2026-01-07 13:12:54

A known financial mistake to be penny-wise, but pound-foolish, that is to say frugal and discerning with small expenses but spendthrift on the big ones.

You might think it's therefore best to be penny-wise, pound-wise, and that could be what's best for your bank account, but it's an austere and joyless way to live for many of us.

I'd argue the most pleasant quadrant is actually penny-foolish, pound-wise. Being penny-foolish lets us benefit from our misplaced intuition to overvalue small immediate gains while still enjoying pound-wise financial security.^[1]

Blogs are filled with guides on pound-wisdom, which may go in a later post if you want my specific take.

So here's my guide to penny-foolishnesss, though a word of warning: ensure you're indeed pound-wise when doing this, lest you end up in the dreaded penny-foolish, pound-foolish quadrant!^[2]

1) Still enjoy coffee

A general heuristic could be to invert all out-of-touch financial advice, like "don't get avocado toast or coffee". These things often don't add up to much, but still feel expensive, perhaps even more so because of the scolding.

If you're really buying $5 coffees daily, get a drink subscription for typically $50/month or less from Pret, Panera, or oftentimes your local indie coffee shop (if you're the discerning type).

In fact, I don’t even usually drink coffee, but when I lived in London, I still got the Pret subscription and drank decaf. The immense feeling of luxury from having free (i.e., sunk-cost) coffee clubs across the city made it one of my best-ever lifestyle purchases (and I wouldn't shut up about it).

2) Buy the “nice” version of things

This can be a generally good financial habit, since these items often last longer and are more repairable, but in some cases, the ROI is unclear. Rather than deliberating, for smallish purchases, just go for it. Even if the item doesn't pay for itself, you get to enjoy higher quality the entire time, and the expense amortizes over a long time/many uses.

Examples: Nice leather shoes, Japanese nail clippers, good bedsheets. Some even include lifetime warranties: Darn Tough socks, Osprey bags.

Yes, sometimes you’ll buy “nice” things, and they’ll turn out not worth it, but that’s the whole point! You get the luxury of doing this and not really caring because it doesn’t add up to much.

3) Follow the “Magic of Tidying Up”

For clothes specifically, try to shoot for a small number of high-quality items you like and actually wear.

You can do this by making your closet a Move-to-Front self-organizing list: Whenever you return an item after laundering/wearing, put it back on one side of your wardrobe. Over time, all the regularly worn clothes will find themselves on one side and the less-used ones on the other. Then try to improve the types you wear and donate the others.

4) Get nice consumables

I use this toothpaste (with nano-hydroxyapatite) and Korean sunscreen that doesn’t burn if it gets in your eyes. Consumables have the benefit of being variable-cost (i.e., you pay for how much you use), so the buy-but-don’t-use scenario is capped.

5) Good produce (i.e., fruit, veg, nuts)

This, like the toothpaste, might be more like a health investment than a frivolous luxury, but even if it weren’t, the small cost would be worth the quality. When I say high-quality, I'm talking about stuff you’re more likely to eat rather than some comparative nutritiousness, as that probably dominates the health effects anyway.

If you want good produce and a good deal, ethnic stores/markets (in the US, usually Asian or Latin American) tend to offer the best combination.  Have an LLM help you pick out the good wares if you’re unfamiliar.

6) Discard stuff, knowing you can buy it again

If it's cheap, you can have another delivered to you in 48 hours. Yes, even stuff I possibly just misplaced, I sometimes buy again rather than continue looking for it.

This probably looks wasteful and consumerist, but consumer goods just aren't very carbon-intensive, at only ~0.167 kg CO2/$, while for example a flight is nearly 6x as much at ~0.976 kg CO2/$. A lifetime of wasteful small consumer purchases still likely releases less carbon than a few long-haul flights. Also, as shown below, you can easily mitigate the impact through donations:

7) Donate, rather than sell

Usually, you never actually get around to selling small stuff, and even if you do, arranging the transaction is a headache. Accept penny-foolishness and donate it. Donating used to be a chore, but with apps like Olio, you can more or less order a free pickup like it's Uber Eats. The app is strongly incentivized to prioritize donors over donatees, so the karma system enables donations at your total convenience.

8) Buy multiples of stuff you like

Multiples of stuff will really instill that feeling of mass-produced abundance in your bones.

