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Why should you read novels? We tell children they’re magic carpets for the mind / exercise for the soul instead of the body / lighthouses in the great sea of time. But aren’t they ultimately a form of entertainment? Many years ago, I read Crime and Punishment. Here, with no research and no notes, is what I can remember about that book: It was pretty good. There was some guy, I think named Ras-something. He was really angsty/edgy and lived in a small apartment or attic. One day, for no particular...

They say you’re supposed to choose your prior in advance. That’s why it’s called a “prior”. First , you’re supposed to say say how plausible different things are, and then you update your beliefs based on what you see in the world. For example, currently you are—I assume—trying to decide if you should stop reading this post and do something else with your life. If you’ve read this blog before, then lurking somewhere in your mind is some prior for how often my posts are good. For the sake of argu...

When I started this blog, I promised myself that I would always steer into weirdness. (As they say, “Get busy being weird, or get busy dying.”) While time has shown there are limits to what y’all will tolerate [ 1 2 3 4 ] I still sometimes feel a need to publish something that’s pure exuberant stupidity. Thus, I present: WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD ACCORDING TO VARIOUS PEOPLE OR OTHER ENTITIES Q) Why did the chicken cross the road? A) The chicken ain’t fussy. Everybody gotta be somewhere....

That your dog, while she appears to love you only because she’s been adapted by evolution to appear to love you, really does love you. That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot fr...

I recently asked why people seem to hate dating apps so much. In response, 80% of you emailed me some version of the following theory: The thing about dating apps is that if they do a good job and match people up, then the matched people will quit the app and stop paying. So they have an incentive to string people along but not to actually help people find long-term relationships. May I explain why I don’t find this type of theory very helpful? I’m not saying that I think it’s wrong, mind you. R...

Here are a few things that seem to be true: Dating apps are very popular. Lots of people hate dating apps. They hate them so much that there’s supposedly a resurgence in alternatives like speed dating. None of those are too controversial, I think. (Let’s stress supposedly in #3.) But if you stare at them for a while, it’s hard to see how they can all be true at the same time. Because, why do people hate dating apps? People complain that they’re bad in various ways, such as being ineffective, deh...

I recently wondered if explainer posts might go extinct. In response, you all assured me that I have nothing to worry about, because you already don’t care about my explanations—you just like it when I point at stuff. Well OK then! Pointing machines How did Michelangelo make this ? What I mean is—marble is unforgiving. If you accidentally remove some material, it’s gone. You can’t fix it by adding another layer of paint. Did Michelangelo somehow plan everything out in advance and then execute ev...

Will short-form non-fiction internet writing go extinct? This may seem like a strange question to ask. After all, short-form non-fiction internet writing is currently, if anything, on the ascent—at least for politics, money, and culture war—driven by the shocking discovery that many people will pay the cost equivalent of four hardback books each year to support their favorite internet writers. But, particularly for “explainer” posts, the long-term prospects seem dim. I write about random stuff a...

Say an alien spaceship is headed for Earth. It has 30 aliens on it. The aliens are weak and small. They have no weapons and carry no diseases. They breed at rates similar to humans. They are bringing no new technology. No other ships are coming. There’s no trick—except that they each have an IQ of 300. Would you find that concerning? Of course, the aliens might be great. They might cure cancer and help us reach world peace and higher consciousness. But would you be sure they’d be great? Suppose ...

I fear we are in the waning days of the People Read Blog Posts About Random Well-Understood Topics Instead of Asking Their Automatons Era. So before I lose my chance, here is a blog post about some random well-understood topics. Marathons are stupidly fast You probably know that people can now run marathons in just over 2 hours. But do you realize how insane that is? That’s an average speed of 21.1 km per hour, or 13.1 miles per hour. You can think of that as running a mile in 4:35 (world record...

