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  • The best definition of faith I’ve ever heard

    The best insight into faith I’ve ever heard came from Dave Grohl, of all people.

    Most people think faith is about religion. This isn’t true. Faith is believing in something despite the absence of evidence. Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters is not religious to my knowledge, but he explains in his autobiography that as a kid, he held an irrational belief that he would be a successful drummer. That irrational belief never went away.

    Dave Grohl had no reason and no evidence as a kid that he would be a successful drummer. But he still believed it. Eventually he became a world-famous drummer. Did believing he would be famous manifest something for him? Was it a prophecy only he could see? Did he just believe in something that happened to turn out to be true? I don’t know. But I do know that this is faith.

    Although faith closes off some possibilities, it delivers real benefits too. Someone who believes in a religion’s mythology, despite any evidence, gets the full benefits of that religion – participation, a worldview, a reality tunnel that is typically tested and works.

    What current science tells us, and what this has had to do with faith

    Given current scientific understanding, we don’t know if we are capable of apprehending base reality. We don’t even know if we can only comprehend the limits of our psychology. Plus, there is a logical danger of filling in with the meaning of the universe with unearned positive claims. So does it make sense to have faith?

    Yes, if you want to. You can simply say “I have faith but I don’t know.” That is intellectually honest.

    Obviously, there is real danger in having faith in something bad for you. So be careful of salespeople and people who tell you what to believe. Tell them to wait while you do your own research and make your own decision, if you choose to make that leap of faith. You can definitely put your faith in the wrong things. So if you decide to have faith, make sure it is your decision.

    Use this statement: “The truthful claim is that we don’t know the truth about XX for certain. But given that, I choose to believe Belief X because WHY.”

    This gets you the benefits of faith, while still allowing you to stay tolerant of other opinions.

  • Respect your city gods

    Respect your city gods

    In Ancient Greece and Rome, citizens believed their cities were protected by a chief god. This god claimed the city, lived there, and protected it. Worshipping the city god honored the city. The rituals honored the city’s people. These “gods of place” extended to rivers and sacred groves; even individual neighborhoods had protector gods.

    These gods functioned like a network of rulers. When the god wasn’t known, residents still paid their respects. In Cato’s On Agriculture he remarks that before clearing an unknown grove, a farmer made an offering to the unknown protector god of that grove.

    These individual city gods were part of the Roman pantheon. Whatever god or gods you worshipped, Rome expected loyalty to its imperial cult. Maintaining the rituals and giving respect strengthened the state and its citizens, on a higher level than the city.

    All these rituals created a deep sense of place that is in many ways gone from today’s world. We are too mobile, too quick to build, too fast to destroy. Our movement means it’s hard to maintain the gods of place for long.

    Yet one ritual perseveres – football. Football combines deep ritual, city iconography, and devotion, bringing a city together in ways no other ritual or sport does in the United States. Consider that regardless your politics, your race, or your membership – you belong to the cult of the local football team. You don’t need to be a fan to want your local team to win. This is healthy.

    Next time you go to a football game, consider this: By supporting the team, you pay respect to your city. The deep fans are priests, holding the lore and mysteries. When you travel to the city to attend a game you go in pilgrimage to honor the city and its spirits.

    In that spirit, I created this video with the iconography of the Chicago Bears, and Chicago’s spirit. A bear god, wreathed in the great Chicago fire, a monster – the monster of the midway. The Sears Tower and the Statue of the Republic flank on his left. Witnessing the summoning of this bear god are Chicago’s mayors who unfurl the city’s flag.

    Note that Brandon Johnson is omitted given that he may be the mayor who loses the Bears to Indiana. In antiquity, losing a god was a catastrophe. Taking a city’s god was a way to conquer it. Unless Johnson comes up with a plan to keep the Bears in Chicagoland, then by this metaphor he abandons his role as city protector, staining his tenure. If he keeps the Bears, then he will have earned his place.

  • Why you should choose a lane

    Why you should choose a lane

    Once you state a strong preference (like “I hate Politician X because he’s evil”) your mind immediately goes into defensive mode. You interpret different opinions as personal attacks, and you lose the capacity to think rationally. This is called cognitive bias. Cognitive bias makes you into an NPC over time as you repeatedly take inflexible positions.

