A sanctuary sign can keep speaking long after the ground begins to answer.

It's funny, the behaviour in animals that we ascribe to personality. Thinking about it too much makes me wonder if there's even such a thing in humans.152 words · 1 image

You operate under the delusion that your trajectory is upward, a linear climb toward some vague, golden summit. This is a cognitive survival mechanism, and it is killing you. Entropy does not…

Generative AI has made plausible ideas nearly free, and a fashionable argument says this changes everything. It doesn't. Ideas were never scarce—judgement was, and remains so. On Grub Street at…

Or the lack thereof.

A love letter to all that we've become to survive the world we came from This is an archived post from August 18, 2025. Click here for the revised piece for Toyon Multilingual Literary Magazine .…

Many problems resist us. A fix backfires, or a symptom returns once the cause looks gone. Systems thinking is a way to handle these stubborn problems.

Bostrom's dragon parable is right that normalized death by aging is still a horror, but it does not by itself solve mortality, meaning, political succession, or the design problem of a society where…

== Marxian predictions == In my parents' time, everyone - even the poor and certainly even rich plutocrats - understood the Marxian predictions which - like those of Hari-Seldon - seemed bound to…

Learning to be non-judgmental is an art. You are at peace with your world when you don’t judge others. Being non-judgmental towards judgmental people is the supreme discipline.#Mindful #Ideas

Weekly events, and an essay 'The Tyranny of the Short Form', in celebration of our new (Longer-Form) Emails.

Maybe you need failure Maybe it reminds you what's important to you Maybe in the midst of yearning and longing and dreaming and wanting You let everything around you Unravel So that you can put it…

" A s you become an adult, you realise that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalise how much tenacity everything…

My pastor recently recommended the book Leadership and Self-Deception (The Arbinger Institute (c) 2000, 3d ed 2018), which I read this past week. While the book does not acknowledge Christianity…

Here is a excerpt as part of the series I’ve created for my Spark My Muse YouTube Channel (Here’s the link to find the rest: youtube.com/@Sparkmymuse) This part 4 in the series of 7…

This post gets at something I’ve never quite been able to say: When I think about what I wish to accomplish if I knew I was going to die, apart from spending time with my loved ones I think…

Out of a mixture of curiosity and resentment, the practice and concept of retreat has occupied far more space in my mind than it will ever deserve. As is the case with most things that piss me off.To…

There seems to be a dawning realization that our social inventions - institutions, norms, culture, processes - are invented just as our products are. At that point of realization, some people become…

A human future, without horror.

A lot of suffering stems from not knowing what we want. The only way to know what we want is to enquire. All enquiry requires awareness. Of your thoughts. Your feelings. Your urges. Your instincts.…

A peril of the mind: that of losing the power of thinking otherwise than polemically, as if one were facing an audience and in presence of the enemy. — Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul…

Want to win the story game? First, know whose story you're really telling.

staring into the chasm of what could have been

Many people engage in "Vice Signalling", where they will intentionally do actions which are considered to be bad according to some social norm or morality system. Recently this has become a…

A bronze pin leaves the earth, and the future discovers it has been shouting over older machines.

If destroying takes less effort than building, how does all this still exist?

Beyond Authenticity Authenticity is one of the great ideals of our time. We are told to find ourselves. To follow our inner voice. To discover who we really are. Every age has its guiding promise.…

That is all.

You are a leaking vessel. Every second you spend calculating the ‘right’ moment, the container thins. You treat time like a bank account, but it is a burning fuse that doesn’t care…

I wrote that AI leaves you with zero excuses and meant it as good news. The darker half took me longer. If the excuse is gone and you still don't move, it was never the excuse stopping you.

There is a feeling a lot of people carry out of their younger years and never quite name. Not a crisis. A hum. The quiet sense that you were a little behind. That everyone else got handed a manual…

In Egypt there is the Nile, which flows through an otherwise desert. I dig a long canal so it will come to my field, while the workers in the city build the tallest skyscraper yet. With the sunlight…

“With all his gifts, he had of imagination not one spark. Fancy and wit he had in his earlier work; and grace he never lost; but for the rest he had only an immense quantity of that ‘cleverness’…

I had a tougher week than usual. Someone I deeply care about had a bad fall, followed by the passing of Om. It made me think again about the impermanence of life:...

Your email marketing works great - until one customer actually reads it and decides to ignore it. Your ‘data’ says that ‘people in your demographic’ will behave a certain way.…

I’ve been having deep discussions with friends of late, and in one of them, I said that I am slowly coming to the realization that anyone, at any time, can just create their own version of reality…

I recently read Will Manidis’ Against Taste and found myself nodding along to much of that essay: The taste thesis, at its deepest and most simple structure, reverses this order. It places man at the…

🔊 Listen to this post I keep thinking about a sign in an old workshop. Not a dramatic sign. Just a piece of cardboard with thick black marker: DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR WHEN IT RAINS. That is already…

IT Philosophy. Perfectionism, as the industry practises it, is the chase for the last ten per cent, and that last ten per cent costs more than the ninety that came before it; the polish rarely earns…

For about fifteen years, my answer to a music theory question had the same shape: open another window. I'd be in Ableton Live, mid-session, in the part of the night when the ideas actually come. A…

Self-knowledge is difficult to acquire, but liberating once attained. Yet it happens, if at all, in a piecemeal fashion - something like the personal counterpart of what historian Carroll Quigley…

the holy glow and who asked who what it is contradictory or realisability? or both, god - in the reading like you're hair razing a little trick all coming in lots like novelists their precarious…

I’ve increasingly been hearing people assume or claim that meritocracy and social mobility go hand-in-hand. Their argument often goes like this: This argument is extremely compelling because it is…

Most days of your life everything proceeds pretty much as expected. And then there are days when your view of reality changes. The latter is generally prompted by some completely unanticipated event.…

There’s much conversation right now about what AI can do. The processing power, the parameters, the emergent capabilities nobody fully understands yet. The question I keep asking: what does it enable…

Pensamos antes para hacer más fácil el camino. El plan economiza, no gasta en decidir, más bien, guarda para el recorrido. En el camino hay obstáculos, encuentros inesperados, información. Planea. Y…

Have you ever been overburdened by a barrage of thoughts? Not one or two, but dozens. If you are even half as self-aware as you should be, you would have wondered where all these thoughts came from.…

Knowing oneself doesn’t mean reforming oneself. Knowing oneself is a roundabout way of finding excuses for oneself. — Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14 Clever people are…

Goodhart's law is only half the story. The real risk in engineering metrics isn't gaming, it's losing the palate to tell good work from the look of it.