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
- Curiosity and What Equality Really Means - UCLA medical school commencement speech about empathy, and anecdotes about how hospitals are one of the few equalizing places in the world
- ACX: The Far Out Initiative - Related to the The Sinusoid. Scott analyses the Far Out Initiative.
- The Evaporative Cooling Effect - 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.
- Also made its way into several(?) Cornell classes as required reading, including CS, econ, and sociology (Cornell site page)
- SSC: Meditations on Moloch - Scott anthropomorphizes the reason why individual human incentives are virtually always maligned with societal incentives, and gives a bunch of examples
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
Neat
Simply well-written
- Brian Balkus obo Palladium: The Mineral Conflict 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
- https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/reading-lolita-in-the-barracks - artfully written account and reflection of a bookworm conscripted into mandatory 2 year South Korean military service in the 2010s
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. Fun fact, only ~10% of people in Osaka like mint ice cream. 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