• Toiletries for your travel bag
• Clothes you like: buy multiples for when they are in the laundry, wear out, the same thing in various colors, etc.
• Items for your not-too-expensive hobbies. E.g.: I have meditation cushions pretty much everywhere I visit, periodically, i.e., home, office, parents’ house, etc.
• For favored consumables with a long shelf life, buy them in bulk to instill a sense of limitless abundance. E.g: I buy Lao Gan Ma in 6-packs.

10) Find small instant-buys

• If it occurs to me that I may read a book, I immediately buy it (digital versions are particularly good for this, as they are cheaper and don't add to clutter).
• Single-payment mobile apps (i.e., not a subscription or DLC). The Apple App Store initially anchored consumers to a ridiculously low price for mobile software, and today you can still buy apps for single-digit prices.

11) Accept one-off ridiculous luxuries 

Occasionally, I'll buy something that seems ridiculous as a temporary item, but is still worth it for the temporary lifestyle upgrade.

• Once, when at a sublet without one, I bought a countertop dishwasher and just let the landlord keep it at the end. Seems crazy, but they are available for <$200, and dishwashers are far more environmentally-friendly than hand-washing.
• Similarly, I ordered a full-sized thermal printer, which I later similarly gave away. They are very compact, come with special paper, don't use ink, and at ~$50 are better than trying to find a library or print shop on those few occasions when you really need a printer.

12) Keep buffer money in your low-yield account

I know you're always supposed to have your money maximally work for you, but having some extra cash as a buffer removes the stress of worrying about specific balances at a low risk-adjusted cost. You'll have to know yourself here, as you could be tempted to spend this immediately; it might require a separate, annoying-to-access account.

Put a dollar value on your time

One of the most valuable perspectives in all this, and one that may even net you out ahead if done well, is to put a numerical value on your time.

If you are salaried, divide your salary by 2000 to get a rough estimate of your hourly rate, e.g. $70,000/year = $35/hour.

However, many time-use surveys show that workers spend a minority of their time on job duties, with only 39% being a typical figure. When you also consider the all-in cost for employees (i.e., benefits) as ~1.3x salary, the above figure could be ~3x too small!

So if your productive time is worth $100+/hour, go ahead and buy that dishwasher.

2026-01-05 19:03:53

There are some disagreements that are really about naming: the two parties could live and let live about the underlying substance, but one or both get very upset if the others claim a given name.

For example, some religious tensions are like this: some religions would be fine to live-and-let-live with Minority Y if they would "admit" that they're just an unrelated group with no true claim to be X-ian, but are adamantly anti-Y if Yers are claiming the label X.

Or take what is now the Republic of North Macedonia, whose applications to join NATO and the EU were stalled for a long time over a dispute about what name they could/couldn't claim, rather than about whether the-polity-this-name-points-at could be a member.

Personally I feel this way about American Cheese. It's not something I want to eat, but I could live-and-let-live if it came by a different name. But the fact that A.C. is identified as Cheese 1) makes my life much more difficult, because I get into complex negotiations at delis over whether something containing "cheese" actually contains cheese, and 2) just feels philosophically wrong.

To the extent that there's a lesson here, it's that maybe occasionally a fight can be solved very easily just by changing something's name. I doubt this is actually useful very often, because it would only be true in the case that one side cares passionately about the name and the other is completely unbothered, and in such a case it's unlikely it would have become a big deal in the first place. But if you realize you're in such a case and therefore fighting about nothing but names then voila, problem solved.

2025-12-31 21:33:02

One thing I think about a lot is which activities are actually much more dangerous than most people realize, and which (potentially) they wouldn't do as much if they realized the costs. I have five nominations: agility sports, airplanes/airports, skiing and snowboarding, cycling in cities, and international travel.

One reason I suspect people don't take these dangers seriously is that their own experiences seem too anecdotal. And I think there's potential mistakes on both sides here, i.e. you can trust your anecdotal experiences too much and too little. If you have one friend who got swallowed whole by a zoo-lion, that's probably not evidence that zoos are more dangerous than we think they are, that's just incredibly bad luck. But if it's happened to 3 different people in your network then it's probably time to notice and ask questions, even if the statistics say zoos are very safe overall.

