The Easiest Way to Silence Your Inner Critic
The way we talk to ourselves can be decidedly harsher than the way we talk to others. In fact, many of us are stuck in a toxic feedback loop with…
How to Psych Yourself Up Without Feeling Cringe
As much as I like the idea of affirmations, I’ve never felt anything but corny when saying “I can do it!” or any of the other types of positive self-talk…
This Is a Philosopher on Drugs
My undrugged mind, to borrow a witticism from J. L. Austin, delivers to me a world of “medium-sized dry goods” and little else. My drugged mind delivers to me spirits…
Yes, Lab-Grown Meat Is Vegan
I wish I came to veganism through an epiphany about the right to personhood of animals, or recognition of the environmental harm that animal farming causes. But I didn’t. What…
You Should Try ‘Intuitive Dating’
You’ve tried online dating, speed dating, and blind dating. If you’re still striking out in the love department, how about trying intuitive dating? “Intuitive dating means dating with information coming…
Effective Altruism Is Pushing a Dangerous Brand of ‘AI Safety’
Since then, the quest to proliferate larger and larger language models has accelerated, and many of the dangers we warned about, such as outputting hateful text and disinformation en masse,…
Collective Mental Time Travel Can Influence the Future
We’re often told to “be here now.” Yet the mind is rarely tethered in place. We take mental trips to our past, revisiting what happened yesterday or when we were…
TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone
TikTok’s ascent to becoming the most popular site on the internet has sparked endless discussions about its stickiness—as if it were capable of hacking our normal cognitive pathways and transmitting…
Redactle Is Like Wordle but for a Whole Wikipedia Page
Screenshot: Redactle.com Wordle is tiny; Redactle is big. Where Wordle asks you to solve a single five-letter word, Redactle presents you with an entire blacked-out wikipedia page, and not a…
The Three-City Problem of Modern Life
But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of a great…