    And yet – sometimes you want your opinion to become your identity

    There are proven strategies to avoid cognitive bias (see below), but I’ve noticed that people who write about them rarely mention the benefits of adopting strong opinions. When you choose an identity, you penalize clear thinking, but you also get benefits you don’t get otherwise.

    Saying, ”I’m a Republican” or “I’m a Democrat” aligns you with a team. And teams get benefits: Teams attract likeminded people, create community, and give people a shared worldview. People on teams get to see the world in a way that’s easier to manage, since remaining unaligned is very hard for humans to do, given the way that our brains are built.

    If you play roleplaying games, this is what happens when you join a faction. When you join a faction, you get new quests and conversation options.

    Can you join a faction and stay open-minded?

    I believe you can do both if you blend your opinions with strategies for preventing cognitive bias. This gives you the benefits of joining a group without turning into an NPC. Here are the key tactics:

    Tactic One. Align to the ideas, not the party. Rather than saying “I’m a Liberal,” say “I’m inclined to Liberalism.” This shows a commitment to ideas rather than being a party follower, and gives you room to maneuver if the party changes. You get the benefits of joining a faction, but you still get to think critically. I got this tactic from You Will Not Stampede Me.

    Tactic Two. Use “opinions loosely held” and “thinking in bets” when you make political claims. Even if you align with 100% of your chosen party’s positions, don’t say “Politician is evil.” Say “I’m 99% certain Politician X is not right for us.” You get the faction benefits while still being able to think critically, because you’ve given yourself freedom to update your worldview with new information.

    Tactic Three. Believe in policies, not parties. When people get overjoyed that their party won an election, they’re getting excited about a team. That’s fine but it misses the bigger point: Policies matter, not team sports. When you focus on policies, you’ll see your own team ignore those policies over and over. This demonstrates really fast that teams do not necessarily do what they claim.

    Take a Position

    Take a position. It’s good for you. But take it like a tolerant freethinker to save yourself from becoming an NPC. And don’t forget to vote. You’re voting for your identity, and that’s immensely important.

  • Bangalore, Milwaukee – and the potential of your early twenties

    Bangalore, Milwaukee – and the potential of your early twenties

    In my early twenties I worked in a Milwaukee call center, processing credit card complaints. Customers complained to an India team first. If that team couldn’t resolve the problem, they escalated it to the Milwaukee center, where we resolved it.

    All the Milwaukee reps sat in a large open room of cubicles, logging in promptly to start our shifts, where I put on my headset and logged into dashboard software giving me information about the incoming caller. The managers sat at the edge of the room, in taller cubicles, where they listened to our calls to monitor the quality of our customer service and ensure we were hitting our timelines for resolving issues.

    It felt like a dead-end job, and I’m supposed to say I hated it. But the truth is, I really enjoyed the work. All day long I fielded calls from people all over the United States, and since pretty much everyone has a credit card, I talked to people from all walks of life, living in places I’d never visited, and listened to their stories while resolving their issues.

    (more…)
  • A cosmic hope for history

    A cosmic hope for history

    My uncle keeps asking me to listen to the Catholic priest Richard Rohr. I don’t know much about Rohr, except he’s an intellectual, in the tradition of thinkers like Thomas Merton or Eckhart Tolle.

    (I’ve been blessed that in my family and my extended family we’ve always been surrounded by books and quality thinkers, and encouraged to read the original source texts of religions and philosophers and be curious, and talk openly about them. I say this because it’s normal to me. But I’ve heard some people’s religious upbringing and it was awful. So if you’ve run into that, this might not land.)

    At any rate, I did listen to the YouTube clip below, and I set aside one of Rohr’s books to read later. One quote from the YouTube clip stood out, even though I didn’t understand it at first. I’ve been working through it, and now I think I get it. Rohr says:

    “Nothing dies, everything is transformed…but we pulled Jesus out of the Trinity and tried to understand Him as a standalone figure…it was meant to be a universal cosmic statement of how reality works….Jesus is meant to be the universal archetype, the cosmic stand in, of everything”

    Here’s what I think that means, even though I admit I don’t fully understand it. Christians believe that God loves humanity. This is not necessarily what other cultures believe. Some cultures believe life is suffering, some believe the purpose of life is to gain glory, others believe that we are all one.

