2025-12-09 22:17:27

Published on December 9, 2025 2:17 PM GMT

It is equipped with heat sources of various kinds, heat-resistant containers, a hob to evacuate toxic gas, instruments to manipulate reactive material adapted to different textures, measuring equipment, and, importantly, a stock of reactants, complex organic compounds that get restocked regularly and stored at cold temperatures to preserve their purity.

Over the course of a lifetime, we train to become better chemists. We get to discover surprising ingredient combinations. How weird it is that pears pair well with blue cheese! We learn the physics of heat when we have the great idea of adding water to a pan about to burn to stabilize its temperature at the point of ebullition. When making pizza dough, we interact with a practical application of polymer science. Through knitting and hydration, glutenin molecules bind to one another, forming chains in a molecular network.

The lab can also host biology experiments. When making a sourdough starter, we apply a selection pressure over weeks, sometimes years, to domesticate a diverse ecosystem of yeast and bacteria. The species adapts to the context in which they are raised: the humidity level, the flour, and the temperature of your kitchen. They become your best allies during baking: the yeast turns the sugar into bubbles of CO2 in your crumb, and the bacteria lower the pH by producing lactic and acetic acids, giving the bread its delicious sour taste.

The same room also works as an intermittent psychology lab. This is where we discover that other humans can have radically different subjective experiences of the same physical reality. “What? This delicious coriander taste like soap to you?” We learn that our tastes and values are not fixed, but evolve over time. We can even deliberately cultivate new tastes! The 10-year-old me would be very surprised to learn that I now enjoy drinking this bitter black liquid.

The result of this hard work is something very few scientific experiments can give you: good food, happiness, self-confidence in your ability to fulfil your needs, and importantly, a means of communicating love that goes beyond words. “I cooked the chocolate cake to keep the inside liquid, just like you like it. Have a bite.”

2025-12-09 21:10:59

Published on December 9, 2025 1:10 PM GMT

Cross-posted from gleech.org.

In what ways can we can fail to answer a question?

I mean necessarily fail: actual barriers to knowledge, rather than skill issue hurdles. But of course contingent failures are much more common: “We didn’t ask the question in the first place”, or “We didn’t have the particular insight that would have allowed for productive research”, or “We didn’t manage to remove every cognitive bias”, or “Instrumentation is really hard”, or “We are not rich enough to run this study yet”, or “We worshipped the problem”.

I also mean fail exactly; there are often excellent approximations, and we can often legitimately patch over tricky philosophical questions with our unanalysed tacit knowledge.
 

Conceptual problems (the question is not a question)

• A malformed question or category error: the question may ask for something which doesn’t make sense (e.g. “what colour is justice?”, or “Is sigmoid jealous of ReLU?”, or “Did these things happen at the same absolute time? What are the absolute coordinates of this event?”.)
  • Strong incommensurability: the question doesn’t make sense because it mixes frameworks. (e.g. “What is the Einsteinian mass of phlogiston?”, or “What’s the wavefunction of this classical field?”)
• Vagueness: the question may fail to mean anything in particular. (e.g. “When exactly did you become an adult?”)
• False assumptions: we can’t answer it because, while it was clear and made sense, it was wrong from the start (e.g. “Have you stopped beating your wife?” or “Is personality based on nature or nurture?”.)

Logical problems (the question has no answer)

• Antinomy: it turns out that there is no answer because the question is circular or involves itself somehow (e.g. “Is this sentence false?”)
• Incompleteness (“Show that Peano arithmetic is consistent with Peano arithmetic”.) and undefinability (e.g. “Is this sentence true in arithmetic?”) are about some proof answers being inaccessible inside systems powerful enough to be interesting and useful.
• Mathematical independence: The question is neither provable nor disprovable with these axioms. (e.g. Is there a well-ordering of the reals? Is the continuum hypothesis true in ZFC? What is the value of BB(748) in ZFC?)
• Various holes in social mathematics. Important questions like "what's the optimal voting system?", "what does the majority prefer?", "what's a democratic system where people don't have an incentive to vote strategically?", "what's the perfect design for a market?" in general don't have an answer. See e.g. here.
• Anthropic self-locating effects: you can’t get at the answer because you couldn’t exist to observe it. (e.g. “What’s the probability I’m a Boltzmann brain?”, or “What’s the prior probability of observer-permitting universes?”)
• Non-uniqueness is only a problem for questions which ask for the one true answer. (e.g. “What is the electromagnetic potential at this point?”)

