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Also, psychedelics have a fundamental discordance with allopathic research which can never be overcome. The placebo problem is unsolvable. And these medicines are customarily adjacent to non-directive therapy, and ongoing integration. We'll never be able to quantify those things in a trial format the same we we can for a blood pressure pill.... See more

Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code

It’s really easy to write terrible code. But it’s also really easy to write code that follows absolutely every best practice, which has been unit, integration, fuzz, and mutation-tested for good measure – your startup will just run out of money before you finish.... See more

For Lasch, these developments represented a betrayal of democracy: citizenship had been replaced by individualism; virtue had been supplanted by an ethic of material success; belief in equality and in civic obligations had given way to claims of individual liberty and an emphasis upon autonomy. Curiously, while the spirit of aristocratic generosity... See more

We psychiatrists tend to start our first sessions with some variant of the question: “What would you like to change?” People often list negative goals: to be less depressed, stop using drugs, feel less anxious, etc. It’s a start, but we often need more. There is a helpful reframing found in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: no dead person’s goals.... See more

Just think about how much effort you have to put into maintaining the facade of being an Expert — how much effort it takes to always appear as “the one who knows”… and compare that to the freedom and flow and playfulness that can open up when you really allow yourself to sink into not knowing, when you no longer care if you make mistakes or if you... See more

People who are miserable are ugly and unapproachable and have a “victim mindset” because they can’t accept that it is all their own fault, and therefore they are bad. People who are happy must be strong and living virtuous lives full of beauty and tradition. People who are not must therefore be weak and moral failures. This framework of logic makes... See more

The illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its... See more

That people show off these illegible globs in public only makes sense from a signaling perspective: They are saying, “look at how many nodes I have in my brain, amazing nodes, I have so many nodes that a peon such as yourself can’t even guess what’s going on here!”

Arnold Kling, an economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and... See more