For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been studying rationality. Perhaps not to the extent of my ability that I could when my schedule is completely clear, but studying nonetheless. I’ve tried my best to convey the information I’ve learned, to bring it in with poetry and make it applicable, to really take to heart […]

Read more "The Fruits of Labor"

Sometimes I wonder if it’s too easy to fall in love with fantasy.  As a genre and as a generation, science fiction and the millennials are handily paired. The golden era of dystopian novel series is possibly in the decline, but teenagers born at the tail end of the 20th century still keep the magic […]

Read more "Narnia Will Never Be A Bus Ride Away"

A little backstory: in 2008, the founder of LessWrong.com, the biggest community blog and forum dedicated to promoting rationality and explaining rationalists’ practices, posted a sequence on how he made some terrible mistakes as a teenager.  Maybe this seems like a familiar sentiment for most adults. As for me, I’m in the process of making […]

Read more "Eliezer₁₉₉₈ vs. Me"

Poetry changes the world.  It can’t cause natural disasters, or heal our ozone layer, but what it can do is infiltrate the minds of humans. Diction and tone are far more important than the English drop-out can imagine.  Here’s how this works. A baby raised by wolves would not turn out like Mowgli from Disney’s […]

Read more "Have You Heard the Good News?"

Take a man on trial for premeditated murder. Two lawyers are assigned his case, one on the defense and one prosecuting, and between them they bring all the evidence to the table before the jury.  The prosecution has a confiscated journal filled with pages of plotting murder. Though the plot is interspersed with snippets of […]

Read more "I’m Always Wrong, But You’re Never Right"

When I was young enough to play with alphabet blocks and Thomas the Train sets, I used to complain about boredom. Apparently a lot. I was the first child to a young stay-at-home mother who spent her days occupying me with books, paint-by-number, scissor crafts, sprinklers and kiddie pools, puzzles and wooden assembly maps of […]

Read more "I Just Really Wanna Go To Heaven/Prison"

There are two ways to view this title.  On one hand, it references an amusing, if somewhat apocryphal, story about Plato’s Academy. The philosophers gathered around, à la The School of Athens, discussing the best definition of what it meant to be human. Previously, it had been suggested that humans could be defined by their […]

Read more "We Are All Featherless Chickens"

Before I get started with this, I was considering changing the content of my About page. It’s overflowing with vague similes, flighty language, shameless self-promotion. It doesn’t give a comprehensive explanation of the point of this page. It doesn’t point to examples; it draws boundaries around terms that barely belong together; it confuses and refuses […]

Read more "Matching the Territory"