    Christians justify their belief that God loves us by saying that God became a regular human, and felt pain. According to that belief, this is love, because it shows that God gets involved in human affairs. And of course, they believe that God was killed for humans who didn’t deserve it, and that this is love.

    If I understand Rohr correctly, he’s saying that Jesus is therefore the symbol of love. I think he’s saying don’t get too fixated on understanding Jesus because that’s missing the point. The point is what that story tells us about the belief that God loves us.

    And then this, which jumped out at me, because it drives the reason home:

    “When all of history isn’t hopeful, when society isn’t hopeful..it’s really hard to heal as individuals…Christianity was meant to be a cosmic hope for history”

    The writer Grant Morrison (a chaos magician, of all things) first introduced me to this idea – that symbols of hope move us forward. Morrison takes it a step further, arguing that this makes the writer’s task sacred. To write hopeful things is to write a hopeful future. And if I understand Rohr correctly, Christianity is hope, because it means we’re loved, and being loved means there’s always hope that we’ll figure this out.

  • Browse a catalog of possibilities

    Browse a catalog of possibilities

    I purchased Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities after hearing its author, Kevin Kelly, talk about it in a podcast. Kelly is a really interesting guy (he co-founded Wired and wrote the semi-religious book What Technology Wants), so I thought it would be worth the investment. You can see in the picture just how many tabs I put in. More on that later.

    What the book is: One of Kelly’s core ideas in his book What Technology Wants is that we should decide whether technology is useful before using it. For instance, hammers are useful technology, whereas social media’s value is less clear. This book shares the best tools he’s found over the years. That’s a broad category, so this catalog contains tools ranging from Materials Libraries to books on the Eastern canon to kitchen supplies.

    What It’s Not: it’s not shaped well. This is the weirdest format of any book I’ve read. It doesn’t fit well on a shelf or a coffee table. It’s basically a small newspaper.

    What it is, on closer examination: This book is like reading a Sears catalog – if every item was best-in-class and useful. Reading this is fun.

    I’ve been browsing this catalog in my office for three days now, placing tabs all over the place. I just bought a new nose hair trimmer based on one entry. I’ve bookmarked a ton of entries ranging from safety knee boots, to Aladdin lamps, to the best guide for hiring smart.

    This book combines two eras: The joy and wonder of flipping through a Sears catalog at Christmas plus the early days of the Internet, when everything was useful and people were wildly optimistic.

  • The world comes alive

    The world comes alive

    In 1862, a man named Luther Kountze left Omaha with a massive, fireproof safe. Twelve oxen pulled that safe across the open plains until reaching Denver, which was a frontier town only four years old, merged from three mining camps. The town mainly served prospectors, with saloons and gambling halls. Within a year of Kountze’s arrival the small, 5000-person frontier town flooded and caught fire.

    Undeterred, Kountze built a bank around his massive safe, trading prospectors cash in exchange for gold. This established Denver’s “Wall Street,” driving the town’s growth and making Kountze a rich man. Eventually he moved to New York City.

    Today the bank is a Marriott Renaissance Hotel. The new owners transformed Kountze’s original safe into a conference room, placing gold murals around the building to showcase the bank’s history. But there’s another interesting tidbit about the hotel: 16 murals decorate the walls, depicting Native Americans in their everyday lives.

    The artist Allen Tupper True painted the murals for Kountze’s bank, focusing exclusively on Native American life. The paintings don’t show European settlers, images of first contact, or conflict. They show Native Americans living in the woods, playing together, and engaging in ceremonies.

    I’ve stayed at this hotel twice, both times eating a snack in the second floor lounge with a view of the art and the lobby. I like sitting there and spending time gazing around the walls. The art is so beautiful that I bought a book with pictures (Allen Tupper True: An American Artist). Unfortunately the book doesn’t show the art well, so I can’t recommend it.

