2026-07-17 19:11:11

In modern American politics, centristically-inclined voters have an interesting problem: basically every election will be won by a candidate from one of two parties, and those candidates are chosen by each party's partisans, and as a result the candidates are more extreme than the median voter's preferences.

So e.g. if you're a center-left voter you'd prefer to have a far-left candidate to a far-right one, but you'd prefer a center-left candidate to either, and that isn't always within your option-set by the time the election rolls around.

In theory, the general election itself should pull both candidates back towards the center, but some combination of gerrymandering and fundraising and social pressure mean that doesn't always happen in practice either. What can I say? None of us truly know where the center is, but when I look at current American politics I don't think "wow there is such an oversupply of boring centerists."[^1]

Is there anything you can do about that? You can try to elect centerists in the primary, of course, but suppose that hasn't happened yet. What else?

Well, here's an idea I haven't heard talked about: what would happen if a meaningful share of voters promised to split their ticket in every election, i.e. to vote for just as many Republicans as Democrats in the election? Essentially, if the upcoming election is for President and House and Senate and Dogcatcher, the voter says "I will pull for two Democrats and two Republicans among these four, everybody please do your best."

This theoretically would create intra-party competition to move to the center: the Democratic Senate candidate is no longer competing just against the Republican Senate candidate but also against the Democratic House candidate, and if I'm doing the maths vaguely right that "should" pull all the candidates from both parties towards the middle. (It's also a move that centerists are uniquely able to do: a hard-right or hard-left voter might credibly threaten not to vote, but they can't credibly threaten to vote for the opposite wing, no matter how much it sharpens the contradictions).

There's obviously several issues with this proposal.

First, I'm not sure how you could possibly convince either party that enough of you were doing this to move votes.

Second, I'm not sure how many voters there are who are genuinely hand-on-heart willing to vote for both parties, or treat their own vote instrumentally in this particular way.[^2]

Third, to the extent that you're center-left or center-right rather than truly at the center of the current political spectrum, strictly voting for equal numbers of Rs and Ds might be sacrificing some of your short-term policy preferences.

More generally, I'm not sure what the long run equilibrium of this voting style would be; part of me thinks it would drag the long-term policy equilibrium to the center as well, but this stuff is really hard to calculate.

Still, I think in theory it would be an interesting thing for people to do, and striking that nobody (to my knowledge) does it.

[^1]: eh, look, this is all complicated: there's (at least) three ways to be considered "centerist": one is to hold the median position on every topic, one is to hold an unpredictable collection of positions such that nobody can easily place you on right or left, a third is to have a moderate vibe while doing whatever it is you want ideologically.

[^2]: people are willing to vote instrumentally in MANY other ways! "Hold your nose and vote for X"; "Vote for the crook, it's important!"; "Vote for the lesser of two evils" are all instrumental views of voting that people seem to tolerate, if not enjoy.

2026-07-15 19:11:48

I once had a job that felt a lot like being bullied in high school.[^1] At some point I had to decide whether to leave the job, and was a little torn because e.g. on the one hand, money; on the other hand, feeling bad all the time.

Ultimately what decided it for me was a combination of
1) a supportive partner who told me it was ok to leave (important! grateful!), and
2) I was literally getting constant stomachaches.

I thought this was idiosyncratic but after other conversations I've started to suspect it's common: people who are having stress/trouble at work start having stomach trouble a lot.

I'm not giving advice here, I'm not sure if leaving was the right decision in my case, nor that "once you're getting stomachaches it's time to leave" is good advice in general. But descriptively I think it's what happened, and once I left the org the stomachaches stopped.

It does make me wonder how much of people's ability to hold power comes down to either not-feeling stress in this acute phyiscal way, or feeling it but having a willingness to power through it anyway. It would be fun to interview presidents and CEOs and see what they say, whether they don't get these kinds of stomachaches or whether they power through them.

[^1]: from my point of view – and of course that's a limited one – I got told to do stuff by superiors that would cause obvious but manageable levels of blowback from elsewhere, and then got abandoned by those superiors as soon as the predictable blowback blew back. So it felt like the corporate equivalent of "why are you hitting yourself? why are you hitting yourself?" but with the added humiliation of HR smiling over you saying "in my experience, the best way to deal with problems is to apologize for them: why don't you try apologizing to everyone, for hitting yourself?"

