Slack vs. waste Persistence vs. delusion Costly signals vs. the fundamental attribution error Reasons vs. excuses Honesty vs. rudeness Talent vs. luck Kindness vs. manipulation Efficiency vs. effectiveness Gearing up vs. procrastination Distraction vs. subconscious processing Scrupulosity vs. compulsion Improvement vs. newness Buffer vs. overwhelm Risk appetite vs. recklessness Reinvention…

A collection of reflections on an unmistakably strange time — At the start of the pandemic, I told myself I wouldn’t write about it. I still believed the mass destabilisation was a mere blip I’d later prefer to forget. Seeing as I try to keep my writing ahistorical-ish when possible, why jump on the bandwagon of picking over what would…

How to have (more, creative) ideas — Over the last four years, I’ve amassed a tangled array of thousands of notes on things I find interesting or useful. They’re collected from some combination books, blog posts, songs, tweets, Wikipedia pages, news articles, forum posts, things people say, and ideas that drift into my brain. Having previously shared…

I read a lot of good books in 2020. Like many people, I found myself often struggling to focus last year. Contrary to my usual prioritisation of reading, I ended up probably watching more TV and reading more news each month than I would normally do in a year. But…

Self-sabotage is a confusing, seductive act. — Sometimes self-sabotage is obvious. We go sober for months, then binge drink every night for a week. We save up for a holiday, then blow it all on pointless crap. We meet wonderful, stable people, then push them away with an explosion of unwarranted vitriol. We skip town the night before an opportunity or…

Things to try out for 30-days at a time — ‘Run experiments, place bets, say oops. Anything less is an act of self-sabotage.’ — Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria In my last post, I wrote about why I love short-term experiments as a way to learn new stuff and stress-test existing beliefs. Why you should experiment on yourself every month - Rosie Leizrowice My take is that self-experimentation is one of the most meaningful ways to learn new things about yourself, stress test…www.rosieleizrowice.com

Books about genetics, novel writing, mathematics, parks, and more. — I’m months overdue a book review post because my reviews have been getting too long and therefore intimidating to start writing. So I’ll keep to a few lines on each book, or it will be time to write about another month by the time I finish this one. According to…

We hold too many beliefs about ourselves without evidence — Does it float? Experimental archaeology is a field of study where researchers learn more about history by recreating something people in the past did or used to see how it works. For example, researchers have tried transporting stones of the same size and weight as the ones used in Stonehenge across similar distances…

I wanted to climb inside their music and roll around — The two most intense musical obsessions I’ve experienced so far in my life have been The Beatles and Bright Eyes. It took years of angsty fumbling to write my Sort-of love letter to Bright Eyes, an attempt to convey a slither of the adoration I’ve felt (and still feel) for that band. But The Beatles came first. I’ve loved them for about 14 years now. Despite countless efforts, I’ve never…