In the spring of 1997, police found 39 dead bodies in a San Diego home. The house was the scene of a mass ritual suicide of the religious group referred to as Heaven’s Gate. From investigation, each of these individuals gave their lives under the belief that their souls would be transported aboard a supposed alien spacecraft tailing the Hale-Bopp comet. You can’t make this stuff up. How do 39 rational individuals meet such a self-destructive end through blind faith in an utterly delusional reality?

We’re all born pretty darn close to an intellectual blank slate. A 5-year old doesn’t…

We’re all drowning in a sea of information. The average processing speed of a human brain is 60 bits per second, but collectively we generate 1.7 megabytes of data in the same amount of time. That’s about 30,000 times more data than a single person can ever be aware of, much less make sense of, and the asymmetry is only growing as the age of information takes full swing. Add to this increasing flow of data all of the information that has already been existing, and a shocking fact becomes clear: trying to orient yourself in the modern age is…

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What do self-guided missiles have to say about how we can live our best lives?

If someone asked you what life was like, there’s a million answers you could give. It’s skinny-dipping with the love of your life, it’s crashing a golf cart with your teenage friends, it’s screaming as you watch a spider the size of your face skitter along your bedside, it’s when you get high for the first time and start to doubt everything you ever knew. …

Books are like software. One of the most interesting classes of books are those which update your OS for how you interpret the world. Taking the red pill in the Matrix style paradigm shifts. These books, in no particular order, are a collection of the ~700 I’ve read in the last five years that have provided a drastic adjustment to my worldview in a way that left me feeling like I woke up from a dream.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows

Why you should read:

Y = ax + b. These are linear and simple models that…

Inputs and Outputs

How is is that some people regularly achieve things and behave in ways that seem impossible to everyone else? The most successful people in the world, the ones who drive major advances in technology, culture, and the global conversation often have a mystical air about them. Sometimes they seem like demigods, living on another plane and playing a different game than everyone else. How did they get there and how do they sustain their output?

Biologically, we’re all pretty much the same. For many of us, the overwhelming limiting factor is our environment. Michael Phelps may have superior genetics that…

Why Writing in this Reality Sucks

Because of our limited computational power, contemporary members of our species will never be able to perfectly describe anything they come into contact with, even if they devote our lifetime to attempting it. We are all finite participants in this infinitely complex dance, riding a massive tide of permutations before its inevitable crash into the beachhead of maximum entropy (see Heat Death). To try and make sense of the world is to charge into the waves chopping at the water with a flimsy plastic sword.

To echo philosopher Albert Camus, writing is a perfectly Sisyphean struggle. From the beginning we…

Everybody makes mistakes, here’s one of mine

I used to eat, sleep, and breathe Call of Duty. I would wake up in the middle of the night to sneak downstairs, fire up the Xbox, and blast away at randos from other time-zones. By the end of high school, I had logged close to 24 days worth of gameplay on Modern Warfare 3 alone.

So naturally, four years later, I thought it would be a great idea to trade in my old console and buy a PS4. “Pff, no way would that happen again!” I told myself, “I’ve matured.”

I had no idea how strong a former addiction…

Interconnectivity

My favorite conversations, like my favorite movies, are unexpected. They start somewhere familiar, and then flip everything on its head. To leave for 15 minutes and come back is to find yourself in an alien landscape, with no clue as to how you got there. When the ride ends, your view of life is irreparably altered. Kansas isn’t the same once you’ve been to Oz. Waking reality doesn’t sit right once you’ve been to level three of the dream state. You feel as if you’ve been swept along in powerful undercurrents that have been there the whole time, just below…