2026-04-27 19:11:44
Here is a post that I believe will upset everyone regarding the doing of domestic chores. Luckily, that means it will upset your opposite number as much as it upsets you, so please do send it to your partner and be upset with me together.
In most relationships I've seen, one person does a lot more tidying and cleaning around the house, and the other does a lot less. (I have not noticed ANY underlying characteristics that correlate at 90%+ with belonging to the High Tidying and Low Tidying groups, no sir no ma'am.)
Here's the part that will annoy the Low Tidiers: you think you're doing your fair share of the cleaning/tidying, but you're not.
This is partly just the normal psychology of Work, people always notice the work they're doing and don't always notice the work other people are doing, so they over-estimate their relative share. Someone once told me "if you think you're doing half of the cleaning, you're not doing half of the cleaning. If you think you're doing 2/3 of the cleaning, you might be doing 1/2 the cleaning." And I think that's helpful, and for the major household chores it's true.
But I think there's a second component for cleaning specifically: the Low Tidiers are only considering the focussed blocks of time spent on cleaning and tidying, whereas the High Tidiers are also doing bonus cleaning and tidying in tiny increments throughout the day. This results in a WAY disproportionate share of tidying done by the High Tidiers. (Is it possible that the High Tidiers were socialized this way since childhood, in a way that the Low Tidiers didn't even notice was happening? I cannot imagine how or why that could have occurred.)
Ok, that's the half that will upset the Low Tidiers. The High Tidiers are feeling smug right now, perhaps already having forwarded this blogpost to your loved ones (which you should).
BUT WAIT: I think most of the High Tidiers I've ever met are also wrong about cleaning.
Basically: High Tidiers tend to believe that 1) there is a correct way to perform each chore, 2) it's the way they learned to do it growing up, 3) anyone who does it differently is stupid, or slow, or useless.
I think mostly this view is substantively incorrect: e.g. most people I meet seem to believe that the correct way to load a dishwasher is how their parents did it. This is often untrue on two separate counts: some of our parents were loading dishwashers sub-optimally (shocking I know!), and also dishwasher technology has progressed a ton since we were kids. To the extent there's a right way to load a dishwasher it's a) what some grainy blue collar dishwasher repair channel on youtube tells you, and b) empirically determined by whether your dishes come out clean.
But here's the meta-problem, and the bigger problem. If you're a High Tidier, and you treat your partner like an idiot who can't even load a dishwasher right, but you still want them to do 1/2 the housework, you've changed the problem they're solving from "how do I keep this home tidy for both of us" to "how do I keep my High Tidier partner from being mad at me?" Which is really bad for both of you, because it inevitably means the Low Tidier will be turning to you for approval on all domestic tasks and how they were done, which is extremely infantilizing, and which both of you will resent.
To avoid this, though, you have to find areas of domestic life where you're actually willing for things to be done differently than you would have done them and truly accept them in your heart – not just as a suboptimal outcome you're tolerating because you don't want to fight any more – but as an alternative point on the lattice that is different but neither better nor worse than how you would do things, the way that pizza is neither better or worse than sushi, even though a slice of pizza is bad when judged as a piece of sushi.
Evaluating whether a task has been done well within its own value system is hard, because you will inevitably feel that "no I'm being completely reasonable, it doesn't have to be done MY way but it has to be done well, and this is being done badly." But if you can find some domains where you can accept value pluralism, you can fundamentally shift the dynamic of cleaning/tidying in your household, for the good of all.
p.s. not directly relevant, but still assonant:
2026-04-24 19:11:51
Here is a deep tension at the heart of modern online writing. I am a person who likes to read, and I often click links on the internet to things that sound interesting in theory. And sometimes, after 2 lines or 20, there is a sudden and unexpected fade-out and a box that says TO CONTINUE READING GIVE US MONEY PLEASE.
And 99.9% of the time, my reaction – even if I enthusiastically clicked on the story to begin with! Even if I love the writer and/or topic! – is not disappointment but relief. The part of me that is sad not to find out about [whatever the topic is] is far outweighed by the part of me that's relieved to have one less thing to read.
I'm trying to remember the exceptions to this – the pieces where I truly felt sad not to finish, though never sad enough to pony up money – but while I'm sure they exist, their details elude me.
From the writer's side, paywalls are bad for two reasons. First, people who write just generally WANT more people to read what they've said. I hate to say we'd often pay you to read us, but we would.
Second, the value of a piece of writing generally increases in the number of people who've read it.[^1] You want to write something that Everyone's Talking About, and the more that Other People have read a given piece, the more that Other Other People can quote it and discuss it.
