2026-04-03 19:36:01
One thing I've wondered about basically since college, where I struggled to memorize the required quantity of Stuff, is whether there are better ways to memorize Stuff. I have tried spaced repetition software like Anki, and my sense is that it works if you can bring yourself to do it, but I am unable to bring myself to do it, and therefore for me it doesn't work.
But since we have recently (?) entered (??) a brave new world (???) where LLMs can just make you all kinds of creative (????) product on demand, I decided to ask my friendly local language model to write me some songs. First: US states by average income
Second: some important equations from physics
Third: the poem Design by Robert Frost, which I have long loved but struggled to remember
I am not a good prompter, neither a good educationalist, so I'm not convinced I'm prompting this model very well nor that I have the right sense of what the ideal type of song for memorization would look like. If you have better ideas, please let me know.
p.s. some pre-llm prior art:
2026-04-03 13:25:16
This is the follow-up to a previous post that listed 12 ways to be penny-foolish. These tips are most relevant for a US cost-of-living breakdown.
"Pound-wise" is, of course, the other half of being penny-foolish/pound-wise, but most of this is widely covered on various finance blogs. Instead, I'll elaborate on only my particulars. I can't really call this advice, since I don't really advise anyone to try these things, since they're weird and unworkable for most people.
Still, if you can pull them off, even temporarily, the gains are large.
To be wise about pounds, first you need to know what they are. Below is an illustrative chart.
This will almost always be your largest expense, and in big cities, it will dominate overall.
It's easier said than done, but my savings strategy has been more to avoid paying rent entirely rather than finding especially budget accommodation for the long-term. How to avoid paying rent? My methods:
Avoid, not evade, taxes. The fact that this is even slightly unseemly means it’s probably under-utilized, but most of the tax avoidance you’ll do is actually the government trying to incentivize you! Tax is taxes ~1/3 of your gross income, so this is certainly a pound, not a penny.
The main tax savings come from using your retirement accounts: an IRA and a 401(k) save you taxes now, and the Roth versions save you taxes later. With these, you'll avoid tax and take advantage of the miracle of compound interest. Compound interest is so powerful that if done right (hint: a low-fee index fund), it will dwarf all other financial decisions, becoming the only pound-wisdom really necessary. Make these savings as automatic as possible, ideally by having them taken directly from your paycheck.
That said, some people do go overboard pinching pennies when they're young and poor, when the marginal value of money is high. You'll have to find some middle ground, but you can solve your retirement savings problem entirely by temporarily saving aggressively when you're making OK money but still relatively young, say late 20's through 30's.[1]
If you've got healthcare through work, great. I often didn't, so here's my historical approach:
Among the worst money pits, think of it as a reverse investment. An interest rate on debt is as bad as that same rate on an investment would be good. The most obvious debt to avoid is credit cards, which have a guaranteed rate in the teens (which would be spectacularly good as an investment, but bad as a debt) because so many people default on them. Unless you plan to negotiate or default, you're subsidizing everyone else who does.
Get a cash-back credit card and automatically pay it off every month. I use the Fidelity 2% rewards, Capital One Quicksilver 1.5% (no forex fees when abroad), and the Amazon Prime 5% back Visa for Amazon purchases only (assuming you have Prime, as I finally do now after mooching off my brother's account for ~2 decades).
Ideally, avoid having a car altogether, but if you must, get one that offers good value. Toyotas run better than Mercedes, and as Paul Fussell describes in his classic Class, expensive cars actually signal the opposite class status of what you'd naively expect:
If your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you're not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem
You may have noticed a theme here: I am mooching off of those around me. This would be bad and parasitic if I didn't reciprocate at all, but with reciprocation, it is net good for everyone involved. Further, just the act of trading back and forth in good faith with people you know strengthens and deepens those relationships. We're saving money and having fun!
This will be harder for women who want children, so are on compressed timelines. ↩︎
2026-04-01 19:20:48
I met a guy once with a pretty sad story. He'd been a successful professional with a cool and adventurous life: he'd traveled the world and had all kinds of stories about, say, visiting some random country and deciding on a whim to build a vineyard there, before whimsically moving somewhere else instead. Later in life, he had a serious incident and was diagnosed with severe mental illness, which he was now medicated for.
There were obviously many negative consequences of this for him, but the one that was most poignant to me was the way he talked about all these previous stories. His self-identity had been as this cool adventurous guy who did "crazy" things. Now he wasn't sure what to make of himself: whether his fun adventures were unrelated to the mental illness, or correlated but not the same as the mental illness, or if all these things he liked about himself were mental illness all along.
