2026-06-05 19:11:09
I've been thinking lately about how many years I've spent reading things from the internet, and how few of them I remember. So I'm continuing a little series on Pieces Of Internet Writing That Have Actually Stuck With Me.
Next up: Tim Tebow Chronicles, by Jon Bois. (Heads up that a lot of this review is self-plagiarized from myself ~4 years ago).
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This is a weird one, in that 1) it stuck with me for form rather than content reasons, 2) it had blended in my mind with Bois' other sprawling internet-piece 17776, 3) I can't remember the content of either of them specifically, beyond a general sense that they're about a post-work future and people playing absurd continent-spanning games of neo-football, and 4) yet I still do think about them, and the project they embody, both for "what could writing on the internet look like, in all its damaged glory?" and also "what will we do with our time in a post-work future?", which are also related.
There's a story (that I have never fact-checked and yet assume is true) about how in the early days of television the producers just set up a camera and pointed it at people who were basically performing radio dramas. And then it took years for people to ask (and answer): what can we do on screen that's native to this medium, rather than importing the assumptions of the old medium, now that we're free of its constraints?
It's kind of crazy to me 1) how rarely internet writing is formally inventive, 2) how in practice people don't SEEM to want that very much?, and when writers/publishers bring out weird interesting formats readers generally aren't (I think) very interested?
Anyway. I'm in a weird spot where I'm writing about this as A Story I Still Think About, and I do think it's thematically relevant for the fast-approaching Lumière train of AI, and yet I can't exactly recommend reading it, unless you have a vast amount of time on your hands (appropriate to the theme) and/or are extremely interested in these particular topics. The Chronicles felt long, to me, and its thesis felt basically summarised by this short bit in the middle:
I always felt like I kind of related to Todd. He played football all his life, he had been there and done that. And now, he was just hanging around for no reason. The difference between us is that, you know, I eventually found a team that could use me. He just didn't.
Nothing will make you lonelier than not having purpose. Purpose is like gravity. All the friends and fans and everything? Without purpose, they're just floating there, the universe is like a big soup.
Basically, Bois is ambling towards a kind of David Chapman-esque philosophy: the games we play have meaning even though we create that meaning ourselves. See also:
There is no one to cheer us on in these final days. When we score our touchdown, there will be no scorekeeper. No one will see us score the grandest goal in the history of sports.
Volquez: But I guess this game isn't really about that, is it?
Tebow: I guess not.
Volquez: We're players, but we're also spectators to all this wonder. The cities, the valleys, the ancient crater. And these mountains. They're gorgeous.
And also:
You know, when I was younger, a lot of academics back home used to turn up their noses at sports. They were lowbrow wastes of time, they said. People were too obsessed with them. The unmissable insinuation being, of course, that they themselves were up to something more important.
We are small. We are nothing. We are such nothing that the universe does not acknowledge that we are even here, and it never will. Accept that. And now, stand on this line, and look at that quarterback, and drill the fuck out of him. Nothing you do will be more important, because nothing you do will be important.
It is quite well that we love sports. Because one day, sports will be the only adventures we have left. There will be nothing else to do, and for eternity.
Humans cannot endure in a future without problems. It's not in us. Sports invent problems as nothing else can.
My issue philosophically with The Tim Tebow Chronicles is (incidentally) the issue I had with the TV show The Good Place: they want to make claims about a world with no external arbiters, where meaning is meaningful even though it doesn't have any truly objective grounding. (Cf David Chapman again, who is trying to make this work in Meaningness, which I admire but also find very hard to read).
But this goal is incredibly, extremely, even-more-synonyms-for-very hard to do to anyone's satisfaction. So both Bois and the Good Place writers pull a kind of bait-and-switch, subbing in a series of external arbiters and escalating authority figures who can give the characters their Gold Stars For Being Good.
This is exactly the problem though: your philosophy claims that there is no external authority who can give you that gold star! The whole point is that we have to endow our own meaning!
I am bothered by this bait-and-switch, and hope I'm misunderstanding both authors/creators, but... if I'm misunderstanding them, I don't understand what I'm not understanding, etc.
2026-06-04 19:11:38
Is This Anything? was a long running series I did on this blog, and I guess I'm now reviving. It's named after the thing standup comics say when testing out new, rough material. Arguably most of the blog is already that, but this is even more so.
I have what's best described as a destructive but passionate on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter. A lot of people like to talk about Twitter as a "hellsite" that they hate (but keep using?) and I'm like: no, my problem is exactly that I love going on Twitter, it hacks my brain and is bad for me, but I obviously love being there.
