30 Reflections

30 things I learned since I was 20

I recently turned 30.

It kinda feels like the first “real” adult age. Despite what everyone has been telling me since I was little, so far, being an adult has been absolutely awesome and I prefer it vastly over every other lifestage.

I have changed a lot since I was 20. I barely recognize myself on many axises, while on others I remain exactly as I always was. There’s something comforting about that, it feels correct.

I would say the period from my mid twenties to now was the period where I learned the most in my life. I’ve been gifted with many unusual experiences, opportunities and adventures that have taught me so much.

Here are 30 things I learned. From least to most schizo.

I expect some of these to be obvious. Some of them are Chekhov’s Koans. I think all of them are deeply true, but might be poorly explained.

1. Don’t be stupid

Being smart is hard. So hard that almost always when people try to be smart, they just end up hurting themselves more.

First and foremost, don’t be stupid! Focus on noticing the predictably stupid things you are doing and then just don’t do them!

The reverse of this is also true. Be stupid! Living by the maxim of “first, do the simplest possible thing, you’re only allowed to try something cleverer after you tried that” has been wildly successful for me.

If you meditate on this, and follow its wisdom, the student will be enlightened.

2. You can just do things

This one is a cliche at this point, but it’s true. It’s hard for me to put into words how much younger me did not understand how many “““rules””” were completely fake and made up in my head.

Just cold email people. Just try to figure out something yourself. Just raise money and spend it on cool projects.

“But what if something bad happens?” Are you hearing yourself right now??

Just do things!

3. There is more to unlearn than there is to learn

I used to have a big blindspot around the concept of unlearning things. I’m plenty good at learning new things, and it was always obvious to me why learning new things would be useful.

What I didn’t realize is just how unbelievably many stupid things I believed and had to unlearn. And how much effort this would take.

I would say after about 26, I spent more of my mental energy unlearning bad things/habits I had picked up than on learning new good things and habits.

It is very likely you have similarly accrued a lifetime of bad memes that are holding you back.

4. Thinking is not a free action

For some reason, I used to have the implicit belief that “thinking” is just a thing that happens automatically. If the moment comes where I need to figure something out, either I will have already figured it out, or not. Either I will have “inspiration”, or I won’t. (This is an exaggeration, of course)

“Thinking” is an active action. It takes time and energy.

If you don’t budget for “when will I think about topic X?”, then chances are you will simply never think about topic X and you will screw it up.

5. If you don’t do something, it doesn’t happen

If you don’t do something, it doesn’t happen.

Things happen because someone (or something) makes them happen. If you don’t make them happen, and there is no other process or person that makes them happen, then they don’t happen.

Meditate on this.

6. You can exchange money for goods and services

One of the weirdest and stupidest copes I had lodged in my brain was that I somehow didn’t need much money or that money wasn’t useful, or that the usefulness of money would “level off” at some modest amount of money, that somehow I couldn’t “use more money” after a certain point.

This is absurdly, hilariously nonsense.

Of course I can use more money. Diminishing returns are still returns!! (and sometimes there are step changes in what kinds of plans you can pursue with money. I would be doing very different plans if I had billions of dollars!)

If you give me more money, I will turn it into more of the kinds of things I do. Hire more expensive people. Try more risky bets. Scale advertisement/communications. Build more new orgs. Whatever! There is absolutely no limit to how much I can turn money into lowering AGI xrisk (since that is the primary thing I do)!

Money is extremely useful!

Anyone who says otherwise is either deluded, playing some kind of political signalling game or incompetent.

7. Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you made a mistake

Assume you have a bet you can take. 80% you get something great out of it, 20% you get a modest penalty.

You take the bet, it goes wrong, you get a modest penalty.

Did you make a mistake?

On the one hand, sure, if you could have known ahead of time the bet wouldn’t work out, you could have not taken it. But on the other hand, no you obviously didn’t make a mistake! It would have been stupid not to take this bet in expectation!

What I have seen both in myself and others is that people often take “but there might be a downside” as a valid counterargument for trying things in general. Or they feel that “success” is not when you have maximum positive outcomes, but when you have an absence of negative outcomes. This leads to paralysis.

If you want to succeed, you need to take bets, and if you aren’t taking enough bets so that some regularly blow up, you’re not trying enough things. You should have a constant stream of failure at all times.

8. Many things are hard but tractable

When you propose something ambitious, a lot of the immediate counterarguments that both other people and your own internal mind will tend to bring up are arguments for why it’s hard or expensive. This is very different from tractable or possible.

It’s easy to get these confused. When something is hard or expensive, it can feel like it’s impossible and therefore not worth thinking about. This is very rarely true.

9. There are no adults in the room

A very memorable experience of my late 20s was when I met a person I greatly respected/looked up to. It was the second time (I think) we had met. I was excited, I was getting into the world, doing real things, building an org, but I had also been already facing a lot of headwind almost from the get go.

