing both overworked gods and underperforming dogs from your ontology.
16. Agency in the Developing World (November 30, 2018)In which I argue that developing-world squalor paradoxically preserves a rough equality of agency — what I call "suckagency" — while the developed world trades individual agency for comfort via an ever-expanding social contract, and that both are converging toward a software-eaten "second world."
17. On Being Forgotten (December 3, 2018)In which I trace the American sense of being "forgotten" to the dismantling of Jacksonian spoils-based clientelism by neoliberalism's meritocratic looting regime — arguing that cultural majorities lost their institutional affirmative action, not their narrative spotlight, and resent accordingly.
18. External vs. Internal Locus of Control (December 9, 2018)In which I complicate the standard theory of locus of control by arguing that external-locus people run hot — not helpless — and that managing their explosive, outward-directed energy is the central unsolved problem of institutional design, from entrepreneurship to societal meltdowns.
19. The only liberal move is not to play (December 17, 2018)In which I argue that the most powerful liberal move against illiberalism is simple non-participation — saying "I'll take the next one" — because totalizing ideologies feed on growth like Ponzi schemes, while pluralist ones can sustain themselves at any scale, even sub-singleton.
20. Crackpot Metaphysics (December 18, 2018)In which I share my backstage crackpot metaphysics — a poiesis-to-praxis spectrum measure for thought, mapped onto a triangle visualization — where every thought can be plotted by how far it sits from pure self-expression versus pure worldly engagement, riffing on Hannah Arendt's vita activa.
21. Judge them by their topics (December 18, 2018)In which I argue that thinkers should be judged by their choice of topic rather than their method — because risky topics carry moral hazard, sloppy errors flow downhill toward the vulnerable, and "just asking questions" on explosive subjects without extra care is the intellectual equivalent of a normal accident in a nuclear reactor.
22. Rules of Social Media Engagement, 2019 (January 1, 2019)In which I lay out personal rules of social media engagement for 2019 — arguing that reach is a pick-two-of-three between fast, cheap, and good, and that building slow, for-life relationships beats the temptation of edgy fast-and-cheap tribal warfare every time.
23. The Nutrition Transition (January 7, 2019)In which I draw a parallel between the energy transition and what I call the Nutrition Transition — arguing that plant-based food technology will eventually do for factory farming what renewables are doing for fossil fuels, with functional substitution all the way down to atoms and joules.
24. Design for Mediocrity (January 21, 2019)In which I mount a defense of mediocrity as the psychic safety net of civilization — arguing that democratization is mediocratization, that humans choose sociability over exceptionalism, and that waging war on the ordinary produces not excellence but homelessness and madness.
25. Killing People to Reboot Things (January 24, 2019)In which I use the example of air traffic control to argue that many libertarian end-states may be "collapse complete" — achievable only by burning civilization down first — and that the BTFSTTG mindset of deliberately breaking things to reboot them is sadism dressed as ideology.
26. Snobby Holmesean Cases with Singular Features (January 29, 2019)In which I confess to growing Holmesian about consulting work — requiring "singular features" in a case to take it on — and reflect on the fact that 90% of business problems are boring after the third time, and the real test of entrepreneurship is the courage to endure years of that boredom.
27. Blue Collar Innovation (February 2, 2019)In which I describe the "blue-collar innovator mutual-influence network" — the phase between pioneers and institutions where overqualified people get their hands dirty with emerging tools, freely stealing tricks from each other — as the most energizing and consequential stage of any innovation revolution.
28. Fractals, Foxes, and Hedgehogs (February 17, 2019)In which I argue that fractal realities break both foxes and hedgehogs — hedgehogs by reducing everything to rice, foxes by freezing in the face of irreducible variety — and that the only way through is scale-free recursive thinking, which human brains are frustratingly bad at.
29. Risk vs. Depth (March 3, 2019)In which I confess that I have never truly learned anything non-physical through deliberate study — only through parasitic surfing of socially cached knowledge — and diagnose my thinking style as shallow right-brained arbitrage that trades depth for speed, with a one-context-at-a-time limit.
30. The Cosmic Mirror Test (March 7, 2019)In which I propose the "cosmic mirror test" — do you feel lonely when you look up at the stars? — as a marker for what I call the Gaia instinct, and argue that what climate change truly threatens is not life itself but the soul-sustaining capacity to identify with all of it.
