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Agency without a self or free will
Argues that free will and a unified self are illusions, yet agency persists as the ability to shape probabilities, habits, and environments rather than exert sovereign control.
Writing in public
Uncompressed public thinking
Short, plain, unhedged essays on thinking and cognition, civilization, and identity, with poetry, story, and the small crafts of attention: coffee, calendars, kitchens, and code.
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Moral circles contract under scarcity and threat
Human cooperation and moral inclusivity expand during abundance and security but contract to family and local ties during crises like economic collapse, war, or pandemics. Traces this pattern from 1990s globalization through 2008, 2016, and 2020.
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All postsWhy the democracy–freedom incompatibility argument is about definitions
Peter Thiel's 2009 claim that freedom and democracy are incompatible rests on stipulated definitions: negative liberty per Berlin and pure majoritarianism nobody practices. Constitutional limits admit the tension; the incompatibility is manufactured to remove decisions from voting.
Founders' errors about human nature and constitutional authority
The framers' 1787 model of human nature failed on faction, slavery, and "the people," yet their structural intuitions about fragmenting power held up; this undercuts original-intent jurisprudence while leaving public-meaning originalism and the institutions' own record intact.
The year turns slowly, not at midnight
Revisits the author's own claim that the year fades from late autumn and turns only in spring, keeping solstices, equinoxes, and lunar phases while refusing the neo-pagan wheel of the year. Concedes the claim is northern and temperate and that January 1 is a social clock in its own right, and finds its best point in the winter, when the returning light and the deepening cold belong to different years.
Three readings of inner thoughts shape outer reality
Three readings of the maxim that thoughts shape reality: a defensible behavioral loop (Merton, placebo, Stoics), a trivial claim about perception, and a failed metaphysics propped up by survivorship bias and the just-world fallacy, plus the neglected outer-to-inner direction.
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Essays that say what the rest is trying to do.
Two Latin mottos as inner and outer epistemic loops
Explains two personal Latin mottos—COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·ENUNTIA (later FARE) and PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE—as inner and outer epistemic loops linking thought, learning, connection, and action.
Why Feynman and Watts lectures still resonate
Feynman and Watts lectured before institutional caution, algorithmic clipping, and permanent crisis reshaped public speech, allowing uncompressed, adult, cross-disciplinary thought unfolding live rather than as artifact.
The wheel turns an old man and his son by the river
Short story in the style of Hemingway's Nick Adams by way of Maclean: an old man and his adult son sit by a river he has fished for decades, reflecting on lost records, faded memories, and the passage of generations.
The republic as something each generation must keep
Argues that the American republic's endurance is an ongoing achievement of recommitment rather than a guaranteed inheritance, drawing on Madison, Franklin, Arendt, and Jefferson while questioning what counts as continuity given the Civil War and Jim Crow.
COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·FARE