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Editing is far easier than writing. You can usually look at a finished product and notice its flaws in a single read-through. “This section is a bit redundant”, “the tone in this passage is jarring”, “this paragraph feels overlong”. As long as you have something that’s rough but substantive, there’s...

Whenever a discussion touches ethics, philosophy, or relates to guiding principles, hypotheticals become useful. We cannot investigate every idea with real experiments, but we can test the consistency and precision of principles that guide us with thought experiments. It isn’t necessary to see a man murdered in front of you...

Continuous distributions are everywhere - for virtually everything we care about, a little more is a little better (or worse), and a lot more is a lot better (or worse). This presents a problem - we need to create rules that reasonably and fairly apply across these continuums, where the...

Veganism is Virtuous, but not Obligatory Tl;dr: Here, I argue that eating meat is morally acceptable. The central point is that every argument for abstaining from animal products being a moral obligation is also an argument for more extreme levels of obligatory abstinence. The “as far as is practicable” constraint...

An insidious pattern among smart people is feeling that because something is familiar and obvious, you are impervious to ignoring or forgetting it. In challenging times, I have often heard these clichés and reflexively shrugged them off. “Oh, I should dust myself off and pick myself up? What a lazy...

The existence and necessity of sales is a middle finger to the classical economic assumptions of perfect information and rational buyers. The stereotype of the sly salesperson using devilish tricks to bypass your rational faculties and hypnotise you into a decision you would not have made upon reflection is partly...

It’s incredible how many consensus guidelines dissolve when you look closely at them. If you listen to any authority on the subject of sunscreen, you will hear it endlessly repeated that you absolutely must reapply sunscreen every 2 hours while you are in the sun, and immediately after swimming, sweating,...