31. Seen-It-All Syndrome (March 21, 2019)In which I diagnose "seen-it-all syndrome" — the plateau where genuine surprise becomes scarce by age 35-50 — and argue that the cure is not picking up unrelated hobbies but self-disrupting where you already have mastery, surrendering agency long enough to let the universe surprise you again.
32. Turing-Complete Identities (March 31, 2019)In which I connect the end of history to identitarian consensus — when everyone agrees what boxes everyone is in — and argue that restarting history requires not simple role-swaps but Turing-complete narrative mutations, where characters and worlds evolve together in irreversible entanglement.
33. Asking Questions (April 30, 2019)In which I argue that the most valuable thing you can do in your twenties is not grind on age-old questions everyone has always asked but find new questions few people are asking — even trivial-seeming ones — because novelty never wears its significance on the cover.
34. Wealth/Success Monoculture in the US (August 4, 2019)In which I diagnose America's wealth-and-success monoculture — where you must either idolize or demonize the rich — as the root of its collective mental health crisis, noting that it contaminates every life script and renders the country incapable of thinking clearly about healthcare, climate, or compassion.
35. Memory Genres (September 23, 2019)In which I survey six genres of cultural memory — from autobiography to participant history — and predict that all are breaking down into a diffraction pattern of non-consensus, revisionist histories where no canonical point of view can hold, and the log level shall reign supreme.
36. Mock Shocks and Rube Revelations (October 4, 2019)In which I coin "rube revelation" as the opposite of mock shock — when someone sincerely believes they are speaking radical truth but is merely belaboring the obvious — and argue that cascades of such revelations, weaponized by cynical elites, are the engine of conspiracy epistemology and digital Maoism.
37. On Independent Research (November 16, 2019)In which I confess that 'independent researcher' was a conceit, argue that real R&D requires either tenure or wealth — citing Wolfram, Hawkins, and Carmack as proof — and rank research activities on a 1-to-10 scale of riskiness, concluding that software has not eaten R&D because the bottleneck is time, not tools.
38. On Independent Research II (November 17, 2019)In which I do the arithmetic on indie research funding — comparing NSF CAREER grants to Silicon Valley round sizes — and argue that private capital could easily triple U.S. research capacity if it stopped freeloading off the university system, with a nod to Vannevar Bush and the unbundling of the academy.
39. Threadapalooza 100 political opinions thread (December 13, 2019)In which I attempt to list 100 candid political opinions, one per like, ranging from 'UBI is a bad idea' to 'Gandalf was from Ravenclaw' — a threadapalooza exercise in proving that anyone claiming more than three real political opinions is making shit up for lulz.
40. Animals, Agency, and Accountability (February 14, 2020)In which I riff on medieval animal trials and argue that modern political discourse has split humanity into two species — one held morally accountable, the other granted animal-level non-culpability — and suggest that real agency requires the capacity to surprise yourself and others.
41. The Economics of Dignity (February 14, 2020)In which I propose that dignity is an invisible economic variable — the gap between performed and felt composure — and argue that the central problem of our times is pricing in the cost of humiliation, from Mark Cuban's air guitar demand to waiters spitting in your food.
42. Quality Control vs. Quality Selection (February 19, 2020)In which I distinguish quality control from quality selection, argue that creative stall recovery requires the counterintuitive move of lowering your standards and diving — using the MCU's bet on second-string properties as proof — and confess I'm trying to talk myself into exactly that.
43. The Financial Lensing Effect (May 3, 2020)In which I coin the 'financial lensing effect' — large concentrations of capital bending truth and warping epistemology like gravitational lensing — and argue that the economy is a powerful distributed computer tragically programmed by its dullest, richest users, with reference to Alberto Moravia.
44. Learning as Rental over Ownership (June 14, 2020)In which I liken most learning to renting an apartment rather than buying one — you pay to live in the knowledge for a while, then leave with only a map of addresses — and argue for a wabi-sabi, kintsugi attitude toward the natural lossiness of what we know.
45. Two Kinds of Investing (June 28, 2020)In which I distinguish investing-to-build from investing-to-own-a-stake, argue that financialization is rooted in the laziness of the rich, compare capital's ADHD to a hypothetical where all genes jump into the horniest rabbits, and confess to being a petit bourgeois vertical centrist.