So I asked him: “Who are the good people? The people I should coordinate with?”

He responded in his usual theatrical flair after a long pause: “First, you should not go into this expecting there to be adults in the room.”

I sighed: “Yeah…I guess I’m just doing due diligence.”

I have done due diligence, and if you need someone to tell you this, let it be me: There are no adults in the room! No one is in control!

There is a interesting psychoanalytic take on the concept of global illuminati/world government-type conspiracy theories. The interpretation is that people like to imagine there is an all powerful, shadowy, evil cabal running everything, because then at least someone is in control. Someone knows what is going on, and is making choices. The things that happen have meaning and order. And this is more comforting (even if the controllers are evil!) than the fact that reality is Chaos and no one is in control.

10. Academia is a (deeply) dysfunctional social group

I used to have a very naive, idealized view of scientists and academia. For me, scientists were the one group of people in the world that were smart, that were rational, that were using science to make the world a better place.

I wanted to be a scientist, a professor, to take part in this grand shining beacon of humanity and science known as “academia”, free from the irrationalities of “politics” and “money” and all those ugly, non-scientific things.

lol fucking lmao

To put things as mildly and politely as I can: Academia is an absolute fucking cesspool of political corruption, soul crushing metrics gaming and outright fraud functioning mostly as a jobs program for nerds that only produces valuable science completely in spite of itself, not thanks to it, because it manages to trap some genuinely smart and hard working people there like a venus fly trap its prey and keeps them alive to suck more “citations” and “grants” out of them.

I won’t argue the case here, there are plenty of better resources elsewhere.

Fixing this will not be easy.

11. The market isn’t efficient, except where it is

I think “you can’t beat the market” may be one of the single most harmful things you can teach a smart person. (It might be a good thing to teach to a dumb person)

The market is incredibly inefficient almost everywhere! Knowing the few places where it is pretty efficient (short term pricing of high liquidity commodities, for instance), is a useful thing to know, but in almost every other place, the market is not efficient.

One of the most common truisms in startup culture is “the incumbents are not competition.” And boy, you just truly have no idea how true this is.

It is truly almost impossible for me to express in a way that 20 year old me would understand just how much no one is even trying.

Also, all those studies about how “the median outcome of (whatever) is (whatever)” don’t apply to you. You don’t understand how bad the bottom quintile is, on literally any metric. If you’re reading a 7000 word essays about complex life lessons on substack, you are not in the bottom quintile of whatever metric you care about. (Don’t do crypto or short-selling tho)

12. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist

Living as a human is basically a state of constant cosmic horror in which your memories are constantly being deleted, corrupted and modified every waking moment.

If you don’t write something down, you will forget it.

You might think “That seems wrong, I can’t remember a single thing I have recently forgotten because I didn’t write it down!”

Exactly.

Importantly, you need to not just write things down, you also need a process by which you regularly look back and review your notes. If you don’t do it, you will just never actually review your notes, and your memories will again be deleted.

By the way, have you been taking notes so far? How do you expect to remember any of this without reviewing your notes??

13. The scarce resource is attention, not intelligence

I spent my early 20s in a culture that was, in my opinion, deeply unhealthily obsessed with intelligence.

Yes, intelligence is extraordinarily powerful. But it’s not magic. And more importantly, it’s not actually the bottleneck for most smart people I know. (It is sometimes the bottleneck for not-smart people I know, I am sorry to say)

Most smart people could give up 20 IQ points in return for perfect attention control or resistance to addictions/compulsions or overcoming their traumas, or just to be less fucking cowardly, and they would be 10x more happy and productive.

In my experience of building organizations, running projects, leading teams, etc, I have found consistently that I was basically never bottlenecked by intelligence (I could always just pay some super genius for advice if there truly was something I needed more intelligence on. Super geniuses are surprisingly cheap), but I was often bottlenecked by attention (or care).

There is a kind of magic “make things work” juice that people have. I usually call it “hero power.”

It’s the thing that startup founders have and corporate drones do not. It’s a kind of energy and love and care and force that can be applied to make extraordinary things happen.

Often, people point to hero power as “energy” or “drive” or “agency.” I think those all play a role, but I think the main underlying force of hero power is attention.

Hero Power is what pushes the boundaries and creates whole new groups and projects, and can maintain them singlehandedly.

But it’s a scarce resource, and if you use too much of it, you burn out.

So it’s very important to not solely rely on hero power, because it’s limited and only partially renewable (some people never come back fully the same after burnout).

So if you want to maintain longterm great things, your primary goal should be to make sure things happen whether or not you do them. To replace hero power with process.

14. It takes love to see

If you don’t love, if you don’t care, you cannot see.