Ontic problems (the answer is literally inaccessible)

• Uncomputability: we can’t answer it because no computer or mind can. (e.g. “Is this random?”, or “Does this Diophantine equation have integer solutions?” or “What’s the shortest Python program that outputs this file?” or “Can you write a program that checks if conjectures follow from these axioms?” Or you asked about the language the problem is in.)
• Computational intractability: we can’t answer it because it would take too long, including if we turned the universe into a computer. (What’s the best way to schedule these classes, avoiding all conflicts and respecting room capacities and lecturer availability? Or “I forgot my password; crack this file”.)
• Inapproximability: we can’t even approximate the answer because it would still take too long. (e.g. “What’s the maximum clique size in this graph?”, “What’s a (log n)-approximation to the chromatic number?”)
• Quantum indeterminacy: there’s no answer because (maybe) physics is intrinsically random. (e.g. “When will this radium atom decay?”)
  • Physical constraints, speed limits and no-gos: it can’t be answered in principle because of physics. (e.g. the answer is beyond the cosmological or particle horizon, “what will happen in this galaxy 20 Gly away?” or “Can we measure this state in two bases?”, or “Make a perfectly accurate interferometer”, or “What are the microstates of this black hole?.)
  • Mixing: the answer is gone; we arrived too late; the system forgot the answer. (e.g. “What was the exact microstate of the gas in this room 1 hour ago?”, “What was the original state of this thermalised system?”)
  • Non-ergodicity: the answer isn’t reachable because the system doesn’t mix. (e.g. “What equilibrium will this glassy system reach?”)
  • Measurement problems
    • Disturbance or decoherence: we can’t answer it because our instruments disturb the thing in question too much.
    • Complementarity: we can’t answer it because the answer was excluded by another question we asked first. (e.g. “where is this electron and how much momentum does it have?”)

Epistemic (we cannot get at the answer)

• underdetermination or unidentifiability. (e.g. Is spacetime fundamentally Lorentzian? Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is true? Why do physical constants look fine-tuned? What was the ancestral DNA sequence at some past generation?)
• Chaos: we can’t answer it because we can’t measure the initial conditions well enough to predict large systems. (e.g. Where exactly will this double pendulum be in 100 Lyapunov times? What’s the weather like 3 months out?)
• Computational irreducibility: getting the answer is inseparable from running the system, the question has no shorter answer than a full simulation (e.g. “What will this cellular automaton look like in 10^100 steps?”)
• Hidden variables: we can’t ever observe the actual variables (e.g. What are the simultaneous values of σ_x and σ_z for this electron?)
• Cognitive closure: we’re not smart enough to answer it. (e.g. “What is it like to be a bat?” It kinda looks like quantum gravity could also be an example.)
• Cognitive bias: we’re not rational enough to answer it (e.g. “How biased am I?”)
• I suppose I should mention the original “epistemic barrier”, the putative conceptual barrier between the mind and the world.

??? (the question is logical and/or ontic and/or epistemic idk)

• Observer effects
  • Back action (e.g. What’s the pre-measurement spin of this electron? What are the “real” observables in this quantum system? or “Measure the full-speed time evolution for this system”.)
  • Theory-ladenness:
    • Semantic theory-dependence: Our observational vocabulary already presupposes theoretical commitments that prejudge the answer (e.g. What’s the rest mass of an electron, without assuming special relativity? What’s the ‘real’ temperature of the CMB independent of blackbody theory?)
    • Perceptual theory-dependence: Our perception is shaped by theoretical expectations, so we cannot see the answer “directly” (e.g. What do electron tracks really look like? What does this fMRI show before we apply the hemodynamic response model?)
• Future contingents: it doesn’t have an answer yet so we have to wait. (e.g. “What lottery numbers will win next week?”)
• Hysteresis: we can’t answer it because we weren’t there at the start and the system remembers. (e.g. What’s the magnetic moment of this material at field strength H? When will this old rope snap? At what temperature will this water freeze?)
• Reflexivity and strange loops: the thing in question is self-referential or causally dense, or it [changes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_characteristics) when answered, and so can’t be picked apart. (e.g. “What’s the best method for finding the best method?”; “Which level of description is fundamental in this self-referential system?”, “Which part of your mind is the real you?”.) See also antinomy.