    This hotel wears its history proudly and with taste. But the truth is, wherever we go, we’re surrounded by forgotten history that isn’t always clear. If we choose to look, the ordinary world explodes with life and memories of those who went before. I recommend doing this, often – especially if you find yourself caught in a pattern. The world is as interesting as we make it, so why not pause a little and notice the deeper patterns around us?

  • This is the time we are here

    This is the time we are here

    This morning I dragged my suitcase through Times Square, on the way to a morning meeting. People were setting up tables, and it was largely empty except for the early morning commuters like me, streaming by on the sidewalks. I’ve spent a lot of time in Times Square over the last thirty years. I know how it’s changed, and also remember how it looked the first time I visited it.

    It occurred to me that this particular point – right now – is the time I’ve been given to be alive. New York in 2026 is not the same as New York in the 90s or New York in the 50s or New York in the 1800s.

    All of us, meaning anyone reading this, all of our enemies and friends and people we haven’t met, we all share this point in time. We are travelers together in this particular configuration of earth, and this moment has its own customs, its own levels of success, its own versions of what it means to be good and its own celebrities.

    That’s what I was thinking as I walked through Times Square, dragging my luggage, watching them set up tables early in the morning like I’ve done many, many times before.

  • The influences and surprising origins of Hypnospace Outlaw

    Eventually her daughter contacted me and it turned out that she couldn’t read and needed me to do everything for her so she could keep doing her psychic calls. She was apparently close to eviction. I knew she was a bit of a scammer but it really messed me up and was really hard for me to navigate morally and ethically. It’s gotta be hard to find work if you can’t even read and psychic phone counselling, while skeevy, certainly isn’t the worst way to make money in such a situation
    — Read on www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-influences-and-surprising-origins-of-hypnospace-outlaw

  • Are we finally reducing screen time?

    Just went for a long walk while using ChatGPT Voice with plugins on my phone, and I think it’s a more consequential update than it might seem at first glance.

    On my walk, I talked through my calendar, email, and to-do list. I had ChatGPT read through my emails and triage them. Then, we added items to my to-do list. Then, we reviewed my calendar. By the end of the walk, I’d finished getting organized, and never had to look at a screen once.
    — Read on x.com/_simonsmith/status/2102836288541913351

  • Level up your life with skill trees inspired by videogames

    Level up your life with skill trees inspired by videogames

    Skill trees are essential to role playing games, allowing you to spend experience points to level up your character however you want. The Maker Skill Tree Project extends this concept to real life. Download skill trees on topics ranging from Adventure to Fishing, as each skill tree guides you through increasing levels of skills to build competency in a topic. Get the skill trees here.

  • A Hit Before It Was Made, And A Fairy Tale Ahead Of Its Time: How Nobuhiko Obayashi Made “House”

    I’ve seen House countless times, and nearly every time I get something new out of it. My experience has gone from “bizarre and WTF did I just watch” to “a very goofy, charming horror comedy” to “a goofy haunted house movie that’s also an emotional fairy tale about the effects of WWII on everyone young and old.” Its initial reputation, and permanent history on the back of the Criterion cover is honestly a tragedy. Sure, for a first time viewing its mishmash of descriptions preps you well, but for subsequent viewings, its legacy being “an episode of Scooby Doo directed by Mario Bava” almost feels like a joke. House is still goofy, visually bizarre and has a lot of moments that are genuinely funny and charming, but the emotional core of the movie is the Aunt, and its post-WWII generational trauma is unavoidable when watching the movie.
    — Read on www.perisphere.org/2025/10/19/a-hit-before-it-was-made-and-a-fairy-tale-ahead-of-its-time-how-nobuhiko-obayashi-made-house/

  • Viking Metal Bands: The 10 Worth Hearing in 2026

    Heilung call their genre “amplified history”, and no two words describe it better: throat singing, bone rattles, war chants and human pulse, performed in ceremonial paint by a collective that opens every show with the same ritual blessing. Where Wardruna reconstructs, Heilung possesses: their concerts are less performances than séances with a light rig.

    The vibe: primal, shamanic, hypnotic. For fans of: losing track of the century you live in.
    — Read on www.mythic-harmonies.com/viking-culture/viking-metal-bands-list/

  • It’s just the law of large numbers

    It’s just the law of large numbers

    I was waiting in line at the airport and the guy in front of me was taking so long to figure out something on his phone with security that several people in other lines passed us by. Whatever challenges he was having with his boarding pass, it never resolved before I jumped into another line after he’d been trying to figure it out for five minutes.

