2026-11-02

Mood of the day

Very relatable at the moment for me.

2026-11-03

as some wise person on Twitter once said, via Helen DeWitt: "procrastination is how you preserve the fantasy of your potential"

Supplements

Against supplements

My method was tripartite. I reasoned that though we can’t be absolutely sure, a supplement was, on balance, likely worth taking if three things held. First, we have a plausible evolutionary story about how we originally evolved in an environment with more of it, and our modern diets do not. Second, there is a logical, not obviously disputed, story about how it works. Third, the balance of evidence suggests that consuming the nutrient at least correlates with good health, and ideally well-designed trials show that it actually causes good health.

With such a rigorous method, how did everything fall apart? It’s a sad story. Ultimately, it was both a bad methodology and I applied it badly. The core problem is the same problem for all theorizing, the same problem the methodology of science was designed to solve: it is very easy to validate one’s tender hypotheses by looking carefully for validating evidence. Another perhaps equally big problem is that most science is nearly useless.

But there was a more profound problem. People like the wise Stuart Ritchie and my colleague Saloni Dattani had been telling me for ages that science was overloaded with complete nonsense, which I accepted on an intellectual level but had not really absorbed into my intuitions. My feeling had always been that we could still draw conclusions if we had a big enough pile of papers. But now I have come to believe that something like 90 percent of research is nearly valueless.

Just as Peatism was undermining my emotional investment in supplementation, an intellectual justification for supplement scepticism appeared in the form of a blog post by Milky Eggs. The average paper in nutrition science is so bad, because of the usual range of poor research practices ranging from fraud to p-hacking, that even large bodies of research papers can have not just the wrong magnitude of effect, but the wrong sign. It is surprisingly easy to produce dozens of papers showing something false, and what’s more, there is a bandwagon effect, and people do it all the time.

2026-11-04

Finding my thing

if you feel behind right now don’t worry you aren’t

this resonated with me today morning

But really I’m trying to find something. My thing. And if I do what I’ve done, I won’t find it. I need to change it up. So from now until the end of the year, the formats will vary, the content, even the days + frequency of when I post. I’m in experimental mode. The digital equivalent of going to Thailand, slinging on those awful trousers and finding myself.

I need to post what I’m interested in. For me to continue doing this for a long time, I have to make these for me. So what am I interested in?

I’ve stopped using Grok Bot for everything, except to ping me when Carlos Alcaraz is playing. I’m reading more long-form. I’m consuming less slop (and spending a little less time on X). I’m recording a voice-note every morning for a minimum of 10 minutes, and not doing anything with the transcript. I’m letting things percolate, noticing what I come back to.

Agents give you answers to everything. But if we’re ‘soul-searching’ or trying to connect the dots, an answer presented to us may not be the right path. Even if it’s a reasonable one. All I’m ‘optimising’ for here is - what do I really want to do? And noticing what I keep coming back to when I take the time to think on it.

This is not an ‘anti-ai’ stance at all. I love AI. I can do so much more than I ever could. It’s a tool though, not a person, and I use it as such. You probably need a grand total of one tool (an agent). Instead of looking at everything as an opportunity to optimise, I want to use AI for fun.

I want to use AI for fun . YES!

2026-11-05

Friendship

Bound by your history

I often hold on to some kind of hope that I can actually erase my past. I want to pretend that all the years that have passed—in particular, all the difficulty and challenge, especially the challenges that didn’t have a “happy” or “palatable” ending—simply never happened. One arena in which this tendency to erase my history takes place is in friendship itself. As in: new friends give me the chance to pretend my past doesn’t exist. And to be clear, there is something relieving about this – each new moment and each new friendship really is an opportunity to begin again. It’s very exciting to connect with new people and give them the most mature, most confident form of me, without having them see my little tucked-away drawer of all the experiences and actions that I’m ashamed of. But over time I’ve found that there is a shallowness to this way of connecting with others. There is a deeper and more honest joy in connecting more deeply with the people who have actually seen my ugly, messy drawer and have chosen to remain with me.

I am not sure I entirely agree with the sentiment above, but it did make me think because I have been that person who has constantly attempted to erase my past.

Waiting in line

When did waiting in line become the activity?

…Getting her hands on one of its elaborate flavoured iced drinks took around four hours, she says, but that long stretch of waiting has since paid off. “It was very much worth my time because the content I created at it has gotten me a lot of paid collabs and new connections with brands,” she says. “It was an inspiring and motivating way to start my time in New York.”

Once something to complain about, waiting in line for routine purchases has become a way to signal that you are part of something. Blame a lack of third spaces, but young people are queuing down the street for everything from froyo to Warmies plushies to Rare Beauty and Tank Air pop-ups. Even if you’re not posting “spend the day with me” videos from the queue – which many people do – you can simply walk past and post a video of everyone waiting. There are even entire dedicated accounts asking what people in New York are queuing for, and whether it’s “line-worthy”. So, when did waiting in line become the activity?

In an algorithmic culture, it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you’ve “discovered” something new and exciting, only to show up and realise that thousands of other people were served the same video at the same time. This, naturally, shapes our experience of collective taste, where everyone is reading the same viral book, buying the same tank top and waiting for the same feed-worthy matcha, rather than stumbling into a local shop and finding something unexpected for themselves.