There are many, many things in the world that just cannot be seen unless you truly, deeply care. Many things can be done without caring, or at least you can be paid to care about them.

But not everything is like this. Some things you can only see if you care, if you love.

15. It is what it is

It is what it is.

16. Nothing is ultimately satisfying

This sounds more grim than it actually is, but it’s really important to understand that nothing will give you the ultimate satisfaction, salvation, make you feel good forever and never feel bad or unfulfilled ever again.

There is no such thing. No job promotion, product, drug, sexual partner or anything else. You can get the biggest success of your life, and yeah it will satisfy you maybe for a while, but you will still get annoyed next time something annoying happens, and life will feel normal and mundane again in due time.

The correct reaction to this is neither to crave, nor to not to crave. Life is a process, it is not an eternal end-state. It’s a flow you surf on, not a game you win and then turn off. Enjoy the satisfaction you get when you get it, don’t cling to it when it moves on.

I am explaining this poorly. Go read the buddha or some shit.

17. You’re a savage if you don’t meditate at least a little

I resisted the stupid meditation bandwagon for a long time, employed every single cope in the book to justify why it was cringe or unnecessary.

Look, there are plenty valid criticisms of meditation as a practice, and of the wider world of buddhism and related ideas in general.

Still, people spend time going to the gym to improve their muscles and body. If you don’t spend at least that much time on strengthening and controlling your mind, you are a basically a savage animal that is sentient accidentally.

I know this, I was such an animal for most of my life! And I’m still barely sentient now!

The first time I really meditated was because a friend told me I couldn’t count to 1000 in my head. Absolutely trivial, how the hell could it be possible that I, a grown ass, highly numerate adult couldn’t count to 1000??

Dear reader, I only made it to about 330 before I lost track.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have the skill of counting, of course. There was just so much noise, so many thoughts, distractions, so much garbage, I had to try so hard and use so many crutches to just not lose the fucking number! And I realized: Wait, I’ve been living in this mental chaos all my life?

I am now happy to report I can easily count to 3000 and higher without losing my place once, meditate up to 2h at a time, etc. And yet, there is still sooo much chaos and inefficiency. I have a long way to go, but at least I don’t live in complete mental cacophony anymore.

You should be able to control your thoughts and attention. You should not be mentally incontinent as an adult, you should be able to count to 1000 and concentrate for 15 minutes without an interrupting thought, so put in the necessary training.

18. Your mind is accidental (unless it is not)

Where do your thoughts come from? Why did you think this and not that? Why did you decide to go down this path in life, and not that one?

Do you know the answers to these questions?

If not (and usually we do not), then you must realize that your mind is basically accidental.

If you don’t have a process, a mechanism by which you make choices, if you don’t reflect on options, on your thoughts, emotions, feelings, then you are effectively just a natural output of whatever forces in your environment happen to take hold of you.

You being a good person or a bad person, being like this or like that, will be fully determined by forces outside of your locus of control.

And is that really how you want to exist? Who is answering this question?

19. Your values are contradictory, and that’s ok

Humans value many things, some of them make more “sense” than others. Sometimes they can be contradictory. You might both value action and peace, you might value mercy and also punishment. You might like some stupid TV show that is “objectively” garbage but it means a lot to you.

And all of this is ok!

There can be a temptation to “fix” ones values. To identify the inconsistencies and “repair” them, find a new set of values that don’t have this “flaw”.

This is a very dangerous thing to do. There are few things that can permanently erase who you are as a person, that can damage your soul, but this is one of them.

It can be very tempting to have a frictionless life, but you can only be frictionless if you have no contradictory values. If you have contradictory values and you’re doing one thing and not the other, this will create friction…but that’s not necessarily a bad thing!! You can endorse that!

Of course, reflecting on your values, clarifying them, and finding where something you may have thought was a value isn’t really, or something you thought you didn’t care about you actually care a lot about is extremely important and valuable!

But beware pressures to sand down your soul’s beautiful edges. Sometimes it might be called for, or even necessary. But if someone or something demands of you to dismiss and destroy your values, that thing is probably hurting you.

20. You can just not care and take the hit, but it accumulates stress debt that you have to pay off

Yeah I know it sucks or it hurts or whatever. But you can just not care.

When something feels bad, when you feel it starting to get to you, you can just Not. You can just take the hit and do whatever it is you needed to do anyways. You have this action you can choose, whether you know it or not.

I’m not saying you should always take it, but you should know you have the option.

You can take hits. But if you keep taking hits, you will accumulate stress. If you accumulate too much stress, you burn out, and then everything sucks.

Do not burn out.

You need consistent methods to work off your “stress debt”, and you need to actually pay it off regularly. This can be by doing fun things, spending time with your family/friends, just sleeping in and doing nothing, whatever. Find something that works for you.

