Against Modesty’s Bailey

Modesty arguments often say that you should mostly or entirely bow to ‘expert consensus’ or the views of particular others, and who are you to disagree.

In Favor of Enjoying Things on Purpose

The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shoppin...

What the Internet Is Teaching Young Men About Desire

When pornography becomes the default sex education, it reshapes how a generation learns about power, intimacy, and attention

Anthropic on Twitter / X

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude. pic.twitter.com/aLUPBifxth— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 6, 2026

The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything

Interest is everything Each time I sit down to choose a topic for this newsletter, there’s a moment when my self-important inner judge – who loves to involve himself in such mat...

Predictive processing frameworks for perception can explain recent drone sightings in the United States

We draw on the predictive processing theory of perception to explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the context of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies. We argue that the uniquely sparse properties of skyborne and celestial stimuli make it difficult for an observer to update prior beliefs, which can be easily fit to observed lights. Moreover, we hypothesize that humans have likely evolved to perceive the sky and its perceived contents as deeply meaningful. Finally, we briefly discuss the possible role of generalized distrust in scientific institutions and ultimately argue for the importance of astronomy education for producing a society with prior beliefs that support veridical perception.

Information foraging

Information foraging is a theory that applies the ideas from optimal foraging theory to understand how human users search for information. The theory is based on the assumption that, when searching for information, humans use "built-in" foraging mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors find food. Importantly, a better understanding of human search behavior can improve the usability of websites or any other user interface.

Chris Olah on Twitter / X

Research Intimacy: Internalizing obscure knowledge, equations, relationships, and ways of thinking related to a research topic.— Chris Olah (@ch402) August 16, 2020

How social media is fueling an intense form of romantic obsession

The digital world is primed to fuel episodes of profound infatuation known as limerence.

People Frameworks

How Leaders Should Think About People

Ok, so who is with me?

1.6K votes, 96 comments. 36M subscribers in the memes community. Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a…