2026-02-02 19:46:05
Many years ago, I had a friend who was extremely kind, generous, gregarious, interesting... and seemed to annoy a lot of other people we knew. I remember being stumped why she wasn't more popular: I couldn't really point at anything she was doing wrong, and so many things she was doing right.
Eventually I had the thought maybe she's trying too hard? – there was always a sense that she WANTED everyone to have a good time, too, that she needed you to enjoy yourself as much as she was.
I think that was the right direction, but one step short. Like a lot of my favourite people, and a lot of the people I know who are not as universally beloved as they should be, I think she was stressing people out.
There's a lot of different ways to stress people out. Certainly one of them is "being needy", which is unfortunate, because a lot of people are e.g. genuinely feeling anxiety, and asking for reassurance for that anxiety, and in the process self-fulfilling their anxieties.
Meanwhile, people who have status and power and popularity in a given social circle will inevitably find it easier to be relaxed and at-ease in that circle. What can I say? To those who have much, more will be given.
I am under no illusions that merely realising "you might be stressing people out" is enough to be able to tackle it: as mentioned, some amount of your ease-of-being is a hard-to-fake signal of how you're feeling. You cannot un-stress yourself by stressing about it.
But I do think that try not to stress people out is a specific instruction that you can try out in social situations, with different implications than other possibilities you could try. I have written before that parties are like babies, and that if you're stressed while holding them they will get stressed too. But I actually think every social situation is like this (approximately), and if you think in conversations my job is to be at ease rather than my job is to be interesting, you will likely get more of both? [Edit: or my job is to have fun, or some other instruction that suits your personality!]
How do you be at ease? Some things to try are:
2026-01-30 19:46:54
Last year I tried a product called MathAcademy that I really wanted to like. I was recently reminded of a review I tweeted about it, and I wanted to have a canonical version of that review on my blog as well. But please be warned that this is almost-certainly not-interesting unless you're very interested in math education.
MathAcademy: if you read this and are willing to let me use your product to learn in what you consider a slightly sub-optimal way, please let me know, I'd be delighted! I truly think you're onto a great thing and are needlessly limiting people's ability to learn from it.
Anyone else reading this who might have an in at MathAcademy and can help me do the same, ditto!
MathAcademy was one of the weirdest product experiences of my life. In short: I think they have an amazing product, but they're very opinionated about how you use it, and as a result I can't use it at all, which makes it worse for me than a worse product I could actually use.
Basically: the MathAcademy team have figured out some really smart things about how learning works, such as interweaving small units of different topics in order to help you REALLY learn (and remember) new material – they contrast this with traditional homework assignments where you do the exact same problem 100 times, to the point where you're doing it by rote that day, but then can't remember a thing a week later.
I think this is extremely true and insightful, and if I'd had this product in high school when I *had* to study a fixed curriculum I'm sure I would have learned it much faster and better.
But as a result of this philosophy, their product is super prescriptive about which topics you can study and in what order, and unskippably forces you to study the units they say in the order they've decided is best for your long-term learning (assuming a fixed curriculum).
I sort-of understand the part about forcing you to take certain units in a certain order, because of e.g. the aforementioned educational benefits of interweaving material. Sometimes there's a tradeoff between enjoyment and learning (see, e.g., DuoLingo), and I get that on some level I'm "hiring" MathAcademy to force me to keep doing the hard parts as well as the fun ones.
What I don't understand is why MathAcademy is fixated on the "fixed curriculum" part. I hated calc in college, and loved linear algebra, so I was was super excited to re-learn LA and signed up for the relevant course. When I got to the course.... I had a few days of a really fun experience, putting in an hour a day and having a great time, until suddenly my entire "next units" became unskippable trig/calc/etc, as far into the future as the site would let me see.
After several rounds of emails with the (very nice and responsive!) team there, begging them to let me study the LA I signed up for, they confirmed that this was just fundamentally their philosophy and that I had to do it their way.
The most frustrating part for me is that – among many cool things they've done! – they've built these beautiful DAGs of every unit and every dependency within each course. Therefore, more than any other educational provider that I know of, they actually do know exactly which units within a course require which other units as pre-req. So, if they wanted to, MathAcademy could grey out any areas of the Linear Algebra course that require a given unit of calc/trig, and just let me study the rest. Who knows, maybe that would even motivate me to go back and study more trig or calc!
But since I'm literally not allowed to progress at all until I do a seemingly-endless stream of trig/calc pre-reqs – and with literally 0 of the material I'm actually interested in to keep me interested – I'm very sadly giving up.