21. You can schedule emotional labor

Extremely powerful life skill: Processing things emotionally is an active action (like “thinking”, in fact this is just a flavor of thinking), and you both can and need to schedule time to actually do it.

When something emotionally impactful happens, you should practice developing a feeling for “how long/how much energy will it likely take for me to emotionally process this?” and then you should schedule that time/energy and actually process it.

There is a common folk belief that emotions are somehow magic that cannot be predicted or controlled or worked with. Look, they’re neurons like anything else. Spicy neurons maybe, but just neurons.

When I am hit by some setback or tragedy, I can usually by now immediately estimate how much this will affect me for how long and how much I will need (An hour alone? A day off? A week long vacation? A month of mourning?) to get back to normal. I then find the best compromise with my schedule to budget this like any other active process I need to complete.

The more advanced version of this is “pre-mourning”, where you just do the emotional processing for a tragedy that hasn’t even happened yet, so when it hits you just bounce right back.

One more point: When you schedule emotions like this it is extremely important to actually “keep up your end of the deal.”

If you tell your brain “Ok, we can’t be upset right now, but next week we’ll take a day off where we’ll take all the time we need to be upset”, your brain knows if you’re lying or not.

If you have promised yourself vacations or breaks in the past and have in fact consistently taken them, your brain will, almost miraculously, actually chill out and let you operate at close to normal levels (unless it’s truly too overwhelming or whatever), because it “knows” it will gets its promised break time later. That’s why it’s so important to actually take the breaks! No last minute “ohh but I feel kinda fine and this work is really important…” You need to be a trustworthy trading partner to your emotions!

Also, take notes when processing emotions. Anything not written down doesn’t exist and it helps immensely with processing.

22. Social problems can be approached mechanistically

One of the most practical and transformative insights I have had in my late 20s is when I realized that social situations aren’t some magical, non-physical types of problems you cannot reason or plan for. You can model social situations, you can develop plans, track progress on KPIs, have OODA loops, etc.

A core insight related to this for me was: The unit of social action is (usually) the group, not the individual.

I could (and should) write a whole book about this, but let me give you an illustrative example:

One time, I was talking to a very senior person at a large AI company. They were a manager/CEO-type person. I was trying to convince them of AGI risk, and even though I had perfect counterarguments to any argument they brought up, they were just not budging at all.

So, frustrated from the conversation, I conclude this person is just utterly irrational, cannot be reasoned with, it’s all just impossible.

But then a friend of mine pointed something out: “Connor, they’re not a technical person. These aren’t their opinions, they’re getting them from somewhere else! Go ask who they listen to on AI safety!”

I figured it was a bit of a weird question, but why not, I happened to be seeing that CEO again a few days later anyways.

So when I met the CEO again, I asked them who they listen to regarding AI safety. To my shock, they casually listed three names off the bat.

So then, I went one by one to those three people, and talked to them, and they were technical people and did in fact update based on my technical arguments!

And, surprise surprise, in a later podcast, suddenly I hear that CEO using some of my arguments, even though I hadn’t talked to them since.

The mistake I had made was that I was modelling individuals when I should have been modelling groups.

The algorithm that was generating the CEOs words was not “evaluate all the technical knowledge I have for the most plausible argument and output that”, but “take the average of those 3 guys I trust’s opinions and output that.” I had been effectively talking to a ghost of people not even in the conversation! No wonder I wasn’t making any progress!

(also, as an aside, I don’t think this means the CEO is “stupid” or “irrational” or even “making a mistake”. I think it’s very reasonable to trust your smart friends on topics you are not an expert on!)

There are many, many mechanisms like this at play in social scenarios, way too many to discuss now. But this should give you a flavor.

The mechanics are different than other problem areas, but there are mechanics!

23. Being a nerd is almost equivalent to being a bad person

I grew up a nerd. I love D&D and science and all that kind of stuff. I was immersed in very autistic/nerd heavy culture. 4chan, reddit, IRC, the works. Worse, I grew up a New Atheist. God forbid.

I developed (as many teenagers do) a superiority complex. Look at all these stupid non-nerds and their stupid non-nerd ways! If only us smart, kind nerds ruled the world, then everything would be better. The world should be begging to pay me to use my intelligence to solve their problems using science!

EA and rationalism are particularly toxic ideologies in this regard. Especially how EA turns “having a lot of IQ” and “being a morally good person” into two very closely linked concepts. (It’s not a coincidence that I have met more full blown clinical sociopaths in EA than almost anywhere else) I have met many, many rationalists and EAs, and they don’t need more IQ points, they need to stop being such fucking nerds.

A weird thing happened to me at some point over the last couple of years. I started being disgusted by people I used to admire or want to emulate. I started being disgusted by mathematicians, philosophers, programmers and authors/bloggers that I used to see as role models.

There is a kind of disgust I now feel towards nerds, especially a certain flavor of nerd that we all know.