You could view some of these as not failure but just having a non-unique answer; we don’t fail to answer the question, just parametrise the observer and then answer. If non-uniqueness is a failure, it’s a happy one; it just means that you get too many answers and have the nicer problem of picking one.

You will have done well if even once in your life you fail to answer a question for these reasons. Getting so far means you have avoided hundreds of punji traps, claymores, nerve gasses, madnesses.

See also

• The great majority of unusable maths
• Against philosophy
• Aaronson
• Gelman and Yao
• The Unknowable
• The Outer Limits of Reason
• Epistemic Options in the Face of Epistemic Barriers
• Epistemic Boundedness and The Universality of Thought

2025-12-09 18:52:26

Published on December 9, 2025 10:52 AM GMT

I have been interested in effective altruism since before I knew the term. I have long done things like give money to charity, buy products that seem ethical and avoid products that seem unethical (such as factory-farmed meat).

I do not derive much joy from any of this, though. It feels like a chore.

Nor do I particularly enjoy things like giving money to beggars. 

The kinds of easily-available altruism that I do enjoy tends to be helping people that are already relatively happy - for example when an old lady asks me to reach something for her on the top shelf.

(I might also also conceivably enjoy helping people with major things, but those opportunities rarely arise, and I do not want to seek them out.)

I have been reading a lot of Buddhist-inspired literature recently, and they talk a lot about "the joy of blamelessness". I... don't get that.

I am interested in hearing from other people who are into effective altruism. Do you derive joy from it? If so, how?

2025-12-09 16:30:44

Published on December 9, 2025 8:30 AM GMT

On the 3rd of August last year, I woke up early. I stood nervously with a hundred other runners in a hall in the city of Newmarket, near Cambridge in the UK. I felt intimidated as I looked at the calves, the size of champagne bottles, of the other participants. Only a few runners were starting their first 100k that morning. For many, this was not even the peak of their season. This route was long but almost flat, with only 1,000 meters of cumulative elevation. The real ultras were happening in the Alps, where long distances were combined with a crazy amount of ups and downs.

I was almost startled when the race gun fired. I had been chatting for a few moments with a runner I recognized from the 50k I completed the year before. I started running at 7 am, and I would not stop until 15 hours later, finishing the race in the dark with my headlamp guiding me.

As I took my first steps on the path, almost delighted to stretch my legs in the fresh summer morning, I thought about how this would never have happened without Adam.

Why did I do that?

Adam and I were living in the same apartment during my time in London, and we regularly went running together, taking part in Saturday morning 5k park runs near our home or running after work along the canals.

One day, he asked me if I had any plans for the upcoming long weekend, and I said no. He planned to run a marathon by himself along the banks of the River Thames and invited me to join him as if it were a movie screening. I thought I could always stop at any point if it became too hard and take the tube back home, so I accepted. This is how I discovered that my body was particularly well-suited for running long distances without dedicated training.

I became curious to see how far this newfound ability could take me. So I continued to follow Adam and signed up for my first proper ultra marathon, the SVP50, the little sister of the SVP100 that he signed up for. The SVP50 went even better than the marathon organized at the last minute. It turns out that easy access to hydration and food along the way is a game-changer.

For this new edition of the race, we were supposed to run the SVP100 together. However, he injured his leg a few days before and had to make the difficult decision not to participate. So I was alone, holding the flame on that August morning, about to conclude my journey of discovering how far I could run.

Though that was not my sole motivation.

After my first marathon, I became fascinated by the mental state one reaches during long runs. It is a sort of trance where the complexity of the world dissolves, and your sole purpose in life becomes putting one foot in front of the other and getting to this arbitrary point you decided would be the “end”.

I also enjoyed finding a space where I could explore the surprising achievements my body could complete while putting my brain on the backseat. Knowledge work makes my brain the king organ, while the rest of my being is relegated to a “support role” that needs to stay active through exercise.