    Meanwhile, when it was my turn, I had my id ready and the whole process took about 15 seconds. Same for the person ahead of me.

    I used to assume this one person doesn’t know what they’re doing and because of that, they’re holding up everything. I don’t think that way anymore. Now I just think it’s the law of large numbers.

    After all, most people are moving fast. Which means that most people move fast all the time. I always move fast, except, wait — have there been times when something went wrong, and I caused a delay? Yes, but they were very rare.

    So now I assume that this guy is probably very fast on average, but once in a blue moon, something goes wrong, and he holds up the line. Just like the rest of us, And airlines, who are processing thousands of people a day, are always going to have a person who is having a day when things are going wrong.

    When I look at it as the law of large numbers, I get less annoyed. And I see that most of the time, the statistics show that things are operating well, and I appreciate that.

  • My understanding of liberalism

    My understanding of liberalism

    Liberalism is an answer to the Wars of Religion. How do we stop people killing each other over their version of the good life? Liberalism answers by building a neutral framework that allows people to pursue their individual versions of the good life.

    The key components of that framework are: Individual rights. Each citizen is born with a package of rights at the individual level. People don’t get separate rights based on their beliefs or their political party. Markets. Free markets allow people to purchase what they need to pursue their vision of the good life. The government does not decide this for them. Neutrality. The government doesn’t decide the good life for people. It merely provides the framework.

    My understanding: This system is the best one we’ve discovered to allow people with different beliefs to get along with each other. It raises the standard of living, and increases technology development.

    The downsides: The liberal framework produces inevitable downsides. Inequality. A framework of markets and individual rights produces inequality, because it rewards certain behaviors. For instance, it rewards mobility – the ability to move where the work is. Over time, this rewards some more than others. Lack of meaning, The goal of liberalism is to allow people to pursue their vision of the good life, and it’s neutral on what that is. This means the liberal framework offers no answers on the afterlife or the purpose of life, and resists any one answer from dominating. Therefore it leaves people alienated unless they find their own meaning. Antiseptic culture. Strong cultures impede liberalism and get in the way of markets and multiple versions of the good life. Liberalism therefore reduces culture to sameness and produces conformity.

  • Mark Zuckerberg

    The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.
    — Read on colossus.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-profile/

  • Cocktail party ideas

    many people who have a superficial understanding of topic assume that the topic is as complex as their understanding of the topic instead of realizing that only knowing a bit about a topic means that they’re missing an understanding of the full complexity of a topic.
    — Read on danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

  • China’s first AI-generated longform TV series

    “It’s the first-ever fully AI-generated entertainment to hit mainstream provincial satellite prime time,” writes Mandy Wong. After seeing Bytedance Seedance 2.0’s (AI text-to-video model) release earlier this year, the team behind Journey to the West felt there was an opportunity to make a long-form series and break through a market “saturated with uninspired short-form dramas.” In this week’s feature translation (link to Huxiu article), Shuhan Liu reports on the makings of this AI-generated TV series.
    — Read on chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-374-chinas-first-ai-generated

  • I Just Found It All Really Fake Before As Well

    I Just Found It All Really Fake Before As Well

    I get the sense that I feel far less affronted by AI slop than some (or possibly many) of you do. I don’t like AI slop, but I don’t feel as viscerally annoyed about it as many people do, and it struck me that one possible reason is: I just found very large parts of the intellectual world to be incredibly fake and bad before, too.
    — Read on www.atvbt.com/i-just-found-it-all-really-fake-before-as-well/

  • A cheesehead’s view of the world

    I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but of the countries that I have visited, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands seem most similar to Wisconsin in a cultural sense. Lots of Germans settled there after the failed 1848 revolutions (the same year that Wisconsin achieved statehood). There were also lots of immigrats from Scandinavia. I presume these migrants brought some of the egalitarian instincts that defined Wisconsin culture.
    — Read on scottsumner.substack.com/p/a-cheeseheads-view-of-the-world