They work in tech or academia, think they’re better than everyone else (but often present as humble, they would never say that they think their intelligence makes them a better person, that would be terribly gauche), but refuse to actually work on the most important problems when it isn’t “fun” for them. They deploy massive galaxy brain cope to justify why they must be allowed to “follow their curiosity” and do whatever is most fun for them. Of course solving the world’s biggest problems just happens to involve doing their favorite pet project. It’s their cOmPaRaTiVe AdVaNtAgE!! Usually they will bring up “category theory” or “Haskell” or “being cracked” somehow. They often have a destructive Adderall addiction.

And they are massive, overwhelming cowards.

They don’t stand up to injustice, they don’t do politics (that’s beneath them and icky), they are massively greedy (but are great at explaining their greed as actual being altruism), and most of all they eschew and fear responsibility more than anything. If other people get hurt, because their social media recommender algorithm tears families apart, or because their sports betting app drained all their money, well that’s those people’s fault! Free market, baby! If they bought the product, it must be morally ok. It could never be that they, the morally superior nerds, have any responsibility!

I remember having a conversation with a very senior person at OpenAI. This person assured me that, of course, he and OpenAI care sooo much about AGI safety and alignment, of course it would be top priority to make sure things are done safely, and that of course the government should be a part of regulating that! So I said that of course I agreed, and was happy to hear that, the government should indeed prosecute and punish people that do dangerous things with AI.

And oh, dear reader, I wish you could have seen his face. Pure panic overtaking him, his entire body language convulsing away from me in squirming, weasely horror. “No, the government shouldn’t punish people!!”, he cried, “It would be much better if the government rewarded good actors like OpenAI! Positive incentives!” Yeah. How convenient.

The spiritual core of this type of nerd is “I should be allowed to to do whatever I want, because I’m smart, and society should be organized around allowing me to do whatever I want.” Academia should fund me to do my useless research, governments should allow me to import greymarket narcotics, the world should allow me to build AGI because I think it’s cool. And I will cry and scream and use all my IQ points to divert resources from other things to make it so I can play with my toys all day, and be praised for it. It’s not enough that I get to do useless math all day, you also need to pay me and make me high status for doing it!

They are children, weasels and cowards.

It’s basically a form of low grade sociopathy.

24. Not being a nerd is almost equivalent to being a bad person

Yeah but the New Atheists were right tho.

Theodicy is a devastating flaw of monotheistic conceptions of a omnibenevolent and omnipotent god. Religious fundamentalism is really bad! Building new technology is really important!

The reactionary position (“just go back and don’t do progress” or “just take all the nerds’ toys away”) is also untenable, and evil.

Science is in fact the correct way to think about reality! (not “academia”, I mean the capital S kind of Science”)

Yes, nerds are very annoying, and very evil. If you work at Meta (or OpenAI, or Anthropic, or one of the other unambiguously evil companies), you are partaking in systemic evil. If you’re a low level, oppressed drone that needs the money to raise your family and you have no other options…ok, maybe it’s just a shit situation.

If you’re a high IQ top tier software engineer, you have options. You are just evil for working there. Oh I’m sure you think you’re a good person, I’m sure you have a whole essay cooked up in your head about why it’s actually totally justified that you should be allowed to do this and you deserve this pay and you are not a bad person. No, you are a bad person.

But, scientists, and engineers and nerds built the wonderful good parts of the world too. They deserve the credit and support for having done so! Many of them were, in fact, not cowards! Or they were cowards that at least worked for good purposes (and got lucky not to be captured by sociopaths).

If you dismiss science, if you disrespect people trying new things, even when those new things don’t work out, you’re also kind of a bad person. We need people trying new things, pushing the boundaries, experimenting, and it’s great that we as a civilization can give those weirdos (of which I am surely one as well!) the resources and space to do their weird experimentation, and we can reap the benefits.

I am thankful to the New Atheists, to the cracked engineers that build the software I rely on, to Kant, Leibniz, Plato and all their autistic philosopher wordcel friends, to the nerds of this and previous generations. Without them, where would we be?

And we need more! We need more nerdiness, more experiments, more new ideas! We need to play with our toys, both to discover new frontiers, and because it is fun. And if we’re not at least having fun, haven’t we already lost?

If you are a nerd, you should try being less of one. If you are not a nerd, you should try being more of one.

Neither extreme is enviable, superior or wholesome. We should strive for the playfulness, the dedication and the intelligence of the nerds, while not using our intelligence to trap ourselves into moral cowardice and exploit the commons around us.

25. Being Good is very hard

There is a conception of what “being (morally) good” entails that is something like “if you want to be good, then you will be good!”

This is utterly, deeply, dangerously wrong.

Being good is very hard! You have to know many things, do many things, learn many things, to be good in different scenarios. Being evil is the default!

