What follows is a Spanish translation of my favorite essay of all time: Paul Graham’s Keep your identity small. I’m not very pleased with the way in which I translated the title, but I wasn’t able to come up with any better alternatives; the verb ‘to keep’ (in the relevant sense) and the second person (in the imperative mode) are both singularly hard to translate into Spanish.
Ben Kuhn is a data scientist and engineer at a small financial technology firm. He previously studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, where he was also co-president of Harvard College Effective Altruism. He writes on effective altruism and other topics at his website.
Omnia mea mecum porto. – Cicero
Update 1 (2018): I am profiled in Rowan Hooper’s book, Superhuman.
Update 2 (2022): Both my bliefs and my circumstances have changed significantly since writing this post, and I no longer endorse some of the things I say below. The list of possessions at the end is now hopelessly out of date. Also, minimalism is more common now than it was back in 2014, so I don’t expect this to be as interesting as it may have been when it was first published.
All the stuff I own fits in a carry on backpack.
I’ve created two new Anki decks. The first one [archived] lists German case inflections for all gender, number and article combinations. The second one [archived] contains recordings of each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, in various octaves, played on the piano and as a pure sine wave; it is an experimental deck to test whether spaced repetition could help develop perfect pitch.
My other Anki decks may be found here.
See also: Chrome extensions I like
Here’s a list of all the apps currently installed on my Android smartphone. My favorite ones are boldfaced. Please note that a few apps require root access; if your phone is not rooted, these apps will not work.
Let me know if you think I’m missing anything. I’m interested both in superior alternatives to the apps I currently use and in completely novel apps.
Paul Christiano is a graduate student in computer science at UC Berkeley. His academic research interests include algorithms and quantum computing. Outside academia, he has written about various topics of interest to effective altruists, with a focus on the far future. Christiano holds a BA in mathematics from MIT and has represented the United States at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He is a Research Associate at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and a Research Advisor at 80,000 Hours.
A while ago, I did a quick survey of the literature on earning to give—the pursuit of a high-earning career with the express purpose of donating a large portion of one’s earnings to high-impact charities. Given the recent interest in the topic, I thought I should turn those notes into a proper bibliography. If I’m missing anything, please let me know.
That anything should exist at all does seem to me a matter for the deepest awe.
Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist.
The most important question of all is also one of the most neglected. The list below includes what are, to the best of my knowledge, the only scholarly writings in the contemporary literature that directly address the question of why the universe exists. (That question includes two sub-questions, ‘Why is there anything at all?’ and ‘Why does this particular world exist, rather than some other’, which we may call the “general” and the “special” ultimate questions of existence, respectively.) Note that this excludes non-scholarly writings (such as Jim Holt’s Why does the world exist?); writings that address the question indirectly (such as those found in certain areas within physical cosmology and the philosophy of religion); and writings too removed from the present (published before, say, 1850, such as Leibniz’s De rerum originatione radicali). My personal recommendations are boldfaced.
If you think I’m missing something, please let me know.
Inspired perhaps by Luke’s movie recommendations, I have decided to pick my favorite films of the 2000s. More specifically, I’m picking one film –my favorite– for each of the ten years comprising that decade. Future posts will list my favorite films for other decades. I may revise this post as I watch new films, or as my tastes change.
I should note that I barely watched any films during the second part of the decade. This may explain why my picks for the last five years of this period are more mainstream, and arguably lower in quality.