2026-05-20 19:11:25

A few times in my life, I've made decisions that had a feeling of extreme preordaindness: I met a person and felt I already know you, or had a choice to make and felt like I didn't really have a choice to make, the die had already been cast long ago.

There are many reasonable explanations for this phenomenon, but I want to proffer a somewhat unreasonable one.

People always say that, when you die, your life flashes before your eyes: you experience it all again, at least the highlights, at least briefly. Sometimes I like to believe (or symbolically believe) that the life I'm living now is actually just a playback of a life already lived.

In much the way that our dreams are not quite as 3D as our actual lives,[^1] I suspect that the implication here is that the beings whose lives we are replaying are higher dimensional than we are, having richer and denser experiences of which this life is just a projection. Much of the detail comes as a surprise, still, but some of the core facts of your life are so overwhelming that you recognize them as they approach you. Oh, you think: this is her. This is it. This is it.

[^1]: I don't think my dreams are 2D, exactly? But they're somehow... flatter than my real life? At least how I remember them, though I'm never sure how much the waking-me is accurately remembering the dream-me's experiences.

2026-05-19 19:11:00

A wise friend of mine once told me: if you're not happy with how your life is going, think about changing one of these things: who you're with, where you live, or what you do for work.

I'm no expert on living happily but I think this was good advice. And also that I think it can be non-obvious which of these are making you unhappy: e.g. you think you hate your job, but really you just hate your city, and if you moved elsewhere you'd find the same job pleasant.

2026-05-18 19:11:27

Paul Grice was a philosopher of language whose Maxims of Conversation I find myself wanting to reference fairly often. It's not that I think they're correct in a deep sense (more on that later), but I do think they're extremely useful touchpoints, and I wish everyone knew them so I could quickly reference them.

The idea is that most people will usually obey these four norms in conversation, and will generally expect (subconsciously) that you are following the norms too. They are (paraphrased):

• People will try to be relevant to the thing said before (the maxim of relation).
• People will to speak as clearly, as briefly, and as orderly as possible (the maxim of manner).
• People will try to give as much information as needed, but not more (the maxim of quantity).
• People will try to say true things, and not to say false or unsupported things (the maxim of quality).

Again, I don't think these are good as Rules You Must Follow In Every Conversation, or that they universally describe what people actually do.

But I do think they're a reasonable description of what many people are doing in many kinds of conversations, and a reasonable baseline for what you can assume many other people will assume you're doing when you're conversing, such that it's useful to know them and useful to signal when you're planning to deviate from them. Like conventions of a literary genre, it's fine to rebel against the expectations, but that's very different from just not-knowing them.

So, for example: in general, people will assume that the next thing you say in a conversation will be directly related to the last thing spoken by the last person who spoke. Different people have different thresholds of relevance, which is already a good thing to be aware of. But if you have a very low relevance threshold, and you're launching into a story that's only tangentially relevant to what came before, you should be aware that the whole time you're saying it the listeners are liable to be trying to figure out why you're telling this story and how it connects to what was said previously, creating large cognitive overhead for them.

It's a little like when GoogleMaps keeps re-routing as you drive in the opposite direction that it thought you were going in, constantly spending its brainpower on figuring out how you could possibly get from where you are to where you said you're going, when actually you just weren't going where it thought any more. So it's polite – if you're going to say something not-super-relevant – to flag that explicitly, so people aren't left trying to connect the dots that aren't actually there.

2026-05-17 21:29:07

I had a lot of great questions and comments on last week's widget showing how unrepresentative we all are of the broader population.

E.g. several people asked me what the most common combination was, and exactly how common it is. And friend of the blog L. asked if the results were largely driven by age, and at the time I didn't have an answer to that.