Breaking a promise is easier than keeping it. And it’s not sufficient to not “want” to break a promise. You have to actually keep the promise!

If you promise you will keep a secret, but you don’t have enough self control to stop yourself from at a later time blurting it out, then you are incapable of being good! It doesn’t matter if you “intended” to be good, only your actions matter! If you want to be good, you better start working on that self control until you are capable of it.

“Intention” is the useless, easy part. Following through is the hard part.

Do you know what you get if you’re “actually” a bad person deep down, but you just always do the good actions anyways, even if you don’t really “intend” it?

A good person.

26. People consent to a lot of stuff that is still bad for them

I grew up a classic western liberal in the 21st century. A classic tenant of this philosophy is the primacy of consent. If two adults of sound mind consent to do something, that doesn’t infringe on the liberties of others, where’s the problem?

And yet, sports betting. Pay day loans. Fentanyl. Social media algorithms. YouTube Kids slop. Cults. Even just some “alternative lifestyles” (fill in whichever ones you like).

Obviously consent is insufficient. People are getting hurt, a lot, by things where no “traditional” coercion is happening.

I don’t really know what to do about this.

27. Freud was wrong, but not in the way I thought

I have a lot to say about psychoanalysis, I will try to say as little as I can here.

Psychoanalysis is very interesting to me, not because it’s correct (it’s not, it’s extremely wrong), but because it makes correct predictions about parts of reality my other models don’t. I have a pretty good conventional folk model of psychology that usually predicts most behaviors pretty well, but it breaks down and makes wrong predictions when stuff like sex and power dynamics get involved. Psychoanalysis provides interesting frames on those blindspots of mine.

Psychoanalysis tries to present itself as science, and I think this is a mistake. It’s much more productive to think of psychoanalysis as a distinctly western form of mysticism (and people such as Jung realized this connection much more explicitly).

There are many things Freud was wrong about. Most of the things are not very interesting or surprising, and you’ve probably heard the standard critiques many times by now.

But what I think is an interesting mistake, because it still somewhat persists post-Freud, is the belief that the subconscious always “knows” what is “really going on.”

I’m sure someone has made this critique before, but this is obviously bullshit.

You can have a trauma and have absolutely no idea where it’s from or what to do about it!

Saying the subconsciousness always knows everything about its traumas and how to resolve them or what you “really need to do” is like saying every computer also contains the exact source code of a bug free version of itself, just hidden in a weird part of its filesystem.

Why would you ever expect that??

Clinical psychotherapy is closer to software engineering/debugging than it is to magically reading off the answers from your dreams or expressing all your feelings until the correct answer appears. Maybe reading your dreams can be a useful part of the debugging loop (idk, skeptical), but you should not expect the answers to be “in there somewhere.” The solution must be engineered/built.

There are many more things I have to say about psychoanalysis that I will save for another time. But if you want to read psychoanalysis, a few recommendations:

• Freud is much better in the original German

• Jung is much better than Freud, but quite different

• Edward Teach is (kinda) like Freud but just strictly better (read him if you read anyone on this list)

• Lacan lol lmao

28. Evil is a real thing in the world

Most problems in the world are due to complex structural forces, ultimately amoral factors and do not have any cleanly “evil” guy you can point to.

Most problems.

It is fashionable in our modern, “enlightened” world to downplay the influence of genuine, unabashed, moral evil, instead invoking “incentives” and moral relativism, or whatever.

I think this is (psychoanalytical) cope, the kind nerds do. Realizing you are dealing with actual, genuine evil is scary. Especially if they are your boss, friend, lover, family member or political representative. It’s so much easier to find an endless parade of excuses of why it’s not really evil, it’s just “““rational”””, or whatever.

Sure, some people are “just” “amoral” sociopaths that just have no leaning towards good whatsoever. That’s pretty bad. But it is very important to understand that genuinely evil sadists exist!

What I’m talking about are people that will optimize to cause others harm, even against their own best interests. They take inherent joy in your suffering. The more negative your outcome, the more positive their feelings.

People like this exist. They are not super common, but their effects and harms are vastly disproportionate to their frequency.

I could (and might) write a whole book about Evil, these people, their psychology and how to spot and defend against them. There is a lot of important things to be said here.

For now, I will leave you with three of my simplest and most effective trick for detecting people like this:

• They are unfathomably petty. Like seriously, you cannot imagine. They will go to extraordinary, completely irrational lengths to avenge a grudge over things that seem utterly trivial.

• They lie about irrelevant things. Normal people sometimes lie about important things. It’s not good, but it makes sense. If there is something big and important on the line, maybe you’ll get fired if you tell your boss the truth of how the project is going, yeah, sometimes normal people lie. Evil people lie about completely absurd, senseless stuff for no reason. They’ll lie about where they went on their holiday. They’ll claim to be pregnant when they’re not, at a company party. They’ll lie about what your colleague likes for breakfast. Just bizarre things that are easy (but annoying) to check, yet they lie anyways.

