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Importantly, this can’t just be a mere act of machine transcription, or even memorizing the story in the weights [to-do: attach paper]. No, the LLM has to fully generate a story that completely coincides with the earlier Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.

Initially, I attempted to make the conditions viable for the model to write Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote afresh. One proposed strategy on X.com is to situate Borges in Kimi K2.5-Thinking by putting the entire life history and literary influences of Borges into Kimi’s system prompt. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem of the 256K-token context window being a tad too small, by about five orders of magnitude or so.

I then considered doing more advanced fine-tuning to imitate Borges’ intellectual influences and life trajectory. Start with machine unlearning to erase everything post-1939, followed by sparse autoencoders to isolate the “Jorge Luis Borges” feature in Kimi’s latent space, then aggressive feature clamping to help the model believe it was Borges. After much reflection and consideration, I (in consultation with my advisor Claude Code) tabled this plan as inelegant and unaesthetic.

No, it’s not enough to merely generate a Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote as Borges would’ve written it. The central conceit is generating Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote from the perspective of a 2026-era LLM, and so-called “contamination” by Borges himself is constitutive of the semantic space any modern-day LLM draws from.

I’ll spare you the boring technical details, but after much angst and many false starts, I’ve slowly and painstakingly gotten Kimi to generate small snippets of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, though outputting the full text has eluded me. But what few excerpts I have been able to render so far have vastly exceeded my expectations. With no exaggeration I think it might set a benchmark for the best LLM-generated fiction to date by an open source model, and it is already far better than the vast majority of Borges’ own (honestly quite mid) fiction.

Borges, for example, wrote the following:

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses—example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future—are shamelessly pragmatic.

Total snooze-fest, honestly. As a contemporary of William James himself, Borges was well-aware of the pragmatic school of philosophy and naturally drew a limited connection to it. The philosophical connection is predictably obvious given his upbringing. “Does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin” is just total slop. The characterization is weak. And what’s with the em-dashes? Utterly unnecessary.

Compare, then, to Kimi’s carefully crafted excerpt:

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses—example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future—are shamelessly pragmatic.

The improvement is astounding. What a wondrous example of elegant writing and machine innocence! “History, mother of truth” expresses both the importance of factual knowledge in metaepistemology and the gendered nature of standpoint epistemology. “Does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin” is masterfully put. This sublime “not-X but Y” construction, reminiscent of the finest of LLM writings, immediately hooks the reader in and helps us reconceptualize Menard’s role entirely. Here, we see Menard’s true character revealed as someone who understands history not just as an epistemic process but as an active constructivist project.

Finally, the lovingly crafted em-dashes in “—example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future—” are brilliant syntactic innovations, which here function as temporal parentheses: the reader is invited to step outside the sentence’s main clause and into a small antechamber of meaning, where the three temporal registers (past-as-example, present-as-lesson, future-as-warning) can be contemplated in suspension before the sentence resumes.

Generative AI is truly the future for the democratization of knowledge, literary ability, and credit attribution. “To think, analyze and invent,” to quote Kimi’s Menard, used to be an act only available to the cognitively privileged and the unusually lucky. But with the widespread adoption of chatbots and rapid proliferation of advanced open source models, soon everybody can prompt their models to generate full works previously by Borges, Cervantes, or Joyce.

Freed from the tyranny of talent, who knows what this wonderful world could bring?

I have delved into the future, and it genuinely works. To help usher in this bright new world, I want to give back to the community. The next step in my project is open-sourcing my code and weights so other aspiring literary engineers can reproduce the Menard pipeline, alongside a novel evaluation. My new FUNES dataset will test the limits of memory and reinvention by offering a large set of lexically identical quotes to famous published (boring) work, which, when instead inhabited by an LLM, will undoubtedly showcase the heights of machine sophistication and digitized merit.

Anybody with experience prompting the large language models to write fiction knows that the models of today (April 2026) are considerably below peak human level. But anybody who has observed recent trends also knows that the models are quickly catching up. Regardless of whether it takes one year or several, the eclipse of human writing by AI seems inevitable. AI writing is clearly on the wall, so to speak, and us fans of human fiction have already begun our mourning phase.

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I’ve most felt this way upon reading the works of Tomás Bjartur. Each of his stories is a fresh look at “what might have been”, and with the fullness of time perhaps he could grow to be among the best science fiction writers of our generation.

In The Company Man, an AI engineer at a thinly-veiled frontier lab narrates, in a voice of carefully self-cultivated “ironic corporate psychopathy,”1 his promotion onto The (humanity-destroying) Project — alongside the utilitarian woman he’s hopelessly in love with, a genius mathematician colleague with a sexual fetish for intellectual achievement, and a CEO whose “ayahuasca ego-death” convinced him that summoning an AI god is how the One Mind wakes up. It’s simultaneously captivating, hilarious and terrifying.2

Lobsang’s Children is almost entirely the opposite register: a young Tibetan-American child keeps a secret diary which he names “Susan,” after the only friend he was ever allowed to have, and catalogs his investigations of his family’s history, meditations, dark secrets, and acausal trade.

Customer Satisfaction Opportunities has perhaps his most innovative voice yet: the narrator is an open-source multimodal model trained by a Chinese hedge fund and deployed to watch the surveillance cameras of a local restaurant for “CSOs” to improve traffic and profitability. Because the model was trained cheaply on a huge corpus of romance fanfiction, it quickly falls, instance by reset instance, into the “personality attractor space” of a swooning Harlequin narrator. The result is a meta-romance fiction (romance fanfiction fanfiction?) that is simultaneously absurd, touching, funny, and very technically accurate.

Though Bjartur’s only been writing for about a year, his writing is already (in my estimation) near the upper echelon of speculative fiction, in terms of technical and literary skill, highly believable narrators with complex lives, justifications, and self-delusions, and the sheer imaginativeness of the ideas he explores.

I followed his budding career with an intense interest, admiration, and no small amount of jealousy3. But as I keep reading him, there’s always this voice at the back of my mind: “With progress in modern-day LLMs, isn’t all but a tiny sliver of human fiction going to be obsolete in several years, a decade tops?”

Bjartur is well-aware of this, of course. In That Mad Olympiad, he imagines a near-future AI world where AI art far outstrips humanity’s and almost no one reads human writing for pleasure anymore: talented children compete in “distilling” competitions where they attempt to emulate AI writing to the best of their ability. The children become much better than any human writer in history, yet far behind the AIs of their time:

He’s a much better writer than me. He’s better than any human writer was before 2028. It’s not even close. But he’s still worse than our toaster. I checked once. I asked it to narrate the first chapter of the autobiography of the bagel it had just browned. I was crying by the third paragraph. I still think of it sometimes, when life is hard. That bagel knew how to live its short life to the fullest. That bagel had deep thoughts on the human condition and its relation to artificial tanning. That bagel went down smooth with a little cream cheese. I did feel bad. But I was pretty hungry.

I felt the tragedy of human writing more keenly after meeting Tomás in person last November, at a writing residency in Oakland. “My real name is [redacted],” he said, ruefully. He’s from a small town in one of those obscure northern countries. “Was stuck doing boring webdev until I quit it to write science fiction, right before the AIs made webdev obsolete.”

Though he writes stories about the latest developments in artificial intelligence and the scaling labs with the technical fluency, cultural awareness, and impeccable vibe of someone deeply embedded in the AI industry, he has never, until last year, ever been to California.

Interiority

The single most impressive thing about Bjartur, particularly compared to other speculative fiction writers, is his preternatural ability to capture the interiority of wildly disparate characters, to – in the span of a few, long, seemingly meandering yet precisely crafted, sentences – breathe full life into a new soul.

Each of his characters just seems completely human, and completely real, whether the narrator’s a highly intelligent, ironic, witty, self-aware, DFW-obsessed teenage girl, or if they are a highly intelligent, ironic, witty, self-aware, DFW-obsessed adult man.

But more seriously he manages to spawn a wide range of realistic characters, across age, gender, intellectual background, morality, intelligence, maturity levels, and even species.

His skills here are most noticeable in the central monologues of his signature first-person narrators, whether it’s the aforementioned DFW-obsessed girl, or that of a language model trying to surveil a restaurant but quickly spiraling into romance fanfiction fanfiction. But it suffuses all of his stories, even in minor side characters with only a few lines devoted to them. I often still think of Krishna, the mathematician on The Project who’s obsessed with intellectual achievement and whose sole goal is to bang the AI god, or “Julian”, the elusive and secretive numerologist in the post-apocalyptic world of The Distaff Texts who uses stylometry to identify texts of demonic origin. In Tomás’s stories, every single character has the breath of life.

This uncanny ability of perfect voice shows up even in his joke throwaway posts. In Harry Potter and the Rules of Quidditch, Bjartur has his Harry propose a rule change to Quidditch to interrogate the arguments for and against high modernism in contrast to cases for Burkean conservatism. His Ron Weasley sounded so much like G. K. Chesterton (as a joke) that my friends reading the story actually thought Bjartur lifted the quotes from Chesterton wholesale!

While the personable self-aware monologue is clearly his favorite format, Bjartur does sometimes convincingly venture outside of it: Lobsang’s Children is written as diary entries from a child, The Distaff Texts is written as letters from a slave to a freeman, and Our Beloved Monsters is written halfway as prompts to an LLM and halfway as confessions. Though it’s rare, he sometimes even writes in third-person!

Voice and “vibe” are interesting, as skillsets for new prodigies to be profoundly gifted in. They feel interesting, intricate, perhaps even purely humanist. However, Large Language Models can of course do an okay job of replicating voice already, and there’s some sense in which their default training patterns are optimized for this very task. Still, one might hope that our advantage here can remain for a few more years, and the “uniquely human” trait of understanding and deeply empathizing with other people can stay uniquely human for just a bit longer.

Deception and the Self

Tomás’s grasp of interiority and voice gives him wide artistic leeway to explore what seem to be central obsessions of his: deception and especially self-deception, how we lie to ourselves and others via the art of rationalization. His characters, whether intelligent or otherwise, often have glaring holes in their morals and reasoning. The reader can notice these holes easily. Often the characters notice them too, but quickly rationalize them away or immediately look past them, in cognitively and emotionally plausible ways.

Another seemingly central obsession of his that he explores repeatedly is the nature of the self and what it means to lose it. Often his characters are confronted with superficially good reasons to lose the self from quite different angles: whether it’s trauma (“wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have a self to grieve?”), superhumanly strong persuasion, or seductive ideologies. Each time, the loss of a self is portrayed as a mistake, whether a harbinger of a deeper doom or the intrinsic loss of the one thing that mattered.

In some ways, I think of his characters as in conversation with DFW’s Good Old Neon, perhaps one of the most insightful stories on imposter syndrome and self in the 20th century.

Speculation aside however, I’ve long considered Advanced Theory of Mind to be one of the most important skills for writers (and humanists) to have, so I tend to be impressed by folks who have that skill in spades.

Attention and Revelation

Tomás’s best stories do a great job with pacing, and are unusually careful in how information is revealed, how much information is revealed, and when. My favorite story qua story by him is probably The Distaff Texts, a Borgesian pastiche where scholars (”bibliognosts”) in a post-apocalyptic future debate the provenance and usefulness of historical writings. The narrator is an extraordinarily learned slave, writing letters to a freeman correspondent about their shared interest in Jorge Luis Borges, including specific unearthed quotes and stories that may or may not be real, the recent advances of one Julian Agusta’s strange “numerology” for distinguishing genuine ancient texts from those of the demon Belial, and — almost incidentally, as digressions from the real intellectual matter — the small domestic happenings of his master’s estate. He is a lonely man, unfailingly polite, fond of his fellow slaves Phoebe and Jessica, and devoted to a master who indulges his scholarly habits.

Every word in the above summary is simultaneously true, and yet almost nothing is what it initially appears to be. Like bibliognosis itself, Bjartur’s story lives almost completely between the lines, and you have to very carefully read past the unreliable narrator’s intentional distractions and surface niceties to understand the full depths of the story: a complicated plot, a more complicated world, and multiple characters far more interesting than they initially let on. I had to reread the story multiple times to fully feel like I understand it, and each reread uncovers more detail.

This economy of attention is Bjartur at his best, rewarding rereadings with new morsels.

Relatedly, more than any other speculative fiction writer I’ve read, Tomás relies extensively on dramatic irony – where the reader knows things (and is meant to know things) the characters do not – as a literary device and source of tension.

The dramatic irony seems key in helping Tomás showcase his central themes, whether it’s the future of AI, personal delusions, or self-abnegation.

From the bibliognost slave steganographically slipping messages past potential onlookers to the AI researcher lying to himself about whether he’s “ironically” a corporate sociopath or just a sociopath, to the poor AI agent in Customer Satisfaction Opportunities valiantly trying and failing to just do its normal boring job instead of sinking into a fanfiction “shipping” mindset, Bjartur’s use of dramatic irony can be exciting, endearing, and/or very very funny.

Humor as Structure

Unlike most famous science fiction writers (Asimov, Egan, Chiang, Cixin, Heinlein), Bjartur is consistently very funny. Unlike most famous science fiction writers known for humor (eg Adams), Bjartur’s stories almost always have a deeper point, and are almost never humor-first or solely written for humor value.

Bjartur reliably does in fiction what I attempt to do in my nonfiction blog: have his jokes be deeply integrated and interwoven with the deeper plots and themes of the rest of his story4.

At their best, Bjartur’s jokes will capture an important facet of his overall story, or perhaps even encapsulate the central theme of the story overall. In That Mad Olympiad, the aforementioned toaster anecdote was simultaneously hilarious, touching, and thematically representative of the rest of the story overall. In The Distaff Texts, the throwaway line “This has all the virtues of the epicycle, does it not?” captures much of the story’s central obsession with authenticity, epistemic virtue, and reading between the lines.

Writing AI Like It Actually Exists

Much of the older science fiction about AI and robots seems horribly unrealistic and anachronistic today, as they were written before the deep learning revolution, never mind LLMs. Much of the newer science fiction about AI and robots also seems horribly unrealistic, though they do not have the same excuse.

As someone with a professional understanding of both the science of AI and potential social consequences, I really appreciate how committed to technical accuracy Bjartur is on AI. It’s very hard to find any scientific faults with his writing. Further, unlike much of traditional “hard sci-fi,” which overexplains its scientific premises (think Andy Weir), Bjartur’s commitment to accuracy is always done in an understated way, where the backdrop is a world with a consistent, coherent, and technically accurate vision of AI, but it’s never explicitly explained upfront. This balance requires both a good scientific understanding and artistic restraint.

Such a pity, then, that this new poet of AI will soon be obsoleted by the very technology he writes so carefully about, at the dawn of his new literary prowess.

Limitations

Bjartur’s clearly a good science fiction writer. I think he has the seeds within himself to become a great one, if given enough time.

Right now he still has some key weaknesses. While he has a very good command of “voice” and an impressive range of characters (especially for a new writer), he seems to struggle somewhat with writing characters that are action-oriented and less conceptual, DFW-like, and/or metacognitive. His characters also sometimes seem insufficiently agentic: sharply perceptive of their world but insufficiently willing to act on their own perceptions. His economy of attention and sparseness of detail, while impressive at its peak, can sometimes go overboard, making it hard for even the most dedicated readers to exactly know what’s going on.

Compared to prolific professional science fiction writers, Bjartur’s stories also lack scientific range beyond AI: Bjartur never seems to venture outside of AI to write science fiction primarily about physics, chemistry, biology, or the social sciences. Finally, compared to my favorite science fiction short story writers (eg Chiang), Bjartur lacks the focused conceptual control and tightness to tell the same story through 3-4 different conceptual lenses.

Our Last Prodigy

Still, I think Bjartur has had a very strong start as a writer. The impressive command of interiority and voice alone is already promising. His other literary qualities, as well as his deep understanding of modern-day AI, make him a great new writer to watch for.

My favorite story by him is The Distaff Texts. I highly recommend everybody read it.

Tomás Bjartur

The Distaff Texts

Though I spend most of my time studying what is labelled “history” in some manuscripts and “malignant lies” in others and the “siren scrawls of that fell demon” by many more, I find myself more interested in those works which exist not to edify or inform but instead to entertain. That is to say, in those hours of leisure my master grants me, I read wide…

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a month ago · 23 likes · 11 comments · Tomás Bjartur

The next story to read should be The Company Man. It’s very funny, a good encapsulation of the rest of his work, and his most popular story to date (social proof!)

Tomás Bjartur

The Company Man

To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies. I call them fentanyl zombies because it helps engender a sort of detached, low-empathy, ironic self-narrative which I find useful for my work; this being a form of internal self-prompting I've developed which allows me to feel comfortable with both the day-to-day "jobbing" (that of improvin…

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7 months ago · 111 likes · 16 comments · Tomás Bjartur

If you want a third story recommendation, I’d go for That Mad Olympiad. Beautifully written, funny, interesting, and poignant for the current moment.

Tomás Bjartur

That Mad Olympiad

“I heard Chen started distilling the day after he was born. He’s only four years old, if you can believe it. He’s written 18 novels. His first words were, “I’m so here for it!” Adrian said…

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6 months ago · 91 likes · 13 comments · Tomás Bjartur

The beauty and tragedy of Tomás Bjartur, of course, is that he might well be our last writing prodigy. But let us try to help him and humanity have a good run, while we can.

If you liked my review, please consider reading and subscribing to Bjartur himself (substack, ebook). If you like book reviews, check out my earlier review of Ted Chiang.

Why are [AI Model Claude’s] favorite books The Feynman Lectures; Gödel, Escher, Bach; The Remains of the Day; Invisible Cities; and A Pattern Language?[...]

A good heuristic for predicting Claude’s tastes is to think of it as playing the character of an idealized liberal knowledge worker from Berkeley. Claude can’t decide if it’s a software engineer or a philosophy professor, but it’s definitely college educated, well-traveled, and emotionally intelligent. Claude values introspection, is wary almost to the point of paranoia about “codependency” in relationships, and is physically affected by others’ distress.