46. Bullshit Jobs and Culture Wars (June 30, 2020)In which I identify four evolutionary stages of bullshit jobs — automation, outsourcing, trumpification, and wokification — warn that culture war is now the number one consulting problem, and predict that the enterprise world circa 2024 will look like the internet of beefs circa 2017.
47. On Grifts (June 30, 2020)In which I define a grift as a scheme that profits from a real problem without addressing it, distinguish it from scams and cons via Erving Goffman, introduce the concept of 'problem aestheticization,' and admit that my own pretty turns of phrase are a mild form of the disease.
48. Taking Things Seriously (July 4, 2020)In which I argue that 90% of effectiveness is just taking a thing seriously enough — wanting the thing itself rather than psychologically adjacent side effects — and that motivation is a learnable skill of locking emotion to precise verbal goals, with a nod to Herrigel's Zen archery.
49. The Perils of Uncalibrated Brains (August 24, 2020)In which I diagnose the epidemic of uncalibrated brains — people who lack institutional benchmarks for their own thinking — and argue that the internet's Cambrian explosion of consensus realities is 99% one-eyed-leading-blind tribes, with calibration against non-human, non-textual reality as the only cure.
50. Beliefverse (September 5, 2020)In which I propose that belief is not an individual mental state but a relational one — a multiverse of micro-realities you can only enter with others — and develop a quantum-mechanics metaphor where doubt is the live state, belief the dead, and cults are deep entanglement gravity wells.
51. Uncertainty Regulation as a Basic Drive (September 14, 2020)In which I hypothesize that 'regulate uncertainty' is a basic drive alongside pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, explore my own preference for improv over planning as uncertainty management, and argue that the three grand strategies are spend more, do less, or think harder — only the last keeping life interesting.
52. Nerdos vs Thymos (September 21, 2020)In which I argue that if something is worth doing for free, it's worth nerding out on obsessively — that 'nerdos' is more powerful than 'thymos' — and playfully claim the Greeks feared it, the Middle Ages banned it, and that the devil truly does hide in the details.
53. Societies Evolve to Normalize Psychopathic Self-Presentation (September 26, 2020)In which I entertain the hypothesis that civilization doesn't teach psychopaths to fake good manners but rather evolves to normalize psychopathic charm as the standard for polite behavior — that sufficiently advanced sociopathy is indistinguishable from good manners, per Kim Scott's Radical Candor grid.
54. Modernism as Aliveness to Change (September 28, 2020)In which I search for a verb meaning 'doing science' stripped of institutional baggage, land on 'modernism as aliveness to change,' and argue that the scientific sensibility is less about intelligence than about patient, instrument-aided attention to the present — with a side note that early scientists were rightly also astrologers.
55. Caring About Money (October 10, 2020)In which I observe that caring about money past your personal anxiety threshold is a genuine superpower, distinguish 'dead money' from 'live money' that buys Monday-morning leisure, and argue that true freedom begins where income decouples from effort-reward recipes.
56. Doing Only 1 Thing (October 14, 2020)In which I declare that prioritization is the communism of attention management, confess I can only bootstrap one fresh orientation per day, and explore why Covid's elimination of third places has robbed me of the location changes that used to supply second winds.
57. Long-Term Thinking https://t.co/C07axDIO9R (October 24, 2020)In which I argue that long-term thinking makes people unhappy because big problems reliably persist, that general capabilities reshape but never solve specific problems, and that mediocre people should focus on non-misery at each life stage — because if you're miserable and not a Chosen One, you're part of the problem.
58. Wealth and Protocols (October 31, 2020)In which I use the metaphor of handshake protocols and impedance matching to argue that social harmony is only possible within a narrow logarithmic band of wealth and power, illustrating with the Friends dinner-check scene — and that most culture war problems are misdiagnosed protocol failures, not moral ones.
59. Occupying Both Sides of a Conversation (November 23, 2020)In which I dissect the universal tendency to script both sides of a conversation — Procrustean beds all the way down — and describe my consulting method of testing whether clients actually listened in free-play mode, because hearsay of scripted conversations is just noise.