• They always have an excuse. It’s never their fault. They’re always the victim. Every bad thing you see them do has some explanation why this was a one off, or actually completely justified. Any individual “mask slip” will be possible to explain away, and they will try a lot to gaslight you into dismissing each individual case (and try to make you look crazy if you try to alert others to these dangers).

These aren’t 100% or enough to always detect evil, but they are extremely powerful heuristics. Ignore them at your peril.

Beware, and be ready to fight.

29. There is no such thing as Chaotic Good

There are exactly three alignments: Lawful Good, Lawful Evil and Chaos.

Good is a subset of order. There can of course be ordered Evil, and it can be a very terrible kind of Evil, but there can be no un-ordered Good.

Good is a fragile, unnatural property. Nature is not Good. Nature is ruled by entropy, and entropy is Chaos.

Love, happiness, safety, beauty are ordered phenomena. They cannot exist in Chaos.

Chaos is hell. It’s really, really bad.

If you deregulate everything, give everyone libertarian freedom, you don’t get capitalist utopia, you get Somalia (or worse). You get roving warlords pillaging and committing unspeakable violence (and that eventually likely evolve into states again).

If you bring Chaos, all that is left is death.

30. Lots of people like being oppressed/abused, and it fuels evil

This is a weird one, and this essay is not good. It’s quite bad actually. But this is important.

To be crystal clear, oppression is bad, and most people who are being oppressed are victims that deserve to be helped and are not at fault.

B U T

This is not always the case.

One of the most influential (to me) books I have read (and still not finished, which the author would find wonderfully ironic) is “Sadly, Porn”, by Edward Teach. It’s a book of raving, vitriolic pornographic projection and psychoanalysis. It’s very good, but not for everyone (or maybe anyone). Amusingly, every single review of the book seems to be wrong. Which feels very fitting if you know the book.

One of the ideas of the book I found most insightful for me, is this idea that people crave being oppressed. That they will go out of their way, of their own free will, to find the most evil creepy sociopath vampire in his castle and beg him to please, oh please oppress them. And the vampire says “well, ok, I guess why not, if you insist, I do like how blood tastes.”

This isn’t the first time I have encountered this idea. It has floated around the vaguely rightwing/nietzschean ideasphere for a long time. I had always dismissed it out of hand as just cope by evil people that want to feel like they are good people. “No, these people actually LIKE when I am evil, I am doing them a favor!!” Classic authoritarian bullshit.

I have recently had to reevaluate that judgement (partially).

It’s true that oppression is bad, and oppressing people is bad. (News flash: If you oppress people, even if they ask you to do it, it’s still bad!) Yet, there is a thing where people will go out of their way to both be oppressed, and to avoid escaping their oppression when given the opportunity.

Some of it is learned helplessness or whatever. But there’s another effect that I had not previously accounted for.

This could be a book in itself, but basically, especially in the west, people go to extraordinary lengths to avoid being blamed. Once you internalize this, a lot of strange phenomena start clicking into place.

The classic outcome of this is that people avoid being strong, or fetishize being weak. Because if you are weak, then you can never be blamed, you are never responsible. Seeing weakness as equivalent to, or precisely what makes, goodness. This view is very repulsive to me. (Here is a related post by a friend of mine)

This also relates phenomena like the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. If you interact with a problem, you could be blamed. So best to not even try to solve problems. But “not even trying to solve problems” could be blameworthy! So what’s the solution? You just have to make yourself so weak that you couldn’t even try to solve any problems, even if you wanted to. Perfect blamelessness nirvana at last.

And one of the best ways to achieve this weakness nirvana is to get someone stronger and more evil than you to oppress you. I mean, if you’re being oppressed by an evil vampire, it’s not your fault when bad things happen in the world! It’s the vampire’s fault! And of course, you are totally 100% against the vampire, but you know how it is…

The most crystal clear example of this in the modern world is engineers working at big tech. I’ve already said this previously, but if you work on Meta recommender algorithms or whatever, you are a bad person doing bad things. But working on recommender algorithms is fun! So how do we close the loop?

Find an evil, evil vampire (CEO, managers, whatever) that takes all that blame and “being responsible” nonsense off your shoulders. Don’t worry about it, kitten. Just make the numbers on this chart go up, and we’ll do all the scary politics and “being blamed for things” for you!

There might be legitimate worlds where you are actually, genuinely crushed under the boot of some totalitarian corporate or government oppressor. And if that happens, yeah that’s just a really fucking shit situation, good luck.

But that is so incredibly not what is happening here. Top tech talent are some of the smartest, richest, most flexible people in the world. They could figure out other things to do. Or even better, they could put some of that IQ to use into making the world better instead of feeding it to vampires.