I think the solution is to make footnotes paywalled. Footnotes are decorative yet tantalizing. They're the perfect thing to paywall.[^2]
Fear not (or perhaps "relieve not"): I'm not planning to paywall anything on this website. But maybe as a proof of concept I'll subscription-wall my footnotes in future, so that you have to be a logged-in reader to see them.
[^1]: some forms of information, like stock-tips, are worth more the fewer people have read them, and even clever arguments can have a value from being hard to access, because then the reader can steal them and pretend they're her own. But these are values to the reader, not the writer, so honestly maybe it's still true that the writer always just wants as many people as possible to have read it.
[^2]: if this were a paid publication I'd now have to go on for 4 paragraphs saying the same thing in more words, but I think this pretty much covers it, so I'll stop.
2026-04-23 19:11:32
I think it's kind of common knowledge at this point that that we're each in an adversarial relationship with the tech we use, and that e.g. while I'm trying to unaddict myself from social media, the social media companies have 1000 smart people whose job it is to hone the product specifically in order to keep us coming back. It's not a fair fight, and it can't be.
What I think we haven't collectively internalized is how much that's true for many of our other interactions with many other institutions. This podcast episode I just listened to on Small College Closures was an interesting example of this: universities care intensely about their "yield", what % of the students they offer admission to will actually enroll.
The universities are modelling your likelihood of accepting them based on a linear regression with thousands of variables, e.g. people who come for a campus visit are 7.5x more likely to enroll than those who don't.
Here's the bit that I should have predicted, but didn't: universities set your financial aid accordingly. If you go for a campus visit you'll get a lower financial aid offer, because the university knows you're more likely to enroll anyway.
I think we should basically assume that any time we're interacting with a well-funded institution whose income relies (in aggregate) on getting something out of us, that they're making extremely detailed and deliberate efforts to get that something out of us.
2026-04-22 19:11:23
Man this person is internet poisoned, in the exact (ish) same way I am internet poisoned. It is horrible and amazing to see someone rendering our affliction so brilliantly on the page; I do think in some tiny way it will help me waste less time online, having seen how awful it looks from the outside, like noticing another smoker's yellow-stained teeth and yellow-stained curtains and understanding with horror that you have them too. This is your brain on Twitter, says Lockwood, and fries me. I just need another 9999 of these nudges to get me the rest of the way.
I've talked before about meta-spoilers, and how even someone telling you that there are spoilers for a book is in some sense a spoiler. I'm really not sure how to deal with this book specifically. But take this meta-commentary about meta-spoilers as a clue, and be ready to put this book down if you don't like where it's going.
So my general take on poetry collections is that even an amazing collection is mostly bad; you should judge a collection by its peak experience, and even three (or two, or one) incredible poems can make a whole collection worthwhile.
This audiobook – admittedly a Collected Poems – is unusual in that I really enjoyed a large share of the poems. Not all of them are mind-blowing but a good half are good, which is great. They are read by the author in a delightfully personal way, she does not do The Poetry Voice and her reading is all the better for it.
Romance novel. It's ok but I think not as good as her first, Kiss Quotient. Conceptual (but not plot) spoilers below.
This one is a bit didactic for my tastes, and while I appreciate the thing it's didachē-ing, it got a bit heavy handed for me. It also suffers from one of the great issues of romance novelling, which is: if the characters are perfect for each other, why don't they just get together? But if you make them not-perfect for each other, why is it such a perfect romance? So the writers often have to come up with increasingly contrived justifications for why the perfect-for-each-other couple don't just live happily ever after from chapter 1, but which doesn't make either of the partners less-perfect, and it all feels very strained.
The other issue I have with this book is is that I think the ML is an emotionally-stable pixie dreamboy.
2026-04-21 19:11:01
I believe it's a Known Thing in the transit literature that riders care most about frequency. It's also a Known Thing in the human experience that getting to flights is extremely annoying, you have to add SO much buffer to be sure you're there on time. Here's why.
Imagine you're trying to get to a restaurant that's 10 mins away from you by bus, but the bus comes exactly every 20 mins (and you can't trust which exact 20 mins that will be). Here's how early you have to leave the house in order to be different %s sure you'll arrive on time:
Compare it with walking – say the same location is 20 mins away on foot, but with very low variance.
You can see how 1) if you REALLY care about arriving on time, you end up choosing the method that's slower but more reliable, 2) to arrive on time you have to throw in a large amount of buffer.
(I know I'm motivated to choose certain numbers here, but there's a widget at the bottom where you can see how the outcomes are sensitive to different assumptions).
By contrast, here's a bus that takes 15 mins but arrives every 10 mins: if you're trying to hit above 90% confidence that you'll arrive on time, you prefer this bus even though it's 50% slower in the best case scenario.
