2026-08-26 19:11:02
I find it really hard to keep track of the category of chore that you only need to do every 1 or 2 or 3 months: when did I last change the air filters? When did I last wash the washing machine? So I made a little tool to track these:
There are lots of apps out there that offer similar services, but I wanted something extremely simple, with local data storage, and where I could track long-gap recurring tasks rather than daily habits.
If you want to use this yourself, navigate to this website from your phone and save the icon on your home screen for easy access. Enter the names of tasks you want to keep track of and the frequency you want to do them, and then check back occasionally to see if you're overdue. That's it!
THIS IS NOT AN APP, IT IS A WEBPAGE THAT STORES DATA LOCALLY ON YOUR PHONE, which means that if you ever clear your browser cache it will delete all the data. You can export the data as a .csv file occasionally to make sure you don't lose it, and/or you can accept the impermanence of all things.
Hopefully this goes without saying, but: you should not use this or any other similarly scrappy tool for anything truly important to you, it is presented as-is with no guarantees of fitness, etc. With all that said, hope you enjoy it!
2026-08-25 19:11:41
The Wason Selection Task is a famous result in psychology. It goes like this:
You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a symbol on one side and a color on the other. The visible faces of the cards show an Atom, a Bit, orange and blue. You don't know what's on the other side of each of these cards. Which cards must you turn over in order to test whether the following rule is true: "if a card shows an atom on one face, then its opposite face is orange?"
The answer, counterintuitively, is that you have to turn over the atom card and the blue card (not the orange card).
Basically: if the Bit card is orange on the other side, that doesn't violate the rule; it may also be true that Atoms are orange, whether or not the Bits are.
Whatever is on the other side of the orange card, this card can't possibly violate the rule, for the same reason: our rule just said that atom implies orange, but Bits could be orange too.
You need to turn over the Atom and the Blue cards, because if the Atom is blue or if the blue is an Atom, the rule is violated.
I think about this when I see influencer videos telling the general public all the signs that you're ADHD, or that your parent was a narcissist, or that you're secretly a wizard, or whatever.
Do you sometimes feel lonely? That you're not like the other kids around you? That your life is lacking a little rightful magic?
I have no doubts that a wizard living in the mundane world would have such feelings. But I also believe that non-wizards in the mundane world often have these feelings. Having these feelings therefore doesn't rightly imply that you're a wizard.
I am certainly not in doubt about the existence of ADHD, or narcissism, or certain kinds of wizards. But I think that some advocates and activists for these conditions spend way too much time asserting that if you experience WXY then you're probably a Z, and I simply don't think that's good reasoning: if non-Zs also experience WXY, or if many people who experience WXY are non-Zs, the claim (in its strongest form) doesn't hold. We need to spend more time flipping over the other cards.
2026-08-24 19:11:30
11 years ago I ran little experiment where I tried to convince a couple of my friends that I was a chatbot. I remember it fondly and think about it intermittently, as the world of chatbots has raced ahead:
I was reminded of this recently when one of those This Time X Years Ago algorithms resurfaced a comment that got left on the French translation of my piece. I think about this comment even more than I think about the article:
It says:
It's fascinating
What an interesting man is Uri Bram !
Tomorrow he will pretend to be a robot, than a statue, then an idiot....[^1]
No, that's already done.
If you haven't written online, it's probably hard to explain how delightful this comment is.
So many trolls are low-effort, just generically telling you you suck as a person and/or should never have been born.
Other comments are clearly from someone who either didn't read or didn't understand your article: there is something truly maddening about this, you just want people to hate you for things you did say.
So the fact that this commenter took the time to deliver a relevant, specific, personalised burn was just beautiful – I felt seen, I felt known – and they even spelled my name right. Raoul if you're out there please write to me, I'd love to buy you a drink.
[^1] yes I'm aware of the alternative meaning/translation, but this is a family publication so let's go with "idiot"
2026-08-20 19:11:55
1) "How do you figure out if someone is vegan?" "Don't worry, they'll tell you."
This is a selection effect; if someone just quietly orders animal-less things whenever you eat out together, and otherwise keeps their diet to themselves, you might be friends for years without discovering their veganicity; people merely think vegans are always announcing it because the ones who announce it are the ones they're aware of. Ditto for Crossfitters, pilots and Harvardians.
2) "Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History" is a claim about a selection effect, not about the causal impact of different levels of rebelliousness.
Specifically, it comes from historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's paper "Vertuous Women Found," arguing that well behaved women mattered greatly in 17th Century New England, but had been neglected in modern (1970s) scholarship because they seemed "humdrum" compared to "antinomians and witches," so they Seldom Make [it into] History [books].
3) "You start thinking you're good, because the people who come to see you all like you," said the sage. "But, the reason they came to see you is because they like you."
4) The night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King gave his famous Mountaintop speech. Incredibly you can watch a recording; it's one of the most harrowing things I've ever seen. He ends:
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life, longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land.
The first time I saw it I thought: this is unreal, it's like he knew he was going to die tomorrow. But the real story is equally harrowing, just in a different way: he'd spent ten years at this point surviving assassination attempts, and he spoke often about the possibility of his murder.
5) "I'm not saying you're self-censoring," says the critic to the journalist interviewing him. "I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."
6) A thing that is said sometimes is that one night stands are never actually good in terms of the [redacted].
But that's obviously a selection effect: if you both enjoy the [redacted], you're far more likely to do it again in future, which retroactively makes it not-a-one-night-stand.
