Hypertext as Literature

What is this?

Classic One-offs

Books




Byrne Hobart

Writes at The Diff.

Kevin Simler

Writes at Melting Asphalt.
Neurons Gone Wild
To reject gods and spirits is easy: just bully them away in the name of science.
Ads Don’t Work That Way
Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct
Status as Space
People often conceptualize status as space — more specifically, as territory — and that this helps explain a wide range of phenomena.
Tears
A Tale of Dominance, Submission, and Friendship on the Cheap.

Gavin Leech

Writes at argmin gravitas.
Why I’m not a philosopher
Philosophy's functions & benefits, and why they aren't real(?)
Ramsey
The philosopher's philosopher, the economist's economist, ...
Economics as philosophy of life
Trying to take maxims and wisdom from the dismal science
Why is quality rare?
Why in general is it harder to do things well than badly?
Against The Culture
For and against Iain Banks' utopia.

Aaron Swartz

Writes at Raw Thought.

Patrick McKenzie

Writes at Kalzumeus.

Gwern Branwen

Writes at gwern.net.
Death Note Anonymity
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in Death Note and considering fixes
On Really Trying
What are the true limits to motivation?
Everything is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
Sidenotes in Web Design
In typography/design, ‘sidenotes’ place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their pros/cons.

Visakan Veeraswamy

Writes at visa's voltaic verses ⚡️.
Are You Serious
Search your heart. What are you serious about? How far will you go?
branching paths
crackle, crackle, crackle, BOOM
I don’t wanna!
me: [to myself] fuck you, i won't do what you tell me!!
relationships are challenging + a lot of work
This blogpost is basically a “cleaned-up” or “unrolled” post of 5 of my Twitter threads. I put this together because I think it’s a useful thing to share with friends who are engaged, or newly wed. I am not an expert, I am just a dumbass with experience. I hope my experience is useful to you.
Why Were You Late
Here’s a story that I often tell people, and it’s useful enough that it’s worth writing up to share with more people.

Bret Victor

Writes at WorryDream.
What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change
A personal view.
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
A systematic approach to interactive visualization.
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
Magic Ink
A treatise on a new approach to UI design. Interaction considered harmful.

Adam Mastroianni

Writes at Experimental History.
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives
Brain training begins in the hips
A response to a reader's question
Against All Applications
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them
You can still discover stuff, I promise

Emevas

Writes at Mythical Strength.

Robert Heaton

Writes at robertheaton.com.

Cedric Chen

Writes at Commoncog.
Career Moats 101
A brief primer of nearly everything I've written on career moats.
Pay Attention to Deviations from Mainstream Incentives
Look for aberrations in typical behaviour, and then treat those aberrations as signals to dig into the incentives that motivated these companies to do as they do
Beware What Sounds Insightful
Internet writers optimise for attention, not truth.
The Chinese Businessman Paradox
This is a series of posts that attempts to make sense of the traditional Chinese businessmen I dealt with.
The Games People Play With Cash Flow
Why free cash flow is the metric traditional Chinese businessmen intuitively focus on.

Toby Shorin

Writes at Subpixel Space.

Scott Alexander

Writes at AstralCodexTen.

José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente

Writes at Nintil.

Rohit Krishnan

Writes at Strange Loop Canon .
On Medici and Thiel
Why we should radically scale genius grants
Spot The Outlier
Talent spotting, Berkson's paradox and enabling luck
On thinkers and doers
Why we might need something like tenure for many more people, to cultivate more thinkers in a doer's world
Eureka! On the clustering of geniuses
Examining the social networks essential to innovation
Trolley problem as an issue with Bayesian priors
Creating mini worlds

Venkatesh Rao

Writes at Ribbonfarm.

Roger's Bacon

Writes at Secretum Secretorum.

Erik Hoel

Writes at The Intrinsic Perspective.
Why we stopped making Einsteins
Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
How the strangeness of our dreams reveals their true purpose
A new explanation for dreaming suggests it does something far more profound than reinforcing learning as we sleep. It might even explain our love of stories.
We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI
How today’s novelists cope with their HBO anxiety
Baldwin in Brahman
A proposal to ban AI research by treating it like human-animal hybrids

Crispy Chicken

Writes at McLegibilist.
Intellectual Fascia
What holds scientific discourses together?
Relative Semantics Are More Real Than Absolute Semantics
Shared relative differences as foundational linguistic reference points
Starving in the Motte
Easily defensible claims are for Wikipedia and losers

Dan Luu

Writes at danluu.com.

