I work on building new institutions of basic science at New Science.
I’m most inspired by Augustine of Hippo, Aaron Swartz, Freeman Dyson, Scott Alexander, and Gwern.
Feel free to email me at [email protected] and to follow me on Twitter. If you’d like to ask for advice, please email [email protected].
Recent
Dec 27, People who are going to change the world
Dec 23, Why you shouldn't build your career around existential risk
Nov 19, Abolish the NIH
Sep 30, The ouroboros of academic peer review
Sep 17, On suicide
personal favorites
- Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- Omens of exceptional talent & Cursed omens of exceptional talent
- People who are going to change the world
- Intelligence killed genius
- How my views on AI changed every year 2017-2024
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now (I will read the draft and give feedback to anybody who decides to write something as a result of reading this)
one-pagers
- On impact & on what we should do with our lives
- Losing the idea of progress
- Why you shouldn’t build your career around existential risk
- On deification
- On suicide
- On YIMBI
- I’m broke, divorced, and unemployed.
- I’m terrified of old people
Advice
- What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice
- lifehacks
- Advice from Tyler Cowen & (unauthorized) advice from guest 04
- College Q&A
- It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
- How to make friends over the internet
- I no longer believe that it’s possible to achieve extremely high productivity sustained over long periods of time working on difficult projects alone, so now I spend the majority of my working time co-working with my friends over video in my virtual gather.town office
- Writing advice
Metascience/education
- Is anything inherently difficult?
- The ouroboros of academic peer review
- Abolish the NIH
- thoughts on science, science literacy, and replication
- Translating an issue of Nature
most notable
- My 2022 self (I don’t know them) was very wrong about meditation, huge monitors, and… sleep.
- Ideas not mattering is a psyop
- (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders
- Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
- questions
- Napoleon: a Cautionary Tale for Young Idealists
- A Two sentence Jailbreak for GPT-4 and Claude & Why Nobody Knows How to Fix It
- How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
- AI Alignment Is Turning from Alchemy Into Chemistry
- The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment
- Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit?
- Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research
- What is the alternative to utilitarianism?
- Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design
- Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- Forecasting humans becoming generally intelligent with biological anchors: year 10,000,000,000,002,2022
- You are a morale-driven machine
- Tools / Gear
- Links
- Issues with Bloom et al’s “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation
- Research Ideas
- Best of Holden Karnofsky and Sam Altman
- Gwern’s Most Important Writing (in essays, tweets, book reviews, and other forms)
- Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
- Don’t believe self-reported data
- William MacAskill misrepresents the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
- Is AI alignment on track? Is it progressing… too fast?
- 16 questions posed & answered by Leslie Berlin’s book “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age”
- Theses on Sleep
Personal
- Q&A with my high school self: helping 14-16 year old Alexey to deal with his emotions, to ask for help, to talk to people (and his dad), to learn, to get things done.
- On Friendship and on Finding Your People
- 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College
- My journal: years of depression and self-loathing; learning to accept myself and others; overcoming video game addiction
- My Favorite Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts, Music, Video games
- People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire
Fiction & Art
- How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same
- Why You Should Not Go on a Tinder Date with Me
- Dating
- RAPIDLY PRESS X TO REFUSE TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN MORTALITY
- A dying snake
- Poems
notable
- Ramanujan, Einstein, Tolstoy, Napoleon, Richard Muller, and Michael Jackson on God
- Why We Likely Underappreciate the Pace of Technological Progress
- Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”
- Fun Economic Facts
- Interview with Ben Kuhn about productivity, his college experience, job choice, the value of an inside view, the EA community #interview
- Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
- Polynomial Time Reductions and the P vs NP problem
- Three Questions for Russia
- Online courses and textbooks I recommend
- Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?
- Tweet rot
- Low tech stuff I recommend
- Can We Trust Peter Turchin?
- Scientific experiments I want to fund
- Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
- Philosophers for Sale
- Julian Jaynes and the Ancient Tablets
- The most we can say about earnings of Substack’s top writers
- Who is the real prophet of longtermism: Will MacAskill or Sam Altman?
- Hierarchies of Status
- Playing With Identity
- Cargo Cult Productivity
LaTeX
- Matec Notes – a multivariable calculus coursebook
- How Our Commitments Slip Away From Us (pdf, my bachelor’s thesis)