Leopards sprint faster than any other animals, and giraffes have necks long enough to reach the most inaccessible leaves; humans’ running endurance might have been one of our strengths as a species, allowing us to chase prey to exhaustion. We might have bodies (and psychologies) specifically fitted for long runs. I enjoyed stepping into this more animal side of being human, feeling a sort of closeness to my ancestors. The trance I experience during long runs is probably something I could bring up if I were to spend an evening catching up with them around a campfire.

Running worlds.

I must say that I did not prepare properly for this race. Or at least, I didn’t prepare physically much. I run a few kilometers every week and did a trial marathon two months before the race. I bet everything on mental preparation. I needed a way to grasp what a hundred kilometers would feel like so I could project my motivation at the end of the race and not feeling during the race, “I thought it would be over by now, but I am still running.”

I decided to solve this problem with mindware. I split the route into seven pieces, the chunks in between the blue pins on the map above that mark the aid stations along the way. For each chunk, I built a mental world that I would construct mentally on top of the environment I perceived, with themes freely inspired from the worlds in Mario Bros.

There was the lava world, where the rivers I crossed were currents of melted rock bubbling and projecting incandescent droplets around. The ground was charred. After each step, I imagined how my foot caused cracks in the ground through which I could see the lava coming out.

In the ice world, the trees were thin spruces and pines. I would imagine the people I meet as Inuit covered in fur coats. The bricks of the buildings were swapped for ice cubes, igloo-style. I reframed the stiffness of my muscles as my sweat crystallizing, making my movements harder.

This imaginative exercise was a fun way to pay attention to the environment during the race, though the mental images I created were not very vivid.

The road became filled with small puzzles. I tried to turn elements from the environment into the world I was imagining. I would meet a cow in the mushroom world and recall from a forgotten part of my memory that I had the perfect mental image for this crossover coming from my Minecraft experience. I would ask questions like, “What should streetlights be in the marshland world?” and make up wooden beams covered in vines, with giant fireflies sitting on top.

What comes to mind when I cross a cow in the mushroom world.

As the race unfolded, the worlds became harder and harder to construct in my mind, and eventually, they only surfaced sporadically. Instead, something else took their place. The pain.

The pain.

I reached kilometer 50 around midday in good shape, running at an average pace of 8.5 km/h during the first half. However, my condition deteriorated from there. I started feeling strong cramps in my quadriceps that, fortunately, subsided after some time. After 70 kilometers, my feet began to hurt. They swelled more than I expected, and my shoes turned out to be too small for them. These last kilometers were the most painful experience of my life. This experience stayed with me, even a year after the race. It made me more open to understanding, at a visceral level, how much suffering one can endure.

At the 80-kilometer mark, I took a long break at the aid station and asked for support from a nurse. She pierced the blister on my foot and gave me painkillers. In the calmest voice, she announced that the blister ran too deep and that I was likely to lose the nails on my little toes permanently. The prospect of irreversible bodily impact (even as small as this one) made me consider whether I had pushed myself too far. But the nurse boosted my morale and advised me to keep running. She shared her experience providing emergency health support to migrants in the Dunkirk refugee camp. I think it had the intended effect, as I began to feel that my situation was not as desperate after all.

So I continued the race. I picked up two sticks by the side of the road and finished the race walking with my improvised poles. Over the last 20 kilometers, my pace plummeted to only 5 km/h. I was racing against the clock to make it to the last aid station before the cutoff time. I arrived 45 minutes before the cutoff and had the pleasure of meeting Adam, who came all the way from London to cheer me on at this final checkpoint. After this boost in motivation, I finished the race in 14 hours and 51 minutes, 40 minutes before the final cutoff.

I am not running alone.

The most important lesson I took from this race is how it forced me to incorporate a long-term perspective into my actions. I was not running alone. How I felt at kilometer 60 depended on how well I handled hydration over the previous kilometers, how I forced myself to carefully chew thee salty potatoes I ate at kilometer 30, even when I was not hungry. My knees felt good because of all the attention I had been putting into unfolding my steps with minimal impact on the ground.