The thing is, some of the dangers in your own personal life really wouldn't show up in national statistics. For example, the statistical probability that an American will be struck by lightening in their lifetime is 1-in-10k, but that risk is not evenly distributed. I live in a big city and I'm pretty sure that if lightning struck here it would hit a skyscraper long before it got to me. But if you live up a mountain and love hiking and have multiple friends who have gotten in near misses with Zeus' arrows, your personal risk is probably much higher and you should probably take that seriously.

One way I think about this is that I have a limited number of friends and relations, and if any specific injury or tragedy has happened to 3 or more people I know then it's probably a meaningful danger for People Like Me. Again, there's a lot of ways to overestimate your risks and I really don't want to encourage that – you're more likely to hear about your friend's cousin who spontaneously combusted than your other-friends' other-cousins who live quiet, desperate but uneventful lives. But I think some people over-index on statistical data to the point where they're ignoring the patterns in their own immediate experience.

Without further ado, here are my nominations: if you have more, please do leave them in the comments.

Agility Sports

I have long believed that any sport which requires quick changes of direction is far more dangerous than most of my friends acknowledge. I don't know a normal name for these so I'm going to call them Agility Sports, though maybe it should be Reflex Sports, or Plyometrics or something.

I think the main danger in these sports is that you'll twist, sprain or tear some part of your foot or leg and be unable to walk for a month or two: this is obviously not the worst thing in the world, but it's very inconvenient, and to me makes those sports not-worth-it overall. For example, bros-of-the-blog (gender-neutral) C and S recently invited me to play squash, and I greatly like the idea of playing squash with them, but I also like being able to walk, so I declined.

Most team sports have this property (e.g. soccer, basketball), but so do some individual sports that include sudden and uncontrolled movement. By contrast, weightlifting doesn't have any of this, and I suspect it's safer than people realize. But I'm not at all confident about how human bodies work, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that some kinds of strength training ultimately cause asymmetric development which ultimately leads to sprains/twists/tears.

Of course, not-exercising at all is dangerous in a different way, so I don't want to cause anyone to stop exercising completely. Experīmentum perīculōsum, iūdicium difficile.

Skiing and Snowboarding

I'm not sure I have to justify this one: I think everyone kinda-knows they're super dangerous, but people keep doing them anyway. I feel like they must be unbelievably fun for the amount of risk that people take on for them, it's got all the leg-tearingness of agility sports plus some additional risk of paralyzation or death.

Airplanes or Airports

No I don't mean for mortality, I know that air travel is safer than driving etc.

But almost-every time I travel by plane lately I catch a cold or something, and I've given up on pretending this is a coincidence. I remember being told that airplanes filter all the air continuously, so they're safer than not-airplanes for respiratory infections, so maybe I'm actually catching something in the airport rather than the airplane. Or maybe air travel just tires me out a lot, and weakens my immune system, and then I catch something afterwards as a result. I don't know, I just think something is going on here that is not being captured in any kind of statistics: generally, I sense that any kind of negative health outcome that does not lead to hospitalization doesn't get recorded, but cumulatively can be meaningful for your own personal decisions (e.g. train vs plane travel, or how much elective travel to do).

Cycling in Cities

One of my favourite people got hit by a car while cycling in a city and had their life changed forever, and frankly that was enough by itself to put me off city-cycling. After it happened I realised that I've had multiple friends who have had to go to hospital duty to city-biking accidents, though thankfully most of them were ok in the long run.

This one is tricky because all of the methods of transport in big cities have dangers, either inherent (like car accidents) or contingent (like safety concerns with walking or riding transit).

I'm specifically saying "city cycling" here because I think it has a different risk profile than cycling in the suburbs or countryside, I just don't know enough about the latter to say anything.

By the way: as I understand it, bike helmets have foam inside and once that foam has been impacted even once it will be condensed and no longer function if you're hit again, even if the helmet has no visible damage on the outside. So e.g. if you drop your bike helmet on the ground, it's no longer going to protect you correctly if heaven forbid you got in an accident.

International Travel

The book Plague Time claims that many chronic illnesses – heart disease, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, many forms of cancer – are not actually idiopathic but rather are caused by germs.