Here's the widget so you can play with it (on web):
2026-04-20 19:11:42
Heads up in advance: I don't know what the moral of this story is, or whether it's worth reading for most people, but sharing this anyway in case it helps anyone. In order not to clickbait you, I'll say upfront that the reason for the net-goodness is just that I'm a phone addict, so having my phone break and become unusable for a time was probably good for my brain.
Ok, so, there were two reasons I bought a refurbished iPhone in the first place:
1) As a young bundle of atoms I made the mistake of reading a lot of pop econ books, and one of the things I internalized was that people irrationally optimize for saving money on small purchases ("which of these tins of tomato should I get, this one looks better but is $1 more!") and then end up spending huge amounts when making expensive purchases because they've already anchored on a high number so what's another $100 (or three).
2) I really, really like being able to hold my phone in one hand; for me, the iPhone SE (4.7" screen) was the perfect form factor, but Apple decided to discontinue that whole lineage in 2022, and then also the the line of the 5.4" 13mini in 2023. I'm not at all an Apple loyalist, but the situation for Androids is roughly the same: big-phone enjoyers might not realise how difficult it is to get any modern phone smaller than 6".
I was pretty unsure about this decision, because part of me thought that the peace of mind of buying a brand-new phone would be worth the extra cost, but my inability to buy a small phone from any marquee brand pushed me to take a risk on a refurbished 13mini.
I inevitably spent way too much time looking at options – the internet is full of I Bought A Refurbished Phone And My Face Got Eaten By A Bear stories – but I figured that was selection bias. One great thing about buying a new phone direct from a marquee brand is that it reduces decision fatigue, because at least you know where you're buying it from, but second hand doesn't have this advantage and the internet is also full of I Bought A Phone From [Name Of Second Hand Market Place] And Got Eaten By A Bear, Again stories.
After (again) wasting an irrational amount of time on research, I eventually went with a phone seller called Nexus Tech Solutions with a 5* physical location on googlemaps and who actually answered his phone and gave reasonable explanations to all questions.
For the first ~2 months everything was dandy and I thought I'd won this particular gamble. Then – as I'm wont to do – I dropped the phone on the floor, and the back smashed off completely. Reading about this online, I saw that a lot of people claimed that Original Apple Glass (TM) is designed not to crack that way, and it's mainly an issue with refurbished glass. The guy in Texas insisted the glass was original, and that he would replace it for me at a discount, but since the cost of repair was almost half the cost of the phone I figured it wasn't worth it. Somewhat miraculously, the phone kept working with only a cheap plastic Phone Back Protector to cover its innards.
A month later, my phone suddenly stopped being able to send or receive calls. There followed a truly incredible series of interactions with my carrier (T-Mobile) via their chat support that always went like
me: I am unable to receive or make calls
them: I'm sorry to hear that! I am calling you now to help out
me: I'm afraid that won't work, because the issue is precisely my inability to make or receive calls
them: I'm sorry to hear that! I have tried calling you and received your voicemail: can you please call us back?
me: I would dearly love to be able to do that, but as immediately just now mentioned, that is precisely the thing I cannot do
I eventually elliott.org-ed my way out of the problem and got T-Mobile's premium support, who told me that my phone had been excommunicated by its original carrier. They unfortunately could not tell me who the original carrier was, making it impossible for me to do anything about it.
As best I can tell, the likely situation is that my phone's original owner had bought it on credit and stopped paying, and ~6 months later the original network had therefore cut off the phone. Everything except the calling/texts still work fine, so e.g. I can use it on wifi for whatsapping and as an audiobook player, which is honestly not nothing but does not span the entirety of my telephonic needs.
The aforementioned Dylan at Nexus Tech, who had previously been so responsive, alas now ghosted me completely. Which I suppose, at least, is in fine phone-related tradition.
Anyway. I ordered a Unihertz Jelly Phone online, a conceptually-cool tiny android phone which unfortunately never arrived, one of the other qualities I generally appreciate in a phone, and whose manufacturer unfortunately refused to refund it for weeks after their mail carrier started showing DAMAGED: CONTACT SENDER. Eventually my loved one gave me a perfectly-functioning but for-me-large flagship Android, which has stayed with me to this day.
The silver lining of all this, as mentioned, was that I ended up spending a ~month without a functioning phone in the outside world: I basically just had to do stuff at home on wifi, and then commute etc phonelessly until I reached another wifi location. I was in an unusually deep phone-addiction hole at the time, and this inconvenience jammed me out of it, which was great. But it's hard to suppress the feeling that if a broken product is net-good for your life because it derails your addiction to said product, something is going really wrong for you in a way that's gone from "haha I'm soooo addicted to X" to "no really, I am addicted," hahalessly.