As I ran, I felt grateful for my past selves that brought me to where I was, and I imagined my future selves as I strived to do what was right for them to continue running.

During such a long race, no mistake is allowed. This brought me clarity and rigor in thinking about actions that don’t benefit me directly but are vital for my future selves.

I feel this mindset generalizes well to other parts of my life, where I need to coordinate the actions of my selves across timescales of months or years instead of hours. I try to cultivate it every time I procrastinate on scheduling an appointment with the doctor, when I am tempted to skip a language learning session, or when facing any hard tasks that I know are the right thing to do.

After the race.

The race put my body in a strange place. I had little appetite for the two days following the race, and I experienced hour-long hiccups. My whole body was stiff, forcing me to walk at a pace that made me empathize with the older people I used to be annoyed by as I struggled to pass them on the sidewalk. Fortunately, after a few days, these symptoms stopped, my muscles allowed me to start walking mostly normally, and I recovered completely from the race in about a month (though I continue to try to empathize with older people’s slow walking pace).

As the nurse warned, I lost the nails of my little toes. In fact, I lost all my toenails except for my big toes. However, contrary to her prediction, they all regrew over the year following the race, and I am now enjoying a full set of healthy toenails (except for one of my big toenails, which is in regrowth mode due to an unrelated event I will refrain from sharing, as this might already be too many toenail stories for one post).

Will I run more ultramarathons?

I ran one marathon after this 100k, and I might do more in the future, as I still enjoy the trance state that comes with long-distance running. However, I will most likely not go further than 100k. These might have been the most impactful 15 hours of my life; they gave me a strong baseline of self-confidence in my body and a visceral understanding of pain. I feel I can now put this chapter of long-distance running aside and take on new challenges in other domains of my life.

2025-12-09 13:08:40

Published on December 9, 2025 5:08 AM GMT

You probably type some things a lot, especially if you do non-trivial amounts of administrative or communicative work. There are also probably things you would type more if it was easier to! For instance:

• Link to your personal website
  • Your email address or phone number
  • Your LinkedIn
  • Your calendar booking link
  • Your GitHub profile
  • Your Google Scholar
• The website/email/contact of an organization you represent
  • “I am contacting you on behalf of XYZ org. We work on…”
• Command aliases across servers/terminals
  • Commit message templates
  • SSH incantations
• Common phrases/sentence fragments
  • “Just wanted to follow up on this!”
  • “Please reach out to”
  • “Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.”
• LLM prompts
  • Something to the effect of “think really carefully about this”
  • Style/content guidelines for deep research, specialized agents
  • “Help me prepare for a meeting with this person”
  • “Search XYZ docs to implement this”
  • “I can’t find this person’s contact”
  • “Please review the attached for grammar, tone, clarity and flow…"
  • “Help me write a prompt that”
  • “My political enemy has presented this proposal. Please red-team…”

Save that time by using text expansions, shortcuts triggered by a short phrase, through something like AutoHotKey (Windows) or Alfred (Mac). This can be set up in <30 minutes and is fairly intuitive; Claude is great at writing AutoHotKey scripts.

As Neel Nanda alluded to in his 80k interview, text expansions can substantially reduce friction to using LLMs in Very Obvious Ways to accelerate your work. For instance, I’m now much more likely to get tone feedback on important communication and use LLM help to aggressively red-team rough ideas.

Text expansions help me focus on the hard parts of whatever I’m doing without spending 45 seconds trying to pull up and copy over yet another profile link. They also reduce context switches and therefore potential excuses for procrastination or distraction. Consider trying them out!

Appendix: Select Text Expansions I Find Useful

/iacy

I am contacting you on behalf of the AI Safety Initiative at Georgia Tech, a community of technical and policy researchers focused on mitigating catastrophic risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

/gscholar

/mysite

/phone

/linkedin

/cal (my calendar booking link)

/gmail

/enemy (a la Nanda)

My colleague who I absolutely despise just drafted this. Please red-team his work.