It all seems bananas. They insisted by email that they were only giving me the pre-reqs that were absolutely necessary for the course I was taking, but again: who says I want to study the whole course as they construed it? I wondered aloud to them if their product was designed for high-schoolers who HAVE to take a fixed curriculum, and if my use-case was outside their scope, but they said that actually most of their customers are adults like me learning for fun or work-interest. In that case, why does it matter whether someone wants to study the whole of "MathAcademy Linear Algebra" or just some subset?
What can I say? I suppose if I were sufficiently motivated I would just go back and learn everything they told me to before studying the thing I want to, but it's hard enough to find time/energy for independent study as an adult and this was just too far for me. Presumably there are people out there who are even more dedicated than I am, but surely just wanting to take linear algebra as an adult puts you in the 99th percentile for this, and enough to be worth supporting?
(As AI has improved significantly since I took this course, I have seriously considered just cheating: going back to MathAcademy and getting an AI to do the units I don't want to do so I can do the units I want to. But I don't have the energy to cheat a system into letting me learn maths, I'm sorry).
I do want to stress: I think a strange thing happens sometimes when someone makes a product, and someone else says "I wish you'd made a different product!", and the producer just thinks "ok, that's nice for you, but I made the thing I wanted to make." I'm not under the illusion that MathAcademy owes me anything, they have every right to make this amazing product and then lock it away from me as they have done. I am sad about all the above, because they want people to learn maths and I want to learn maths from them, and the current situation seems needlessly wasteful to me. But I'm sad about it not mad about it, they do not owe me anything.
I would still recommend MathAcademy to an interested high-schooler who has no choice but to learn all of these topics anyway: with the (strong) caveat that I never got far enough with MathAcademy to learn any new material, rather than re-learn things I once knew, it definitely feels like they've figured out smart things about teaching and learning.
But if you're an adult in similar shoes to mine, I would sadly advise staying away. I've never seen such a clear example of an organization letting the "perfect" (by their own lights, but not by mine!) be the enemy of the good, or of people who've figured out so much about the pedagogy and yet missed such a huge amount about human psychology: instead of learning slightly sub-optimally, I'm now learning nothing at all.
2026-01-28 19:49:17
Something that's bothered me for a long time is Thinkfluencers advertising their life philosophy like so:
1) I used to be very unhappy
2) then I discovered the wonderful Method X
3) I started started lecturing and writing about Method X
4) now I am happy
Basically, the message of these books is always you, too, should try Method X. But I think that's just a confounder. These people have 1) found a shared community with other adherents, 2) get to lecture other people about what they do with their life, thus validating their life choices, 3) sometimes also become rich/famous/successful.
I suspect that what makes people happy is finding community + having other people listen to your opinions. (If there's one thing that watching billionaires spend their times spouting opinions on twitter has taught me, it's that for some section of the population Having People Listen To My Opinions is the no 1 most pleasurable thing you can do with all the wealth and power in the world).
The specific Method is actually just a macguffin, it doesn't matter what it is or does. As a corollary, if you just sit at home and follow the method without being part of a community or having people listen to you, you will get ~0 of the benefits.
Obviously there's situations where this wouldn't hold: notably, if you start following a method privately and it really changes your life and you only later start writing/talking/etc about it. But I think that in most cases the adoption and the popularity are intertwined: most thinkfluencer books I see are full of "in one of my lectures, an audience member said..." YES! You have an audience, that feels amazing, that is why you are happy. What particular sermons you preach to that audience doesn't matter, you could tell them the opposite thing and you'd still be happy, because people are listening to you.
2026-01-26 19:08:14
The big benefit of having money in life is not getting a bigger apartment or nicer clothes or fancy restaurant meals, although those things are truly lovely; it's that when a disaster strikes you can spend whatever money it costs to fight it without constantly worrying about the cost.
The big benefit of being organized is not the day-to-day value of having all your emails answered and resting easy that your taxes are done in January, though those things are valuable; it's that when the great catastrophe of your life strikes, you'll have the systems in place to stay on top of it (and also, will have more capacity because you don't still need to finish your taxes).
The big benefit of cultivating equanimity is not being happier and calmer in everyday life, though I'm sure that's delightful; it's that when the moment is brought to a crisis, you are not.