2026-07-13 19:11:23

Every so often I will write things down with a pen on paper and feel an incredible sense of joy and gratitude. Somehow there is this system whereby I can encode my thoughts into symbols, and then transfer those symbols onto a surface, and then both I and other people can later imbibe those symbols and transfer them back into thoughts. What the hell! This is incredible.

Numbers are also incredible. I tried to write some sentences about this but I couldn't figure out how. But iyknyk: numbers are rad.

I do not believe that in a million years I would have come up with either of these myself. Some previous human(s) had this incredible breakthrough that abstract concepts can be embodied in manipulable symbols, and then that system can be taught to other humans, and those humans' abilities in all kinds of spheres can be 100+x'ed as a result. Genuinely brilliant. I don't even know what to call them – cognitive technologies? They have changed my life forever, obviously, and I'm so deeply grateful for it. YOU ARE READING MY WORDS RIGHT NOW, WE ARE DOING THE THING.

Of course this leads me to wonder... are there any other things like this out there? Are there yet-uninvented or just not-yet-popularized symbolic/cognitive technologies that we might still benefit from? If you have ideas – specific or just "I think it might be this-shaped" – please let me know in the comments.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is something spacial/directional: maybe there's some better way to symbolically map space and direction that would make it easier for all of us to rotate the proverbial shapes? But I don't know what it would be, or even what shaped hole it fills.

2026-07-10 19:11:40

Every so often, someone will tell me I simply MUST read such-and-such, or HAVE TO visit someplace, or WILL LOVE a certain movie.

I hate this so much.

I can't tell how much it's just a cultural thing; I can't tell how much they think they're speaking hyperbolically, rather than literally commanding me to do something; I don't know how much any other people are bothered by this, or if this is unique to me.

But I hate it! Please stop.

2026-07-09 19:11:46

Perhaps if you grew up in Canada they taught you about this in history class, but it's brand new to me!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Daughters

Apparently in the 1600s, France had a severe gender imbalance in their efforts to colonize North America. 

In English speaking colonies, whole communities and families moved together– men, women and children--usually to escape religious persecution and create utopian communities without government oversight (the North) or to reinvent feudal farming communities (the South). 

In contrast, the French government was way more hands-on with their colonies, and New France was more of an economic effort than a social/utopian experiment. Most of the French colonists were young working men without wives or families.

So, for ten years (1663-1673), King Louis XIV sent about 800 penniless young women to New France, all expenses paid, with a completely new wardrobe, household linens, and dowry thrown in. This initial financial boost meant that the girls weren't prostitutes or servants, but rather free agents with the economic power to choose their own husbands. Because the King was providing their dowry, they were known as "The King's Daughters" which is a pretty cheeky nickname--a bit of a flex, a bit of a roast. 

The best part of reading this Wikipedia entry is scrolling the Famous Descendants section. In addition to some male ice hockey players and at least one canonized Catholic saint, these women passed their genetics on to:

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Angelina Jolie

MADONNA (!!!) 

Chloe Sevegne

Now I'm re-imagining the conversation:

ADVISOR: Your Majesty, we don't have enough women in the New World. 

KING: Easy fix, Paris is chock full of baddies. Go there and get me 800 of the hottest, smartest, hungriest girls you can find.

KING: Oh, and make sure they can absolutely kick someone's ass!" 

Yes, I knowwwww that the Notable Descendants section has a massive selection bias, but it's delightful to imagine a boatfull of healthy, strong 18-25 year-old Madonnas, Angelinas, Chloës and Hilarys. It's such drama! 

What kind of social instability and absolute havoc was going on in those ten years when 800 of them showed up? What were they thinking? What were they feeling? How much did they interact with First Nations women? Did they have any moral or intuitive scruples about colonization? What was it like to live in a world with very few older women? I'm sure there is some historical record answering these questions, but since I don't speak or read French, I will probably just enjoy wondering and not knowing. 

Thanks for Wikiing with me! :-) 

2026-07-08 21:44:47

Ever wondered how your namesake stock has been performing these last few years? Are you outperforming or, um, experiencing headwinds? Well, now you can find out.

[Cannot stress enough that this is a toy, I make no guarantees on the accuracy of this data, and this is not investment advice.]