If this turned out to be true, I think one of the implications would be that travelling to exotic places is way more dangerous than we think it is. Basically, anywhere that you could pick up new and interesting germs, different from the ones you're already exposed to, would put you unknowingly at risk of a lifetime of chronic disease. Depending on the percentages, I think that might singlehandedly tip the balance on making certain kinds of elective foreign travel not-worth-it.

2025-12-29 21:23:49

This is supposedly the best book about getting a divorce.

I am extremely not-getting a divorce, but

1) I saw two uncorrelated references to it as a Best In Category book, which usually gets things onto my book-list regardless of what they are (e.g. this is also why I'm reading a book about Call Center Management).

2) I think we should all probably spend more time doing "disaster preparedness" like this? If you ever do get a divorce / go to hospital / get sued, you will suddenly be trying to learn about a complex Systems Problem at the exact same time that you're extremely stressed and emotionally fraught. And frankly, for most white collar professionals, these are higher-probability prepping situations than stockpiling food and water, but I know far more people who do the latter. (I think the food-and-water prepping is also worth it, though! Life hack if you're in America: find your nearest LDS home storage center).

3) I am (to reiterate) extremely not-getting divorced but I do get into various situations where someone is mad at me and I am mad or sad at them, and I want to do a better job of navigating those situations, and I suspect that a good divorce book would have useful lessons about this. I think one useful life-strategy in general is to get the "professional grade" version of things even though you're only using them at an amateur level, e.g. mountaineering jackets are going to be really water-and-windproof, and this is helpful to me even though the only mountains I go near are metaphorical. So I figured a divorce book might be helpful in dealing with other kinds of contentions.

Anyway, thoughts from this book:

• Divorce is a difficult problem because you have exactly 1 counterparty; if your counterparty is being uncooperative, you can't pick someone else to divorce instead, you just have to deal with it. Your entire option set is "stay together", "come to an agreement outside court," or "go to court and do whatever the judge mandates."
  
  I feel like a lot of the biggest problems I have in life are like this (to different degrees or over different timescales), they basically boil down to "there is only one counterparty and you can't work around them and if they want to make your life miserable then your life will be miserable": your ability to negotiate a good outcome is really harmed when there's one other party you must deal with, no matter how they behave. This can happen with next-door neighbors, family members, bosses/employees (on some time scale). But marriage has the extra element of a very restrictive legal contract that's ultimately backstopped by some un-appealable judgements from a judge.
  
• More generally: I feel like one of the most important truths to make peace with as an adult is that a sufficiently motivated person can (for some amount of time) ruin your life. I originally wanted to write they "can ruin your life, if they're willing to ruin their own", but I'm not even sure that's true: I think sometimes someone can ruin your life in their spare time and at no cost to themselves. And this genuinely fills me with horror, but maybe also I should be grateful that in practice most people don't do this, even thought they could?
  
  (Edit: I guess they can't exactly ruin your life, but they can create conditions that for many people will be all-consuming and miserable. Potentially if you're zen enough, you will be able to sing through it anyway; happiness independent of conditions, baby.)
  
• One of the big game-theory problems for this book is that lawyers are very expensive, so you should be willing to give your counterparty a generous share of your combined assets in order to avoid going to trial. I.e. it's better to concede 55% of your combined $X assets up front than to go to court and each get 50% of the $0.8X you have left after paying lawyers.
  
  However, if your counterparty knows you believe this they can squeeze you pretty hard – it's not exactly a slippery slope, it's not like they can escalate from 55% to 60% to 65% to 70%, you do always have the option of going to court once the expected value of the unfair split vs the trial outcome gets bad enough. But if your ex knows you've read this book, they could rationally demand a fairly unfair split in their favor, and know that you're likely to take it.
  
  I do think the ideal would be for your ex to think you're willing to go to court when actually you're willing to give them 60%, and I don't think this book really wrestles with the strategic implication of its advice. The author is right, you're STILL better off getting rinsed but saving your sanity!, but you're even better off saving your sanity without getting rinsed, if you can manage it. It's a classic surplus-division problem, and there's no good answer to figure out who gets how much of the surplus.
  
• One of the author's big contentions is.... don't try to teach your ex a lesson, no matter what they did to you, it's not going to happen and you need to accept that. Just Get This Done, as the title tells you, and move on.
  