As I get older, one of the hardest things for me to react to is when friends do things that 1) are non-normative in our society as it exists, 2) seem to make them happy and fulfilled. Occasionally they'll even ask me: is this thing I'm doing crazy?
And I don't know what to say. I think many great things in our world start out from bucking social norms, from people who had the courage to be a little bit crazy: they all laughed at Wilbur for saying man could fly and at Whitney for his cotton gin, I'm told, and those things worked out great. On the personal level, many it'll-never-work-out couples have worked out great and been the joy of many lives.
At the same time, social norms exist for a reason, and many bad things also start with someone doing something a little bit crazy. I really do believe that there's a thin line between greatness (whether personal / moral / societal / whathaveyou) and madness, and I'm not sure from the outside how you can tell which side of the ridge someone is sliding down.
I'm sure this will turn out wrong as well, but the closest thing I have to a heuristic for distinguishing between the two is a kind of emotional affect I see in some people (but not others) when they're doing something crazy-seeming.
I once met a guy who had just met a woman while both of them were travelling in a foreign land. They had matched on a dating app and met in person to discover they had no actual shared languages. They had spent a whirlwind weekend together communicating entirely through translation apps, and then both gone home, and now he was going to fly halfway round the world to her homeland to see her, still barely able to speak each other's languages.
I think this is a crazy thing to do, in general, but hearing him tell the story gave me a good amount of hope that this romance might work out. He didn't seem manic or delusional at all, just kind of calm and peacefully inevitable. He knew it sounded crazy, and he knew it might not work, but it felt right to both of them (he said) and they wanted to give it a shot. I left the encounter thinking: you know, I don't think this is crazy.
But honestly, I doubt that "seems calm and thoughtful rather than high-energy about the crazy-sounding thing" is a consistent and reasonable heuristic, and possibly it's just a reflection of my own personal tastes in energy-level. If you have a better way of telling the difference, let me know.
2026-03-30 19:18:37
If a novelist is really good at novelling then whenever something weird/unnecessary/contrived happens in the novel, you KNOW that thing will have plot relevance later, because otherwise it wouldn't be there.
I feel this way about Connie Willis, for example: when someone behaves unrealistically in her novels I know that's going to be a contrivance required for later, because she's too good to have unnecessary things happen unnecessarily.
(I guess the best novelists would make it so that the plot-relevant items aren't contrived either, and where you're in such a flow state while reading them that you don't notice when the big clues get slipped right in front of you, but who among us has such talents?)
This has weird consequences: in some ways, worse novelists are in some ways better to read, because when weird stuff happens it might just be because they don't control their writing super well.
For example, I actually really like Brandon Sanderson, and over time I've come to realise that he's super tightly controlled in his own way, but the first time I read one of his books and the protagonist went on a long unnecessary spiel about guns I remember thinking "this might be a case of literal Chekhov's gun, but also this guy might just be a ridiculous writer who really likes talking about guns, so he's self-inserting his hobby here like those ridiculous land-reform sections in Anna Karenina." As a result, I really couldn't tell whether the information was ever going to be relevant, and this increased my overall surprise in the novel.
By the way, for many years I had this (specious) Did You Know in my head about Chekhov's Gun, namely, that Chekhov originally meant it as a complaint rather than an imperative: the problem with theater, he was saying, is that if you see a gun on the wall in the first act you know (from previous theater experience) that it will go off in the third, so the surprise is ruined, versus in real life where there are tons of random superfluous details everywhere and you never know what is going to matter or not.
I have tried to fact-check this a bunch of times and not only can I not-find support for this claim, I have pretty repeatedly found people saying that what Chekhov meant by his Gun is pretty much what everyone thinks he meant by his gun. [EDIT: commenter Alex kindly confirms!] So I'm going to tentatively claim this thought for myself instead and call it Uri's Gun: the problem with fiction is that if at literally any point the author lingers over a gun, you know it's going to go off eventually, and that ruins some of the surprise.
2026-03-25 19:42:47
If you're in New York, come hear me talk about the weirdly unfamous cure for hiccups this Saturday at Nerd Nite NYC.
Recently I've been thinking about things that I wrote in previous ATVBTs that now seem wrong to me.
In 80/20 Strength Training, I approximately-recommended taking creatine. After a while taking creatine, I started to suspect it was making me more agitated/angry. I googled about this and there were various pages on "why creatine rage is a myth", i.e. pages saying that taking creatine doesn't make you agitated, but also that many other people have had this suspicion, which makes me wonder if it's real after all.
