Articles I like
publish Opened 2023-12-07 but I should have done it way sooner. Related to Poetry and literature I like.
Articles
Thought-provoking
- Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem - I really like this one.
- On the Internet no one knows you’re a god - real life anecdote about how real online personas can be
- Hunter Thompson’s letter to Hume Logan, 1958 - I think about this one a lot. He was only 22 when he wrote it.
- A Cult of Ignorance - Isaac Asimov being edgy in 1980
- Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die - Bit of a morbid topic but an excellent reframing of what it means to be a parent and how one should measure their time left on Earth
- https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/curiosity-and-the-prisoner - Commencement speech about curiosity and what equality really means
- ACX: The Far Out Initiative - Related to the The Sinusoid. Scott analyses the Far Out Initiative.
- https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ - 2010 essay popularizing Eliezer Yudowsky’s “Evaporative Cooling” term to describe what causes (and mitigates) the death of social networks. Originally written to critique Quora, which has indeed evaporated in just a few short years after this essay, it holds relevance to any tech founder starting a social network business.
Just for fun
- How to be a -10x Engineer
- https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
- ACX: Every Bay Area House Party - Scott Alexander’s magnum opus
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Statics of cow tipping
Simply well-written
- Brian Balkus obo Palladium: The Mineral Crisis is here
- Pundit’s Fallacy - the best definition
- https://www.plasticlist.org/report - 6 month long and $500k research investigation into the presence of plastic chemicals in everyday food. Turns out to be a rabbit hole and way more than you wanted to know about the current state of scientific research into safe dosages of plastic chemicals.
- https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/not-a-meat-eater-faq/ - balanced take on vegetarianism, written by an omnivore-sympathetic vegetarian
Regarding career
Articles I’m pretty sure I’ll like when I read them
- https://moretothat.com/the-time-trap-of-productivity/ quick read. I forget why I liked this one, I should reread it
- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/29/upshot/new-york-neighborhood-guide.html
- various stuff on https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/WD3tN2eqjK (maybe this is against the rules, I should just remove it from this page)
- https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/how-rich-would-1-billion-americans
- https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob
- https://whitherthewest.com/2024/03/08/why-tolkien-hated-dune/ from March 8
- https://nautil.us/is-christianity-based-on-psychedelic-trips-623594/
- Vaguely related to Arguments against Christian life after death
Nothing special articles
Nothing special, I just don’t want to forget these exist.
- https://soranews24.com/2022/06/23/is-roughly-half-of-japan-preconditioned-to-hate-mint-chocolate-sweets/ fascinating and hella specific article about Japanese preferences for mint chocolate chip ice cream where a city had 10% fondness for it. Relevant to Nature vs nurture
Appendix
Misc
This page is sort of related to Internet roasts.
Article sources
Generally speaking, I’ve had good experiences with:
- msci.com
- pew research
- axios for current affairs
- The ones I linked from within Rationalism
- YouTube documentaries