  This feels so hard, in so many fallings-out I've had the thing I most desperately wanted was for the other party to just understand or even acknowledge my perspective, and it's genuinely painful to just have to walk away while the other person seemingly refuses to even see what I'm aggravated about.
  
  It's probably the right advice, I get that, but man is it hard in practice.
  
• In divorce, teaching your ex a lesson is double-stupid because divorce costs are paid out of shared marital assets, so you're actually paying for both of your lawyers, whether you like it or not.
  
• You should really, really be organized with all your documents (bank statements, wages, assets etc), it will make your life easier. Of course the implication here is that you should be organized with your documents all the time, so you don't have to do it retroactively. Man I hate this point but that's probably why I need to do it.
  
• Keep a diary: I am surprised how often this comes up in legal and quasi-legal situations, having a contemporaneous written journal seems to count for a lot. If you're ever in a situation of interpersonal dispute, start keeping an (unemotional) diary of what they said to you and when.
  
• The author talks a lot about the "meta case": not the legal case itself, but e.g. how the judge feels about you for extra-judicial reasons based on vibes and how you behave. He says his first boss would always ask (before all other questions about a case) "who's the opposing lawyer?" and then "who's the judge?"
  
  This is so uncomfortable to me. We want to believe in an impartial judicial system, right? This is one of the core principles of liberal democracy, right? And yet nobody behaves like this is actually true: people hire expensive lawyers and go judge-shopping (where possible) and behave in certain ways that (they think) will make the judge more sympathetic to them, none of which is consistent with The Majestic Equality of the Law.
  
  The author of this book presents this tension as "if the case is on the bubble, and you've been a jerk, that could nudge the judge to rule against you," but... I don't know, I think in practice it's much stronger than that. It's not "the meta case will make the difference if literally everything else is tied," it's more "the meta case makes a significant difference even in cases that aren't anywhere close to ties, it just violates our shared pretense to admit that."
  
  I feel like I'm breaking some kind of rule even by talking about this?
  
• Relatedly: a wise man once told me: "social factors dominate human interaction and what actually happened only matters in extreme cases." That is, 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.
  
  I really need to practice this. "If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and/or provoking you" is one of the most important life skills, and I'm not even really sure how to get more practice for it outside the bad moments when you need it most and also it's hardest to summon. Meditate more, I guess?
  
• When people ask my advice about writing books, I often tell them to spend inordinate time on designing the cover + picking the title: I suspect that 50%+ of your book's outcome will stem from the title and cover rather than the contents.
  
  In this case, I Just Want This Done is a banger title: it's emotionally resonant, clear and concise, it's not a phrase I'd actually heard before but it's immediately clear what it means, well done.
  
• You can't win a divorce, only lose less.
  
• It's clear that having you and your ex's lawyers being on good terms and communicating well is ideal. So maybe the ideal setup would be to collaborate on hiring sets of lawyers who have a history of working together: the author says he does this sometimes in Alternative Dispute Resolution setups, he recommends a copacetic lawyer to his client's ex and that makes the case go smoothly.
  
  But you could imagine how, for the client, this could get you in a situation where both lawyers are biased against you, if your ex or their lawyer are manipulating you.
  
  I don't know what to say exactly, principal-agent problems are ridiculously hard, you want your lawyers to fight the other set of lawyers iff it's worth fighting, and otherwise to get things done as collaboratively as possible. And it sounds like most often you want your lawyers to be conciliatory and not spend $10k of billable hours to solve a $5k problem, but you're not in a position to tell the difference and they are. Tricky!
  
• Re: kids, in many jurisdictions the term "custody" has been replaced with "parental responsibility", because "custody" sounded like jail. "Visitation" was replaced with "parenting time" for same reason. It's pretty funny to me that I've heard these terms for years and never made the connection, but now I see it....
  
• If you own a small business, the component of your business value that is "personal goodwill" belongs just to you, not to the company, and therefore isn't counted as a marital asset.
  
  This kind of makes sense to me – in lots of small businesses, the owner is the company, if she quits then the company's value would quickly round to nothing – but it feels like an interesting valuation problem.
  
