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Applied Divinity Studies
2025
May 10

Book Review: Nadia's Antimemetics

2024
Feb 9

On the Experience of Using a Guest Pass at an Elite Gym

2022
Dec 19

Unpleasant Experiences Considered Pretty Fun

Aug 23

The Repugnant Conclusion Isn't

Jul 13

Punching Utilitarians in the Face

May 8

Statistical Theodicy

Apr 5

Corporate Culture is the Final Holdout of Mainstream America

Feb 19

San Francisco Shoplifting: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

Feb 17

San Francisco Shoplifting: Prelude

Jan 20

Every Grant is also a Bounty

Jan 18

You Can Get Fluvoxamine

Jan 17

I'm Donating 90% of my Recent Income to Slime Mold Time Mold

Jan 15

Finance

Jan 12

Is Time Working for or Against You?

2021
Dec 23

Make COVID Predictions, Take My Money: On Zvi, Bets and Taking Ideas Seriously

Dec 22

Lea Degen on Cities, Optimism, and the Danger of Floating off With No Grip on Empirical Reality

Dec 7

My Interview with Alex Berger

Nov 30

Progress Studies Exegesis

Oct 28

My Interview with Byrne Hobart for The Browser

Aug 31

One Year of Applied Divinity Studies

Aug 16

Ordinary Life Improvements 2030

Aug 13

The Myth of the Myth of the Latte Millionaire

Aug 12

The Most Interesting Generation

Aug 11

A Subconscious Dilemma

Aug 2

How Long Should you Take to Decide on a Career?

Aug 1

Varieties of Deterministic Experience

Jul 30

Yes, X Causes Y

Jul 28

Failures of Megaproject Management, or Why Are the Olympics so Unprofitable?

Jul 26

The Transhuman Olympics

Jul 19

Writing about my job: Internet Blogger

Jul 14

Generating Intuitions for Exponential Growth

Jul 9

Become a Billionaire Part II: You're Not Even Trying

Jul 7

Life Advice: Become a Billionaire

Jul 2

Does Moral Philosophy Drive Moral Progress?

Jun 29

On Being a Loser, or Should you Start a Blog?

Jun 28

The Hypostatic Union of Kanye West

Jun 17

Contra Smith, I Guess

Jun 4

60,000,000,000 Chickens

May 15

The Irony of “Longtermism”

May 14

The Moral Foundations of Progress

Apr 16

Book Review: The Making of Prince of Persia

Apr 3

My Fantasy Intellectual Draft Picks

Mar 27

A List of Very Bad Things

Mar 23

Data and Models

Mar 23

Mistakes

Mar 23

Criticism

Mar 16

Crypto is Stupid; Everything is Stupid; It's All Okay

Mar 15

Asymmetric Opportunities and the Cult of Optionality

Mar 11

Against and Then for Hyperproductivity

Mar 10

Responses and Testimonies on EA Growth

Mar 9

On Radical Reforms, Technocracy and Seeing Like a State

Mar 8

Why Hasn't Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?

Feb 19

The Byrne Hobart Portfolio

Feb 18

The Irony of "Progress Studies"

Feb 11

Highlights from the Comments on Organizing Research

Feb 10

Why Haven't We Passed any Constitutional Amendments Lately?

Feb 9

Is There a Translational Research Gap?

Feb 8

Are Athletes Great for Longer?

Feb 8

Why does this blog take so long to write?

Feb 8

Notes on Adam Marblestone’s Focused Research Organizations

Feb 1

Wake Up, You've Been Asleep for 50 Years

Jan 28

No Revival for the Industrial Research Lab

Jan 26

Progress Studies: A Discipline is a Set of Institutional Norms

Jan 25

Don't Read the News

Jan 22

SlateStarSubstack

Jan 19

Contra StatNews: How Long to Herd Immunity?

Jan 15

Progress Studies: Tensions of the Liberal Order

Jan 14

Progress Studies: A Question in Search of a Discipline

Jan 13

Was Vaccine Production Actually Delayed?

2020
Dec 8

Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism

Dec 1

About Applied Divinity Studies

Dec 1

Every Post I Couldn't Write This Year

Dec 1

What is an Explanation?

Nov 29

Highlights from the Emails on Golden Handcuffs

Nov 29

Empirical Estimates of Golden Handcuffs

Nov 25

The Golden Handcuffs Were Inside of You The Whole Time

Nov 23

The Best Writing Against, For, and On Substack

Nov 23

The Murder of Wilbur Wright

Nov 20

Correlated Returns are Insufficient for True Alignment

Nov 19

Lambda School's Incredibly Naive Incentive Alignment

Nov 18

Austen Allred is Consistently Deceptive

Nov 18

Transcendance and Material Gain in Queen's Gambit

Nov 3

The Epistemic Pain of Prop 22

Oct 30

Are the Neurotypicals Okay?

Oct 30

I Couldn't Read Papers Until I Learned The Greek Alphabet

Oct 23

Replying to Robert Wiblin on Young Rationalists

Oct 23

Revising my Views on the Impact of Teachers

Oct 23

No One is Even Trying

Oct 23

A Vote for Jo Is at Most Half a Vote for Trump

Oct 16

How to Become Famous on Substack Overnight (in Ten Years)

Oct 16

Preemptively Apologizing

Oct 16

MR VS HN

Oct 15

Bus Factor 1

Oct 6

Base Rates on Secession

Sep 28

Beware the Casual Polymath

Sep 17

Markets Are about Information, Not Incentives

Sep 9

Learning in Public in Real Time

Sep 8

On "Not voting as a form of protest"

Sep 7

We Only Need 10,000 Voters

Sep 6

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Resolved

Sep 5

Where are All the Successful Rationalists?

Sep 4

The Great American Election Lottery

Sep 3

Unemployment Part 2 - How to Save Yourself

Sep 2

Ranked Choice Voting is Arbitrarily Bad

Sep 1

Unemployment Part I – Quitting Won't Save You