becoming uncringe

1. Survivorship By Us

   1. self-optimization
   2. media
   3. epistemology

   April 5, 2025

   18 min read

   tl;dr

   all information that ever reaches you is subject to some level of survivorship bias because information undergoes a darwinian selection process to get to your eyeballs. this means your world model is quite inaccurate, and reading more information won't really make it more accurate unless you are strategic about how acquire this information to purposefully defang the selection pressures. also your own personal experience can give you insights that are useful to your own life and nobody else.

   anti-media media

2. A Glossary of Accidental Social Defections

   1. social
   2. game theory

   April 21, 2025

   19 min read

   tl;dr

   dont be overconfident dont make isolated demands for rigor dont tease dont psychoanalyze take responsibility for understanding people before you respond to them dont say obviously true crowd pleasing statements dressed up as claims dont nitpick dont stick uncharitable context to statements and likewise dont demand that nobody shall stick the "wrong" context to your statements.

   i just want you to know that you were the person i was thinking about while i was writing down all these mean things

3. Tool Banditry and also a Modest Defense of Echo Chambers

   1. argumentation
   2. philosophy

   June 25, 2025

   12 min read

   tl;dr

   try not to sweat where someones ideas come from. theyre just words we use to capture slippery concepts. the mere invocation of an idea, framework, or vocabulary from a source you dont like is (very often!) not an endorsement of that source or even an enthusiastic acceptance of the sub-claim that specific idea/framework/word captures. rather than being treated as loadbearing evidentiary claims, these concepts can just be useful to pump intuition and guide your audience somewhere else completely unrelated. speaking of completely unrelated: talking with people who already agree with you about most things can get you to the interesting parts faster so "echo chambers" arent ENTIRELY lame and pointless.

   two theses are better than one

4. Advantageous Trades Vastly Outnumber Strict Upgrades

   1. self-optimization
   2. media
   3. epistemology

   August 5, 2025

   13 min read

   tl;dr

   political messaging and narrative media encourage us to treat most problems as straightforward when in fact most problems are very challenging dilemmas with uncomfortably slim margins between costs and benefits. even when you accept that most choices incur a cost, there are some personal interventions you can deploy right now that are a relatively low cost with a rather outsized upside

   maybe this is obvious