So today I made an Explorer tool that lets you poke at the data more easily and see how rare various combos of answers are. E.g. If you're less-than-certain in the existence of God, think same-sex relationships are totally ok, and have a bachelor's degree (or higher), you're in a 1-in-6 minority among Americans as a whole. But I suspect you're much more common than that among this blog's readership, and that you're likely to be in an overwhelming majority among your own friend-group. And I truly think national politics gets distorted in part by people thinking their own views and traits are far more common than they really are, and I hope this tool can help us collectively train our intuitions on just how weird we actually are. Happy exploring, let me know what you discover!

2026-05-15 19:11:06

Obviously it depends on the type of presentation, but here's what I currently do for my talks:

Slides should only have images and headlines, not reading-text. People will naturally read whatever text is on a big screen, and they will not listen to you while reading the text, so anything more than ~5 words on a slide is going to kill the mood in the room while people read your slide instead of paying attention to you.

Put timestamps in your presentation notes. Decide in advance how long your presentation should be, time yourself giving the talk beforehand (multiple times), and put timestamps in your notes e.g. [2:00], [3:00], [4:00] at the relevant spots in the slides.

The point is not too hit those marks on the day– you will inevitably talk slower or faster at times, start late, get on a tangent, skip a slide, whatever. The point is to know how you're running relative to standard, like the pacers in a marathon, and then know when you need to slow down / speed up accordingly.

Don't panic. Like parties (and babies), audiences react to your stress. Put serious attention into feeling relaxed so that the audience feels relaxed with you. Also, the audience has no idea what you were planning to say, so it's far better to skip a section or fudge something but stay calm than to stress the audience out by spending a bunch of time backtracking.

This is also important in case of tech issues, which are legion. Whatever happens, just smile and roll with it. On that note:

Set a person in the audience who will tell you if something bad is happening technologically, and assume otherwise everything's fine. It's bad if the speaker is inaudible, but it's also bad if the speaker keeps stopping to ask "can everyone hear me?," or gets flustered about the fact that they think people can't hear them.

Microphone and speaker technology are weird, as professional musicians know. I once gave a talk where, due to the audio setup, I was hearing myself echo on every word; I briefly thought about stopping the talk to check about that, but that's exactly the kind of stressed-out behaviour that stresses audiences. And when I asked my friends afterwards they had no idea what I was talking about it, it was just an issue for the speakers on stage.

It turns out the solution to all of this is to have ONE person (in the audience, or running the talk) who has solemnly sworn they will give you a signal if there are any issues, then you as speaker assume there are no issues until told otherwise. Thanks to the excellent NerdNite for showing me how this works.

Practice a ton, to the point where you've given the entire talk multiple times in full before you're doing it live for an audience. I'm repeating this one because it's probably the most important.

In some sense I feel like "practice a lot" is obvious but I also see a lot of people not-doing it, and I'm not sure I fully internalised how much you need to do it until Friend-of-the-blog N. gave me advice before a talk once.

For my most recent talk, I downloaded the screen recording software OBS and did four full run-throughs of the talk in the week leading up to it. I didn't watch all those recordings in full, but it was super helpful both in terms of helping me feel calm with the material and in terms of figuring out the structure and timing of the talk.

I think there's all kinds of cope that people tell themselves about being "better when improvising" or whatever, but I mostly think we wish that were true because practicing is annoying and hard. I do think that talks benefit from some live flexibility – I wouldn't want to watch someone recite a talk word-for-word from memory – but realistically you're going to be a better Flexible Improviser if you've got a really solid foundation first. So have a clear plan for your talk and get to the point where you can do that version unhesitatingly, even if you later deviate from your plan on the day.

2026-05-14 19:11:45

In my life I have struggled mightily to find situations that allows me to spend my time working at 95-105% of my sustainable long-term capacity.

I have had situations where I worked at 120% of my sustainable long-term capacity, and burnt out.

I have had situations where I worked at 20-50% of my sustainable long-term capacity, and was bored.

Where do I find the situations that lets me work hard but not unreasonably hard? Why is this so hard to find?