PatrickDFarley

While your connection to your past self is mostly about your sense of identity, your connection to your future self is more practical. Broadly, it’s about building a better life. You do this through a timeless policy of charity and trust. Act charitably toward your future self, and in turn...

(Introduction: Your four-dimensional body) Some people use meditation to learn valuable things about their deepest selves; some use therapy; some use psychedelic drugs. I use time travel. Why connect? My reasons, in no particular order: Reflection: Look at your past selves to see how you’ve changed, and how you haven’t....

Introduction You are a four-dimensional being. And it’s fitting, because you live in a four-dimensional world. Three spatial dimensions, plus time, the dimension we all move through at a nearly-constant rate. In Einstein’s famous relativity equations, time is treated much like the three spatial dimensions. And those are the best...

I previously wrote about the present perfect tense and how it can make you waste time pursuing things you don’t really want—when you want to have done them instead of wanting to do them. Now I notice the continuous tense characterizes another pitfall, kind of the opposite: sometimes you want...

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy just put into visuals something that I already knew: AI is coming for my job. “Technical Writer” is not actually a big enough category to get its own rectangle within the technology group, but everything in the technology group is red, and red here means “high...

When I first read In the Balance on Slate Star Codex I was fascinated in the beginning and middle, and then exhausted as the ideas got progressively harder to think through. I read it again a few months later, and several times again after that. There was something captivating about...

I was way too far in life by the time I figured out my sleep cycles. This is one of those personal metrics that’s worth learning and memorizing because once you know it, you’ll use it often—like your daily calorie expenditure, or the exact chemicals you’re allergic to, etc. It’s...