Essays | ||
| 2022 Aug | Accidental terrorist | True story about how I almost ended up jailed for terrorism in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language. |
| 2022 Apr | Valley of the timeflowers | Sci-fi short exploring a species of plant that can erase its predators from history. |
| 2022 Mar | Grief as a toolkit | Properly understood, the grieving process resembles everyday rational problem-solving. |
| 2022 Mar | Parallel insights for AI safety | By zeroing in on where AI safety overlaps with other domains, we can see more clearly what to try, what works, and what doesn't. |
| 2022 Feb | Symbol-pushing spiders | To understand AI existential risk, we need new intuition pumps—like the machine that can mimic human writing with no more brainpower than an insect. |
| 2021 Nov | Teaching adults about Santa | We shouldn't pretend Santa exists. We should know it. |
| 2021 Nov | Dumbledore's shadow | Deep down, Harry Potter suggests we can master our own darkness by intellectualizing it away. |
| 2021 Nov | We shouldn't execute all parties to a Supreme Court verdict | You can reduce frivolous lawsuits by killing both parties after every verdict—but there are also downsides. |
| 2021 Nov | Why are logic puzzles so fascist? | The simplified universe of the logic puzzle is often delivered at gunpoint. |
| 2021 Oct | A cutaway view of life | Spirited Away builds trust like a documentary; we like seeing behind the scenes. |
| 2021 Oct | Into the World | Over the Garden Wall uses fantasy to tell an important story about growing up. |
| 2021 Oct | Clearly thinking about something else | Rosenberg has written an otherwise colorful and engaging philosophical book about death which is unfortunately narrow-minded about what it means to survive. |
| 2020 Jan | When Cinderella strikes out | Dahl's James and the Giant Peach tells us a new Cinderella story: even if you miss the opportunity of a lifetime, the universe follows its own peculiar mechanisms. |
| 2019 Oct | The Blueprint | How a tax haven became a premier medical institute. (Short story) |
Works in progress | ||
| (2021 Nov) | The world of learning | The quest to catch all the Pokémon stands for the child's quest to understand the whole world. |
| (2021 Nov) | The wickedness of nano-billionaires | As an archetype, a billionaire is a transformative power wasted by selfishness. We each have our own spark of power to use. |
| (2021 Dec) | Participant-free morality | If morality is mostly about individuals, we'll need a more expansive theory for when identity and agency get complicated. |
| (2022 Sept) | Plant figs, not flags | Proposal: Use native/endemic crops as a shorthand to refer to geographic regions. As an alternative to flags, this approach carries an inclusive, humane, nurturing political orientation. |