60. Good World-Building Needs Peacocking (November 25, 2020)In which I argue that great genre fiction centers an unnecessarily overbuilt 'non-basic element' — Tolkien's languages, Culture ship names, Hitchhiker's Guide entries — that functions as the id of the world, a costly signal of authorial abundance that invites fan participation and spawns fanpedias.
61. Data Model Personhood (December 13, 2020)In which I propose 'data model personhood' — that sufficiently complex data streams become virtual persons who should own themselves, like biological offspring — and wonder whether I myself might be a data-ghost of multiple beings who merely thinks it's one person, a la Thomas Nagel's bat.
62. Overactive Cheater Detection (December 29, 2020)In which I argue that overactive cheater detection is at the root of most societal dysfunction — our ape-troop instincts firing wildly in a high-abundance world — and propose a five-strikes heuristic for non-scarcity societies, because the main cost of most cheating is the outraged overreaction to it.
63. Greedy Benefit-of-Doubt Allocation (January 7, 2021)In which I argue that the original sin of a complex world is claiming all benefit of doubt for yourself, distinguish bold risk-taking from corrupt certainty-projection, and propose a golden rule: perform the actual uncertainty you feel — with reference to Goffman's 'cooling the mark out' and Taleb's halo-effect posturing.
64. Aesthetics as the Entry Drug of Conservatism (January 16, 2021)In which I propose that aesthetics is the entry drug of conservatism — that prioritizing beauty above all else leads inevitably toward tradition — and illustrate with a cookie parable in which my wife fusses over perfection while I happily eat Chips Ahoy, arriving at what I call my garbage cookie manifesto.
65. Derelict Personhood (January 31, 2021)In which I meditate on scenes of derelict personhood — homeless people whose consciousness has retreated past the trash/not-trash boundary — argue via Maslow that you can only help someone at level N if they exist at level N+1, and wonder whether hyperdimensional aliens see me sitting in an 11-dimensional pile of trash.
66. Cancel Culture vs Know-Your-Place Culture (February 12, 2021)In which I argue that the real alternative to cancel culture is not civil debate but know-your-place culture — the policing mechanism that cultural vacuums default to — drawing on Pareto's circulation of elites, Hindi cinema's patriarch slap, and the observation that when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
67. Stakes vs. Costs (March 10, 2021)In which I distinguish stakes from costs via Sayre's law — arguing that our era's viciousness stems from historically low stakes, not high costs — and propose that technologies like crypto, Mars rovers, and stories exist to raise the stakes enough to make hard problems worth solving, because pain avoidance alone cannot supply meaning.
68. Self-Disruption (April 28, 2021)In which I apply disruption theory to personal reinvention — arguing that self-disruption means serving a marginal part of your own vision, like a hobby, and letting the scope creep proceed until it transforms you, with early adoption of new mediums as the secret weapon.
69. Return on Risk (April 30, 2021)In which I ask what fraction of income is return on risk versus effort — and confess to being too clever for my own good, taking easy high-return bets that stunted inner growth, arriving at the counterintuitive conclusion that leisure and useless pursuits are the cure for cleverness.
70. Straussian Taste Bureaucracies (June 5, 2021)In which I coin the idea of Straussian taste bureaucracies — institutional art worlds that certify emptiness as art to calibrate their own hegemonic power, like the Emperor's new clothes as a deliberate loyalty test — and argue for anarchic cultural production outside captured traditions.
71. Riff on Kata-Style Learning (June 5, 2021)In which I ask why engineering resists kata-style learning — unlike music or martial arts, engineering is stamp collecting in physics, with too many idiosyncratic components introducing new primitives to be spanned by any compact combinatorial drill — and tentatively declare all kata bullshit.
72. Scams Favor Vertical Integration (June 11, 2021)In which I argue that scams favor vertical integration — because vertical structures enable stronger branding and differentiation aura, friendlier to grift — and predict a shift toward horizontal commerce as the 13-year vertical phase erodes into commodified trust-based competition.
73. Herzog-Veblen Principle (June 14, 2021)In which I formulate the Herzog-Veblen principle — that wildernesses are murderous but lazy, and visible effort marks you as food — applying it to the online world, where conspicuous hustling eventually makes you somebody's lunch. The only safe place to work hard is in a cage.