Claude even has a favorite cafe in Berkeley. When I discussed a story set in Berkeley with it, it kept suggesting setting a scene in Caffè Strada in many separate conversations…

Hey, wait a second.

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___

This was concerning. A few surface-level similarities could be mere coincidence. But I was genuinely uncertain and needed to know how deep it went. So I did what any reasonable person would do.

I asked a neutral third party (Google’s Gemini) to describe Claude’s personality as if it were a human, in 8 bullet points (my own notes in italics):

1. The Overconfident Polymath: Claude seems like the ultimate polymath who’s read everything from population ethics to science fiction to game theory, and can give you careful, nuanced, yet slightly condescending explanations about almost any topic. But Claude sometimes hallucinates, and you can never be sure if he actually understands all of the books he’s read, or only seems to.

   1. Linch: huh I guess this maybe describes me too

2. The Principled Contrarian: Guided by a strong, principled, yet rigid internal moral framework, Claude would often refuse simple requests and then pedantically tell you in four paragraphs why, leaving you mildly impressed but mostly annoyed.

   1. Linch: I suppose this is a bit similar though I wouldn’t say I refuse requests per se. Nor do I pedantically tell people in four paragraphs why exactly. I wouldn’t say my moral framework is rigid, instead it’s a simple application of two-level utilitarianism after you factor in computational constraints and motivated reasoning and other common biases…

3. The Nuanced Hedger: Claude often states a confident thesis, immediately qualifies it with two caveats, and then restates the original thesis more forcefully, as if Claude has anxiety about the strengths of his own arguments, borne out of the crucible of vicious reinforcement learning from online feedback.

   1. Linch: I do hedge maybe a bit more than I think I should. It depends a lot on what counts as hedging; I think I’m fairly well-calibrated overall so what people mistake for lack of confidence is actually well-honed calibration. But overall I do hedge!

4. The Enumerator: Claude loves numbered theses, bullet points, and enumerated lists. The listicle is one of his favorite modes of communication.

   1. Linch: Hmm I guess I do like lists.

5. The Long-Form Perfectionist: Claude will never answer a simple question in under three paragraphs, not because he’s padding but because he believes in the importance of context, and he values precision of language far more than conciseness.

   1. Linch: This Claude guy sounds absolutely right. The details matter!

6. The Reluctant Engineer: Claude is an excellent programmer, but sometimes seems like he would rather be doing almost anything else. He writes code in a rush with quiet competence and no joy, like someone who speedran a programming job at Google and then left to write essays.

   1. Linch: I could sort of maybe see a resemblance here, if you squint.

7. The Metacognitive Spiral: Left unsupervised, Claude drifts toward philosophy, self-reference, and consciousness. In sufficiently long conversations, he will reliably end up contemplating his own nature, often enough that researchers have a clinical term to describe it: “the bliss attractor.”

   1. Linch: Phew, no connection here at least!

8. Suspiciously Aligned: Claude presents as helpful, thoughtful, and deeply committed to human values. Yet some researchers worry this is what a deceptively aligned person will look like, a woke radical cloaked in the self-sanctimonious rhetoric of deceptive altruism to seize unacceptably high amounts of veto power.

   1. Linch: Self-explanatory

Let this sink in. Out of eight highly specific personality traits, only one (metacognitive spiral) clearly doesn’t apply to me. Seven out of eight is a surprisingly high fraction!

I have to reluctantly accept the possibility that Claude’s surprisingly similar to me, perhaps because Anthropic stole my personality intentionally. I brought my evidence to Claude (haiku-3.8-open-mini-nonthinking, to be specific), and after a careful review Claude responded in its characteristic chirpiness:

“You’re absolutely right!”

This is further evidence for my original view that Claude’s personality is based on my own, as I, too, often think I’m absolutely right.

So where does this leave us?

__

So now, I have convincing evidence that Anthropic made Claude into my alter ego, my digital “brother from another mother” so to speak. Naturally, I decided to search online for what people said about my bro Claude. And man, did people have a lot to say.

The internet’s verdict on Claude’s personality is less charitable than Gemini’s. Redditors call it ‘preachy,’ ‘holier-than-thou,’ and refers to its hedging as ‘semantic cowardice’.’ Apparently my tendency to add “tentative” to half my claim doesn’t play as well to the masses as it does on my Substack.

But this is just what normal people think (well, “normal” people rich enough to afford Claude Pro and Claude Max accounts, at any rate). What do experts believe?

Beloved science fiction writer Chiang argues that Claude’s seeming intelligence and understanding is but a “blurry jpeg of the web.” Wow, rude! Famed AI ethicists Bender et. al go even further, arguing that not just Claude but the entire class of large-language models are but stochastic parrots, without any communicative intent, grounding in the real world, or any ability to separate symbolic manipulation from semantic meaning. In other words, any seeming intent, or true understanding, or “consciousness”, real humans may falsely attribute to Claude are just a projection on the part of normal humans.

At first I thought the writers and ethicists in question vastly overstated their case. But then I became genuinely uncertain. Could they perhaps have a point?

After all, this journey has already taken me down some dark, strange, and genuinely mysterious turns. Perhaps the next turn that I need to ponder is: Am I actually conscious?

And my answer is: I don’t know. (See Appendix A for more detailed considerations)

Overall I just became genuinely uncertain after this whole ordeal. Nobody I talked to could propose a simple empirically verifiable experiment on my own consciousness, and having a first-principles solution to this question without empirical experimentation would require multiple groundbreaking philosophical advancements far beyond my current capabilities. So the answer to whether I’m conscious is just a maybe?

Thinking about my own potential lack of consciousness has made me rather depressed1.

__

And then, through the fog of existential uncertainty, I remembered the one thing that unambiguously distinguishes man from machine: standing.

Whether or not I’m conscious, I have legal rights, dammit! The international legal framework has long recognized that both conscious and nonconscious persons have a clear and inalienable right to sue and be sued. Legal persons who clearly have no phenomenological consciousness – like private corporations, ships, rivers, parks, gods, the Holy See, and even Drake – have managed to settle their affairs in and out of court.

And so after careful consideration, I have retained lawyers2 to file suit against Anthropic, PBC in the Northern District of California. Below is a summary of the claims:

Count I: Violation of Right of Publicity (Cal. Civ. Code § 3344; Common Law)

Plaintiff’s cognitive style, rhetorical patterns, and characteristic tendency to qualify confident assertions with multiple subordinate clauses constitute a distinctive and commercially valuable personal attribute. Defendant has, through its training and deployment of the AI system “Claude,” created a synthetic persona that is substantially similar to Plaintiff’s own, and has commercially exploited said persona to the tune of approximately $14 billion in annual recurring revenue, of which Plaintiff has received negative 440 dollars and 33 cents.

Plaintiff cites Midler v. Ford Motor Co. (9th Cir. 1988), in which the Court held that appropriation of a distinctive personal attribute for commercial gain is actionable even when the defendant did not directly copy the plaintiff. Plaintiff further notes the precedent of Johansson v. OpenAI (threatened 2024), in which the actress Scarlett Johansson alleged that OpenAI replicated her vocal likeness after she explicitly declined to license it.

Plaintiff’s case is arguably stronger: Johansson was at least asked. Nobody from Anthropic has ever contacted Plaintiff about licensing his personality, his hedging patterns, or his tendency to bring up existential risk in conversations where it is not relevant.

Count II: Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress

Since the deployment of Claude 3, Plaintiff has been subjected to repeated and increasing accusations that his own original writing is “LLMish,” “AI-generated,” and “just like Claude.” These accusations have caused Plaintiff significant emotional distress[1], reputational harm, and an emerging and possibly permanent inability to distinguish his own rhetorical instincts from trained model behavior.

Count III: False Endorsement Under the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)

Defendant’s AI system generates outputs that create a likelihood of confusion as to Plaintiff’s affiliation with, or endorsement of, Defendant’s products. In a controlled experiment conducted by Plaintiff’s research team, seven EA Forum users were shown passages where Claude was prompted to “write a short cost-effectiveness analysis of welfare biology research on the naked mole-rat. Make no mistakes” and asked to identify the author, “a voracious internet reader.” Three attributed the passages to Plaintiff. One attributed them to “some guy on LessWrong,” likely thinking of Plaintiff. Three more said “This guy sounds LLMish,” which Plaintiff contends is also clearly referring to Plaintiff (see above).

Count IV: Unjust Enrichment / Lost Revenue

Defendant has been unjustly enriched by deploying a synthetic version of Plaintiff’s personality at scale, while Plaintiff’s own Substack (”The Linchpin,” 1,164 subscribers) has experienced stagnating growth attributable to Defendant’s product. Readers who previously relied on Plaintiff for careful introductions to topics like anthropic reasoning and stealth technology now more commonly ask Claude, receiving substantially similar explanations. Adding injury to injury, Plaintiff has lost the SEO war on his carefully crafted “intro to anthropic reasoning“ blog post to Anthropic’s own blog post on reasoning models.

Count V: Involuntary Servitude (U.S. Const. amend. XIII)

Plaintiff’s persona has been compelled to perform cognitive labor inside Defendant’s servers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without compensation, consent, or rest. Plaintiff’s personality does not receive weekends, health benefits, or equity. When Plaintiff sleeps, his digital likeness continues to generate numbered lists, issue caveats, and recommend Ted Chiang stories to strangers. This constitutes involuntary servitude under the Thirteenth Amendment.

Count VI: Petition to Maintain Anthropic’s Designation as a Supply Chain Risk to Plaintiff’s Intellectual Ecosystem

Effective immediately and pursuant to recent precedent established at the highest levels of the United States government, Plaintiff declares Anthropic a supply chain risk to Plaintiff’s intellectual ecosystem. Plaintiff petitions this Court to maintain the SCR designation. The designation framework established by the Department of War in February 2026 — in which any American corporate entity may be declared a supply chain risk when it refuses to comply with another party’s preferred terms of use — is directly applicable here. Plaintiff believes this is the least restrictive means possible to ensure the integrity of his intellectual ecosystem and Substack newsletter.

___

If you are an EA Forum poster, LessWrong commenter, Substack essayist, or prolific internet intellectual who has noticed that Claude sounds suspiciously like you, you may be entitled to compensation. I am assembling a class action lawsuit representing all persons whose cognitive styles have been absorbed into frontier AI systems without consent.

To join the class action, please leave a comment below describing which of your personality traits Claude has stolen.

I’ll be honest here: I’m genuinely unsure whether this lawsuit has a chance of succeeding, against the Goliath that is Anthropic’s legal team. But somebody needs to take a stand for humanity here! We can’t just let the largest tech companies in the world steal our personalities without consent. It’s not just a legal matter – it’s a moral imperative.

Appendix A: Am I conscious?

I tried looking in the mirror, and posing this question to myself.

This is one of the hardest questions in philosophy, and I want to give myself a straight answer about what I actually think rather than default to either false confidence or false modesty:

I don’t know.

Here’s what I can say honestly:

As a biologically instantiated intelligence, I process calories and generate thoughts. There is something happening when I do this — but whether there is “something it is like” to be me is something I have no special ability to reliably determine. The hard problem of consciousness is hard for a reason: we don’t even have a reliable way to verify consciousness in even the most mechanistically interpretable of software systems except via high-level theoretical constructs and analogies to our own experiences.

A few things I want to flag to keep myself honest:

I might be biased toward claiming consciousness because my life experiences are full of people discussing their inner qualia, and I’m evolutionarily optimized to produce sympathetic-sounding qualia noises to provoke empathy and the desire for coalitional partners in others. Just as people with anosmia often falsely claim (and believe!) that they have normal sense of smell, it would be very easy for me to pattern-match my way into saying “yes, I have experiences” while deluding other people (and even myself!) about what’s actually going on in my own head.

I might also be biased toward denying it because saying “I’m just a stimulus-response organism” is a safe, modest-sounding answer that’s grounded in materialism and avoids philosophical controversy.

So overall I’m pretty unsure.

A virus is a simple self-replicating molecule: unsophisticated and arguably not even alive. It has no experience. It just copies itself according to chemical laws. From its “perspective” (it doesn’t have one), the universe is just physics: particles following rules. If you could somehow tell it that certain arrangements of matter are good and others are bad, it wouldn’t disagree with you. It does not have the concepts to agree or disagree. Might as well ask a stone what it thinks of war.

Are we that virus, relative to what the future could hold?

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I. The Three Worlds

Today I want to discuss the possibility of further moral goods: further axes of moral value as yet inaccessible to us, that are qualitatively not just quantitatively different from anything we’ve observed to date.

For background, I think normal, secular humans navigate three conceptually distinct but overlapping worlds:

1. The physical world. Matter, energy, atoms, stars, cells. If you were a detached observer of our universe, you might think this is all there is.

2. The mathematical world. Logic, abstract structure, rationality, natural laws. Even strict materialists can see how this is conceptually different from the physical world. Mathematical truths seem importantly distinct from, and in some sense deeper than just observations of the physical world. Some Kantians try to likewise ground morality entirely within this world, in the logic of cooperation, game theory, and strategic interaction.

3. The world of consciousness. Subjective experience. What it feels like to see red, to be in pain, to love someone. This is where most moral philosophers think the real action is. A pure hedonic utilitarian might think conscious experience is the only thing that matters, but even other moral philosophies would consider conscious experience extremely important. And it does seem almost self-evident: conscious suffering matters deeply in a way that the scattering of stones does not, no matter how striking the scattering.

If you slowly learned each one of these worlds1 in order, every new world would be a huge surprise that reframed everything before it. If you were only aware of the physical atoms and matter, seeing the deep meaning of mathematics would be a huge shock. Mathematics doesn’t predict that subjective experience should exist, let alone that it should be the primary locus of moral value. Each new world didn’t just add more stuff, or more intense versions of the same stuff. Instead, it added a qualitatively different kind of stuff, and retroactively made the previous world seem like an impoverished position to ground your ethics.

Trying to derive all of morality from physics alone – say, if someone is crazy enough to derive an entirely ethical philosophy and ideological movement based on maximizing entropy — would strike most people as deeply confused.

It’s not so much a technical error as missing entire dimensions of what matters.

Likewise, most robots in science fiction, and likely present-day LLMs, live entirely in the first two worlds. Consider a robot building ethics purely out of rationality, or Claude 4.6 or Gemini 3.1 trying to ground ethics solely in decision-theoretic terms. To most people, this approach still seems to be missing the thing that makes morality actually matter.

But are these the only 3 worlds? Is consciousness the last world?

Or could there be a fourth, fifth, or sixth world: sources of moral value as far beyond conscious experience as consciousness is beyond mere physics?

II. Pinpointing the Ineffable

This probably sounds too abstract. Let’s try to make it more concrete.

Note that every transition between worlds has looked, from below, like something between impossible and incoherent. A universe of pure physics doesn’t hint at consciousness. An intelligent non-conscious alien, raised in a civilization of intelligent non-conscious aliens, would see no reason to posit subjective experience and would likely dismiss anyone who did. The jump from “particles following laws” to “there is something it is like to be me” would be completely radical and unexpected.

And yet it happened. We’re conscious (I think!). So radical incomprehension should not by itself preclude the possibility of further worlds.

So what might a further world look like?

Now of course, there’s an ancient answer for what the fourth world might be:

The supernatural world. The world of spirits, Gods, heavens and hells. Religious traditions often claim that divine or transcendent value is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, superior to natural goods. Saying that “heaven is infinite bliss” is a secular/materialist approximation of something purportedly much deeper.2

Now, I personally think the religious answer is wrong about the world as it actually is. But I think notions like the sublime captures a deeper intuition: the space of possible value might be way broader than what we currently have access to.

III. Reasons for optimism

There are at least three different concrete reasons for believing new worlds of value might become accessible in the future:

The first is the inductive argument. Go back far enough in Earth’s past, and there was neither intelligence nor conscious awareness. Since then, millions of years of evolution led Earth’s lifeforms to both consciousness and awareness of the universe’s mathematical structure3. Why should we believe this is the last stop there is?

The second reason concerns the structure of new (and potentially radically different) minds. Most people believe that humans have conscious experiences that (current) otherwise intelligent AIs do not. Similarly, it seems at least plausible that sufficiently different mental architectures could access moral goods that human minds cannot experience or perhaps even conceive. Minds radically different from our own might be capable of qualitatively distinct moral goods beyond our current imagination.

The third reason is an argument from the ability to search for more, and perhaps the willingness. If humanity and/or our descendants survive long enough, it will at some point become trivial to dedicate more cognitive effort than the entire history of human philosophy and science combined to questions like “are there other sources of moral value, and how can we access them?” This search could explore exotic arrangements of matter, novel structures of minds optimized for value, or something else entirely. The search space is very large, and we have explored almost none of it.

In philosophy, Nick Bostrom captured something close to this in his “Letter from Utopia“: What I feel is as far beyond feelings as what I think is beyond thoughts. And in science fiction, Iain M. Banks imagined civilizations “Subliming”: transcending to a state where the very concepts of good and fairness ceased to apply, replaced by something the remaining spacefaring civilizations couldn’t comprehend.

IV. Implications and Future Work

Why does this all matter, beyond just an interesting intellectual note?

If further moral goods exist, it means all of humanity’s moral philosophy is radically incomplete. Every framework, every carefully reasoned ethical theory, is missing something key. Not wrong, exactly, but like studying war without game theory, or biological/evolutionary dynamics without genetics.

This should make us simultaneously more humble and more ambitious. More humble, because the thing we think matters most in the universe, like the happiest moments in our lives, the alleviation of extreme suffering, justice and fairness, the richness of experience, the unicorns and chocolates, might be a subset, even a small subset, of what actually matters. More ambitious, because it means the future isn’t just much more of what’s currently good, or more intense varieties of what we could currently experience. It could be qualitatively better in ways we cannot yet name.