/tonefeedback

Please review the attached for tone, grammar, clarity, and flow. Provide inline edits (mark specific changes with track changes or comments), assess whether the tone sounds authentic to my voice and flag anything that feels off or too formal/informal, note any grammar/clarity issues like typos, awkward phrasing, or ambiguities, and provide structural feedback on reordering or restructuring that would improve readability. Important constraints: preserve my core meaning and style—I want refinement, not rewriting—be honest about what doesn't work, and if something is unclear, tell me rather than guessing my intent.

/genprompt
Help me write a prompt

/findemail

Find an email address for [PERSON'S NAME] who [RELEVANT CONTEXT: works at ORGANIZATION/has ROLE/etc.]. Search publicly available sources including LinkedIn, company directories, academic pages, professional websites, and press releases. Verify the email through multiple independent sources when possible. If you find the email, cite specific sources where it appears. Check recency and prioritize sources from the last 1-2 years. Note confidence level: high [3+ sources or official directory], medium [1-2 credible sources], low [inference or single unverified source]. If you cannot find a verified email, state this explicitly rather than guessing. Provide alternative contact methods if found, such as LinkedIn, institutional contact forms, or department emails. If you can only infer a likely pattern [e.g., [email protected] based on other employees], state this as inference with low confidence. Do not generate or guess email formats without evidence, use emails from outdated sources without flagging them, or present low-confidence findings as verified.

/ultrathink (taken from but did not originate with a comment from Thane Ruthenis)

Use greater rigor, attention to detail, and multi-angle verification. Start by outlining the task and breaking down the problem into subtasks. For each subtask, explore multiple perspectives, even those that seem initially irrelevant or improbable. Purposefully attempt to disprove or challenge your own assumptions at every step. Triple-verify everything. Critically review each step, scrutinizing your logic, assumptions, and conclusions while explicitly calling out uncertainties and alternative viewpoints. Independently verify your reasoning using alternative methodologies or tools, cross-checking every fact, inference, and conclusion against external data, calculation, or authoritative sources. Deliberately seek out and employ at least twice as many verification tools or methods as you typically would. Use mathematical validations, web searches, logic evaluation frameworks, and additional resources explicitly and liberally to cross-verify your claims. Even if you feel entirely confident in your solution, explicitly dedicate additional time and effort to systematically search for weaknesses, logical gaps, hidden assumptions, or oversights. Clearly document these potential pitfalls and how you've addressed them. Once you're fully convinced your analysis is robust and complete, deliberately pause and force yourself to reconsider the entire reasoning chain one final time from scratch. Explicitly detail this last reflective step.

2025-12-09 10:47:07

Published on December 9, 2025 2:47 AM GMT

A wise woman once said: humans are not automatically strategic. I'd like to propose a way of being more strategic in the kitchen. I'd like to propose that you learn the reverse sear technique.

But not just the technique. Not just the thing you do to cook a steak. I'd like to propose that you learn about the underlying concepts. The problems that the reverse sear solves, how it solves them effectively, what techniques are adjacent to the reverse sear, and why it applies to things like Brussels sprouts, not just rib eyes.

I expect that learning these things will have a large ROI.

• I'm hopeful that one can learn them in a matter of minutes or hours. I don't think it's the kind of thing that takes days or weeks.
• I suspect that the benefit of such learning is often large. Eating is something that we do quite frequently, and many of us get a fair amount more enjoyment out of their food when it actually tastes good.

Goals

Steak

To start, consider a steak. When you buy it at the grocery store in it's raw form, it will look something like this:

You probably don't want to eat it in it's raw form though. You probably want to cook it.

That begs the question: how do you want to cook it? I think it's helpful to break this question down into two components:

1. How do you want to cook the interior?
2. How do you want to cook the exterior?

To the first question, you probably want to cook it such that the interior is tender and juicy.

I suppose that not everyone falls into this camp though. I suppose that some people genuinely, authentically enjoy the inside of their steak most when it is tough and dry. And I suppose that other people^[1] genuinely, authentically enjoy the inside of their steak most when it is raw and chewy. But for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that your preferences are not unusual.

To expand on this question of what your goals are for the interior, you probably want this tender and juicy makeup to be uniform. You probably want to avoid gradients like these:

Ok. So what about the exterior? Well, that's pretty simple. I think most people want an exterior that is nicely browned like this:

Meat

But here's the thing: these goals are not unique to steak!