One of the most impactful inventions of the late 20th century was when sociopaths figured out how to domesticate nerds, or how nerds figured out how to get sociopaths to adopt them as pets.

Nerds figured out they can give the sociopaths something they want (technological power and obedience), and in return sociopaths give them that sweet, sweet oppression and blamelessness they crave. They never have to feel bad about playing with their toys, or what those toys end up being used for. That’s someone else’s problem.

You were just following orders.

31. A better world is possible

I used to be a “techno optimist”, a “transhumanist”, even. I grew up in a culture where technology promised to solve all the terrible, scary problems humanity was facing.

Everything will turn out ok, just ignore that nagging sense of doubt and ambient disgust at what kind of future this promises. Just build more technology, faster. Faster. Even faster.

It’s for the revolution singularity, comrade, any feelings of doubt or disgust at what this future looks like are just irrational. It’s rational to want humans to be replaced, to maximize utility. What are you, some kind of luddite? You want your children to have a nice life, for there to be pretty art, for you to have time to relax and grow, to take things slow? How inefficient, comrade, we could instead be converting your family’s atoms to hyperoptimized giga hedonium. You of course don’t value your own family more than all the trillions of counterfactual happy beings that could be created instead. You wouldn’t disagree with that, would you, comrade? That would be irrational.

Your values are contradictory, and that’s ok. My values are contradictory, and that is ok.

I want to take things a bit slower. I’m not a transhumanist (not the San Francisco kind, at least), I’m a humanist.

I don’t like the utopia that transhumanists are selling, and for so long, I just couldn’t feel what a humanist utopia would feel like, or whether that was actually a thing, or a thing you were allowed to want.

Recently, I’ve started to really “feel the humanism”, what a well ordered, friendly, wholesome human society could look like. That masters and wields technology wisely and justly, rather than letting technology rule it.

You don’t have to sacrifice your values on the altar of “progress”! You can love things just because you love them, not because they are the most “efficient”, you can enjoy things, you can do things for no good reason at all. You can smell the flowers along the road, you can enjoy your weird little niche art that’s only for you and your friends.

You can have a world like this, and you should demand it.

Human values are complex, multifaceted, contradictory. It is the primary goal of every extremist to grind down the rich beauty of humanity’s soul into the simplest, most disfigured shape it can. Because then it will be so easy to get what you wish for. If only you wished for something you didn’t actually want.

Historically, the Human Project was one spread over generations. You didn’t strive to solve all the problems within your lifetime so you could enjoy them, instead you chipped away at the overwhelmingly huge problems bit by bit, so one day your children’s children could enjoy the fruits of a brighter future. This idea of “progress over generations” features heavily in humanism, and in concepts such as karma.

But imagine if the enlightenment humanists, the greek philosophers, the buddha, had access to the internet. Coordination and the Human Project become a lot easier and faster if you can instantly send messages to anyone in the world for effectively free!

What would the humanists do if they had the technology of today? Could we see the fruits of our labours even within our lifetimes?

We can build a new humanism for the 21st century, today.

For the first time, the final stage of the Human Project is in sight. The project of peace, prosperity and the pursuit of happiness for all.

It can be done. The Project is not yet completed, but it can be.

Final Reflections

I don’t have many regrets. Maybe I should call my mom more often.

I had some terrible things happen to me in my life, things that could have been Game Over, but they don’t really bother me anymore. You can just grow and get over things. You are not your trauma.

I have been very blessed. I am in good health, I am surrounded by people I like, and working on problems I care about. My job is very demanding, so sometimes I get put on an emotional rollercoaster, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Overall, I’m very happy. I have everything I want. I am very grateful. I wish this for everyone.

I don’t know if I will live to see 40.

Or if I do, whether humanity will still be in charge of this planet. I don’t expect so if things continue as they currently are. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. But it’s not looking great.

The world can still be saved, but not for much longer. I think we will likely see Game Over in the next 2-5 years.

I am very grateful to have gotten to such a wonderful state in my life before that point. I am grateful, but the battle is not over, it is not yet time to rest.

The shape of the Problem has been clarified in my sights, I can see it more clearly than I ever could before. And for the first time, I think I see how to fix it.

I don’t know if I can do it, definitely not alone. Building a better humanism, a prosperous and peaceful world, for everyone, to master technology before it masters us, to wield our powers wisely and justly to enable our universal pursuit of happiness, is a tall task.

The odds were always against us.

But if there is one thing I believe, it’s that this world is worth fighting for. It’s worth it, for all the people enjoying their lives, all the people suffering, all the children and happiness still to come. For all of them, for you, for me, it’s worth fighting.

I think I might know how to save the world, and dammit I’m gonna try.

— Connor, 2025