Picture by me. On January 1st, 2019, I woke up in my room in London, fed the cat, made coffee, then sat down to begin my first day working at FS. The first thing I did was to make a new Google Doc entitled ‘TGMM3: Systems and Mathematics.’  About two and a half years later, that Google Doc is now an actual real-life book that you can buy and hold and spill drinks on and even read. It’s the third volume in the Wall Street Journal bestselling Great Mental Models series. It’s about systems and mathematics. You can learn more about the project and (hopefully) order copies here. Rhiannon Beau ..read more

A collection of reflections on an unmistakably strange time At the start of the pandemic, I told myself I wouldn’t write about it. I still believed the mass destabilisation was a mere blip I’d later prefer to forget. Seeing as I try to keep my writing ahistorical-ish when possible, why jump on the bandwagon of picking over what would surely just be a few weird weeks? Hey, remember when we all lost our minds and started sanitising groceries and bumping elbows? Yeah, that was a strange moment. Plus, I couldn’t excavate a single coherent sentence —even in my diary, which went quiet — re ..read more

Taken by me. Over the last four years, I’ve amassed a tangled array of thousands of notes on things I find interesting or useful. They’re collected from some combination books, blog posts, songs, tweets, Wikipedia pages, news articles, forum posts, things people say, and ideas that drift into my brain. Having previously shared some of my notes on writing as thinking in public and on improving writing quality, here’s a selection of my notes on ideation: where ideas come from, how to have more of them, how to be creative, and so on. (Parts marked with Thoughts: are my own thoughts written as re ..read more

Fey with one of my books. Taken by me. I read a lot of good books in 2020. Like many people, I found myself often struggling to focus last year. Contrary to my usual prioritisation of reading, I ended up probably watching more TV and reading more news each month than I would normally do in a year. But that was balanced out by having more free time to read and a number of work projects requiring extensive research. During 2020, I became more meticulous about taking notes on what I read. Each time I finish a book, I go through it and, taking cues from my annotations, transcribe key points, usef ..read more

Taken by me. I’m months overdue a book review post because my reviews have been getting too long and therefore intimidating to start writing. So I’ll keep to a few lines on each book, or it will be time to write about another month by the time I finish this one. According to Goodreads, I hit my 2020 goal of 100 books. That’s 29,035 pages or an average of 80 per day. Cool. *** Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals — Robert M. Sapolsky ‘One of the most important concepts in all of biology is that you can’t ever really state what the effect is of a particular gene, or what th ..read more

‘Run experiments, place bets, say oops. Anything less is an act of self-sabotage.’ — Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria Picture taken by me, featuring Fey’s hands, my Instax camera, and pictures from this year. In my last post, I wrote about why I love short-term experiments as a way to learn new stuff and stress-test existing beliefs.  As part two of that post, here’s a list of around forty ideas for one-month experiments, along with a brief summary of why they might be interesting.  Some I’ve tried myself in the past. I’ve excluded a few past experiments that weren’t all t ..read more

Picture by me, featuring the hands of Fey Chu and a wash bag by Dreamers & Thinkers.  Does it float? Experimental archaeology is a field of study where researchers learn more about history by recreating something people in the past did or used to see how it works. For example, researchers have tried transporting stones of the same size and weight as the ones used in Stonehenge across similar distances using the technology available at the time to see how it might have been done. Unexpected things always happen when theory makes contact with reality. Trying out a hypothesis by do ..read more

35mm film picture of my teenage bedroom (complete with many Beatles references), taken by me in around 2013. The two most intense musical obsessions I’ve experienced so far in my life have been The Beatles and Bright Eyes.  It took years of angsty fumbling to write my Sort-of love letter to Bright Eyes, an attempt to convey a slither of the adoration I’ve felt (and still feel) for that band.  But The Beatles came first. I’ve loved them for about 14 years now. Despite countless efforts, I’ve never come close to laying out my associated emotions like butterflies in a display case ..read more

A suggestion for prioritising new ideas and finishing what you start A visual representation of storing shiny objects to chase, in a shop window in Berlin. Taken by me. The biggest predictor of whether I finish any project (i.e. a think with an end point) is almost always whether I’m able to keep working on it until it’s done, or whether I get excited about something new and jump into starting that. Letting unfinished projects you were once enthusiastic about pile up is a bad idea for a few reasons.  If you only work on things during the initial burst of energy and novelty, you do ..read more

In October, I spent a few enjoyable evenings watching a series of lectures from the MIT course ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey’. The course covered some of the content from Douglas Hofstadter’s book, so I watched it in part as a precursor to reading the book. Another reason is that it includes material from areas with which I have little familiarity, such as computer science. I find it valuable to sometimes learn about topics I don’t necessarily have the groundwork to understand well because things end up connecting over time. I encounter something else and find that earlier lear ..read more