Consider chicken breasts. Chicken breasts are infamous for having their interior overcooked. There are plenty of monsters who like their steaks well done, but I think far fewer are pleased when the interior of their chicken breast is dry and chalky. People want this:

Not this:

And it's usually desirable to get some browning on the exterior as well.

The same is true for pork tenderloin, lamb chops, chicken cutlets, whole turkeys and many other cuts of meat. In fact, I'm having trouble coming up with counterexamples.

I guess one counterexample is when braising. When braising you don't necessarily want to brown the exterior. But then again, sometimes you do want to shred it, crisp it, and serve it with something. Think pulled pork on a sandwich or carnitas in a taco.

I guess there are a lot of situations like that where you don't necessarily want your meat to be browned or crispy. For example, sometimes you might prefer the simplicity of a tender poached chicken breast without any browning like this:

However, I think these are more so the exception than the rule. The rule is that people yearn for the sweet, savory, toasted complexity you get from the malliard reaction.

As for counterexamples to wanting a tender and juicy interior, the only one I can think of is jerky. In the case of jerky, dry and chewy really is the goal.

Vegetables

So far we've spent the whole post talking about meat. Now I want to branch further out and posit that these goals of 1) a tender and juicy interior and 2) a crisp, browned exterior often apply to vegetables as well.

As an easy first example, let's talk about Brussels sprouts. I've been trying to improve my ability to cook Brussels sprouts and in doing so, I take notes on Todoist. When I do I type out "brussel sprouts" and autocorrect keeps giving me these annoying red underlines. So now I have to capitalize the "B" and end with an "s", which seems counterintuitive...

Sorry I'm getting off track.

Brussels sprouts are a classic example of a food that is gross when prepared poorly and delicious when prepared properly. If the many food YouTubers I follow can be trusted, the story goes something like this:

• In the 1900s, housewives would boil them. They'd be mushy, sulfurous and gross.
• Their husbands were too drunk to care, but their kids cried and refused to eat their veggies.
• Some time in the 2000s or 2010s TV chefs and subsequently, culinary influencers, came along and changed things. Knowledge has spread and people now often understand that you want a tender interior alongside a properly browned exterior when cooking Brussels sprouts. That browned exterior is key: you want those caramelized, sweet, nutty notes.

Think about it, what looks more appetizing, this:

Or this:

Again, we want a tender interior alongside a crispy exterior.

Ok, what about broccoli?

Zucchini?

Cauliflower?

Malliard FTW!

Well, let me pump the breaks a little bit. I don't want to overstate my case. With meat I acknowledged that sometimes you prefer the simplicity of, for example, a poached chicken breast. With vegetables, I want to similarly acknowledge that sometimes something like steamed broccoli just hits the spot:

And for something like green beans, I would question how conducive they are to browning. I think I prefer my green beans to be steamed.

But, similar to the meat section, I think there's more wiggle room with respect to your goals for the exterior than with respect to your goals for the interior. Unless you're looking to channel your inner two year old, I'm not sure when you'd want your veggies to be mushy. I think you usually want a bright and tender, yet crisp interior.

It's worth pointing out that your goals for the interior of veggies vs meat are a little different. With meat we talked about juiciness. I wouldn't quite put it that way with veggies. With veggies, I guess there's some juiciness in green beans and corn but not in broccoli or Brussels sprouts.

Carbs

Continuing my argument, I think the broad goals of 1) a crispy exterior and 2) a tender interior often apply to carbs as well. Think about a nice, warm loaf of bread with a browned exterior and a steaming interior that is still slightly moist.

Or the contrast between the thick buttered exterior and soft interior of a thick slice of bread in a grilled cheese:

My favorite coffee shop bakes these muffins that have a deeply browned exterior and a creamy, almost pudding-like interior that I absolutely love:

I think a good french toast is similar. You want a creamy, custardy interior and a crisp exterior.

With potatoes, it's nice when you can get a crispy exterior that you can hear when you tap with a fork, and a creamy interior.

Even with pasta I think you sometimes want to have a crisp, browned exterior to contrast with the softer interior. People have recognized this with baked pasta dishes. For non-baked pasta dishes I think people are slowly catching on with dishes like spaghetti all'assassina:

There's also gnocchi.

