Brandon Dang

If you’re an expert navigating a novel problem, an LLM won’t imagine a new solution for you. But they become a gift for generalists, who can use them to get up to speed in new domains much more quickly, and resurface and apply knowledge from other fields easily. Generalists can use their adaptability and imagination to work through any “wickedness”... See more

A psychotechnology is anything that can alter your relationship with self, from mainstream talk therapy, to all kinds of meditation, to newfangled forms of therapy like IFS, etcetera. Different psychotechnologies will be more or less appropriate to a given individual. Some will be powerful in combination. There is no one “path,” although some... See more

Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe... See more

So we sit in indecision. We wait for certainty before we commit. But certainty doesn’t come from thinking about a project. It comes from being inside a project.

My friend, the project is the way.

There is a network of people passionately working on interesting things but when I step back a bit there isn’t a coherent story tying things together other than a broad FAFO / make bets on probabilistic outcomes energy. While there is widespread support with people rooting for each other, something I’ve appreciated after hibernating in Asia, it’s... See more

In the era of the never-ending playlist, when tunes are almost too algorithmically available, these writers remind that a regular appointment of conscious listening, playing or singing can be better than a visit to the clinic.

I switched my major to psychology, but not before taking a class where we read Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

That book shaped my view of God for the next 20 years of my life. Durkheim essentially argues that what people worship as God, whether they’re Aboriginal people in Australia or Catholic people in Europe or Muslim... See more