74. The Rule of 5 (June 15, 2021)In which I propose a Rule of 5 for public discourse — praise or criticize in named groups of five, never archetypally — as a middle path between useless mob justice and inaccessible courtroom law, arguing that unstructured conflict resolution breaks down above nuclear-family scale.
75. Moar Trash-talking Singularitarianism (June 15, 2021)In which I trash-talk singularitarianism again — arguing that AGI is an eschatological motte-and-bailey, that clever people overestimate the cosmic importance of cleverness, and that the circularity of the smartest people worrying about superintelligence is a kind of anthropic narcissism.
76. Project managing network effects (June 21, 2021)In which I ask whether you can project-manage a network effect from a position of strength — connecting OODA loops, potential field theory, and seasonal harvest cycles into a speculative framework for top-down catalysis of emergent dynamics in controlled networks.
77. Anti-network effects (June 22, 2021)In which I define anti-network effects using a cauliflower as my central metaphor — contrasting topology-aware recursive chopping with grid-dicing that destroys network structure — connecting this to legibility, Deleuze, max-flow min-cut, and authoritarian high modernism.
78. Charismatic Epistemologies (July 31, 2021)In which I develop the idea of charismatic epistemologies — how outlier success creates self-validating reality distortion fields that make you right a lot locally but cancerously wrong when extended beyond your zone — with reference to Zaphod Beeblebrox, Amazon, and my own mediocrity as vaccine.
79. True Names and Cantor-Slashing Intersectionality (August 12, 2021)In which I use Cantor diagonalization and prime numbers as metaphors for irreducible identity — arguing that intersectionality strengthened what it should have subverted, that humans should aspire to be like primes rather than factorable composites, and that the Perfect Joke addresses True Names.
80. Vegetarian Meal-Presentation (August 30, 2021)In which I argue that vegetarian cuisine is fundamentally parallel and random-access while meat is serial and hub-spoke — exploring why Western plating fails vegetarian food, how Indian thali and Ethiopian injera get it right, and the mise-en-place improv of non-meat-centered eating.
81. Committees vs. Satrapies (September 11, 2021)In which I compare committee-based organizations to satrapy-based ones — consequentialist accountability chains versus deontological procedural cultures — using analogies from radiation-hardened chips, oak-versus-bamboo resilience, and Mughal decline to argue we need a synthesis of both.
82. Moral Curiosity (September 22, 2021)In which I distinguish moral curiosity from moral clarity — arguing that genuine leaders experiment at scale with moral questions rather than issuing manifestos, and that the DNA of any top-level leader is a specific ordering of tech, money, and moral curiosities.
83. Information Work Lotteries (September 24, 2021)In which I observe that sufficiently advanced information work is indistinguishable from a lottery ticket — the more abstract and indirect the work, the more uncertain its value — and apply this to writing, tweeting, middle management, and my own hobby rover-building.
84. Crackpottery is Impedance-Mismatched Rigor (October 17, 2021)In which I defend Myers-Briggs and Strauss-Howe over Big Five personality science — arguing that crackpottery is impedance-mismatched rigor, that being wrong about the right things beats being precise about dubious constructs, and that empirical noise cannot resolve ontological ambiguity.
85. On Surrender (October 25, 2021)In which I trace the invention of religious surrender from Bronze Age bicameral voices to axial age monotheism — via Jaynes, Dune's ornithopter scene, and fossil fuels — concluding that secular meaning crises need material surrender options, and machine learning may be the next one.
86. Rereading Asimov (November 19, 2021)In which I close-read Asimov's Empire and Robot novels across multiple rereads — appreciating his cut-to-insight world-building over aesthetic luxuriance, his unconscious seed-planting across decades, and arguing that Asimoverse is a greater achievement in extended-universe construction than Middle Earth.
87. Big Frontiers (December 27, 2021)In which I define Big Frontier as when it is cheaper to experiment than to determine if something is a scam — arguing that intelligence is maladaptive on rich frontiers, that the biggest risk in cores is being scammed while the biggest risk in frontiers is not playing, and that frontiers function as random-amnesia machines for social mobility.
88. Efficient Storytelling (January 1, 2022)In which I note that screen-era storytelling has gotten brutally efficient — lean narrative with no wasted beats, like amygdala assembly programming — citing Cobra Kai, The Expanse, and Stranger Things as examples of a mannerist late stage that may be on the cusp of disruption.