The correct analysis would have to be something like "first encounters between people who are not already dating, are, on average, not especially good," which may still be true, but it's important to get the sample right.
see previous: 9 Selection Effects
2026-08-19 19:11:09
I'm really bad at estimating people's ages, so I made a little quiz to see if I could calibrate myself better. Give it a go here:
2026-08-18 19:11:12
Guest post!
I tell my kids they're extraordinary. For now.
I have four of them, so statistically this is probably unlikely. And given that all four have more than a sprinkle of neuro spice, they're not extraordinary in the ways we traditionally measure these things. That might make some people mad. Yes, I'm aware that autism and the like don't disqualify people from being traditionally extraordinary.
My third born is nine and can't recognize letters outside of her own name. I've been told this is due to memory issues connected to her cognitive delay. The same child changes the passcode on an iPhone weekly to a new six-digit number and has never once forgotten it. To me that's pretty cool.
But I do wonder about the encouraging words. Whether we should, as parents, be telling our kids they're special at all.
There seem to be two fairly opposing schools of thought.
The first is that our kids should grow up absolutely certain that they are special. That home should be the place where they are always believed in. Tell them they're brilliant. Tell them they're talented. Tell them they can do anything they put their minds to.
While I was being relentlessly bullied at school, my dad told me it was because I was too pretty (I literally had a bowl cut, so that was false) or too smart (probably closer to the truth, since my constant questions during class did nothing to endear me to my peers, and I wasn't going to stop pointing out the teacher's errors, so, impasse).
Either way his words missed the mark. They didn't make the bullying feel any better. If anything, I started telling myself that being extraordinary was the reason I was being bullied, which made the obvious solution to become far more ordinary. Turns out I wasn't very good at being ordinary, but that's beside the point.
I was an odd child. At Montessori school I mastered reading at the age of three and then quickly moved on to my next challenge, window washing. I washed windows day in and day out for almost a full year. I had a squeegee and a bucket, and because Montessori is child-led learning, no one redirected me. I wasn't even particularly talented at it.
My mom used to tell me I was a free spirit. I remember her saying it the day we went to a flea market and she bought me a crop top popcorn shirt (they were all the rage) and I spent the next half hour pulling it down trying to cover my stomach, until she finally gave in and we returned it to the vendor. In that context I understood "free spirit" to mean that I didn't like crop tops, although my mom's message was probably that I was rejecting fashion norms.
Her message and my dad's played on a loop during my ruminations as I grew older. Frustrated by my inability to fit in or just be "normal," I would try reminding myself that I was a free spirit, that I was too smart for my peers to get me. It wasn't a soothing thought. And due to probable extraordinaryness I was far more prone to dissect both my own thoughts and the thoughts of my peers, everything a puzzle I just needed to understand. I think for someone like me, a concrete answer about why my brain worked differently would have been far more useful, both for understanding myself and for understanding the motivations of the ones othering me.
The other school of thought is that telling children they're exceptional is how we ended up with a bunch of people who were told they could be anything they wanted and are now deeply offended that the world has failed to recognize their specialness.
There may even be research explaining the random guy at the bar who is absolutely certain every woman in the establishment would be honoured to have him buy her a drink. Researchers have found a relationship between parental overvaluation and narcissism in children. Overvaluation isn't loving your kid a lot or thinking they're wonderful. It's believing, and communicating, that your child is more special and more deserving than other children.
There probably is a difference between raising a child who thinks:
My mom thinks I'm extraordinary.
And raising one who thinks:
I am objectively extraordinary and it's concerning that the rest of you haven't noticed.
I'm just not entirely sure where that line is.
It does seem to me that the people most convinced of their own extraordinariness aren't always the people I find particularly extraordinary. Some of the most genuinely extraordinary people I've met seem to have no idea just how special they are. Which makes me wonder if believing you're extraordinary and actually being extraordinary have much to do with each other at all.
But if we don't tell our kids they're extraordinary, who does?
Not every kid is going to be exceptionally intelligent or athletic or artistic. That's literally not how exceptional works. We can't all be above average. Some of our children are going to be extremely, aggressively average.
Do we need to be the ones to let them know? I'm not sure. The world seems pretty well equipped to eventually deliver that information.
There will be grades and jobs and promotions they don't get, unrequited love and broken hearts. There will be other people who are smarter and prettier and funnier and more successful. At some point they will discover that their parents' assessment of them was perhaps not conducted under strict scientific conditions.
Then there are the kids who really are extraordinary at something. Being told that constantly can probably create its own set of problems.
Maybe you work harder because you believe you're capable of more.
Maybe you stop trying because being brilliant is supposed to come easily.
Maybe being "the smart one" or "the talented one" becomes so much a part of who you are that failing at something feels less like failing and more like finding out you aren't who everyone said you were.
Or maybe, like me, you discover that the thing everyone keeps telling you makes you special isn't necessarily making your life any easier, and you start trying to make yourself a little less special instead.
Some people seem to do remarkably well when the safety net is enormous. They take risks because failure isn't catastrophic. Other people seem to need just enough discomfort to make succeeding feel urgent.
Maybe believing you're extraordinary gives you confidence. Maybe it gives you entitlement.
I don't want my kids to think the world owes them anything because I think they're special. I also don't particularly want to be the person responsible for making sure they're appropriately humbled before the world gets a chance. There will be plenty of people willing to do that.
Maybe the goal isn't actually to convince our kids that they're extraordinary. Maybe it's to make sure they grow up knowing that we thought they were.
I'm not sure those are the same thing.