PendingKetchup comments on my recent post on what it means for something to be heritable : The article seems pretty good at math and thinking through unusual implications, but my armchair Substack eugenics alarm that I keep in the back of my brain is beeping. Saying that variance was “invented for the purpose of defining heritability” is technically correct, but that might not be the best kind of correct in this case, because it was invented by the founder of the University of Cambridge Eugenics...

Here’s one possible hobby: Take something you don’t like. Try to like it. It could be food or music or people or just the general situation you’re in. I recommend this hobby, partly because it’s nice to enjoy things, but mostly as an instrument for probing human nature. 1. I was in Paris once. By coincidence, I wandered past a bunch of places that were playing Michael Jackson. I thought to myself, “Huh. The French sure do like Michael Jackson.” Gradually I decided, “You know what? They’re right!...

Say I think abortion is wrong. Is there some sequence of words that you could say to me that would unlock my brain and make me think that abortion is fine? My best guess is that such words do not exist. Really, the bar for what we consider “open-minded” is incredibly low. Suppose I’m trying to change your opinion about Donald Trump, and I claim that he is a carbon-based life form with exactly one head. If you’re willing to concede those points without first seeing where I’m going in my argument—...

Here’s our story so far: Markets are a good way to know what people really think. When India and Pakistan started firing missiles at each other on May 7, I was concerned, what with them both having nuclear weapons. But then I looked at world market prices: See how it crashes on May 7? Me neither. I found that reassuring. But we care about lots of stuff that isn’t always reflected in stock prices, e.g. the outcomes of elections or drug trials. So why not create markets for those, too? If you crea...

The heritability wars have been a-raging. Watching these, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s near-universal confusion about what “heritable” means. Partly, that’s because it’s a subtle concept. But it also seems relevant that almost all explanations of heritability are very, very confusing. For example, here’s Wikipedia’s definition : Any particular phenotype can be modeled as the sum of genetic and environmental effects: Phenotype ( P ) = Genotype ( G ) + Environment ( E ). Likewise the ph...

1. Your eyes sense color. They do this because you have three different kinds of cone cells on your retinas, which are sensitive to different wavelengths of light . For whatever reason, evolution decided those wavelengths should be overlapping . For example, M cones are most sensitive to 535 nm light, while L cones are most sensitive to 560 nm light. But M cones are still stimulated quite a lot by 560 nm light—around 80% of maximum. This means you never (normally) get to experience having just o...

The idea of “processed food” may simultaneously be the most and least controversial concept in nutrition. So I did a self-experiment alternating between periods of eating whatever and eating only “minimally processed” food, while tracking my blood sugar, blood pressure, pulse, and weight. The case against processing Carrots and barley and peanuts are “unprocessed” foods. Donuts and cola and country-fried steak are “processed”. It seems like the latter are bad for you. But why? There are several ...

(1) Rotating eyeballs Goats, like most hoofed mammals, have horizontal pupils. […] When a goat’s head tilts up (to look around) and down (to munch on grass), an amazing thing happens. The eyeballs actually rotate clockwise or counterclockwise within the eye socket. This keeps the pupils oriented to the horizontal. […] To test out this theory, I took photos of Lucky the goat’s head in two different positions, down and up. (2) Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population ...

Back in 2017, everyone went crazy about these things: The theory was that perhaps the pineal gland isn’t the principal seat of the soul after all. Maybe what it does is spit out melatonin to make you sleepy. But it only does that when it’s dark, and you spend your nights in artificial lighting and/or staring at your favorite glowing rectangles. You could sit in darkness for three hours before bed, but that would be boring. But—supposedly—the pineal gland is only shut down by blue light. So if yo...

AI 2027 forecasts that AGI could plausibly arrive as early as 2027. I recently spent some time looking at both the timelines forecast and some critiques [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Initially, I was interested in technical issues. What’s the best super-exponential curve? How much probability should it have? But I found myself drawn to a more basic question. Namely, how much value is the math really contributing? This provides an excuse for a general rant. Say you want to forecast something. It could be when y...