I'm currently in yet-another attempt to get away from it by using a site-blocking extension which allows you to set rules like "do not let me on this site more than 10 mins out of every 30" or whatever. Unfortunately, it turns out "10 mins out of every 30" is not a good rule for me: it somehow makes the behaviour more addictive, I guess because it has this kind of intermittent variable rewards property where sometimes I log on and I'm allowed to read it, and sometimes I log on and I'm not, and sometimes the site blocks while I'm using it, but I also know it's only ~20 mins till I can get back on. This is all really bad honestly, and while I haven't tracked this accurately at all I worry it's making me use Twitter more on net than I was before. Can anybody help, please?
Most airport restaurants (famously) suck, but Atlanta airport has bizarrely many 4.9* rated outlets, include multiple reviews saying (approximately) "this restaurant would be great anywhere, to find it in an airport is basically a miracle." I'm planning to investigate this but if any of you know the reason already please tell me why.
[in other words: what's the deal with airport food?]
When is it true or not that the hardest part is getting started, so just do SOMETHING to get the ball rolling? I sometimes want to suggest that people who are procrastinating/avoiding something take literally any action in a relevant direction, because doing anything will get you started and you can go from there. But I'm not sure this is true in general, sometimes you're avoiding/procrastinating for good reason (as I have learned the hard way), and so taking a random action might not be a good idea. E.g. someone has been deliberating for a while between different career paths and as a result is not getting anywhere, part of me wants to say ok let me help you put in a job application, what's the easiest application we can do?, it doesn't matter which because you just need to get that ball rolling. But I'm not sure that's always true, or how you'd predict when it is/isn't true.
Sometimes when people talk at me I find myself thinking – I'm sorry – either you think I'm stupid or you are stupid. Do any of you have this experience? Is there any way to figure out which?
2026-06-03 19:11:51
Do you want to be in a Fermi Estimates club with me? Reply to this email.
I'm really not sure at this point which ideas from behavioral economics are actually true, and which are just specious. But if the idea of endowment effects is real (and broadly applicable), much of the advice in the world is wrong.
"Endowment Effects" is the idea that we value something more because its ours. The classic experiment is to give one person a pen and another person a mug, and ask them if they want to swap. Supposedly, almost-nobody ever wants to swap, even though they were randomly allocated either a pen or a mug, and the only reason they should consistently value their thing more is because it is theirs.
But this effect would (I think) trouble a lot of common advice. E.g. "it's not the winning that counts, it's taking part" – in most competitions, most people lose and few people win. If endowment effects make us (over)value what we have, possibly winning does count, but the rest of us trick ourselves into believing that the participation trophy we have is as good as the winner's trophy we lack. And this applies to any domain where few people do X, and the advice-givers are likely to be from among the many who didn't. It doesn't require that anyone be lying or (as the kids say) coping, just that they're irrationally attached to the thing they have.
2026-06-02 19:11:20
One of my favourite words is deliberate: I long to live more of my life deliberately.
E.g. I'm fascinated by the coffee hobbyist community. People like James Hoffman make these wildly specific, wildly popular videos dialling in every element of the coffee-making process: how many grams of beans, how small should you grind them? How many grams of water, and at what temperature? Along the way he blind-tastes the results of all these tiny experiments and figures out which procedure gives the best coffee outcome.
I don't personally have sufficiently specific coffee taste to do this myself – if a cup of coffee is Good Enough that's good enough for me. But it's important to note the spillover benefits from the coffee hobby community to myself: their optimization of the 100% perfect coffee makes my 80/20 coffee miles better. I can easily buy high-quality beans now because other people care a lot about getting the best beans, and I can easily buy a $35 dripper that makes really good coffee and is extremely forgiving of half-assed preparation methods, all because somebody else cared to live deliberately.
Similarly, one of the great transformations of my understanding of cooking was when some combination of Samin Nosrat and my famous coblogger Jehan showed me how to cook deliberately: you make a thing, then add salt, then taste, then add more, then taste, then add more, etc. Then maybe you can write down what you did, and next time you cook the same dish you can pay attention to what you're doing differently, and slowly stumble towards a more perfect bouillon.
A non-deliberate chef might implicitly run 1 or even 0 experiments each time they cook, while a deliberate chef is effectively running 10 or more, and noticing the results. Over the course of a year that's thousands more pieces of feedback, which often compound and combine, and (at least for me) the upshot is both tastier food and a more immersive, enjoyable experience of cooking it.
