My favorite articles of the year

Hello & welcome

Hello from Andalusia, which is a gently beautiful place. I’ve been benefiting from long phone-free days and had a wonderful thanksgiving holiday; I hope you did too if you celebrated.

I started writing here a year ago and there are some new readers here — respond to this and say hi! I’d love to understand what all of you are excited about reading from me, so feel free to answer this poll or email me to expand:

I also thought it’d be a good time to review some of the posts I’ve enjoyed most.

Some of my favorite articles so far

This post is the one that has changed my thinking most since writing it. It’s about how there tends to be huge differences between things at the high end of a distribution and I see it everywhere now.

This post about the 1 big thing I’ve learned from years of data analysis is really about power and it’s a good complement to the previous one.

How social proof worked on me was fun to write about my experience downloading and using the Open breathwork app. As an aside, I still use this app and it’s incredible how 5 minutes of breathing can make me feel radically different.

Energy as a limiting factor will be increasingly relevant as AI makes intelligence a cheaper commodity. Outcomes in people’s lives will be more and more determined by their energy and agency.

An attempt to understand Peter Thiel — I tried to read through an essay Thiel wrote with an open mind. Particularly relevant now that the american vice president is one of his disciples.

A quickly changing world — this is my scariest post, and one I think about a lot, analyzing an aggressive projection for AI progress.

Where are the Amazon Aggregators? This is about the dramatic rise and fall of a zero-interest rate phenomenon that I got to watch from the cheap seats.

I’m a loser, in which I analyze

Venkatesh Rao

’s very fun framework of losers, sociopaths, and clueless people in the workplace.

Alexa, Change your OKRs, where I rant about my inept robot servant and corporate incentive structures.

Thanks for reading! This has been a fun year.