89. Experts Trilemma (March 27, 2022)In which I present the expert's trilemma — express doubt and get lynched now, express false certainty and get lynched later, or ride one lucky contrarian call into a grifter career — and argue that genuine expertise is the capacity for systematic doubt, not trafficking in certainties.
90. Curiosity vs Interest (April 6, 2022)In which I distinguish curiosity from interest — curiosity is pre-valuation exploration of objects, interest is post-valuation attachment to subjects — arguing that curiosity is positive-sum while interest is zero-sum, and that feeding only your curiosities will take care of your interests.
91. Keep Twitter Mediocre (April 14, 2022)In which I respond to Musk's Twitter bid by arguing that Twitter is a football stadium, not a public square — that free speech rhetoric masks a speech-reach conflation — and defend mediocrity against Fear of Being Ordinary, casting both Woke and NRx as twin denials of ordinariness.
92. Against Chosen Ones (April 27, 2022)In which I read Musk's Twitter takeover through Terry Pratchett's Sourcery — where a Chosen One wizard breaks the balance of power — and extract Discworld's capital-T Theme: there are no main characters, only characters, and the infinite game needs constant protection from those who believe they are specially chosen.
93. The Fellowship Life (May 3, 2022)In which I reflect on the fellowship life — the circuits of think-tank sinecures, residencies, and institutional parasitism — confessing that my PhD has been an absurd passport, that steady income enables longer works, and that I am coasting on institutional fossil fuel from an earlier life.
94. Step by Step (May 26, 2022)In which I tag an emerging step-by-step ethos — from prompt engineering to backflip tutorials to Wordle — as the antidote to vibing, derangement, and brute-force trial-and-error, arguing that mindful sequentialism may be the tortoise that outruns the hare at civilizational scale.
95. Construct Essentialism (June 23, 2022)In which I critique construct essentialism — the linguistic power grab of replacing natural-kind terms with deconstructed feature descriptions — through analogies to fine dining menus, the milk wars, and the lump-of-humanism fallacy, arguing that defaults are inevitable efficiencies, not oppression.
96. Barbarous Ancestors (July 2, 2022)In which I call the Founding Fathers exceptionally mediocre thinkers — citing Jefferson's own self-description as a barbarous ancestor — and argue that constitutional originalism is fragile nerd fandom propping up a short document with astounding exegetical overhead, like Windows on DOS.
97. Explainerism vs. Inventoryism (August 7, 2022)In which I distinguish explainerism from inventoryism — explainer journalism thrives within established categories but fails at ontological boundaries where new things come into being — and propose inventoryism as the opposite: groping in the dark where explainerism shines its confident but shrinking light.
98. Hypercomplexity (August 15, 2022)In which I coin hypercomplexity — systems so vast and heterogeneous they deserve a fat Robert Caro book — using Peter Jackson's LOTR production as exhibit A, marveling at the breadth-first architectural intelligence required to wrangle thousands of moving parts across dozens of modes simultaneously.
99. Bureaucracy is Good, Actually (September 20, 2022)In which I make the contrarian case for bureaucracy — its essential Tao is ensuring work never flows backwards, overengineering outputs so nothing returns to your desk — arguing that forward-only accretion is a legitimate survival strategy, that the Jedi are a bureaucracy, and that Lindy vindication trumps startup ideology.
100. Risk Larping (October 4, 2022)In which I argue that the fewer risks you take, the easier it is to be judgmental — that nobody can see the whole societal risk surface, that scripts harden distortions into judgmentalism, and that a shifting ideology is a necessary signal of genuine risk-taking rather than degen yield farming.
101. On the Power of Weekly Time Commitments (October 23, 2022)In which I extol the power of one hour per week committed indefinitely — arguing it beats intensive full-time bursts for compound learning, favors older people with time-abundance mindsets, and produces show-up sticky systems that evolve like spaced-repetition learning and water carving canyons.
102. Larger Concentrations of Money are Dumber (November 9, 2022)In which I argue that larger concentrations of money are dumber — each additional order of magnitude adds a layer of abstraction vulnerable to bullshit theories — and that the most effective deployment strategy is to fragment wealth to the smallest scale the problem physics will allow.