An internet friend recommended trying glycine instead of creatine, I bought some and promptly forgot to take it. I don't have a strong opinion on any of this, but wanted to update you guys in case you started creatine-ing on my account.
In my post on Prescheduling Posts, I basically recommended scheduling blogposts with increasing lags into the future. E.g. if you've written 6 posts, schedule 2 for the next two weeks, then 2 a month apart, then 2 two months apart, so you have over 6 months of runway with pre-scheduled posts.
I now feel more mixed about this – I think it maybe reduces my excitement about writing, I have ideas and I want to tell people about them, and by the time a post comes out 6 months from now I might not be excited about it, and/or I will lose 6 months of possible next-thought-having from the responses to the original post. Also, as my poetry teacher told us, the gods hate hoarders, and grant creativity only to those who trust them to give more later.
There's still some tradeoffs here – one of the most common failure modes for blogs is to not-write for a month or two, then feel like the next post has to be really good to make up for it, then not-write for a year or two until suddenly sending a "sorry I haven't written lately" post, and then never writing again. But basically I can't endorse the original thing I said any more, regardless.
In The Confounder Is Being Popular And Important, I complained about thinkfluencers advertising a life-philosophy that made them happy when (I think) really what made them happy is "finding community + having other people listen to your opinions." A reader pointed out that this is exactly what I was doing in the piece. I guess that doesn't necessarily make it an error but it does make me regret it.
I find most blogs/bloggers/blogposts overly confident, but writing in an un-confident way is annoying. In my head, all ATVBT posts have massive asteriskses, but I don't always include them in writing because (again) it's very annoying. So I have a more general sense of error/regret about a lot of my writing here, beyond these specific errors, I just feel like most of the stuff I write here is regrettably over-stated.
What do YOU think I should be sorry about? Feel free to email me or answer in the comments, as always....
2026-03-23 19:48:53
In New York? Come hear me talk about the weirdly unfamous cure for hiccups this Saturday at Nerd Nite NYC.
Here is a thing that repeatedly bothers me: people will claim that a given political system is biased against a particular political party.
This is not true, because it takes for granted something (the composition of the political coalitions) that is made by man and not by heaven, and which can and will be re-made in future.
It's extremely possible for a political system to be biased for or against a particular population distribution – for example, it can give more representation per-capita to low-population areas than to high-population ones.
That can certainly create a bias towards or against certain types of settlement, e.g. more representation for rural areas than urban ones.
Given history and path-dependency, that can also mean more representation for some regions than others, and given even more history and even more path-dependency that can mean more representation for certain ethnicities or age groups or any other form of social cleavage.
What it can't actually do is bias against any political party, specifically, because political parties are not fixed objects composed inevitably of particular demographics, but flexible coalitions that can (and have) been built and rebuilt over time.
This is weird for us to acknowledge because, at any given time, the parties develop very strong brands. I can feel some of you bristling through the screen, because it really does feel like each political party represents a certain set of coherent beliefs, and we often care passionately about those beliefs. So to claim that our party could just change its policies and attract a different set of voters feels as sacrilegious as saying that a religion could change its core tenents and then appeal to new adherents.
But a political party is not like a religion: it's more like a sports team, which at any given time is composed of a certain set of players, and which in future can trade those players for other players, in order to win.
Again, your particular beliefs or philosophies or priorities can be valid and important, and the beliefs you oppose can be objectionable and bad, and the political system can become de facto biased for or against the kinds of people who share your beliefs or priorities. There just isn't some unbreakable connection between those beliefs and the parties that currently represent them.
I think it's pretty psychologically interesting that at any given time there is an illusion of "naturalness" to the parties: our brains are pattern-matching machines, so they pattern-match each coalition together, finding the commonalities and ignoring the differences until it feels like of course (say) the religious people and businesspeople and the working class are in a party together, so if the electoral system is biased for/against religious people then it is necessarily biased for/against The Party Of Religious People And Businesspeople And The Working Class.
But this is not how things work. Those coalitions have shifted in the past and will shift again in future. If a sports team keeps losing matches it will eventually be taken over by a new manager who changes the team to a different one that can actually win. Similarly, if a political party keeps losing elections, eventually it will be taken over by a political entrepreneur who will reshape it to appeal to a new coalition and win elections again.
And it may still be true that the composition of the new coalition is shaped by the over/underrepresentation of certain geographic or demographic groups, because of bias in the electoral system. And you may still think that's bad, and want to change it. But that bias will now favour a different political party than it did before, because the bias never actually favoured a party, but rather favoured one or more components of the coalition that the party was appealing to.