So far I've been talking about deliberate in a kind of analytically-minded continuous-improvement way that I know not all of you love. But as some of you will already have noticed, I stole the phrase from the transcendant Henry David Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.
As is too often the case, I have not in fact read Thoreau past a few great quotes, although I did visit Walden Pond and had a lovely time there. But what I like about deliberate is that you can live deliberately in an intuitive way, as well as an analytic one. If you'll forgive me a second quote from a person I haven't read properly, but who influenced me a lot anyhow, the poet-politician (not a coincidence) Aime Cesaire once wrote: Above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator. Because life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.
Ironically – or cosmically-fittingly – deliberate [adj] contains its own downfall, deliberate [verb]: you can deliberate your way out of doing anything at all, deliberate or otherwise.
2026-06-01 19:11:27
As a policy, I don't "name names" on this blog. If I'm speaking about anyone negatively (or in a way that might be perceived as negative), I will generally refer to them in an abstracted and anonymzed form. The reason is basically just a cost-benefit analysis, and here's how it works:
My sense is that there is a high fixed cost to ever criticizing someone by name: if it reaches them or their fans, they are likely to be annoyed. There's also some variable costs, because e.g. if you keep criticizing someone over time then it's more likely to reach them, but my sense is that most of the cost comes as a high fixed cost for the first time you make the criticism.
Meanwhile, I think the benefits of "naming names" are mostly small and cumulative. I don't think most readers will notice or remember a throwaway critique, or weight it very heavily in future, unless you either write a long and detailed takedown or ceterum censeo at every opportunity.
As a result, I think the balance of cost/benefits as a writer stack heavily towards only naming names for criticisms if it's a person or group you're really serious about criticizing, and intend to criticize repeatedly over time. If you're just mentioning in passing someone or something that has annoyed you, I don't think it's in your interests as a writer to name them, even if not-naming makes your writing a little less clear and punchy as a result.
I'm not sure how I feel about this from a civic-minded perspective, maybe the world is worse because most people aren't willing to call out most other people because the benefits are diffuse and go to other people, and the costs are concentrated and go to you. But so it goes, if this is a collective action problem then I guess I'm part of the problem.
Incidentally, I think this is why there are swarms of Culture War writers who spend all their time critiquing The Opposition: they were already not going to be friends with the opposition, and already don't care if the opposition's fans are mad at them, and having paid the cost of engaging the bear it makes sense for them to keep poking that bear ad infinitum. Examples of people who do this and who are i.m.o. bad include [lol of course I'm not going to name them].
2026-05-29 19:11:48
I've been reading the internet for more than a decade now, and most of it has washed over me like Tagore's wings. So I'm writing some reviews of pieces that stuck with me.
Elizabeth Newcamp
Like me, you may have long assumed that reality TV shows were not exact descriptions of reality. Still, I thought this was just at the level of selective editing and choice of focus.
In fact, reality TV is not just faker than I imagined, it's faker than I could imagine. As two-time House Hunters participant Elizabeth Newcamp writes:
The first thing you need to know is that in neither episode of House Hunters were Jeff and I actually … house hunting. One time we’d already closed on the house we “chose” in the episode; the other time we’d already lived in our house for a year.
That is, the whole show was filmed as if the couple were looking at options of houses to move into, but they were already living in one of the houses, so (obviously) everything else in the show was unbelievably fake. For example:
The part that really matters, though, is that the interpersonal elements are also, equally fake. "These shows are looking for conflict, so it’s important to be ready to fight a little with your spouse." The producers and participants collaborate on a "storyline", in this case about the wife's overwhelming need for a bathtub. "At the producers’ urging... I hopped into available tubs to try them out and lamented through entire house tours about how I would live, with three kids no less, without a bathtub."
Remember, they already have a home, that they're living in, with a bathtub.
This, of course, has actual consequences. Of course her husband got excoriated on Twitter for "not letting his pregnant wife have the house she wanted;" meanwhile, the writer "was once recognized by a lovely American couple in an airport in Budapest as the “Crazy Bathtub Lady”"
House Hunters itself maybe doesn't matter per se, but reality TV seems to significantly shape our culture, influence how people think about human relationships, and launch certain characters to superstardom. So I think it matters that it's not, in fact, real.
Whenever I see reality TV now, and feel how intensely I feel love/hate/annoyance at certain characters, I try to remember that everything I'm watching is being manipulated far beyond any degree I would have thought acceptable. This makes me kinda sad, and mad, because these people will come back to the real world and be accosted by strangers over stuff they didn't really do.