Nadia

Writes at nadia.xyz.

Zvi Mowshowitz

Writes at Don't Worry About the Vase.

Applied Divinity Studies

Writes at ADS.
The Murder of Wilbur Wright
How many of our greatest minds have we lost?
Quitting Won’t Save You
There’s a persistent myth among unhappily employed people that “if I could just quit my day job and pursue my passion full time, I would finally be satisfied”. It’s me, I’m the unhappy person.
On Being a Loser, or Should you Start a Blog?
Think hard, write words, get an audience, find out for yourself.
Where are All the Successful Rationalists?
It’s been 13 years since Yudkowsky wrote “Rationality is Systematized Winning”. So where are all the winners?
No One is Even Trying
This post is about how little work people do, but it starts with stories of unusually high output.

Jacob Falkovich

Writes at Putanumonit.

Ava

Writes at bookbear express.

Simon Sarris

Writes at The Map is Mostly Water.
The Most Precious Resource is Agency
The world is a very malleable place.
In Praise of the Gods
What the Rationalistic World Forgot
What the Mouse Knows
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Long Distance Thinking
The knowledge of a carpenter is in his hands. The apprentice must work with his own to discover it.
That which is unique, breaks
If we want the forest, we must continue to garden and sow.

Randy

Writes at Egg Report.
Uncritical Theory
The new paradigm we've all been waiting for
A preparatory history and epistemology, as groundwork for a re-establishment of a human culture
beating games and women
winter depression essay
Wittgenstone age mindset
What you call "identity" and "consciousness" was invented in 5000 BC by guys like me, to sell copper
Dating Advice for the modern Serial Killer
Dating App “just the tip”s & tricks

Edward Teach

Writes at The Last Psychiatrist.

Hotel Concierge

Writes at Hotel Conceirge.
The Tower
hey man there’s a hole in my head where information goes
Young Adult Fictions
So please take this in the gentlest possible way: you were never that great.
How To Be Attractive
i’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you / that i almost confused map and territory
The Third Abstraction
Without abstraction, there is only one truth: something exists. I suppose it’s better than nothing.
The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment
i waited 75 years and all i got was this lousy t-shirt

Sasha Chapin

Writes at Sasha's 'Newsletter'.
In Praise of Stupid Song Lyrics
Stupid lyrics are good for you. Bad lyrics are just bad.
If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
It's not a technique problem, it's a sincerity problem
Elliott Smith is Sad, Like You
He always maintained that he loved making his music, even as his music usually claimed that he didn’t love much at all.
Being Too Old Is a Beautiful State of Mind
some maundering about why i go to fewer parties
Notes Against Note-Taking Systems
Dating App “just the tip”s & tricks

0HP Lovecraft

Writes at Zero HP Lovecraft.
God-shaped Hole
seduction in a future world of sexbots and augmented reality
The Gig Economy
a horror of blockchains and microjobs
Key Performance Indicators
the quantified self in the world of direct-to-brain interfaces
Eventual Consistency
An essay on science fiction, Seraphim Rose, Peter Thiel, and the possibility of optimistic futurism.
So You Want to Write Fiction With AI
A meditation on tool-assisted composition.


What is the point of this site?

I don't know man, I build websites. It's just what I do. It pays my bills and makes other people happy. Sometimes they look really good too.

One day I woke up and thought "I wish there was a site that had all the writing that I send to people most often, all in one place". So I put it all together and hoisted it onto the internet.

Some people make lists of every single thing they've read recently. Other make blogrolls and Pinboard pages. I made a custom web page, because I felt like it.

Posts within each writer's card are organised in descending order of popularity/quality; the first post is almost always their most popular one. But the fifth and final one is always a personal favourite.

They might be really intense distillations of the writer's worldview. They might be explanations for a thing I don't want to bother explaining myself. All of them are here because I once wanted them to be, and couldn't be bothered to remove them if I don't anymore.