When daily life is bobbing along, as it usually is, it's incredibly hard to keep these things in mind. It's weirdly difficult to keep showing up to the literal and metaphorical gyms of life – the exercises and practices to get better at being good – because even though the day-to-day benefits are clear and meaningful, they're somehow not motivating enough to keep us putting the work in.
But I think this is a mistake.
The reason to get good is not that you need to be good day-to-day; the reason to get good is that when you need to be good, you'll need it badly and you'll need it yesterday.
2026-01-23 19:47:37
I'm James, a friend of Uri's and a recurring guest on the ATVBT blog.
The Mundanity of Excellence. Excellence is a product of different kinds of work rather than different levels of effort. Technique (how things are done), discipline (doing things correctly, consistently), and attitude (how things are approached) are the things to focus on. “What we call talent is no more than a projected reification of particular things done: hands placed correctly in the water, turns crisply executed, a head held high rather than low in the water.”
“Those of us who retain grand ambitions and high ideals are perhaps to liable to become Casaubonnish, to become like Lydgate, so preoccupied with the dreams of youth and so stung with the perpetual sense of failure as we became assimilated to our lives, that we forgot to do the good that we can do in the time we have to do it in.” — Henry Oliver on Middlemarch
Georgia is losing its southern drawl. One of my favorite things about attending the University of North Carolina was learning the subtle differences between North Carolina accents, to the point where I could place where you went to high school by how you spoke. They were beautiful and unique.
“Just slap something on it” — Vincent van Gogh
It should be easier to send gifts to a person having only their phone number.
“If you get mad you will be seen as losing almost-every argument, regardless of what the other person did that led to you getting mad, again excepting really extreme and explicit evidence.” — Uri. I should be forced to reread this once a month.
Just 13% of Gen Z believes that most people can be trusted — Ryan Burge. Surely at some point this has to rebound?
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” is the best selling single of all time, which I learned at a BP gas station video ad of all places and confirmed via Wikipedia.
The second fastest growing sector in America between 2019 and 2024 was gambling — Matt Stoller
2026-01-21 19:59:08
h/t friend-of-the-blog and ultimate thing-knower Walt
This is probably the best that a non-fiction book can plausibly be: accurate, engaging, great metaphors, the jokes are actually funny. It's even short – or rather, it's unpadded, it says what it means without pointless repetition or digression – which is unheard of.
I'm still not sure that books are the right format for this kind of habit-formation information. What I need is (like the author) to be part of a 2 month sleep study where somebody forces me to go to bed at a consistent time, and then experience the benefits, and then (miraculously) keep doing it for the rest of my life, instead of slowly forgetting about it. That or join a monastery/cult/institution where we all go to bed at 8pm and they turn off the wifi and tell me God will be sad if I don't go to bed on time.
But failing those things, maybe a (very repetitive) podcast or something would be better than a book? I basically need the author to keep repeating these same ideas at me in mildly-varied form until they become part of my identity, and a book doesn't seem like the best way to do that. (I still do recommend the book, obviously, given the actually-available options).
The core argument of this book is that you should focus not only about how many hours you sleep on average but about your sleep rhythm, your sleep groove. To be rested and happy you wanna get in a good groove like a water-fountain on a swingset. (That metaphor will make sense to you after you read the book)
Branded as fictional nonfiction, which seems right: the author is basically using the pretense of fiction to explore ideas 1) without committing to a point of view, and/or 2) that he doesn't think he can talk about in public.
h/t KL, blog-friend extraordinaire
So look: this is one of the most impressive novels I've ever read. I genuinely couldn't stop reading it, I was lucky I started over Christmas because I probably did 30 hours of reading in about 5 days, at the cost of many other activities.
At the same time, I found it ~50% longer than (I thought) it needed to be, so for much of that time I was simultaneously grippingly compelled to read and not-enjoying the reading.
I think you could make the argument that the length is thematically meaningful – this is one of those rare books where the structure of the book exemplifies the argument it makes, and you wouldn't fully get that experience if the book were shorter – but man I wish there were a significantly abridged version of this book so that I could wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.
Also! This novel incidentally contains the best explanation of scientific research methods, the difficulties of recruiting good research participants, and the hazards of interview-based research that I've ever read – this isn't a huge part of the book so if you're reading just for that you'll be disappointed, but if you're into such things then you'll incidentally enjoy it and be like "oh wow yeah this author totally gets it, if more scientists were like her we could have avoided part of the replication crisis."
p.s. other examples of writing that exemplifies itself: Three Uses Of The Knife by David Mamet, A Simple Way To Create Suspense by Lee Childs, what else?