• I feel like one problem with divorce law is that kids are treated as both obligations and assets? Like, often the outcome of a divorce is that the high-earning parent has to provide funds for the child-rearing parent to continue raising the child, which I think implicitly assumes that child-rearing is a burden that neither parent wants to do, but simultaneously in many cases I think both parents would prefer to have custody (sorry, I mean Parental Responsibility) whether or not they got paid for it? I don't know, this thought isn't fully baked, but I think there's something about how we do this currently that's kind of weird and maybe based on outdated assumptions.
  
• The author says that you shouldn't shout at your kids or use any kind of corporal punishment while the divorce proceedings are happening, even if that was normal during the marriage.
  
  I feel like this is pretty weird, when you think about it? Either it's ok to shout and smack children or it's not, why does the parents divorcing affect that?
  
  I think this actually gets at a fundamental tension in modern society, where we're societally ambivalent about whether kids are ultimately under the control of 1) their parents, 2) the government.
  
  For most of human history, I think, this just wouldn't have been a question, obviously kids were controlled by their parents, but recently the government is asserting itself more heavily, with more willingness to assert what parents can and cannot do with their own kids.
  
  So the resolution of this one is just "the government would like to ban all parents from shouting at or spanking their kids, but mostly it can't (so far), but during divorce cases they can, so they do."
  
• You legally can't retire / reduce your income in order to reduce your alimony. That is, if you have a high-paying job and you think to yourself "well, if my effective income from this job is now 1/3 lower, it's not really worth it to me, I'm going to quit and become a gardener / cook / acrobat like I always wanted to be," then the court will say.... no, you can't do that. Or rather, you still owe alimony as if you were working the high-paying job, so in the long run you can't afford to earn less.
  
  (The author says that reducing your income after a divorce is cutting off your nose to spite your face, because you're still keeping 2/3rds of your income. But idk, I think lots of people would change their jobs if it suddenly paid 1/3 less overnight, no spite required! Maybe that seems crazy when your income is millions of dollars a year, but also... maybe the crazy part is that people keep working for so long when they have so much money in the first place? Maybe the divorce is just a wake up call that they have enough money already, and also a wake up call about how they should have put more time into their relationships?)
  
  I don't know, I think I understand the motivation for this rule, but also... this is an incredible level of state intervention in people's life-choices that I don't think we would accept in other circumstances? Like, one of the things that liberal democracies say is bad about authoritarianisms is that in Those Places the government can command you to do a particular job whether you like it or not, and then... it turns out that, in our current liberal democracy, in at least one context the government can (approximately) command you to do a particular job whether you like it or not?
  
  An example I heard from outside this book is that air traffic controllers 1) make a lot of money, 2) don't really have skills transferable to any other high-paying job, 3) aren't allowed to do drugs, including some very normal medications, including some antidepressants. One guy got depressed about his divorce, started taking antidepressants, got fired from his air traffic control job, and then had to keep paying alimony as if he had the high-paying job which he was no longer eligible for, and the judge didn't believe him that he really had no way to earn as much money any more.
  
  My takeaway here is roughly "getting married is signing yourself up to lose some basic rights that you might not have thought about" – e.g. if you have kids, you can be compelled not to move outside a certain radius, so you're potentially giving up both freedom of work and freedom of location, in a legally-enforceable way.

So, there you go. Everything you hopefully won't need to know about getting a divorce. If you have other books I should add to my pile, let me know.

2025-12-27 00:45:03

Happy last days of 2025! Here's a review of the year in Blog, for those meta-interested in blogging.

By far our most popular post this year was 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties. A lot of you probably know that writing online is very power-lawed, but maybe not quite how extreme it is: I think Party Facts already has 1000x more views than our average post, and the gap will probably keep growing over time. Enormous thanks to our editor friend A., who "commissioned" it, and needs to give us more blogpost ideas since she's clearly better at it than we are.

Another highly-reacted post from this year was How Weird Do You All Want This Blog To Be?, which generated more direct comments and emails than anything else we've written, and generally made the blog feel worth doing again. Overall it's kind of shocking how much blogging feels like shouting into a void, so thank you to everyone who turned that void into more of a soiree.