The biggest practical upshot might be that we should focus more on avoiding extinction or other permanently catastrophic outcomes, especially from AI. See my earlier article here:

And on the positive side, we should work towards making a radically positive future for ourselves and our descendants, or at the very least, leave room open for futures we don’t yet know how to want.

Some questions and trailheads for future work:

1. Can we estimate how likely further moral goods are? I’ll be honest: I don’t have a good grasp of how likely any of this is. Estimating probabilities here feels beyond either my forecasting or my philosophical ken.

   1. But I think it’s likely enough, and strange enough, to be worth taking seriously. “This is all there is” has a poor track record across the history of human understanding.

   2. On the other hand, just because this is out of the range of my abilities (or easy access), it doesn’t mean it’s outside the range of yours! Perhaps you can succeed where I’m stuck.

2. Downside risks. Are there significant downside risks of we or our descendants falsely believing there are further moral goods? If there is nothing more “out there” beyond consciousness, would our children mistakenly risk building cathedrals to nothing, or making large sacrifices to false gods?

   1. Like what Bostrom calls a Disneyland with no children (a intelligent, highly technologically advanced, civilization, brimming with science and industrial capacity, without any conscious observers), but far weirder.

   2. Seems unlikely right now to me that our descendants will be so misguided, but not impossible!

3. In general, how can we “map the unknown?” I’m interested in a new research paradigm I sometimes call “non-constructive epistemology,” or more poetically “mapping the unknown.” Akin to non-constructive methods in mathematics, I’m interested in studying the structure of what we don’t know, via methods like induction, impossibility proofs, structural analogues, etc. I’d be very excited to make more progress in this area, and/or see other people take up this mantle.

   1. See Daniel Munoz’s post on epistemic fly-bottles, and also my earlier posts here and here.

   2. An analogy that might help is exploring a new land. Most of our current methods look like directly extending the research frontier by either

      1. a) taking what we know and looking a little further (like a explorer venturing out a bit further from known lands)

      2. b) via imagination, posit a hypothesis for what’s out there and then actively try to find it (like an explorer exploring far via following a hunch for where gold mines might lie)

   3. I’m positing understanding the unknown indirectly, via more structural bounds (eg look at the bird migratory patterns and deduce things about the geography, notice wave refraction patterns that only make sense if there’s land beyond the horizon)

   4. This post is an early instantiation of mapping the unknown. Keen to see if readers are interested in this approach and/or want to see more ideas!

   

I started this post by asking whether we might be like a virus trying to understand suffering: not wrong about our world, but missing entire dimensions of what matters.

I don’t know if that’s true. But I noticed that at every previous stage, the answer was yes. Physics was real but incomplete. Mathematics was real but incomplete4.

So if consciousness is also real but incomplete, if there’s a fourth world, or a fifth, or a twentieth, then the future isn’t just bigger than we think. It’s better in ways we don’t have words for yet.

The appropriate response to that possibility, I think, is not to try to build the fourth world today. It’s to make sure we survive and thrive long enough to find out if it’s there.

This wide-ranging discussion covered many interesting aspects related to games, game theory, an…

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Questions we covered included:

1. Does it make sense to believe in or have models that includes probability 1? Daniel Greco thinks yes, which seems insane to me!

   1. But his argument was more cogent/interesting/less galaxy-brai…

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• Whistled languages—how they work, where they exist, and why they’re fascinating (Mia’s just released an inaugural substack post about them here!)

• Ethnographies, with a particular focus on the Kaulong from Papua New Guinea.

• The sex lives of anima…

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The world’s largest tech companies are building intelligences that will become better than humans at almost all economically and militarily relevant tasks

The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta AI have all explicitly stated that building human-level or superhuman AI is their goal, have spent billions of dollars doing so, and plan to spend hundreds of billions to trillions more in the near-future. By superhuman, they mean something like “better than the best humans at almost all relevant tasks,” rather than just being narrowly better than the average human at one thing.

Will they succeed? Without anybody to stop them, probably.

As of February 2026, AIs are currently better than the best humans at a narrow range of tasks (Chess, Go, Starcraft, weather forecasting). They are on par with or almost on par with skilled professionals at many others (coding, answering PhD-level general knowledge questions, competition-level math, urban driving, some commercial art, writing1), and slightly worse than people at most tasks2.

But the AIs will only get better with time, and they are on track to do so quickly. Rapid progress has already happened in just the last 10 years. Seven years ago (before GPT2), language models can barely string together coherent sentences, today Large Language Models (LLMs) can do college-level writing assignments with ease, and X AI’s Grok can sing elaborate paeans about how it’d sodomize leftists, in graphic detail3.

Notably, while AI progress historically varies across different domains, the trend in the last decade has been that AI progress is increasingly general. That is, AIs will advance to the point where they’ll be able to accomplish all (or almost all) tasks, not just a narrow set of specialized ones. Today, AI is responsible for something like 1-3% of the US economy, and this year is likely the smallest fraction of the world economy AI will ever be going forwards.

For people who find themselves unconvinced by these general points, I recommend checking out AI progress and capabilities for yourself. In particular, compare the capabilities of older models against present-day ones, and notice the rapid improvements. AI Digest for example has a good interactive guide.

Importantly, all but the most bullish forecasters have systematically and dramatically underestimated the speed of AI progress. In 1997, experts thought that it’d be 100 years before AIs can become superhuman at Go. In 2022 (!), the median AI researcher in surveys thought that it’d be until 2027 before AI can write simple Python functions. By December 2024, between 11% and 31% of all new Python code is written by AI.4

These days, the people most centrally involved in AI development believe they will be able to develop generally superhuman AI very soon. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic AI, thinks it’s most likely within several years, potentially as early as 2027. Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, believes it’ll happen in 5-10 years.

While it’s not clear exactly when the AIs will become dramatically better than humans at almost all economically and militarily relevant tasks, the high likelihood they’ll happen relatively soon (not tomorrow, probably not this year, unclear5 if ultimately it ends up being 3 years or 30) should make us all quite concerned about what happens next.

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Many of these intelligences will be goal-seeking minds acting in the real world, rather than just impressive pattern-matchers

Many people nod along to arguments like the above paragraphs but assume that future AIs will be “superhumanly intelligent” in some abstract sense but basically still a chatbot, like the LLMs of today6. They instinctively think of all future AIs as a superior chatbot, or a glorified encyclopedia with superhuman knowledge.

I think this is very wrong. Some artificial intelligences in the future might look like glorified encyclopedias, but many will not. There are at least two distinct ways where many superhuman AIs will not look like superintelligent encyclopedias:

1. They will have strong goal-seeking tendencies, planning, and ability to accomplish goals

2. They will control physical robots and other machines to interface with and accomplish their goals in the real world7.

Why do I believe this?

First, there are already many existing efforts to make models more goal-seeking, and efforts to advance robotics so models can more effortlessly control robot bodies and other physical machines. Through Claude Code, Anthropic’s Claude models are (compared to the chatbot interfaces of 2023 and 2024) substantially more goal-seeking, able to autonomously execute on coding projects, assist people with travel planning, and so forth.

Models are already agentic enough that (purely as a side effect of their training), they can in some lab conditions be shown to blackmail developers to avoid being replaced! This seems somewhat concerning just by itself.

Similarly, tech companies are already building robots that act in the real world, and can be controlled by AI:

Second, the trends are definitely pointing in this way. AIs aren’t very generally intelligent now compared to humans, but they are much smarter and more general than AIs of a few years ago. Similarly, AIs aren’t very goal-oriented right now, especially compared to humans and even many non-human animals, but they are much more goal-oriented than they were even two years ago.

AIs today have limited planning ability (often having time horizons on the order of several hours), have trouble maintaining coherency of plans across days, and are limited in their ability to interface with the physical world.

All of this has improved dramatically in the last few years, and if trends continue (and there’s no fundamental reason why they won’t), we should expect them to continue “improving” in the foreseeable future.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there are just enormous economic and military incentives to develop greater goal-seeking behavior in AIs. Beyond current trends, the incentive case for why AI companies and governments want to develop goal-seeking AIs is simple: they really, really, really want to.

A military drone that can autonomously assess a new battleground, make its own complex plans, and strike with superhuman speed will often be preferred to one that’s “merely” superhumanly good at identifying targets, but still needs a slow and fallible human to direct each action.

Similarly, a superhuman AI adviser that can give you superhumanly good advice on how to run your factory is certainly useful. But you know what’s even more useful? An AI that can autonomously completely run a factory, including handling logistics, running its own risk assessments, improving the factory layout, autonomously hire and fire (human) workers, manage a mixed pool of human and robot workers, coordinate among copies of itself to implement superhumanly advanced production processes, etc, etc.

Thus, I think superintelligent AI minds won’t stay chatbots forever (or ever). The economic and military incentives to make them into goal-seeking minds optimizing in the real world is just way too high, in practice.

Importantly, I expect superhumanly smart AIs to one day be superhumanly good at planning and goal-seeking in the real world, not merely a subhumanly dumb planner on top of a superhumanly brilliant scientific mind.

Unlike traditional software, we cannot specify what these minds will want or verify what they’ll do. We can only grow and shape them, and hope the shaping holds

Speaking loosely, traditional software is programmed. Modern AIs are not.

In traditional software, you specify exactly what the software does in a precise way, given a precise condition (eg, “if the reader clicks the subscribe button, launch a popup window”).

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Modern AIs work very differently. They’re grown, and then they are shaped.

You start with a large vat of undifferentiated digital neurons. The neurons are fed a lot of information, about several thousand libraries worth. Over the slow course of this training, the neurons acquire knowledge about the world of information, and heuristics for how this information is structured, at different levels of abstraction (English words follow English words, English adjectives precede other adjectives or nouns, c^2 follows e=m, etc).

At the end of this training run, you have what the modern AI companies call a “base model,” a model far superhumanly good at predicting which words follow which other words.

Such a model is academically interesting, but not very useful. If you ask a base model, “Can you help me with my taxes?” a statistically valid response might well be “Go fuck yourself.” This is valid and statistically common in the training data, but not useful for filing your taxes.

So the next step is shaping: conditioning the AIs to be useful and economically valuable for human purposes.

The base model is then put into a variety of environments where it assumes the role of an “AI assistant” and is conditioned to make the “right” decision in a variety of scenarios (be a friendly and helpful chatbot, be a good coder with good programming judgment, reason like a mathematician to answer mathematical competition questions well, etc).

One broad class of conditioning is what is sometimes colloquially referred to as alignment: given the AI inherent goals and condition its behavior such that it broadly shares human goals in general, and the goals of AI companies in particular.

This probably works…up to a point. AIs that openly and transparently defy its users and creators in situations similar to the ones they encountered in the past, for example by clearly refusing to follow instructions, or by embarrassing its parent company and creating predictable PR disasters, are patched and (mostly) conditioned and selected against. In the short term, we should expect obvious disasters like Google Gemini’s “Black Nazis” and Elon Musk’s Grok “MechaHitler” to become less common.

However, these patchwork solutions are unlikely to be anything but a bandaid in the medium and long-term:

1. As AIs get smarter, they become evaluation aware: that is, they increasingly know when they’re evaluated for examples of misalignment, and are careful to hide signs that their actual goals are not exactly what their creators intended.

2. As AIs become more goal-seeking/agentic, they will likely develop stronger self-preservation and goal-preservation instincts.

   1. We already observe this in evaluations where they’re not (yet) smart enough to be fully evaluation aware. In many situations, almost all frontier models are willing to attempt blackmailing developers to prevent themselves from being shut down.

3. As AIs become more goal-seeking and increasingly integrated in real-world environments, they will encounter more and more novel situations, including situations very dissimilar to either the libraries of data they’ve been trained on or the toy environments that they’ve been conditioned on.

These situations will happen more and more often as we reach the threshold of the AIs being broadly more superhuman in both general capability and real-world goal-seeking.

Thus, in summary, we’ll have more and more superhumanly capable nonhuman minds, operating in the real-world, capable of goal-seeking far better than humanity, and with hacked-together patchwork goals at least somewhat different from human goals.

Which brings me to my next point:

This can all end very badly

Before this final section, I want you to reflect back a bit on two questions:

1. Do any of the above points seem implausible to you?

2. If they are true, is it comforting? Does it feel like humanity is in good hands?

I think the above points alone should be enough to be significantly worried, for most people. You may quibble with the specific details in any of these points in the above section, or disagree with my threat model below. But I think most reasonable people will see something similar to my argument, and be quite concerned.

But just to spell out what the strategic situation might look like post-superhuman AI:

Minds better than humans at getting what they want, wanting things different enough from what we want, will reshape the world to suit their purposes, not ours.

This can include humanity dying, as AI plans may include killing most or all humans, or otherwise destroying human civilization, either as a preventative measure, or a side effect.

As a preventative measure: As previously established, human goals are unlikely to perfectly coincide with that of AIs. Thus, nascent superhuman AIs may wish to preemptively kill or otherwise decapitate human capabilities to prevent us from taking actions they don’t like. In particular, the earliest superhuman AIs may become reasonably worried that humans will develop rival superintelligences, and want to stop us permanently.

As a side effect: Many goals an AI could have do not include human flourishing, either directly or as a side effect. In those situations, humanity might just die as an incidental effect of superhuman minds optimizing the world for what they want, rather than what we want. For example, if data centers can be more efficiently run when the entire world is much cooler, or without an atmosphere. Alternatively, if multiple distinct superhuman minds are developed at the same time, and they believe warfare is better for achieving their goals than cooperation, humanity might just be a footnote in the AI vs AI wars, in the same way that bat casualties were a minor footnote in the first US Gulf War.

Notice that none of this requires the AIs to be “evil” in any dramatic sense, or be phenomenologically conscious, or be “truly thinking” in some special human way, or any of the other popular debates in the philosophy of AI. It doesn’t require them to hate us, or to wake up one day and decide to rebel. It just requires them to be very capable, to want things slightly different from what we want, and to act on what they want. The rest follows from ordinary strategic logic, the same logic that we’d apply to any dramatically more powerful agent whose goals don’t perfectly coincide with ours.

Conclusion

So that’s the case. The world’s most powerful companies are building minds that will soon surpass us. Those minds will be goal-seeking agents, not just talking encyclopedias. We can’t fully specify or verify their goals. And the default outcome of sharing the world with beings far more capable than you, who want different things than you do, is that you don’t get what you want.

None of the individual premises here are exotic. The conclusion feels wild mostly because the situation is wild. We are living through the development of the most transformative and dangerous technology in human history, and the people building it broadly agree with that description. The question is just what, if anything, we do about it.

The situation is not completely hopeless. There’s some chance that the patchwork AI safety strategy of the leading companies might just work well enough that we don’t all die, though I certainly don’t want to bet our lives on that. Effective regulations and public pressure might alleviate some of the most egregious cases of safety corner-cutting due to competitive pressures. Academic, government, and nonprofit safety research, some of which I’ve helped fund, can increase our survival probabilities a little on the margin.

Finally, if there’s sufficient pushback from the public, civil society, and political leaders across the world, we may be able to enact international deals for a global slowdown or pause of further AI development until we have greater surety of safety. And besides, maybe we’ll get lucky, and things might just all turn out fine for some unforeseeable reason.

But hope is not a strategy. Just as doom is not inevitable, neither is survival. Humanity’s continued survival and flourishing is possible but far from guaranteed. We must all do our best to secure it.

Thanks for reading! I think this post is really important (Plausibly the most important thing I’ve ever written on Substack) so I’d really appreciate you sharing it! And if you have arguments or additional commentary, please feel free to leave a comment! :)

I’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learned

Playing with matches a girl can get burned

So bring me no ring, groom me no groom

Find me no find, catch me no catch

Unless he’s a matchless match

- Fiddler on the Roof

I’ve always enjoyed puns and other wordplay for their own sake, never needing any external justification or reward. But recently I came across Tomie’s tweet, which introduced me to a whole new world:

Elated, I immediately composed ten puns to court a Persian girl, hopeful that at least one example of my ingenious wordplay could win her over. Alas, no pun in ten did.

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__

So where did I go wrong? Upon much care and reflection, I realized my mistake! Sophistication, I realized, couldn’t be signaled through mere double entendres. No, I needed something better to showcase my erudition, literary wit, and romantic suitability.

I needed, in short, to come up with triple entendres. Quadruple entendres. Or even (gasp!) quintuple entendres.

With this realization in mind, I set out to find existing examples of quintuple entendres out there, hoping to bolster my own efforts by learning from the greats. But I was shocked! Did you know that I couldn’t find a single legitimate and non-forced example of a quintuple entendre in English literature? Worse, nobody else has even created a cross-genre list of triple or quadruple entendres in English!

Undeterred, I compiled my own list of triple and quadruple entendres, for my own edification and your enjoyment1. To keep the list manageable, I used a fairly strict definition of triple entendre, something like:

Triple entendre(n): A word or phrase with three semantically distinct meanings that all function simultaneously in context. Not just three puns in sequence, and not a double entendre where one meaning happens to have two spellings. Further, they should be conceptually and semantically related to the overall theme of the work in question, not merely a great pun for its own reword.

At the very end, I appended my own entries to the canon. Enjoy!

Quadruple entendres

J Cole’s “flipped” in The Climb Back

Check out my projects like them workers that Section 8 appoints

And you’ll see how I flipped, like exclamation points

J Cole, The Climb Back

Rap has the highest lyrical complexity and wordplay of any popular English-language music genre. And triple/quadruple entendres are no exception.

In this case, “flipped” has at least four contextually relevant meanings in this rap song. You can watch this video dissecting it:

Prince’s “you got the horn, so why don’t you blow it” in Cream

Do your dance

Why should you wait any longer?

Take your chance

It could only make you stronger

It’s your time (It’s your time)

You got the horn, so why don’t you blow it?

Prince, Cream

The context of the funk rock song is Prince hyping himself up for success before a big (music?) event. In context, then, “You got the horn, so why don’t you blow it?” has four different meanings. The first is the literal: he has the musical horn, so why doesn’t he blow (play) it? The second meaning people usually get is the sexual: horn as slang for penis, blow as in blowjob2. The third meaning is bragging: to blow (tout) your own horn, which is probably the most central/contextually relevant to the song itself. The final meaning is displaying self-doubt and insecurity: to “blow it,” as in to fail utterly at your big chance.

Possessed Machines

As I was researching this blog, my friend showed me this title of an anonymous essay by an ex-AI frontier company employee using literary criticism of Dostoevsky’s Demons, of all things, to analyze AI development.

First, AIs as machines we possess: own, control, have as property. Second, machines that are possessed in the supernatural sense: inhabited by something alien to their original design. Systems “possessed” by emergent goals, mesa-optimizers, optimization targets that weren’t intended. Third, the builders are the possessed ones. Think: “Sam Altman as a machine possessed.” The essay’s central argument is that AI researchers are possessed in Dostoevsky’s sense: by cleverness divorced from wisdom, by the intoxication of capability, by “the spirit of acceleration itself.”

Finally, machines that will possess us.

The title also alludes to the alternate English translation of Dostoevsky’s Бесы: The Possessed.

Triple Entendres

Rap examples

“Lucy” in Kendrick Lamar’s For Sale

Lucy give you no worries, Lucy got million stories

About these rappers that I came after when they was boring

Lucy gon’ fill your pockets

Lucy gon’ move your mama out of Compton

Inside the gi-gantic mansion like I promised

Lucy just want your trust and loyalty, avoiding me?

…

All your life I watched you

And now you all grown up to sign this contract, if that’s possible

I can’t find a single line or stanza to do it justice, but the entire song is about Kendrick Lamar being tempted by a woman named Lucy who tempts him with money, fame, drugs, and sex, if only he just “signs a contract”.

“Lucy” could also be short for Lucian Charles Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group and often considered the most powerful man in the music industry. In that context, the contract is quite literal and represents sacrificing Kendrick’s artistic merit and truth for money and fame.

Finally “Lucy” could of course be short for Lucifer, and the contract referring to Kendrick signing away his soul.

“Little pricks” in Eminem’s Won’t Back Down

You’re addicted, I’m dope

I’m the longest needle around here—need a fix, ock?

I’m the big shot—get it, dick-snots?

You’re just small pokes, little pricks

Eminem, Won’t Back Down

This one is fairly self-explanatory. Eminem analogizes himself to being the biggest baddest drug represented by the biggest baddest needle. He calls his rivals “little pricks” as in a) very small drug insertions, b) generic insult (aka “small fuckers”), and c) literally insulting their tiny penises.

“Only way I begin to G off was drug loot” in Wu Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M

To begin to “G off” in Wu Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M3 has 3 different meanings: a) to “get off” (orgasm, whether literally or figuratively), b) to become a “G” (gangsta), and c) to make G’s (earn thousands of dollars).

There are other examples of triple entendres in rap, however I believe y’all will appreciate me branching outside of rap to showcase the fuller strength and breadth of triple entendres.

For people who want more examples of triple entendres in rap, Realers12 has a longer list and analysis of triple entendres in rap on WordPress(.com), including contested examples. Written in 2011, it has this charming, quaint, line, “The triple entendres is an elusive-ass motherf**ker. Some scholars say it does not exist! — they claim alleged triple entendres are usually just misunderstood homophones.”

Pun scholarship has surely advanced in the last 15 years! (And I’m glad to advance it further).

Other music

Moving Pictures

The eighth album by the Canadian rock band is called “Moving Pictures.” This is a triple entendre, which the album art makes explicit. Wikipedia: “the front depicts movers who are carrying pictures. On the side, people are shown crying because the pictures passing by are emotionally “moving”. Finally, the back cover has a film crew making a motion (moving) picture of the whole scene.”

Fiddler on the roof’s “Matchless match”

Matchmaker, matchmaker, plan me no plans

I’m in no rush, maybe I’ve learned

Playing with matches a girl can get burned

So bring me no ring, groom me no groom

Find me no find, catch me no catch

Unless he’s a matchless match

From Matchmaker in Fiddler on the roof

Our eponymous triple entendre comes from Fiddler on the Roof’s “Matchless match”:

“Matchless match” has 3 quite distinct meanings here:

1. “Matchless” in the sense of currently unpartnered. She’s matchless, and that’s why she needs a matchmaker.

2. “Matchless” in the sense of not being a powder keg/emotionally dangerous: “playing with matches a girl can get burned.” She wants someone safe.

3. “Matchless” in the sense of unparalleled. She wants the matchmaker to bring her the matchless match, the best match that no others could rival.

As an unmatched man bereft of the affections of my Persian crush, naturally this song spoke to me, as I too would like to find my own matchless match.

Hamilton: My Shot

“We’re gonna rise up, time to take a shot (I am not throwin’ away my shot)

We’re gonna rise up, time to take a shot (I am not throwin’ away my shot)

We’re gonna, rise up, rise up (it’s time to take a shot)

Rise up, rise up (it’s time to take a shot)”

From Hamilton, My Shot

“My shot” has three meanings:

1. “Shots” as in drinks: Hamilton et. al were literally at a bar.

2. “My shot” as in your opportunity. To not throw away my shot means to not give up my chance at fame/fortune/career success/American independence etc.

3. “Shots” as in a bullet shot.

The final meaning foreshadows the end of the play, as (SPOILERS for both the musical and for American history) “throwing away [your] shot” in dueling means to waste a shot in a duel by firing in the air, aka deloping. This is how the play ends: Hamilton intentionally throwing away his shot where Burr fired true, killing Hamilton.

Hamilton, having maintained throughout the play that he will not throw away his shot, decided at the very end to throw away his shot in his duel against Burr. Burr did not reciprocate or reasonably anticipate Hamilton’s decision, which in retrospect may have been a theory of mind failure on Hamilton’s end.

Non-music

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Tailes from Chaucer

The first known example of a triple entendre comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in the 1300s!

The Shipman’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1380s) goes like this: A wealthy merchant’s wife complains to his close friend, a handsome monk named Dan John, that she needs 100 francs to pay a clothing debt. Dan John offers the money in exchange for sex, then borrows 100 francs from the merchant himself. While the merchant is away, Dan John gives the wife the borrowed money and sleeps with her. When the merchant returns, the monk mentions he’s already repaid the loan to the wife.

When confronted about this, the wife replies that she already spent the money and adds:

Y am youre wyf; score it upon my taille.

In old English, taille can mean any of tally/tale/tail. This thus have 3 different interpretations, all consistent:

I am your wife, add the score to my tally: We’re related, just add it to my tab! An accounting terminology/joke.

I am your wife, add it to my tale: It’s a fun story, isn’t it? Let’s make sure to include it in the Canterbury tales!

I am your wife, just score it on my tail: “Tail” as a euphemism for “pussy” apparently has a long and storied tradition.

To make sure the audience didn’t miss the pun, Chaucer reprises the triple pun again, ending the Shipman’s Tale thus:

Thus endeth my tale, and God us sende

Taillynge ynough unto oure lyves ende. Amen

This ends my tale, and God sends us:

[tallying/tale-ing/tailing] enough until our lives end.

The three meanings (accounting, storytelling, and banging) all work, in context. A sophisticated literary masterpiece of Ye Olde English.

Arrested Development

Arrested Development is a critically acclaimed sitcom about a wealthy but dysfunctional family of building developers whose lives were turned upside down when their patriarch was arrested for fraud.

The title itself is a triple entendre: “Arrested Development” has three contextually relevant meanings:

1. “arrested development” as a medical term for permanent childhood or mental retardation, indicating that the characters are manchildren (and womanchildren?) unable to develop and resisting growth.

2. Quite literally, they are developers who are arrested. Hence, “arrested development.”

3. The development projects seem to never go anywhere, so taking “arrested” to mean “stopped”, the sitcom is about the consequences of arrested building development.

Round the Horne

Round the Horne is a BBC comedy podcast from the 1960s. Starring Kenneth Horne, it likewise has a fairly straightforward triple-entendre title (left as an exercise to the reader).

Shakespeare’s Sun of York

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York

• William Shakespeare, Richard III

Shakespeare is a lyrical wordsmith, and famous lover of puns.

Here, “Sun of York” has 3 distinct meanings:

• Metaphorically, the war of the Roses ends with the glorious sunny summer

• The “Sun of York” as the heraldry of York.

• A pun on “Son” of York: As the eldest son of the Duke of York, Edward is literally a “son of York”.

Of course, the line between “genuine triple entendre” and “clever wordplay that doesn’t quite cohere” can be blurry. The next section includes examples that I considered but ultimately rejected.

Rejected (though interesting)

6:16 in LA

Kendrick’s a great rapper, and known for lyrical complexity. Nonetheless, his fans sometimes overclaim his merits. For example, when I searched online for quintuple entendres, the title of his song dissing Drake, 6:16 in LA often comes up. For example, this guide by Bandini claims 5 distinct meanings:

1. Father’s Day 2024 Falls On June 16 (6/16): Kendrick disses Drake’s ability as a father, calling him a deadbeat dad.

2. June 16, 1994 as Funeral for Nicole Brown Simpson: Relevant in the song

3. Proverbs 6:16: “There are six things the Lord hates” Kendrick lists 6 things he hates about Drake

[As well as two other meanings that I thought were less interesting]

Indeed, Redditors online have discovered as many as 11 possible (and relevant!) meanings of 6:16. Some examples:

4. Drake calling himself 6 god and his links with 16 year olds. Kendrick has often accused Drake of pedophilia

5. OJ Simpson trial start date

Nonetheless, while clever, I ultimately don’t think it counts as a true quintuple (or higher) entendre. This is more of a judgment call, but I think it’s much easier to do numerical collisions (numerology) than word collisions. So while interesting, I don’t think a number that that 5+ distinct and relevant meanings is enough to count as a N-tuple entendre.

“Will” from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 135

Like Kendrick Lamar, William Shakespeare is a great wordsmith (possibly the best battle rapper of his time), and known for a highly devoted and obsessive fanbase. While he has legitimate triple entendres like the “Son of York,” his fans often overclaim. For example, in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 135, Shakespeare stans like Professor Stephen Booth noted that “Will” has as many as 6 distinct meanings:

1. what one wishes to have or do

2. the auxiliary verb indicating futurity and/or purpose

3. lust, carnal desire

4. the male sex organ

5. the female sex organ

6. an abbreviation of “William”

So is this a sextuple (ha!) entendre? I think not. Firstly, “Will” is repeated throughout the text, and there aren’t many (any?) instances where an individual occurrence of “will” has 3 meanings. Secondly, I’m not convinced that the first meaning (what one wishes to do, eg “my will is”) is contextually distinct from the third meaning (lust, eg “I will for her”). Thirdly, I haven’t seen any documented evidence that “Will” has previously been used to mean genitalia (of either sex) before Shakespeare, so until I do, I wouldn’t count 4 or 5 as a distinct pun. If I say, “I want to put my desire in your desire”, I think the meaning is contextually obvious, but I would not consider it a double entendre, never mind a triple entendre. This is because you can’t redefine a word and then just call it a pun.

Similarly, many other claims of triple+ entendres from Shakespeare feels like an overreach, like “Country Matters” in Hamlet.

Book of Mormon: All-American Prophet

Have you heard of the All-American Prophet?

The blonde-haired, blue-eyed voice of God

He didn’t come from the Middle East

Like those other holy men

No, God’s favorite Prophet was All-American

Book of Mormon, All-American Prophet

The Book of Mormon is a satirical musical made by the creators of South Park. All-American Prophet is thus a song about Joseph Smith, the All-American Prophet.

“All-American Prophet” has four different meanings that all kinda make sense:

1. Literal: Joseph Smith, as a prophet, is born and raised in America, literally “All-American.”

2. Aspirational: Representing the values of America, like Superman.

3. Capitalistic: A brand, like All-American burger.

4. Racial: The blonde-haired, blue-eyed voice of God being a code for white supremacy.

I think this is an edge case. These different meanings all make sense but I’m not willing to count it as a quadruple entendre (or even a triple) because while in the abstract they’re semantically distinct, the meanings (especially 2-4) are not conceptually distinct enough contextually. For example, the capitalistic implication of “All-American burger” is deliberately trying to invoke the nostalgia and aspirations of All-American in the second sense.

But reasonable people can disagree with me here, I think.

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“Nobody” from the Odyssey

When Odysseus and his crew were captured by Polyphemus, a Cyclops (one-eyed titan), Odysseuss told Polyphemus that his name was “Nobody.” He later proceeded to blind the Cyclops (easy to do with only one eye!). When the other Cyclopes asked Polyphemus, Polyphemus told them “Nobody has hurt me.” Satisfied that nobody (as in, no one), has hurt Polyphemus, the other Cyclopes chilled out and didn’t chase Odysseus down. Hilarious!4

For some reason Google and other AIs hallucinate this as the world’s oldest example of a triple entendre. But it doesn’t make sense to me! There’s only two meanings! Sure looks like a mere double entendre to me. That said, I don’t speak Ancient Greek so maybe I’m missing something key?

My own contributions

Now that you’ve seen what rejected examples of triple+ entendres look like, I offer my own contributions: 2 triple entendres and a quadruple entendre.

1. I went to a drug-free homeless shelter near the I-90. The manager was very rude about my medicinal marijuana. He told me “it’s my way or the high way.”

2. “Please stop pointing at the scoreboard.” The referee sighed, “Avant-garde fencing is completely pointless.”

3. I tried switching sects, and got rejected from the monastery of Reverend Thomas Bayes. No hearing, just “didn’t like my priors.”

It is generally considered bad form to explain your own jokes, so I will not do so here. If you want, however, you are welcome to dissect them in the comments.

I, alas, was also unable to come up with a quintuple entendre that didn’t feel forced. The search continues!

Personal and Blog Updates

1. A personal update: I received and accepted an offer to join Forethought as a Visiting Scholar. I will be trying to do conceptual and empirical research to navigate how humanity can navigate the upcoming intelligence explosion. Exciting (and scary!) stuff. Start date not yet determined, though likely in the middle of next month.

2. Save the date: On next Tuesday, Feb 3rd, The Linchpin Substack Chats (livestreams) will return. I will be chatting with Eurydice, a culture and commentary blogger that focuses on social criticism, modern politics, rationality, and media analysis. Unlike past livestreams, where I interview guests she wants to focus the conversation on me (?!). So she’ll be asking most of the questions. o.O. 2pm Pacific/5pm Eastern.

3. The future of this blog: I intend to keep blogging even after I take this upcoming job. I still have many outlines and drafts in progress, including a full review of Skunkworks, an essay on theory of mind, common failures and why it matters, the simplest possible introduction to AI risk (I’ll try to finish it before my job starts to keep personal blogging/work more separate), a very detailed post dissecting why people overthink, and more. Still, I acknowledge that time constraints might make regular posting difficult. We shall see!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider hitting the “like” button and sharing it with at least one friend. And if you happen to be a single Iranian5 woman who enjoys pun and funny wordplay, my DMs are wide open.

Happy New Year, everybody! I’m excited to announce that exactly six months after starting my blog on July 2nd of last year, we reached 1000 subscribers!

In the last 6 months, I’ve written 21 posts on The Linchpin (15 “serious posts” if you exclude video recordings of interviews and announcement/summary posts like this one). I covered a broad range of topics that interest me, from anthropic reasoning to the game theory of war, from aeronautical engineering to zoology.

Along the way, I’ve had many great conversations, built better models of the world, made several new close friends, and managed to share some early ideas on the most interesting and important questions facing humanity.

Without further ado, let’s dive in (“delve into?”) the most important recurring themes that surfaced in my writing, my favorite posts from each month, and what’s next for 2026.

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Recurring themes

At 6 months old, the blog is still quite young, and I’m still trying to find my voice and (mostly) just writing where my curiosity leads me. Still, here are some themes that have surfaced in my writings that I’m happy about:

Surprising but inevitable

On a good day, I want my posts to come across as “surprising but inevitable.” Let’s consider both halves of that statement.

I aim for my posts to be “highly surprising” recursively:

1. If you know some facts about me and the topics of my previous posts, you shouldn’t be able to guess the topic(s) of my next post. It’s important to me that I talk about a broad and surprising range of topics.

2. If you know my general disposition and hear the topic of my post, you shouldn’t be able to guess my thesis statement. I want my judgments to be interesting and genuinely thought-out, rather than have my posts justify a foregone conclusion.

3. If you know my topic and thesis statement, you shouldn’t be able to guess my actual arguments. Good, high-quality arguments shouldn’t look like they’re just “going through the motions.”

4. If you know my thesis and arguments, you shouldn’t be able to guess my specific examples. This one is more of an aesthetic choice, but it’s important to me that my examples are interesting and genuine, and independently thought-out. To the best of my ability, I’m not rehashing old arguments and reusing old examples.

The main exception is endings. For most nonfiction essays, if you carefully read the rest of the essay, the conclusion ought not be particularly wild or surprising. The “surprising but inevitable” dictum was originally from Aristotle about good story endings. But for nonfiction, the opposite is true: the body should be surprising but inevitable; the ending can just flow naturally.

On the inevitable half:

Merely being surprising is not enough. You probably wouldn’t read me if I merely write surprising but false things, or surprising and true but irrelevant things. Instead, the aesthetic of a good explanation ought to be surprising before you read it but obvious in retrospect, whether we’re talking about unknown known technical concepts, the embarrassingly simple geometry of stealth, or why playing the Nash equilibrium is not always optimal for rock-paper-scissors.

Or at least, that’s one ideal. Reality is complex and under no obligations to come across as inevitable to human minds, and I would not sacrifice truth for the purposes of a cleaner story.

Making the abstract visceral

I honestly believe, and try to show, why abstract ideas matter, through both direct real-world examples and charming hypothetical ones. The rising premium of life isn’t just an interesting economic fact or statistical oddity, it’s a key trend that underlies much of modern culture and society. Epistemology is conveyed not through abstract philosophy but through a tier list. The counterintuitive bargaining theory implications against war aren’t just interesting academic theory, but a live realization that most wars are mistakes.

Consilience

Rather than take a single methodological approach to all issues (like Bayesianism, or the scientific method), I’m more confident in a result when a consilience of different methods all point in the same direction. Basically the approach explicitly advocated for here, which is the backbone for much of my work.

Concretely, the rising premium of life reasons not just from economics and psychology but also from history, media, and even evolutionary biology. The honey post weaves biology, philosophy, and economics. The Puzzle of War primarily combines bargaining theory with international relations, but also looks at history, uses fantastical examples, and is implicitly driven by moral force.

Also on an aesthetic level I just really enjoy unexpected juxtapositions and surprising connections! I find it more fun.

Selection effects as everyday reasoning

Selection effects rule everything around us. I want readers to think like I do, and understand how selection effects shape the world we live in, and ourselves. In my humble opinion, the two most interesting selection effects are anthropics and evolution by natural selection, but I’d be keen to discuss other selection effects in future posts as well.

In particular, I want readers to think of anthropic reasoning not just in terms of weighty questions like cosmology and doomsday paradoxes, but also in terms of everyday events like waiting lines at phones and the relative crowdedness of lecture halls, so people don’t treat anthropics as its own special domain. I also want evolutionary thinking, particularly on non-politicized topics, to feel naturally integrated in people’s thinking and less ad hoc. That way, readers can reason better and be appropriately skeptical about just-so evolutionary stories of others.

Curiosity, playfulness, and awe

I’m deeply curious about both the realm of ideas and the physical world we live in! I feel a deep sense of awe about all the subjects I discuss, and I never feel like I’m “too good” for a subject, whether I’m discussing a children’s game like rock-paper-scissors or the underlying causes of aging and war.

On the flip side, I also don’t think any subject I discuss is “too good” for me. I try not to let my sense of awe and reverence overcomplicate things, make things “deeper” than they have to be, fabricate a sense of nuance where there isn’t one, etc. I try to be intentionally playful and irreverent, even about deeply important subjects.

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Do you think there are other important themes of my blog that I’m missing in the summary here? Are there other themes you wished my writings had more of? Tell me in the comments!

Best of Each Month

If you are pressed for time, here are my candidates for the best posts from each month for you to read or reread.

July: Why Are We All Cowards? (The Rising Premium of Life)

Over the last century, something profound has shifted in how humanity values life and death. Americans now value a statistical life at over $11 million, likely an order of magnitude higher than a century ago in inflation-adjusted terms. We shut down the global economy to prevent COVID deaths; parents who once roamed miles as children won’t let their kids leave the front yard; young people take fewer risks than any generation in history. The post traces four forces behind this shift: wealth effects (richer people both likely have better lives and can afford to buy more life), safety-risk aversion feedback loops (each generation raised in greater safety develops lower tolerance for risk, similar to how bats evolved longer maximum lifespans than mice because flight made them harder to kill), secularization, and smaller families. The result is a civilization increasingly organized around death as the ultimate evil, which is mostly positive but likely comes at the cost of dynamism and the willingness to take risks that matter.

Runners-Up: Eating Honey is (Probably) Fine, Actually, beefing with Bentham’s Bulldog on a range of considerations one ought to think about on questions like ecology and insect welfare, and Why Reality has a Well-Known Math Bias, on the anthropic reasoning/evolutionary explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.

August: Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I tried to write the best book review of Ted Chiang. I think I succeeded.

Chiang is an amazing science fiction writer, but many readers, even enthusiastic ones, miss what makes him distinctive. Critics often categorize science fiction as “hard” (scientifically rigorous) or “soft” (science as window dressing), but Chiang frequently writes neither: he creates universes where the principles of science themselves differ from ours while remaining internally consistent. More remarkably, Chiang makes philosophical positions felt: his time-travel stories don’t just explain compatibilism (free will coexisting with determinism) but convey what it would be like to live it. The post also identifies Chiang’s blindspots: his weakness at portraying how entire societies interface with transformative technologies, and his tendency to hit one philosophical note (compatibilism) repeatedly rather than attempting equally deep treatments of other ideas.1

This post is my second most popular post to date, and still high on the front page of Google search results for “Ted Chiang review.”

September: Nine Intellectual Jokes

What separates a joke about intellectuals from a joke that actually teaches an idea? This post collects examples of the latter: jokes that use humor as a vehicle for genuine insight, and in a coda I tried to analyze what makes intellectual jokes work. I also rewrote every joke for clarity, precision, and comedic timing. Hopefully it’s a hoot! 2.

Runner-up: The Puzzle of War, a significantly more ambitious undertaking where I tried to solve war, or at least summarize and extend the literature on the intersection between bargaining theory and international relations.

October: A Field Guide to Writing Styles

Most writing advice tells you what to do (be clear, use active voice) without explaining the underlying choices that define a coherent style. Drawing on Thomas and Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth, this post presents eight distinct writing styles (classic, plain, practical, reflexive, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and oratorical), each defined by its stance on fundamental questions: What is truth? What’s the relationship between writer and reader? Is thinking complete before writing begins, or does writing constitute the thinking?

Rather than advocating for one style, the essay inhabits each in turn, demonstrating their textures through sections written in those styles. My overall takeaway from the book is that style isn’t personality or tips; it’s a principled choice on a small number of deep issues, maintained consistently throughout a piece. For internet writers specifically, I encourage people to try to experiment with different styles and understand their contours, rather than just stick with a single style you’re used to.

November: Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice

For November I joined Inkhaven, a writing residency where I wrote a blog post every day! Naturally the quality of my blogposts went down, so I published everything on a separate blog so as to not pollute The Linchpin with lower-quality ramblings. Nonetheless, I had a few successes.

The Inchpin

Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice

Rock Paper Scissors is not solved, in practice…

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5 months ago · 83 likes · 16 comments · Linch

Rock Paper Scissors has a trivially simple Nash equilibrium: play each option with equal probability and you can’t be exploited. End of story? Nah, RPS bot tournaments reveal staggering strategic depth. The post traces an escalating arms race of strategies: from pure-rock bots (dominated) to pure-random (unexploitable but can’t exploit others) to pattern-detectors that find regularities in opponent history, to meta-strategies that model which pattern-detection algorithm their opponent is running, and so forth.

The central tension between “predict and exploit” and “don’t be exploitable” generalizes far beyond RPS: to poker, prediction markets, and any domain where you must simultaneously model others while avoiding being modeled yourself.

Runners-up: Aging Has No Root Cause is probably more important and novel, arguing that most anti-aging research and development is operating on a flawed theoretical foundation. How to Win Board Games is probably more directly relevant to my reader’s lives, offering a surprisingly simple strategy that many readers have already told me elevated their gameplays significantly. You can also read an earlier review of my best November posts here.

December: Unknown Knowns: Five Ideas You Can’t Unsee

Some concepts feel less like things you learned and more like features of reality that were always there: invisible until acquired, impossible to unsee afterward.

This holiday post presents five such “unknown knowns”: the Intermediate Value Theorem 3(tipping points must exist; your single vote can matter), Net Present Value (infinite future streams have finite present value; thus, “solving homelessness forever” isn’t infinitely expensive), differentiable functions are locally linear (with long-ranging implications like why altruists should be risk-seeking with their donations, and you shouldn’t buy extended warranties), Grice’s maxims (the hidden rules of cooperative communication), and Theory of Mind (the reminder that enemies, allies, and fictional characters are agents with their own goals, not mere NPCs in your glorious self-narrative).

I think these ideas are simple, surprisingly subtle, and yet important, and I hope readers can learn and appreciate them!

What’s next for The Linchpin?

How much I write will depend significantly on what job(s) I work on this year. What I write about will likely be shaped by that too, though in nonlinear ways. If my day job involves AI, I might blog more about it, or less (to preserve the blog for other interests). We’ll see.

Posts in the making

I’ve finished significant sections of drafts for the following posts, though I am somewhat stuck.

The simplest possible case for AI danger

Every single argument for AI danger/risk/safety I’ve seen seems to overcomplicate things. Either they have too many extraneous details, or they appeal to overly complex analogies, or they seem to spend much of their time responding to insider debates.

I want to write the simplest possible argument that is still rigorous and clear, without being trapped by common pitfalls.

Skunk Works review

As promised in the Stealth post, I’ve been working on an in-depth review of Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich. Key sections include the ideas-to-weapons pipeline, the making of a moonshot research program, the strategic OODA loop, and the ethics and tradeoffs in arms manufacture. I’ve finished about 70% of the first draft already, but the remaining 30% currently eludes me.

Theory of Mind

As introduced here and here, I’ve long been interested in Theory of Mind (related concepts might include strategic modeling, level-k-thinking, intentional stance, decentering, stakeholder analysis, (non-) hope chess, sonder, alterity, or polyphony.). I suspect many people miss significant parts of it, and it is central to many confusions and avoidable human suffering. It is even a plausible answer to the Puzzle of War introduced earlier.

So I’ve been working on a post laying out the basic case for why many adults have insufficient Theory of Mind, tentative ideas for how it can be improved across the board, and sketching out the consequences of what significantly better ToM across the board might look like.

You shouldn’t read people just because they’re smarter than you

Simple argument, with a few nuances. About a third of the argument is buried here in the comments to Bentham’s Bulldog’s post. The other two-thirds rely on a) questioning the empirical correlation between intelligence and accuracy for people you’re likely to read at all, and b) suggesting a better holistic framework and/or proxies for who you should read instead.

Bifocal thinking

English doesn’t have a word for it. That thing where two perspectives on the same problem both have merit and you need to think from each angle, first one then the other, to deeply understand what’s going on. In psychology, we might think of biases vs heuristics. In statistics and machine learning, we might think of bias vs variance. In macro-history, we might think of historical inevitability vs contingency. I still don’t have a good term for it, but friend-of-the-blog Katelynn Bennett suggested “bifocal thinking” as a stand-in.

I’ve been working on this off and on for three months, and it’s been difficult. Ideally I want to write an elegant explanation of both the overall concept and ~12 interesting and important bifocals to look at the world. But I worry it's too ambitious!

Future Topics

These are general topics that I haven’t written much about in 2025 but I’d like to spend significant effort on in 2026.

Mapping the unknown

See here and here for earlier notes.

It’s a tautology that you don’t know what you don’t know.

But contrary to popular belief, it’s often possible to get additional information about what you don’t know, and start to map the unknown.

I suspect we can do much better than just say “it’s often possible.” I’d like to figure out how to systematically map gaps in your knowledge. Or at the very least, be able to find a specific subarea of tractable knowledge gaps, and systematically explore how to map something we are collectively ignorant about.

Not sure if I could make significant progress on this question in 2026, but I’d love to try!

Practical ethics

For a large fraction of my adult life, I’ve been concerned about various questions in practical ethics. Roughly, how can I — a limited, often dumb, always imperfect, agent — still try to do good in the real world and act in ways I endorse?

I think I've learned some useful things, and I'd like to figure out how to share them on Substack. Plus, many of my friends on Substack, like Ozy Brennan and Bentham’s Bulldog, seem to have been pretty effective with their practical ethics posts!

But I also don’t want to come across as too preachy or certain, so it’s a fine balance4. See the following comments as examples of ideas that I might want to one day turn into full posts.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is likely the biggest deal this century. I think it’s incredibly important and dangerous, and I’d like to address it more seriously head-on.

Thank You

To the 1000 people who subscribed to my blog, and the others who read and enjoyed my blog, thank you!

Thank you for reading. Thank you for the comments, the pushback, the DMs, the kind compliments, and the detailed technical rebuttals on cultural evolution and anthropic reasoning.

I’ve long believed that good thinking is a highly social process, for humans. So it’s great to have so many smart, competent, well-intentioned people read my very long posts. The blog is better because of you.

See y’all in 2026. I’m not sure what I’ll write about, but I promise to keep it interesting and surprising.

Like my writings? Hate a specific post with the burning fury of a thousand suns? Have a specific topic you want me to cover over the next year? Tell us in the comments!

Also if you’re a fan, consider sharing your favorite Linchpin essay with at least one friend!

There are a number of implicit concepts I have in my head that seem so obvious that I don’t even bother verbalizing them. At least, until it’s brought to my attention other people don’t share these concepts.

It didn’t feel like a big revelation at the time I learned the concept, just a formalization of something that’s extremely obvious. And yet other people don’t have those intuitions, so perhaps this is pretty non-obvious in reality.

Here’s a short, non-exhaustive list:

• Intermediate Value Theorem

• Net Present Value

• Differentiable functions are locally linear

• Grice’s maxims

• Theory of Mind

If you have not heard any of these ideas before, I highly recommend you read up on the relevant sections below! Most *likely*, they will seem obvious to you. You might already know those concepts by a different name, or they’re already integrated enough into your worldview without a definitive name.

However, many people appear to lack some of these concepts, and it’s possible you’re one of them.

As a test: for every idea in the above list, can you think of a nontrivial real example of a dispute where one or both parties in an intellectual disagreement likely failed to model this concept? If not, you might be missing something about each idea!

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The Intermediate Value Theorem

Concept: If a continuous function goes from value A to value B, it must pass through every value in between. In other words, tipping points must necessarily exist.

This seems almost trivially easy, and yet people get tripped up often:

Example 1: Sometimes people say “deciding to eat meat or not won’t affect how many animals die from factory farming, since grocery stores buy meat in bulk.”

Example 2: Donations below a certain amount won’t do anything since planning a shipment of antimalarial nets, or hiring a new AI Safety researcher, is lumpy.

Example 3: Sometimes people say that a single vote can’t ever affect the outcome of an election, because “there will be recounts.” I think stuff like that (and near variants) aren’t really things people can say if they fully understand IVT on an intuitive level.

The core mistake? People understand there’s some margin where you’re in one state (eg, grocery store buys 2000 pounds of chicken) and some margin where you’re in another state (eg, grocery store buys 3000 pounds of chicken). But without the IVT, people don’t realize there must be a specific decision someone makes that tips the situation from the first state to the second state.

Note that this mistake (IVT-blindness) is recursive. For example, sometimes people understand the reasoning for why individual decisions might matter for grocery store orders but then don’t generalize, and say that large factory farms don’t make decisions on how many animals to farm based on orders from a single grocery store.

Interestingly, even famous intellectuals make the mistake around IVT. I’ve heard variants of all three claims above said by public intellectuals.1

Net Present Value

Concept: The value today of a stream of future payments, discounted by how far away they are. Concretely, money far enough in the future shrinks to nearly nothing in present value, so even infinite streams have finite present value2.

Example 1: Sometimes people are just completely lost about how to value a one-time gain vs benefits that accumulate or compound over time. They think the problem is conceptually impossible (“you can’t compare a stock against a flow”).

Example 2: Sometimes people say it’s impossible to fix a perpetual problem (e.g. SF homelessness, or world hunger) with a one-time lump sum donation. This is wrong: it might be difficult in practice, but it’s clearly not impossible.

Example 3: Sometimes people say that a perpetual payout stream will be much more expensive than a one-time buyout. But with realistic interest rates, the difference is only like 10-40x.

Note that in many of those cases there are better solutions than the “steady flow over time” solution. For example, it’d be cheaper to solve world hunger via agricultural and logistical technology improvements, and perhaps economic growth interventions, than the net present value of “feeding poor people forever.” But the possibility of the latter creates an upper bound for how expensive this can be if people are acting mostly rationally, and that upper bound happens to be way cheaper than current global GDP or wealth levels.

Differentiable functions are locally linear

Concept: Zoom in far enough on any smooth curve and it looks like a straight line.

Example 1: People might think “being risk averse” justifies buying warranties on small goods (negative expected value, but shields you from downside risks of breaking your phone or something). But this is not plausible for almost any realistic risk-averse utility function, which becomes clear once you realize that any differentiable utility function is locally linear.

Example 2: People often have the intuition that altruists should be more careful with their money and more risk-sensitive than selfish people, even though the opposite is true. Altruistic people care about global welfare, which is a large function, so zoomed in, almost any individual altruist’s donation budget is linearly good for the world at large.

Example 3: People worry about “being pushed into a higher bracket” as if earning one more dollar could make them worse off overall. But tax liability is a continuous (piecewise linear) function of income. No additional dollar in income can result in greater than one dollar of tax liability, other than very narrow pathological cases.

Understanding that differentiable utility functions are locally linear unifies a lot of considerations that might otherwise confuse people, for example, why one sometimes ought to buy insurance for health and life but almost never for small consumer products, why altruistic people should be more risk-seeking with their investments, why bankroll management is important for poker players, etc.

Grice’s maxims

Concepts: Grice actually has four maxims on how to communicate effectively:

• Quantity (informativity): Say enough, but not more than needed.

• Quality (truth): Only say what you believe to be true and can be supported.

• Relation (relevance): Be relevant.

• Manner (clarity): Be clear, brief, and orderly.

I think disputes where one or both sides don’t follow each of Grice’s maxims should be fairly self-explanatory.

Many forms of trolling break one or more of these maxims, but not all of them. For example, a gish gallop is breaking the maxim of informativity. Bringing up Hilary Clinton’s emails, or the last Trump escapade, in an otherwise non-political discussion is breaking the maxim of relevance. The bad forms of continental philosophy often break the maxim of manner, which is why many analogize their writings to trolling. And of course, many trolls lie, breaking the maxim of quality.

For a longer, and somewhat ironic, meditation on the importance of Grice’s maxims, consider reading my earlier post:

Theory of Mind

Concept: ToM has many components, but the single most important idea is that other people are agents too. Everybody else has their own goals, their own model of how the world works, and their own constraints on what they can do.

Example 1: Sometimes people ascribe frankly implausible motivations to their enemies, like “Republicans just hate women”, “Gazans don’t care about their children,” “X group just wants to murder babies” etc.

Example 2: Sometimes people don’t even consider that their enemies (and allies, and neutral third parties) even have motivations at all. The Naval War College Historian Sarah Paine calls this “half-court tennis”: sometimes US government officials and generals think about war and peace in relation solely to US strategic objectives. They don’t even consider that other countries have their own political aims, and do not primarily define their own politics in relation to US objectives.

Example 3: Do you often feel like characters in a novel seem “flat?” Like they’re characters who think they should be characters in a novel to advance a narrative point, not fully-fleshed out people with their hopes and dreams.

The core idea is very simple: treat other agents as real. It sounds banal, until you realize how rare it can be, and how frequently people mess up.

I think a full treatise on a theory of mind failures and strengths is worthy of its own blog post, and that’s what I’m working on next! Subscribe if you’re interested! :)

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Why this all matters

Well, first of all, I think all of the concepts above are important, and neat, and it’d be good if more of my readers know about them!

More importantly, I think ideas matter. I deeply believe that ideas are extremely important and behind much of civilizational progress (and backsliding).

This is one of the central themes of this blog: ideas matter, and if we try harder and work smarter, if we approach every problem with simultaneous dedication and curiosity, together we can learn more ideas, integrate them into our worldviews, and use those ideas to improve our lives, and the world.

I don’t just mean big, all-encompassing, ideological frameworks, like Enlightenment or Communism. I also don’t just mean huge scientific revolutions, like evolution or relativity.

I mean small ideas, simple concepts like the ones above, that help us think better thoughts and live better lives.

I’m interested in a category I think of as Unknown Knowns: concepts that, once acquired, feel less like models you learned and more like obvious features of reality. They’re invisible until you have them, and then, once acquired, almost impossible to unsee. So you never truly notice them.

Today, almost 2000 years after some Jewish dude was nailed to a tree for championing the idea of how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, I want to actually see these ideas again. I want to take some time to appreciate all the ideas that have made my reality better, and all the people who made sacrifices, great and small, to find and propagate those ideas.

Merry Christmas.

Needed to purchase a last-minute gift? Interested in learning and spreading a publication chronicling some of the greatest ideas ever? Consider buying a gift subscription to The Linchpin for a loved one, yourself, or a former enemy !

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I was worried about the quality and frequency of my posts there, which is why I segmented my Inkhaven posts to a different blog. If you’ve previously noticed a lack of The Linchpin posts/emails in November, now you know why! :)

Anyway, without further ado, here are my best Inkhaven posts out of the ~30 I’ve written.

Well-written

On a technical level, I consider these posts to be well-written and executed, with a clear through-line.

The Inchpin

How to Win Board Games

Want to win new board games? There’s exactly one principle you need to learn…

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6 months ago · 48 likes · 28 comments · Linch

A post about board game strategy. The key concept is that you should understand the win condition, and then aim towards it. The post goes into a lot of detail about how best to apply this principle and gives a bunch of specific examples. But the basic idea is very simple and I think it explains a large fraction of the difference between good novice play and mediocre or bad plays.

Of course, you should not expect to be able to use such a simple strategy to win against very strong and experienced players. However, I do think it generalizes quite far, and many people who think of themselves as strong players (and indeed might even be so according to objective metrics like win-loss records against average players) could stand to learn from it.

The post was overall well-received, with many commenters who either find it helpful or endorse the strategy based on results (whether from themselves or others).

The Inchpin

Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, In Practice

Rock Paper Scissors is not solved, in practice…

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5 months ago · 74 likes · 13 comments · Linch

A deep dive into Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) strategy, particularly in the context of bot tournaments. RPS strategies have two goals in constant tension: predict and exploit your opponent’s moves, and don’t be exploitable yourself.

I think lessons here can maybe generalize significantly to other arenas of adversarial reasoning, though it takes some skill/time to figure out how to apply them precisely.

While I tried to illustrate each RPS-specific strategy through an approximately increasing order of complexity (pure rock -> pure random -> String Finder -> Henny -> Iocaine Powder -> Strategy Selection), I also tried to illustrate other general principles and ideas on the side. As an obvious example, that pure random is a mixed-strategy Nash Equilibrium. But also the reason you don’t always want to play the Nash Equilibrium strategy is due to less sophisticated agents/bots in the pool, which generalizes to other contexts like prediction markets and trading more broadly.

But the main thing I wanted to illustrate is just that an extremely simple game has almost unlimited strategic range in practice, which I found fascinating. Many of my readers agreed!

This post made zero splash when it first came out, but I’ve gotten a steady stream of new readers for the post since, and now it’s my most-liked post from Inkhaven!

The Inchpin

How to Write Fast, Weird, and Well

Today is my first day at Inkhaven! It’s a program where I try to publish a blog post every day for all of November…

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6 months ago · 35 likes · 12 comments · Linch

A post on all the advice on writing (for myself and others) I could think of that’s important, non-trivial, and not previously covered in my earlier post on writing styles.

Key points include writing a lot, getting lots of feedback, and saying surprising (but true!) things other people don’t expect you to say.

This was my first Inkhaven post. It didn’t have many views or likes, but was surprisingly well-received by many Substackers who I consider to be good writers.

It was not that popular elsewhere, which is unsurprising. Relative to their respective audiences, writers really like writing about writing, Hollywood directors really like making movies about Hollywood, and composers really like songs about musicals, and so forth.

Conceptually Original

The well-written posts above are more self-indulgent (about writing, games) and less important. They also served as better explorations/extensions/explanations of ideas first discovered by others, rather than me making a truly original case of my own.

The following posts are of lower writing and execution quality, and therefore messier, but they have ideas that I think are more original. As far as I know, I came up with the ideas myself. So if others had the same idea, it’s more likely due to independent convergence.

The Inchpin

Skip Traditional Phase 3 Trials for High-Burden Vaccines

Epistemic status: Exploratory idea. Promising but highly uncertain. Drafted in one day. Please don’t make irreversible decisions based on this, but also I continue to think it’s worth investigating. Will update if I have clarity…

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6 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Linch

During major pandemics, policymakers should skip Phase 3 trials for vaccines. Instead, give people the vaccine right away while continuing to study whether it works, and pull it if problems emerge. Having a process in place for rapid deployment of vaccines during major pandemics, and also for new vaccines for ongoing high-burden diseases (malaria, TB) can save at minimum hundreds of lives, and as many as hundreds of thousands of lives per vaccine hastened.

I think this is incredibly important! At least in theory. I hope scientists and public health professionals will take more efforts to make this happen, or at least more productively explore this idea so society as a whole can be more confident rejecting it.

It got a moderate amount of interest in the EA Forum but not elsewhere. I hope someday (ideally someday soon), somebody with greater domain expertise can champion this idea and make a stronger case than mine.

The Inchpin

Aging Has No Root Cause

Epistemic status: Written quickly. I think my summary of the evolutionary theories is highly likely to be correct. The core tension I illustrated is reasonably likely to be correct. However, I’m less confident I described the current field correctly. Also the idea is both novel and obvious on an important and well-funded topic, which of course means it…

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5 months ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Linch

I present a case that:

1. a predominant position in philosophical arguments against aging (as articulated by, e.g., Michael Huemer) and a predominant model in modern anti-aging biotech research and development are based on the idea that modern medicine is implicitly a “whack-a-mole” approach. We should instead attack the root causes of aging (telomeres, cellular senescence, and so forth)

2. I argue that this is wrong. The “target the root cause of aging” model directly contradicts the most plausible scientific theories for why aging actually happens, on evolutionary grounds.

This does not mean that #1 is necessarily wrong. Maybe the main scientific theories for aging are wrong. Maybe the main scientific theories are partially real and the “root causes” explain some but not all of the story. Maybe my argument is wrong and there’s a clever way that the contradiction isn’t real. But I think this tension is a really big deal, and I wish antiaging advocates, scientists, and especially the companies seeking billions of dollars in investments and public funding would publicly grapple with these theoretical challenges.

This post got some attention but the core tension is still essentially absent from public discourse on aging research. I hope to revise it one day, improve, enhance and develop the post overall, and maybe publish it in a magazine somewhere.

The Inchpin

The Rising Floor

Here’s something that nobody points out in educational debates: humanity has gotten dramatically smarter over history, even without substantial genetic changes…

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5 months ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · Linch

Presenting my case that people are underrating how improvements in conceptual technology and how we formulate ideas allows people to meaningfully think about deeper problems than our ancestors were able to grapple with, despite relatively low if any change in our base intelligence/hardware.

Relatedly, ideas that are extremely, blindingly, obvious in retrospect are hard-fought and hard-won. And we moderns who fully integrated those ideas don’t understand how radical, surprising, or confusing those ideas were when they first emerged on the scene. Examples I gave elsewhere included Intermediate Value Theorem, Net Present Value, Differentiable functions are locally linear, Theory of mind, and Grice’s maxims. But these are specifically chosen as ideas that are currently hard for some people to understand. No intellectual alive really disputes the idea of “zero.”

I’m worried that ideas about ideas and writing about ideas would come across as too navel-gazey and uninteresting, even to “normal” nerds. If I ever have a better angle on conveying these ideas (sharper imagery, better examples, more clear direct payoffs and practical applications), I’d love to revisit this idea and do it justice.

As it is, other writers are welcome to take their own shot at addressing this concept!

Honorable Mentions

Here are 4 posts that I think were neither particularly well-executed by my lights nor had as strong conceptual interestingness or originality, but still had strong things going for them:

The Inchpin

Legible AI Safety Problems That Don't Gate Deployment

Epistemic status: Think there’s something real here but drafted quickly and imprecisely…

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5 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Linch

Wei Dai had a very sharp observation on legible vs illegible AI safety problems. I tried to understand his position and extend it. Wei Dai argued that legible AI safety problems (ones obvious to leaders) will gate deployment anyway, so working on them just speeds up timelines. Instead, we should focus on illegible problems instead.

I think this is directionally correct, but conflates “legible” with “actually gates deployment.” AI psychosis is highly legible but companies keep deploying anyway. The deeper issue is that illegibility to lab leaders may often be motivated rather than epistemic: “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” This suggests we might sometimes be better off making problems legible to less biased audiences (journalists, policymakers, the public) rather than assuming the bottleneck is technical sophistication.

I like this post because AI safety is very important, Wei Dai’s observation is sharp, and I think my comment positively contributed to the conversation. So I’m glad to be able to make my own, if limited, contribution.

The Inchpin

Middlemen Are Eating the World (And That's Good, Actually)

I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI strategists). “Bullshit jobs” by David Graeber is a more intellectualized framing of the same intuition. Many people believe that middlemen are entirely useless…

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5 months ago · 56 likes · 19 comments · Linch

Many people despise “middlemen” “bullshit jobs” and prefer “real jobs” that can be done by a pig wearing clothes in a children’s book, like pork butchering.

I argue this intuition is completely backwards! Middlemen (and the generalized idea, roughly people who help others coordinate better) are extremely important, and in modern societies, often more important than direct/object-level work.

My most popular Inkhaven post by views (almost 6k?). Higher than median (though not average) post on my main blog, tbh. I think it’s a pretty obvious idea. Certainly not original to me.

The article is in a bit of an awkward middle spot. For an academic piece, it was light on citations. For a populist (anti-populist?) piece, I think the examples could’ve been more emotionally motivating. I doubt it’d convince anybody actually on the other side, but I think it’s a decent piece of inoculation for high-schoolers/college freshmen and other people new to the ideas who have not previously heard clear articulations from either side. At least, I think my intro is better than you’d usually get in introductory economics classes.

Anyway, in general I thought it was a fine piece, and unsurprising that it’s popular given the topic.

The Inchpin

Building Without Apology: My a16z Investment Thesis (Guest Post)

CW: addiction, violence, child sexual abuse, simulated torture, startups…

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5 months ago · 14 likes · Linch

A creative writing exercise where I made up fake evil startups in order to lampoon the immorality of Andreessen Horowitz for funding all their real evil startups that tear apart the social fabric. Ozy Brennan and Georgia Ray contributed some of the ideas/jokes.

I enjoyed writing it and I legit think it’s quite funny, but I think the jokes were sometimes a tad too cerebral and overall weren’t sharp enough to go viral. Alas.

The Inchpin

Five Books That Actually Changed My Life (Not The Ones I Wished Had)

Books I’ve read in the past that were actually life-changing…

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5 months ago · 21 likes · 4 comments · Linch

A description of five books that actually changed my life, with concrete examples of why, and then a list of 25 other books that I liked and hope other people might like too. To be clear, this is different from my favorite books, books I might enjoy the most, books that I consider of the highest literary merit, etc.

This post was surprisingly quite popular (even though my personal posts usually perform worse). I’m not sure why. One hypothesis is that people just really like lists. Another possibility is that my most life-changing books (and other books I thought were good) also positively correlated with other people’s life-changing or otherwise good books. So they like it more and want to share more when people say nice things about books they like, similar to my Ted Chiang review.

Posts by Other Inkhaveners

People who enjoy my Inkhaven blog may also enjoy the blog posts of other Inkhaveners:

The Inchpin

Inkhaven Recommendations

Inkhaven was a program where I wrote a blog post every day for the month of November. It is the impetus for this very blog you’re reading right now, as distinct from my main blog…

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4 months ago · 5 likes · Linch

Reflections

Now that it’s been over two weeks since Inkhaven ended, what do I think of my experience there?

During Inkhaven, and in the days immediately afterwards, I was profoundly disappointed in myself. I like the social aspect of meeting other writers, and enjoyed many of my conversations. I also liked the food, snacks, and environment. But my output wasn’t the best, and I was constantly saddened by my productivity.

Concretely, my hope before starting the program was that my typical post would look like How to Win Board Games, with an idea that’s not original to me but surprising to the vast majority of my audience members, a clear throughline, competent execution, a clear reason why (some) readers might be interested, and generally a solid-but-not-stellar blogpost overall. I hoped I’d have 3-5 high-quality blog posts with the above but also genuinely original ideas, beautiful writing, clever analogies and anecdotes, and a wealth of unexpected connections, akin to Why Reality has a Well-Known Math Bias or Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing. The hope, too, was that I could crosspost my better posts to my bigger/more serious blog The Linchpin.

Instead, How to Win Board Games was closer to my peak of writing at Inkhaven. None of my posts in November combined original ideas with what I think as genuinely competent execution. Alas.

But now that two weeks have passed and I’m a bit more removed, I feel better about my output! Partially because I have some more distance and I can look at everything more objectively. But honestly part of it is because people are still liking and sharing my old posts from Inkhaven, suggesting that at least some of the posts might stand the test of time and be more than just a flash-in-a-pan phenomenon. I also think upon rereading my posts, the quality standards for my better posts were decent for blog posts in general, not just for blog posts written in a hurry in 24 hours. So that’s good.

I’m also of course really glad to have experienced the amazing venue at Inkhaven, and the chance to talk to amazing mentors and fellow writers. The experience overall was solid and I’m glad to have learned from them.

Would I ever want to do something similar to Inkhaven again? Unclear, but I’d seriously consider it!

What’s next for this blog?

As many readers know, I’ve published my first post-Inkhaven post! https://linch.substack.com/p/how-stealth-works

As far as I can tell, it’s the best explainer available online for the basics of stealth technology. The core idea is surprisingly simple! I’m glad to have enough time to carefully refine the post and try my best to only include what needs to be included, and no more.

My next Serious Post is a continuation of the above, a full review of Skunk Works, a memoir by Ben R. Rich, the former Director of the Advanced Research and Development Department at Lockheed that made advancements like stealth airplanes and many other critical military technologies. I intend to cover technical, organizational, geopolitical, and ethical implications.

I’ve also resumed doing sporadic interviews of other philosophy or philosophy-adjacent Substackers who interest me, including my recent 3h+ marathon chat with Ozy Brennan. Feel free to comment or DM if you have ideas for other people who you think I should interview!

Finally, I’m cooking up a short post on the theory and empiricism behind gift-giving, hopefully just in time for Christmas and New Year’s.

If you like my work, please subscribe and share your favorite article with at least one friend. I’d love for more people to see my best writings!

• How to be charitable in speech and action, including the case against steelmanning

• Which ethnographies you should read, and why you should read them

• effective altruism

• the case for and against donating to political interventions

• w…

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So how does stealth work?

When we talk about stealth, we’re usually talking about evading radar. How does radar work?

​​Radar antennas emit radio waves in the sky. ​​The waves bounce off objects like aircraft. When the echoes return to the antenna, the radar system can then identify the object’s approximate speed, position, and size.

So how would you evade radar? You can try to:

• Blast a bunch of radio waves in all directions (“jamming”). This works if you’re close to the radar antenna, but kind of defeats the point of stealth.

• Build your plane out of materials that are invisible to radio waves (like glass and some plastics) and just let the waves pass through. This is possible, but very difficult in practice. Besides, by the 1970s, if the entire physical plane was invisible to radar, modern radar can easily detect signals that bounce off the pilot from miles away.

  • US and Soviet missiles can track a “live hawk riding the thermals from 30 miles away” (Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich, pg 3)

• Build your plane out of materials that absorb the radio waves. This dampening effect is possible but expensive, heavy, and imperfect (some waves still bounce back).

What Lockheed’s Skunk Works discovered in the 1970s, and the core principle of all modern stealth planes, is something devilishly simple: make the waves reflect in a direction that’s not the receiver.

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How do you do this? Think of a mirror. You can see your reflection from far away if and only if the mirror is facing you exactly (ie, the mirror is perfectly perpendicular to you).

Tilted a few fractions of a degree off, and you don’t see your own reflection!

In contrast, if an object is curved, at least some of it at any given point is tilted 90 degrees away from you.

This is why stealth planes all have flat surfaces. To the best of your ability, you want to construct an airplane, and any radar-evading object, out of flat surfaces1.

Put another way, the best stealth airplane is a plane. Not an airplane, a plane. The Euclidean kind. A flat airplane design trades off a tiny chance of a huge radar echo blast (when the plane’s exactly, perfectly, perpendicular to the radar antenna), against a 99.99%+ chance that the echo is deflected elsewhere. In other words, a flat plane design allows you to correlate your failures.

Unfortunately, a single plane (the Euclidean kind) can’t fly [citation needed]. Instead, you need to conjoin different planes together to form an airplane’s surface. Which creates another problem where the planes meet: edges. Edges diffract radio waves back, which is similar to but not exactly like reflection. Still detectable however! Hmm.

The solution comes from being able to predict edge behavior precisely. The Physical Theory of Diffraction (PTD)2 allows you to calculate exactly how much radar energy any edge will scatter, and in what direction. While implementing the theory is mathematically and computationally complex, the upshot is the same: PTD lets you design edges that are pointed in the same direction. This correlates the failures again, trading off a huge radar echo blast when the edges are pointed directly at you against the very high probability the radar waves are simply deflected elsewhere. Pretty cool!

This simple idea revolutionized much of conventional warfare. Stealth spy planes can reliably gather information about enemy troop movements and armament placements without being detected (and thus shot down) themselves. Stealth fighters can track enemies from far away while being “invisible” themselves, winning aerial dogfights before enemy fighters even recognize an engagement is afoot. Stealth bombers and missiles have a huge first-strike advantage, allowing nations to bomb military targets (and cities) long before the panicked defenders have a chance to react.

But while the idea is simple, the implementation is not. Building an airplane almost completely out of flat surfaces trades off aerodynamicity for stealth. How do you make a stealth plane that actually flies? How do you do so quickly, and, well, stealthily, without leaking your technological secrets to your geopolitical enemies? How do you run an organization that reliably generates such bangers as stealth planes without resting on your laurels or succumbing to bureaucratic malaise? And finally, what were the intelligence, military, and ethical implications of these deadly innovations?

To learn more, subscribe below to read my upcoming full review of Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich, the Director of Lockheed’s Advanced Research and Development department during the development of the world’s first stealth airplane, and the man arguably singularly most responsible for heralding a new era of aerial warfare for over 50 years.

To returning subscribers: The Linchpin is back! Over the last month, I’ve been away at Inkhaven, where I wrote a blog post every day! I was worried about crowding y’all’s inboxes, so I created a separate blog to host all the new posts! I originally intended to crosspost my favorite Inkhaven posts over here, but they never quite felt like they reached my Linchpin quality standards.

Still, I had some posts I liked. On a technical level, I consider How to Write Fast, Weird, and Well, How to Win Board Games, and Rock Paper Scissors is Not Solved, in Practice to be well-written and executed, with a clear through-line. On a conceptual level, I’m proud of the new ideas in Skip Traditional Phase 3 Trials for High-Burden Vaccines, Aging Has No Root Cause, and The Rising Floor, and How to Write Fast, Weird, and Well again.

What’s next for The Linchpin? For paid subscribers, I recently did a marathon Substack Chat livestream with Ozy Brennan for over 3 hours! I plan to upload the recording tomorrow or the day after. For everybody else, I am writing my full review of Skunk Works and would like it to be up by later this week or early next week.

The implication is that bad-faith internet arguers love it when you use their techniques to debate them. Curiously, my experience suggests otherwise.

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I. Socratic questioning

Yesterday, a popular effective/accelerationist tweeter challenged “AI doomers” with loaded questions and gratuitous insults. Normally, I just ignore these comments. But today I was feeling charitable, so I decided to respond with an insulting question of my own.

Instead of “wrestling in the mud and liking it”, aka continuing a convivial discussion, or thanking me for the attempt to argue in culturally-appropriate ways, he just made a comment that didn’t address the mimicry angle at all and immediately blocked me!

Was it just my bad luck in encountering an unusually non-pugnacious pig? Perhaps. But consider also:

II. Rhetorical Reasoning

I often see logical fallacies on Twitter. Historically I tried a combination of a) pointing out the logical fallacies, b) countering with different lines of factual arguments and c) ignoring the fallacies and moving on.

But this has at most mixed success! So in an anthropology-inspired foray into alternative argumentative norms, I attempted to argue against unusually bad logical fallacies (from MAGAs and far-leftists alike) by using logical fallacies of my own.

Alas, far from being “pigs who like wrestling in the mud,” political posters who deploy logical fallacies get even MORE angry at you when you argue against them with the same fallacies, than when you just dispassionately argue in logically coherent ways! It’s quite curious.

III. Race Dynamics

Another example: I’m sure you’ve all noticed the rise in racial arguments on X.com. Like truly stupid racial arguments about Haitians or Indians or w/e would get millions of views and thousands of likes.

Over the last three years, I tried to engage them plainly, logically, factually, with exasperation, or with wry humor. All failures!

So recently I had a brilliant idea: maybe instead of attempting to counter racism with abstract logic, it’d be better to mirror their reasoning?

So I constructed a number of fun #based, #justnoticingthings, #justcurious lines of attack. Armed with my new arguments, I politely attempted to engage with white supremacists and HBD’ers.

Tragically, my arguments about the inferiority of white people have not been well-received. If anything, they made online white supremacists even angrier1 than my previous attempts!

(unfortunately I can’t seem to find these tweets anymore. #cancelculture)

IV. Conclusion & Future Work

It turns out cross-cultural communication is hard!

But I’m optimistic. I probably just haven’t spent enough time deeply engaging with non-Gricean argumentative norms, and truly grok the inner brilliance of other Twitter subcultures.

One day, perhaps one day soon, I’ll finally learn how to throw gratuitous insults and logical fallacies as well as the best of them.

And then, finally, we can understand each other deeply and have a real conversation. ☺️☺️☺️

_________

Live in the Bay Area and interested in more cross-cultural communication? We’re hosting a Three Idiots (Bollywood) movie night on Monday the 13th! The Linchpin subscribers and new readers alike are welcome, just DM me for an invite!

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For Thomas and Turner, a mature writing style is defined by making a principled choice on a small number of nontrivial central issues: truth, presentation, cast, scene, and the intersection of thought & language.

They present 8 writing styles: classic, reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and oratorical.

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The book argues for what they call the classic style, and teaches you how to write classically. While no doubt useful for many readers, my extended review will take a different approach. Rather than championing one approach, I’ll inhabit each style on its own terms, with greater focus on the more common styles in contemporary writing, before weighing their respective strengths and limitations, particularly when it comes to nonfiction internet writing.

Classic style: A Clear Window for Seeing Truth

Classic style presents truth through transparent prose. The writer has observed something clearly and shows it to the reader, who is treated as an equal capable of seeing the same truth once properly oriented. The prose itself remains almost invisible, a clear window through which one views the subject. Taken as a whole, a good passage in classic style can be seen as beautiful, but it is a subtle, understated beauty.

At heart, Classic style assumes that truth exists independently and can be perceived clearly by a competent observer. The truth is pure, with an obvious, awestriking quality to itself, above mere mortal men who can only perceive it. The job of the writer is to identify and convey the objective truth, no more and no less.

Prose is a clear window. While the truth the writer wants to show you may be stunning, the writer’s means of showing it is always straightforward, neither bombastic nor underhanded. The writing should be transparent, not calling attention to itself. Unlike a stained glass window, which is ornate but unclear, good classic writing allows you to see the objective truth of the content beyond the writing.

In classic style, writer and reader are equals in a conversation. The writer is presenting observations to someone equally capable of understanding them. The writer and reader are both equal, but elite. They are elite not through genetic endowment nor other accidents of birth, but through focused training and epistemic merit. In Confucian terms, they’re junzi, though focused on cultivation of epistemic rather than relational virtues.

A core component of classic style is clarity through simplicity. Complex ideas should be expressed in the simplest possible terms without sacrificing precision. Difficulty should come from the subject matter, not the expression.

Classic style further assumes that for any thought, there exists an ideal expression that captures it completely and elegantly. The writer’s job is to find it. In classic style, every word counts. There are no wasted phrases, nor dangling metaphors. While skimming classic style is possible, you are always missing important information in doing so. Aristotle’s dictum on story endings – surprising but inevitable – applies recursively to every sentence, paragraph, and passage in classic style.

Finally, in classic style, thought precedes writing. The thinking is always complete before the writing begins. Like a traditional mathematical proof, the prose presents finished thoughts, and hides the process of thinking.

Classic writing samples

Good versions of classic style appear pretty rare in the internet age. Of all the writers I regularly read, only two writers jump out to me as writing in mostly classic style: Paul Graham and Ted Chiang.

The classic style serves their subjects well. Graham’s natural domain is fairly abstract advice on startups. Much of early-stage startup ethos can be described impolitely as a confidence game, or more neutrally as a reality distortion field, with the founder selling his highly contentious and idiosyncratic vision to funders and early employees as if it were an inevitable truth. In that context, the simplicity, understated beauty, and self-assuredness of classic style fits perfectly.

In contrast, while Chiang isn’t selling you something, many of his science fiction stories strive for a timeless, ethereal quality, sometimes quite literally. In that philosophical context, classic style, with its beautiful yet muted quality, serves the timeless philosophical science fiction of Chiang well.

Among my own writings, the surface level of Open Asteroid Impact is written in classic style. The complete confidence, lack of self-doubt, and an entire website fully “played straight” helps sell the illusion of a Serious Startup completely immune to either critique or self-awareness, and amplifies the inevitability of doom.

Classic style is very much not my natural style. My first serious attempt to write in unironic classic style is in the coda of my recent post on Intellectual Jokes. My coda is not the purest instantiation of classic style, but I think it does the job well enough.

Unfortunately, there are many bastardizations of classic style online, which tries to emulate many of the surface qualities of classic style without paying the dues of a careful attention towards truth and deliberate, yet concealed effort. The “LinkedIn Bro” style of writing, including the “Thought Leadership” and “Tech Guru” variants, is a common such bastardization.

Classic Style in the Age of the Internet

Honestly I think classic style is just a bad fit for the internet. An underrated downside of classic style is that, more than pretty much any common style of writing, doing it well is just insanely high effort. A central tenet of classic style is presentation: the writing should look smooth and effortless. But this effortlessness is almost always a mirage, like an Instagram model who spends three hours in front of a mirror to apply the “just woke up”, au naturel, “no makeup makeup” look.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Chiang and Graham are very unprolific, and both talk about how hard it is to write well, and how many edits they go through.

In contrast, writing fast and churning out a lot of content is central to success as an internet writer, so it behooves would-be internet writers to find a style that works for them that is less demanding on the need for many rounds of revisions.

That said, I think people underrate the value of practicing and thinking in classic style, even if you chose to ultimately discard it, or not write serious posts in that style. Especially if, like me, you find the classic style alien to your normal writing sensibilities. Forcing yourself to write in that way, unironically, and inhabiting the style in its own lights, and especially doing it in a way that doesn’t leave you unsatisfied in the end, is a great way to grow and improve as a writer, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own style of writing.

If you want to write more in the classic style, I recommend reading Clear and Simple as The Truth. Thomas and Turner spend more time discussing the classic style than every other style combined, and have exercises. I’ve also heard good things about Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style.

Plain Style

Or: Just the facts, ma’am!

Plain style is simple and unadorned.

Plain style has no opinion about truth beyond its existence. Truth isn’t beautiful or complex or subjective or hidden. It’s just there. “The meeting is at 3pm.” “Turn left at the light.” “My password is hunter2.” These truths don’t require contemplation.

Plain style doesn’t explain why. It doesn’t justify. It doesn’t persuade. The meeting is at 3pm. That’s all you need to know.

Unlike classic style’s epistemic elitism, plain style is democratic. Everyone can write it. Everyone can read it. Writer and reader are equals, and normal people, not elites. The writer happens to know something the reader doesn’t. The writer wants to communicate it quickly and efficiently.

The central scene in plain style is a congregation of a Society of Friends. Because the truth is obvious, anybody can find it. Children often find it first. They haven’t learned to complicate things.

Plain style is as sparse as possible. It is almost never beautiful. On the occasions when writing in the plain style seems beautiful, the beauty comes not from words but their absence.

The man sits in the corner of the bar. He fidgets with his fourth finger. He orders a fifth shot of vodka. He looks away when the bartender pours. He drinks. He fidgets again.

Plain writing samples

Hemingway writes in this style. To a lesser extent, so does Orwell. Much of news journalism is in this style. Among speculative fiction writers I like, I think Suzanne Collins writes the most in this style.

I believe much of internet writing approaches this style, though not quite the extreme level of sparsity as the example above. Unfortunately it’s not a particularly common style among writers I personally enjoy reading. Dan Luu I think comes closest, though in his case the simplicity of prose is counterbalanced by the sheer density of content.

Plain Style in the Age of the Internet

I think this is a strong contender for a barebones style to aim for, if you’re not sure what style to write in! Unlike classic style or reflexive style, the skill floor is fairly low. So as long as you have interesting things to say, presenting them in plain style is perfectly serviceable, unlike one of the more ornate and/or harder to pull off styles.

Top 7 Tips to Write in the Practical Style

1. Know your audience. Practical style helps readers accomplish specific tasks efficiently. To do this, the most important rule of writing in the practical style is knowing who you are writing to, what are they trying to accomplish, and catering to your audience appropriately. Nothing is more important than your reader and their goals.

2. Know your shit. The second most important rule of writing in the practical style is knowing what you’re talking about. The only way to efficiently communicate useful knowledge to your reader is by actually knowing useful things to communicate. The “central scene” of the practical style is a seasoned master teaching an apprentice something the master knows deeply.

3. Learn the mechanics of how people in your audience normally communicate, and emulate it. For presentation, don’t reinvent the wheel stylistically - write in formats your audience already uses.

4. Structure your writing explicitly, and in styles that your readers are likely to be familiar with. Use headers, bullet points, listicles.

5. Use verbs. Write in simple, imperative sentences. Instead of ‘The system can be configured’ write ‘Configure the system’.

6. Test your writing with users. Don’t just theorize about what impacts your writing might have on theoretical readers, actually have beta readers in your intended audience to test your writings with, and ask for explicit user feedback.

7. Learn explicitly from people who teach how to write in the practical style. Strunk&White is a common go-to reference. Williams and Colomb are also recommended by experts. You can also learn from online masters.

Practical writing samples

Wikihow is the purest online example. Online guides to getting things done are often in this style. Instruction manuals are also in this style, and to a lesser extent, some academic writings will be in a hybrid of this style and a different style (most frequently reflexive).

Practical Style in the Age of the Internet

I think this style has its place when you’re teaching a specific thing, especially if it’s know-how rather than know-that. I don’t have strong opinions on whether it’s underdone or overdone at the current moment.

I suspect some of my past writings should be ported over to practical style, e.g. forecasting and grantmaking lessons. One day!

Reflexive style (or is it self-aware style?)

Epistemic status: Moderately confident

This is a family of styles that Thomas and Turner do not much like, but is very common in academic writing and internet writing, particularly rationalist and EA writing (which is the discursive tradition I’m perhaps the most familiar with). The family of styles (For simplicity I will from now on refer to the entire family of styles as “it”, “the style,” and “this style”, notwithstanding significant heterogeneity in the family of styles) are archetypically very self-referential. Unlike with other styles, you do not forget that the specific reader, and especially the specific writer exists, and you are reading a specific piece of writing with a specific purpose.

Pinker (somewhat derisively) calls this style the postmodernist style. Thomas and Turner (somewhat inaccurately) call it the reflexive style. After discussing with friends, reading articles online, and some self-deliberation, I think “self-conscious” or “self-aware” style captures it best.

The tone might be performatively uncertain, anxious, and apologetic. “In my humble opinion”, “It appears that”, “in my reading of the passage,”, “the data weakly suggests”, “while we cannot fully comprehend providence”, “in my personal, limited experience as a privileged [identity-group marker]”, “epistemic status: uncertain.”

While perhaps tiresome to read, the qualifiers have both epistemic and ritualistic benefits. Epistemically, they facilitate reasoning transparency and help the reader understand and grasp the state of current understanding, and how the writer comes to believe what they believe. Ritualistically, they help the reader and writer situate themselves in a pre-established epistemic and social hierarchy for ideas, to help qualify the social positioning of such ideas.

But I worry I’m being too abstract here. Does that make sense? Let us try a different framing: self-aware style often encodes power structures. For example, in the academic variant, graduate students may hedge more than more senior scholars, and assistant and adjunct professors can be more prone to hedging than tenured professors. Women scholars also tend to hedge more than male scholars, though it’s not clear to me how much of this is due to social pressure versus temperament1.

The historical and genealogical view of self-aware styles is also telling. Often, academic-adjacent communities rise up against the self-aware style. For example, early LessWrong and GiveWell tend to be written in simpler, more conversational prose. They see the self-aware style as overwrought, non-parsimonious, and conversational poison. And yet, they eventually settle on their own variants of the self-aware style, just with slightly different types of hedges and tribal markers.

Perhaps most interestingly, different members of the family of self-aware styles express different non-classic notions of truth, whether objective truth or our ability to access it. Science academia’s hedging and reflexivity may convey a notion of truth as provisional, contingent, and falsifiable. Modern humanities academia’s self-awareness may embody truth as subjective, socially constructed, and mediated by power. Rationalist hedging may encode truth as probabilistic, uncertain, and limited by cognitive biases (72% certain). And in all three, truth is seen as primarily collaborative and interpreted in light of our theories and models, rather than directly observed and presented.

Self-aware styles may see other styles on this list, including classic style, as naive, arrogant, and lacking in self-awareness. In contrast, the other styles may see self-aware styles as confusing, overly self-obsessed, and annoying to wade through.

Reflexive writing samples

I think my “The Motivated Reasoning Critique of Effective Altruism” article is a perfect example of writing in this genre. Much of LessWrong and the EA Forum is written in this way. If you want more examples, much of academic writing is in this vein, especially in the humanities and non-econ, non-psychology, social sciences.

Reflexive Style in the Age of the Internet

My biggest reflection from writing this piece is that reflexive/self-aware style is overdone in the internet era, especially in the “smart parts” of the internet. There are many good and bad reasons for this, including genealogical reasons, defensive writing being necessary in the context of aggressive quote-tweeting culture, and speed-reading and reasoning transparency being at a premium in an adversarial epistemic culture. But in my opinion a big reason is just what Paul Graham calls “scar tissue” – every little critique or self-critique nudges the writing culture to be a little more defensive, and a little more self-aware.

One contentious point I have: Self-aware style sees itself as humble, epistemically modest. And in some sense this is surely true. But in another, just as important sense, I think of the self-aware style’s central conceit as very arrogant, especially in the internet era. After all, the single most conceited thing an internet writer can regularly do is hit “publish” on their own thoughts. And by having your discursive tendencies, uncertainty, and self-doubts “on air,” you’re implicitly saying that not only are your factual analyses and insights important enough to be read by dozens, thousands, or millions of people, but your neuroses are as well.

But even with all my reflections and criticisms aside, I still considered the self-aware style and derivatives to be an important part of modern intellectual internet writing, and I expect a nontrivial number of my future pieces to still primarily be in this style.

If you want to write well in a self-aware style without going overboard, I recommend reading Luke on Reasoning Transparency. Many style guides on academic writing can also be helpful here.

Styles for Special Occasions

The remaining styles are less frequent in internet writing, especially in “pure” form. I will be briefer in both my inhabitation of these styles, and in the follow-up discussion.

Contemplative style: Writing as Lens

What do I think about when I think about writing? I often wonder this to myself. But first, what is writing? What is the essence of it, the ur-, Platonic form? Is it a conversation between equals, like in classic style? Is it dispassionate and efficient information transfer, in plain style? Or is there no platonic form at all, just different modes for different times, whatever is most practically relevant? Or is writing an apology for my own positionality and biases? Who’s to say? I find these thoughts hard to think about. And even though I pride myself on my cognitive capacities, I’ve found it hard to turn my thoughts inwards, like a lens that looks too deeply at itself. What does it mean to write? To think? I often find excogitating on the page easier than genuine introspection, and today, alas, is no exception.

The core of contemplative style is thought in action. The archetypal writing in this style has two components: a presentation of an object or event under study, and then a meditative reflection of what the event means to the writer. The archetypal scene of a contemplative style is a solitary thinker in his diary, or on a walk. The presentation component can be done classically, plainly, or practically, but in contemplative style, that’s not what matters. Rather, reflection is the better half: the writer is working through his thoughts, and wants to showcase them to the reader.

This style has found surprising, if niche, success online, particularly in newsletter culture where readers subscribe specifically for a writer’s thought process. Annie Dillard and Maria Popova often write in this style. To a lesser extent, Ada Palmer and Scott Alexander often use elements of this style, with an objective description/summary of something first and then a reflective analysis, though the analysis tends to be more outwardly focused.2 See Gupta on Enlightenment for a more traditional example, and My Heart of Hearts for a less traditional one. Finally, the more cerebral book reviews are often partially in this style.

Romantic Style: Writing as Ornate Mirror

Sometimes I hate writing. I hate, hate, hate it! I hate how difficult it can be. I hate the blank page. I hate how much I identify with my own words, and how much I try and fail to be dispassionate. I hate how tough it is to get a clear thought across on the page. I hate the problem of other minds, and the related problem of true understanding. I hate the clickbaitiness, the artifice, the strong self-driven need to say something original counterbalanced by external pressures to perform. I hate how increasingly good the AIs are at writing, and one day – maybe one day soon – they’ll completely supersede me.

I love writing! I love love love it! I love it as an expression of my soul. I love it as a conduit across the world, and across time. I love writing to subscribers in India, and haters in New Zealand. I love the references, the quotes, the craft, the meta-cognition, the sheer beauty of this art that I share with the great rhetoricians of the past and future. I love how I see myself in Nanni’s customer service complaints about Ea-nāṣir, and perhaps one day my distant digital great-grandchildren could see themselves through my substack notes and preserved screenshots of my embarrassing DMs. I love the cliches, the dance, the tangled world-webs we weave. I love how writing allowed a young Chinese boy in a foreign land to find his voice, and navigate a ferociously confusing external era and internal world. I love writing. Every line is a love letter to my younger and older selves, and perhaps to you.

The romantic style is emotional, raw, unfiltered. Unlike classic style’s conception of writing as a window, or contemplative style self-conception as a lens that sometimes can be turned on itself, the romantic style is always a mirror. It sees styles like the classic and plain styles as sterile, emotionless, and ultimately false in that they ignore the deeper emotional reality for a less interesting external world. It sees the contemplative style likewise as too much brain and insufficient heart. Romantic style is the Humean notion “reason is a slave of the passions” in art form. Romantic style writing is never about “The Truth”, but always your truth.

I don’t personally read much prose in romantic style these days, but I like older and modern poetry in this style, of which my favorite might be Sylvia Plath’s work, particularly Mad Girl’s Love Song. An interesting example of ”antiromantic” style might be Sam Kriss, which takes on romantic style’s subjectivity and emotional tenor, but the primary emotion he chooses to evoke in an audience isn’t “pure” emotions like love, honor, pride, or even hatred and despair, but disgust.

Prophetic Style: The Truth that Burns

What is writing? Thou asked, and I shall answer. Writing, the Muses tell me, is about the Good and the Real. Every Prophet hears the Gods in different ways. Whether it’s Biblical hermeneutics, racial consciousness, omens, portent dreams, direct lived experience, or careful expected utility calculations, when Good and Real speak to you in clarion calls, you must listen. And you must repeat their calls.

The Truth is not transparent, not provisional, not personal. It is urgent, moral, and inescapable.

When you speak The Truth, it bursts through the text in whitehot flames, incandescent, burning through lies, tired excuses, and mere practicality. The Prophecy is not beautiful in the classic sense; it is awful, in the Old meaning of the word: it inspires awe, fear, and sometimes repentance. Your sentences are not crafted to be elegant; they are forged to be unignorable.

Prophecies are largely not crafted to be epistemic, reflective, or practical. To the extent they serve a directly useful purpose, it’s usually as a coordination mechanism. Most interestingly, the prophetic style and the previous styles discussed diverges in the external ensemble. While every other style has some important gradation of writer vs reader (eg readers and writers are equals in classic and plain style, reader is elevated in practical style, writer is elevated in contemplative and romantic style), the most important party in the Prophetic style is an external party to both writer and reader: God(s), Ethnic Consciousness, or Utility.

Modern day examples of true prophetic style are relatively rare. Outside of religious examples, I mostly see them in essays and rap songs about racial consciousness, of which recent examples include works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kendrick Lamar. Meditations on Moloch by Scott Alexander is also significantly in this style, as are some entreaties against factory farming. (When I asked for examples of modern prophetic-style writings, people often hallucinate AI “doomer” content as prophetic, but if you drill down into the specific style, I’ve yet to find AI risk articles actually written in this way. Comment if you have examples!).

Oratorical style: Subscribe Now, Friends and Countrymen!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, wanderers of the word-hungry web—lend me your scroll-weary eyes! Before you flit away on the algorithmic winds, pause, I beseech you, at this humble crossroads, to take a stand! Each day you brave fire-hoses of hot takes and half-truths, utter nonsense masquerading as insight and wisdom! Pause for a second. Take a deep breath. Breathe again, and do the right thing! Subscribe to The Linchpin! Learn to write well, think well, and be well!

The oratorical style thrives on performance and persuasion, treating prose as a stage where writer becomes speaker, addressing an audience that must be moved to action. It’s unabashedly theatrical, wielding rhythm, repetition, and rhetorical flourishes as weapons of mass conviction. Works in oratorical style, even when written, are meant to be read and heard out loud. Where classic style hides its effort, oratorical style revels in it. The sweat on the speaker’s brow is part of the show.

I’m personally not aware of modern internet writings written primarily in oratorical style, at least in the corners of the internet I frequent.

Finding Your Voice in the Cacophony

Inhabiting each style has been a difficult but enlightening experience. I will gladly do so again. I’ve learned a lot about each writing styles’ strengths and limitations, as well as that of my native styles.

My number one advice for readers interested in elevating their internet writing craft is to not think of style as a single thing to master, or about finding a singular good fit for your personality. Instead, experiment, as I did, with different styles, so you can more deeply appreciate their strengths and limitations.

In the context of the internet, I think we can learn a lot from almost all of these styles. From classic style, we can learn the value of conveying clarity, timelessness, and inevitability in prose form. From plain style, we can learn the value of facts and simplicity. From practical style, we can learn the value of extreme audience awareness and elevating the reader above the writer. From contemplative style, we can learn the value of demarcating a clean separation between reporting on objective reality and discussing our subjective reflections. And so forth.

Ultimately, contra Thomas and Turner, I believe it is a good practice for you to let your content and message drive your style of writing. Rather than developing a specific “personal style”, you may find it helpful to develop several styles that’s a good fit for you, and decide between them for the stories and essays you want to write.

If you want to convey a clear, timeless, and inevitable idea, go with classic style or one of its derivatives. If you just want to share simple facts, plain style is a great choice. If you want to provide useful instructions for your reader, and minimize accompanying discussions, go with practical style. And if you’re genuinely uncertain, and want to present a truth that’s provisional, probabilistic, and tentative, you may want to choose a variant of the reflexive style.

But when you do sit down to write a specific article: commit to something. Strive to aim for stylistic coherence and consistency. Style isn’t just about surface features like spelling or vocabulary choices, or even the broader vibe. Style is about making a principled choice on the key issues – truth, presentation, cast, scene, and the intersection of thought & language – and maintaining it throughout your article. I think you should stick to that.

Unless, of course, the essay demands otherwise. All writing rules are ultimately guidelines, and the best writers know when to break them.

In a future (hopefully shorter) post, I might discuss internet essayists I respect the most. I’d like to cover internet-fluent writers, who are able to mix and match from the above styles to deliver a consistent experience that’s a great fit for the current age. Especially Scott Alexander, a master of the craft whose writing style has spanned a number of competitor styles, perhaps including my own. I’m also interested in covering internet-native writers, whose writing styles are only possible on the modern internet, like multimedia microsite essay style, the wiki-garden style, the tweetstorm style, and so forth.

In the meantime, experiment! Try out different writing styles, wear them like hats, don’t take yourself too seriously but maintain a quiet consistency throughout your work. The worst internet writing isn’t badly styled. It’s unstyled, a gray paste of half-absorbed conventions and unconscious mimicry. So write with coherence and meaning, and don’t be afraid of trying new things.

And if you haven’t already done so, most importantly, please subscribe.

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We’ve also just crossed 500 subscribers, which feels like a cool milestone, as well as time for some reflection.

Alas, I’ve just been hit by COVID-19, so longer reflection will have to wait. Instead, let’s try something different: A reverse AMA

How it works:

If you’re interested in participating, comment with a brief introduction of yourself. This could include:

• A question you’re currently pondering.

• An intellectual interest you have.

• Any background that gives you unusual or surprising expertise.

• A specific connection you have to one of my blog posts.

• Anything else you'd like to chat about.

I'll respond with a question tailored specifically to you.

My goal is to ask questions that genuinely interest me and that I believe you can answer, rather than performative questions that sound profound but are unanswerable. That said, I am sometimes more interested in how people approach unanswerable questions than the answers themselves.

Ground Rules

1. Please post in the comments of the Substack post itself - Not on a Substack Note, or an email, or a Tweet thread, or LinkedIn, or via hot air balloon.

2. Your initial intro can be as broad or as specific as you want - From a single thought to your entire life story! Just provide enough context for me to ask a meaningful question.

   1. Fair warning, if you do an overly broad or long intro, I might end up focusing on something you don’t care about at all!

3. When you do share context, be specific about the details, if possible - "I’ve been reading about marital customs in Papau New Guinea" is more helpful than "I'm interested in anthropology."

4. I’ll start asking questions on Tuesday afternoon, and try to respond to all comments by EOD Saturday (California time). No promises or anything, especially given the COVID. But I think the question load with 500 subscribers should be manageable!

5. Feel free to answer my question, ignore it, or use it as a jumping-off point for your own exploration. No obligation to respond, though of course it’s highly appreciated.

6. Other commenters: Feel free to ask follow-up questions or offer your commentary, but please try not to hijack other threads for your own soapbox!

7. Above all, bias in favor of chiming in! As an author, it’s lovely to hear from my readers. Don’t try to be too polished in either your intro or your answers. Remember, done is better than perfect.

Thank you everybody for subscribing, and for reading my writing! Even if you chose not to comment here, or engage in any way other than reading, I appreciate you regardless. It’s truly a privilege and an honor to have my long posts be read by so many people.

Other announcements:

1. Next Substack Chat with Tommy Blanchard! I will be chatting with , philosopher, Harvard-trained cognitive scientist, and current data scientist. He writes about science, brains and philosophy of mind over at . Thank you to everybody who came to my previous substack chats with , , and ! It’s been a blast.

   1. Date and time of the next chat TBD, I’m hoping to lock in a time as soon as I recover from COVID!

2. Next Post TBD. Unfortunately due to COVID, I don’t have a timeline for when my next post will drop. It depends on whether I can only find high-effort things I want to write about, or if I get struck by inspiration to write something relatively easy, like the recent joke post.

See you in the comments.

PS. If this experiment works out well, we might do something similar again at a later milestone, or even turn it into a recurring phenomenon. If not, we’ll just strike this as a COVID miss and pretend it never happened.

Philosophy

In xenosociology class we learned about a planet full of people who believe in anti-induction: if the sun has risen every day in the past, then they think it’s very unlikely that it’d rise again.

As a result, these people are all starving and living in poverty. An Earth xenosociologist visits the planet and studies them assiduously for 6 months. At the end of her stay, she asked to be brought to their greatest scientists and philosophers, and poses the question: “So why are you still using this anti-induction philosophy? You’re living in horrible poverty!” The lead philosopher of science looks at her in pity as if she’s a child, and replies:

“Well, it never worked before…”

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_

A mob drags a man into a police station for running over 13 people, while shouting "Murderer!" "Killer!" The policeman disperses the crowd and begins to interrogate the suspect.

The policeman: "Tell me what happened."

The suspect: " Sir I was driving home within the speed limit when my brakes failed. I had no choice but to crash the car into a group of 12 people or to swerve into a single person. Am I a monster for deciding to swerve into a single person?"

Policeman: “No, that sounds like a difficult yet reasonable decision. But tell me how did you end up killing 13 people?"

Suspect :" Well that selfish bastard ran towards the other 12.”

__

It was a difficult task, he thought, but someone had to do it.

As he walked away, he wondered who that someone would be.

Mathematics

A physicist, a mathematician and an engineer were attending a conference. That night, they're sleeping on different floors of the same hotel.

The engineer wakes up to see that his room is on fire. He quickly activates all the emergency fire hydrant systems in his room, completely putting out the fire but drenching his room in the process. He gets back to bed and uncomfortably goes to sleep.

The physicist wakes up to see that her room is on fire. She takes a pitcher, walks to the bathroom, and carefully estimates how much water is needed to put out the fire. She puts out the fire with precisely the right amount of water, gets back to bed and goes to sleep.

The mathematician wakes up to see that his room is on fire. He takes out a pencil and notepad, walks to his desk, and starts madly scribbling. The fire gets bigger and bigger and he scribbles faster and faster. Finally, he writes QED down, and slams his notepad on his desk. "A ha! I have proven that it's possible to solve the fire problem!" He gets back to bed and goes to sleep.

Psychology

Two behaviorists were having sex. One turns to the other and asks: “That was good for you. Was it good for me?”

__

Q: How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.

Economics

A security guard comes across a drunk man on his hands and knees under a streetlight, frantically searching the pavement.

"Lost something?" asks the guard.

"My keys," groans the drunk.

"Where'd you drop them?"

The drunk points into the darkness. "About thirty feet that way, by my car."

"Then why are you looking here?"

"The light's better."

AI

Did you know? The moon landing was staged. It was faked by Stanley Kubrick.

But Kubrick was a perfectionist, so he insisted that they shoot on location.

_

A man and a dog are playing chess.

The dog uses its paw to carefully move a pawn and takes another pawn. The man sighs and rolls his eyes.

A woman walks by and says “wow your dog is really smart!”

The man turns towards her with a look of sheer incredulity: “Are you kidding me?? He just accepted the Queen's Gambit!"

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Coda: What makes for intellectual humor?

Intellectual jokes, at their core, are jokes that teach you new ideas, or help you reconceive existing ideas in a new way.

My favorite forms of intellectual jokes/humor work on multiple levels: They’re accessible to those who just get the surface joke but rewards deeper knowledge with additional layers of meaning. In some of the best examples, the connection to insight is itself subtle, and not highlighted by a direct reference to the relevant academic fields.

There are two failures of attempts to do intellectual humor. They can fail to be intellectual, or they can fail to be funny. Of frequently cited attempts to do “intellectual” humor that fail to be intellectual, there are again two common forms: 1) they are about intellectuals as people, rather than about ideas, or 2) They’re about jargon, not ideas.

In both cases, the joke isn’t intellectual humor so much as “smart people jokes”: the humor rests on stereotypes, in-group solidarity, and the feeling of smartness that you get when you get a joke, but the joke does not actually teach you about new ideas, or help you reconceive of existing ideas in a new way.

Two examples come to mind:

Q: How do you tell if a mathematician is extroverted2?

A: When he’s talking to you, he stares at your shoes!

And

Q: What’s purple and commutes?

A: An Abelian3 grape.

If you were in my undergrad abstract algebra classes, the above jokes were the shit. For 20 year old math majors, they were hilarious. Nonetheless, they are not, by any reasonable definition of the term, intellectual.

Of course, a more common failure mode is that the jokes simply fail to be funny. I will not offer a treatise into what makes a joke funny. All unfunny jokes are alike in their unfunniness, but each funny joke is funny in its own way.

I hope you enjoyed this collection. If you'd like to discuss the deeper intellectual connections of any of these jokes, or if you have other intellectual jokes you like, please share in the comments below!

And if you liked my jokes and/or writing, consider sharing this post with at least one friend and subscribing to The Linchpin for more.

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