Perhaps people in Asia have recognized this a long time ago with their stir fries. I'm thinking about a dish like pad see ew.

And fried rice. You want the grains to be ever so slightly toasted on the outside (but not enough to make the interior dry).

Paella takes this even further:

So, wrapping up, I argue that you often — but not always! — want 1) a crisp exterior and 2) a tender interior for the item you are cooking.

Technique

Ok, now let's talk about technique. The reverse sear technique is a great way to achieve those two goals of a crisp exterior and a tender interior. First I'll discuss the classic reverse sear technique and then some adjacent techniques.

I'm going to keep things relatively high level though. See this Serious Eats post for details.

Classic

To make explaining the classic reverse sear technique easier, let's assume we're applying it to a steak.

The classic reverse sear technique basically has two components:

1. Warm it up slowly in an oven.
2. Sear it quickly in a pan.

There are other things to mention, but those two things are the essence of the technique, and I don't want to distract from the essence.

First, let's ask why we want to warm it up slowly. Any guesses? It could be fun to guess.

Ok, the reason is to prevent that temperature gradient that we mentioned earlier. To achieve a uniform doneness. When you warm it up quickly with too high a temperature, you get an undesirable gradient. Here's the image again:

So yeah, it's pretty simple: if you want to avoid that gradient, take your time and use a lower temperature.

If really want to go to an extreme to avoid that gradient you can sous vide it.

With sous vide you cook it in a water bath with water that is held at a consistent temperature. Like if you want your steak to be cooked to 125 degrees, you'd program the sous vide device thing to maintain a temperature of 125 degrees and after an hour or so, heat will flow from the warmer water bath into the colder meat until the meat is 125 degrees.

But in cooking it low and slow in an oven the temperature gradient you get is going to be quite small.

Ok, now for the second step of searing it in the pan. For this step we want high heat. Why do we want high heat? Well, for one, the malliard reaction that produces browning happens at around 300℉, so you need the pan to be at least that hot. The other thing is that the more time it spends in your hot pan, the more time there is for a temperature gradient to develop.

If you're extreme you could use a blowtorch or some other creative technique that Chris Young likes to make videos about, but in practice, just sear it in a hot pan.

Adjacent

There are various techniques that I would argue sit pretty close to the classic reverse sear technique.

For starters, consider this example of America's Test Kitchen recommending a reverse sear to cook chicken breast. I'd say it's a little bit adjacent to the classic technique for two reasons:

1. It's a thin cut of meat. That makes it a less central example of reverse searing, I think. A more central example would involve a thicker cut of meat, like a steak. But especially with multi-sensor thermometers like this one, I think you can execute it on a thin cut.
2. They recommend painting a mixture of melted butter, flour, corn starch and pepper onto the surface of the chicken to get better browning. With a steak, there's no need.

For an even less central example, consider For the Best Roasted Vegetables, Start with Steam, also from America's Test Kitchen. As the title describes, the video recommends steaming as a way of slowly cooking the interior.

For cabbage and fennel bulbs this takes the form of covering with tin foil and placing in an oven, because the food item has enough water content to release in the form of steam. For Brussels sprouts it doesn't, so the video recommends adding water to a pan and covering with a lid.

From there, to brown, for the cabbage and fennel bulbs you remove the tin foil and return to the oven on a higher temperature with some oil to roast. For the Brussels sprouts it's similar: remove the lid to get rid of the steam and water, add oil, and crank the heat.

Another example of something adjacent to the reverse sear, I'd argue, is the technique of par cooking and then crisping. For example, with potatoes you want to par cook them in boiling water and then sear with oil.

Notice that the exact method of the initial cook varies — uncovered in the oven for steak, covered in the oven for cabbage, covered in a pan with Brussels sprouts, boiling water for potatoes — but the idea is the same. The idea is that you want a low and slow technique to warm up the interior to the desired level of doneness as a precursor to the final sear.

Same with the final sear. The technique varies. Sometimes you're searing in a pan, sometimes in an oven, sometimes under a broiler, sometimes a frier, and if you're Chris Young, sometimes with a blow torch.

My hope is that understanding the concepts here will help you find places to apply them.