We started this blog almost-exactly four years ago in order to share the good news about Monosodium Glutamate. I had read a bunch of people online claiming that if you blog consistently for a year or two you will naturally start to develop an audience and... I don't think that's actually true? We had a bunch of unfair advantages when starting this blog, a higher-than-average connectedness in the graph of existing successful bloggers, and I would still say that mostly our audience is staggeringly small because the audience for almost-any writing like this is staggeringly small: if people could see the actual reader numbers for various prestige magazines they would cry.

Towards the end of this year I got a few big benefits from the blog that might singlehandedly justify all the time that's gone into it: I met two exceptional teachers/guides who are helping me with two major areas of existence, and made one outstanding real-life friend, for which I'm exceedingly grateful. Someone once said that posting online is a complicated, indirect search function for finding people you resonate with, and I think I'm finally feeling that. But it's probably not restricted to posting, it's more like... making stuff and sharing it with the world is a search function for finding people you'll like.

I blog largely because I have too many thoughts in my head, and left to themselves they keep repeating themselves at me, and blogging lets me clear them out and make space for new thoughts to happen. I do feel like there's a certain magic to writing, and ways that it's uniquely good at letting you think through an argument, and review and re-edit and sharpen what you actually believe. (I think that seeing something in text that you don't really believe is viscerally uncomfortable, and you therefore have to delete it, and therefore help yourself understand what isn't true).

I also think there's a physical dimension to the glory of writing, that trying to structure your thoughts on a 2-D page is inherently Good, and that physically moving segments around helps you figure out which parts are most important, and which bits are pre-requisites for which other bits, and where there's actually massive gaps that you didn't notice while thinking because of the non-linearity of internal experience.

That said... blogging has taken up a vast amount of my time, and I can't honestly say if the opportunity cost was worth it. (Well: to the extent it keeps me out of trouble, maybe that goes the other way). I often suspect that there are some people who just love writing, but other people who love idea-wrangling and then just happen to end up path-dependently doing their idea-wrangling in writing. I think if I could make myself switch from blogging to video or audio I would be better off, and if you're thinking of blogging but feel like you could channel your thoughts through games or short-form videos instead, you might realistically be better off cultivating that.

Happy end of Q1 21C to all! And wishing you an excellent Q2.

2025-12-24 21:27:28

The "endowment effect" is the claim that people overvalue things they own relative to things they don't, even if they only just got the item and don't have any reason to be attached to it (or have inside information about it).

So: participants in an experiment are rewarded with a tchotchke, and then they're asked if they'd like to trade it for a different tchotchke, and they disproportionately choose to keep their first tchotchke, even though it was randomly assigned and the people assigned tchotchke-2 generally keep that one too.

I'm sure this finding isn't entirely true, but unlike many other social psych findings it feels genuinely plausible to me.

I think there's a kind of endowment effect for our own lives, and I think I have unusually little of it: I don't generally feel that my job/beliefs/experiences etc are better just because they're mine. (My blog readership, of course, is precious and unique and I would not trade it for anything).

I'm sure you could prove in 10 seconds that I do still have a large and irrational endowment on these things, but my sense is it's far less than other people's. If you also experience this, or experience the opposite, I'd be keen to hear more.

Here's a thing that bothers me greatly. If one person insists on spending 100 hours researching a topic before having an opinion about it, while another spends 1 hour, the low-research person will publish 100x more opinions.

And just on principle I think for any given topic there'd be far more people who have researched it for an hour (or less) than people who have researched it for 100.

So unless there's some gating on whose opinions get published, or some reason to assume that informed opinions would get more traction than uninformed ones, most of the opinions you read will be from people who know very little about the topic.

And note that this is fractal: even if you decide to only listen to (say) Harvard Trained Historians, there will still be far more published content by the Harvard Trained Historians With A Low Bar For Having An Opinion than from the ones who insist on researching a lot before opining.

This seems very bad.

Of all the convoluted pointless bureaucratic loopholes I jump through, one of the least important but most poignant is borrowing ebooks from the library. There's a digital file somewhere that has 0 marginal cost of reproduction, and me and a bunch of other people queue up to have access to it, and when it's my turn to borrow I have three weeks to read it (which usually expire before I get to it), while other people are needlessly excluded from reading at the same time, and all for... what? As I said, there are other more-important pretzels we tie ourselves in for legal fiction reasons, but this one is just so vivid as a pointless game we play to pretend that something is what it isn't.