AlphaAndOmega

Alternate title: Acid Convinced Me I Am Exactly Who I Thought I Was As the engaged and parasocially addicted reader I hope you are, you might remember that I’ve previously dabbled in mind-altering substances. If not, context you should have is that I'm a psychiatry resident who suffers from ADHD...

Note on AI usage: As is my norm, I use LLMs for proof reading, editing, feedback and research purposes. This essay started off as an entirely human written draft, and went through multiple cycles of iteration. The primary additions were citations, and I have done my best to personally verify...

I. I am not entirely sure how common it is to get so bored on vacation that you voluntarily return to your old workplace and accidentally start practicing medicine. Probably not very. But recently, thanks to certain flight disruptions in Dubai which I do not need to elaborate on, I...

What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are...

CW: Digital necromancy, the cognitohazard of summoning spectres from the road not taken There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It’s a madness born of idle curiosity,...

This is a first-person account from a psychiatry resident (me) enrolling in a clinical trial of psilocybin. Somewhere between a trip report, an overview of the pharmacology of psilocybin, and a review of the clinical evidence suggesting pronounced benefits for depression.

The question, “Will I go bald?” has haunted many a rationalist (and more than a few mirrors), but rarely receives a genuinely Bayesian treatment. In this essay, I combine personal risk factors, family history, and population-level genetics to estimate my absolute risk of androgenetic alopecia - laying out priors, likelihoods,...