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Human Curiosity in the Age of AI

Writes and Write-Nots

Why should the universe have a purpose? The question of the purpose of the universe is an invention of human minds, and has no significance, except fo

When to Do What You Love

Connecting into why it’s valuable. Sometimes you get so lost in a project that you forget why you started it in the first place, or why doing this kin

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from ch

When to Do What You Love

Connecting into why it’s valuable. Sometimes you get so lost in a project that you forget why you started it in the first place, or why doing this kin

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from ch

How to Get New Ideas

Creativity: “I can’t get new ideas staring at a blank page. Creativity, for me, requires motion. When you go on a walk, you can turn your world into a

The mathematical genius Alexander Grothendieck once had a metaphor for solving problems. He suggested that instead of forcing open an impossibly hard

Writes and Write-Nots

How to Get New Ideas

To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defi

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in

“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern

I heard on a Peloton ride (Jess King): It isn’t that no matter what you do that I will love you. I will love you no matter how I FEEL. And that is the

Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the

Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, eviden

What is this teaching me?

Latvia’s Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was created because he was somehow obsessed Blender, the free/open-source 3D modeling tool.

Scott Alexander’s recent post argues that the best response to AI displacement isn’t optimization or doomerism—it’s play. Figure out what you actually

what would one imperfect action teach me?

Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid