Essays I like

I don’t agree with the contents of all of these,
but I consider all of them worth reading.

In no particular order.

My own writing can be found here.

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth

On what children’s culture was, and what it’s becoming.

Something Runs Through The Whole Thread

On words.

Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think

As it says on the tin. This paper has not yet sunk in to the scientific establishment, which means that after you’ve read it you will be better positioned to spot problems in a broad class of papers than most scientists. The paper itself requires a fair bit of jargon and a little math to get through; I've linked a much more accessible (and entertaining) presentation of the core idea by one of the authors.

The Inner Ring

On the allure of the in-group. By C. S. Lewis.

The Asshole Filter

On avoiding the trap of accidentally filtering for assholes.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

On a pecularity in how we judge action vs inaction.

I, Pencil

On how every made thing comes to exist.

The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech

On rich people pretending to be poor, and the death of noblesse oblige. Ignore the title.

Rectangle vision

On looking directly at the rectangles.

Policy recommendations from causal inference in physics education research

On shoddy methods in physics education research, but more broadly a good overview of some ways one can fail at drawing causal conclusions from correlational data.

The ironic-gnome rule

On how different social classes present their interests.

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

What it says on the tin. Particularly but not exclusively recommended for software engineers.

The story of VaccinateCA

An illustration of how to do things that need doing, and some of the many reasons things don’t get done, as conveyed through 27,000 words about a non-profit spun up to help connect people to vaccines in the early days of the pandemic. A study of bureaucracy from the point of view of trying to patch over its failures at a time those failures were measured in lives.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

On formal and informal structures.

The Bitter Lesson

In computing, “general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.”

The Composite Nation

Fredrick Douglas makes the case for Chinese immigration.

On the loss of spinning thread

“I’ve had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people’s lives, and how eerie it is that it’s vanished so entirely.”

Hey Logan, what do you think of free verse?

On free verse in poetry.

Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct

On the morality of earning vs spending money.

bakkot