2026-08-28 19:11:12
Look: I write this blog mainly to 1) meet interesting people, 2) get ideas out of my head so they'll stop bothering me, 3) get better at writing and thinking.
I don't charge money for the blog, and would far rather get your feedback than your money. So if you've appreciated the blog this month (I didn't say enjoyed!), I would love to get your feedback here.
2026-08-27 19:11:28
There's this piece of advice that gets bandied around a lot about how "nobody is thinking about you half as much as you think they are."
Rough idea being: don't worry so much, you imagine everyone is obsessed with your mistakes and quirks, but actually they're too busy being obsessed with their own mistakes and quirks.
I'm sure this is mostly right, but there is a flipside I encounter occasionally: sometimes, people will remember a small stray comment you made 12 years ago. Sometimes they loved it, sometimes they hated it, sometimes they misinterpreted it, often you've forgotten it.
I'm not sure what the right synthesis of these two facts is.
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