A Blogger’s Guide To The 21st Century
Here’s a fun format: get a big white board, and write the years of the 21st century. Write a category; something that has many variations come out every year. Next, write your picks or favourites. Now invite everyone attending to replace a year’s pick if they want and replace it with something they like.
This was a rolling game played last month at Lighthaven. I put up “Best blog post of every year” when the opportunity arose.
2000
My pick: Painless Software Schedules
This Joel SPolsky piece is applicable to far more than software. It’s been the foundation or ancestor of all my good project management.
Crowd pick: Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us
Billy Joy writes with foresight about new technologies and their ethical dimensions.
2001
My pick: Stuck in the Middle with Bruce
A stream of conciousness, half manic fever dream, half calculatingly ruthless ode to victory. Don’t worry about the Magic: The Gathering details, they don’t matter.
Crowd pick:
2002
My pick: Taste for Makers
Paul Graham had not yet learned brevity, but he had learned design. This is a beachhead of aesthetic—perhaps just the legible outcrop into software engineering.
Crowd pick:
2003
My pick: Welcome To The Site
Ah, Cory Doctorow. Never change. Here is the first high profile use of creative commons, which (along with other licenses) should be internet lore.
Crowd pick:
2004
My pick: What You Can’t Say
Paul Graham taking an early swing at intellectual conformity. I like it as a message in a bottle to today’s culture wars.
Crowd pick: Mind the Gap
Paul Graham taking a swing at communism. Wealth creation is cool, liberalism lifts people out of poverty and elevates humanity. Most saliently; you can create wealth! Go out and make something people want!
2005
My pick: Fable of the Dragon Tyrant
A fairy tale of defying our limitations. A bit preachy, and I wish there was more characterization, but it has a nice cadence.
Crowd pick:
2006
My pick: The Martial Art of Rationality
For me, this is the central post of the entire rationality project. Everything else is cruft, addons that either distract from or build on this thesis.
Crowd pick:
2007
My pick: Policy Tug of War
Robin Hanson introduces the concept of tugging the policy rope sideways. It’s neat to look back and see footprints of people doing this.
Crowd pick: The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
A masterful pastiche of engineering blog posts. Plus burritos make everything better. Macej Ceytowski hits it out of the park.
2008
My pick: Security Mindset
Bruch Schnier is the information security blogger, and this is the post on thinking through the security implications of the world. CW: Ants.
Crowd pick: 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong
Eliezer’s Best post—the prereq to all advanced study of language.
2009
My pick: Descent: The Game That Ruined Me
Shamus Young lays out, in an understated warning, the dangers of learning the wrong way. It’s insidious! Once you have bad habits, fixing them can be harder than starting fresh.
Crowd pick:
2010
My pick: Ureshiku Naritai
Wanna be happier? Course you do. Alicorn’s capstone of the Luminosity sequence lays out how she step by step built a happier life. I can’t promise it will work for you—but it worked for me!
Crowd pick:
2011
My pick: Hack Away At The Edges
Luke makes an underrated point here about how to work on hard problems. There’s a lot of things to big to eat in one bite—that’s why we can chew!
Crowd pick: The Abusive Boyfriend
TLP is a generational blogger- no spoilers
2012
My pick: Participation in the LW Community Associated With Less Bias
This. This fucking post right here. This is what I think someone should have been following up on full time, or at least 2x a year. If true, then why? If false, how to fix it?
Crowd pick: Salary Negotiation: Get paid more, be more valued
Patrick McKenzie gives career advice to SWE’s that generalizes to workers in many disciplines. A large portion of my net worth (and current income) is downstream of this post, which also serves as a practical guide to “understanding your counterparty and their incentives.”
2013
My pick: The Lottery of Fascinations
Scott manages to succinctly describe a really relevant dynamic for a big community of nerds. Many of us have that one fascination.
Crowd pick:
2014
My pick: The Control Group Is Out Of Control
The idea of a control group for science is still a funny idea, and also useful! Talking about parapsychology is a good innoculation against trusting everything in a journal article.
Crowd pick: Meditations on Moloch
Moloch, whose mind is pure machiner!
Moloch, whose blood is running money!
There, in Las Vegas, I saw Moloch.
2015
My pick: Not Because You “Should”
Nate Soares outlines a common. . . is it a motivation? This persistant ‘should’ that crops up in our internal monologues and explanations of our behavior?
Crowd pick: The Value Of A Life
Nate Soares writes a version of Fable of the Dragon Tyrant but EA: To save lives and defeat the dragon, you have to put a price tag on a life saved, and do what life savers need and want, including the whole economy. (This description does not give it justice.)
2016
My pick: The Pyramid and the Garden
Scott Alexander manages to give useful advice for conspiracy theories, normal science, and also a good idea for a fiction novel!
Crowd pick: A Possible Way To Achieve All Your Goals
Meditation stuff tells you how to win at life with marginal effort.
2017
My pick: Melting Gold, and Organizational Capacity
Raemon points at a problem across many domains, one which only rears its head when its too late for an organizing team to fix.
Crowd pick: The Face Of The Ice
Sara Constintin’s tight, hard hitting meditation on the rubber hits the road, gearsy, final boss rationality of human survival if its inherent humanism. The real world can kill you. Say something to your fellow travelers.
2018
My pick: Write a Thousand Roads To Rome
Self plug, deal with it, I made the list.
This is my standing answer to people asking why I’m writing about something someone else covered.
Crowd pick:
2019
My pick: Asymmetric Justice
Zvi writes a lot of text. I would argue under all those words he has two through lines, and how good things come to times and places that don’t prevent them is one.
Crowd pick:
2020
My pick:
Crowd pick: Pain is Not the Unit of Effort
Here’s a post that some people need printed out, rolled up, and whapped with like adog with a newspaper. It’s common to make this mistake!
2021
My pick: Self Integrity and the Drowning Child
Eliezer, having seen the outcome a decade on from the community he created, has some pointed advice on being happier and saner.
Crowd pick: Willingness to Look Stupid
I think about this post twice a week. I catch like 10% of the opportunities in my life to look stupid, and it has made me smarter and more effective. Onward and upward!
2022
My pick: Sazen
An essay on essay writing. Too much of this is self indulgent. Sazen comes with an advice and a warning of how you can misunderstand and be misunderstood
Crowd pick:
2023
My pick: Things I Learned By Spending Five Thousand Hours In Non-EA Charities
Jenn’s piece here is worth it if it only had the line “what is your fantasy complement organization?” And then there are lots more good bits! A great bridge between two worlds.
Crowd pick:
2024
My pick: Situational Awareness
Leopold Aschenbrenner changed the posting game with a giant, one-site one-essay work that came out of nowhere. This is a high production value blog post. It comes to put AI on a government radar, and succeeds.
Crowd pick: No Good Alone
By internet princess. There is a narrative you might encounter on the internet and inside of you. It insists you must be a healed person before you get to participate in society. Reyne lays out why this is wrong, and why it’s important not to shut yourself away, even if it means that others can hurt you further, and even if you might end up hurting them back. After all, we are no good alone.
2025
My pick: On Priesthoods
Not about cults!
This is a frank discussion on communication within and without the public eye.
Crowd pick: An upcoming post by one of Inkhaven Residents
Hopefully! Write good posts!
I would love this list (even) more with hyperlinks.
You know, reasonable, I’ve been hearing all month that people mostly don’t click hyperlinks but this post would benefit from them. I’ll add as many as I can find when I get a chance to sit down properly.
Okay, links to all the ones I know the link for have been added.
No link here?
What is “The Alouside Boytmend”? I like TLP but do not recognize the post name, and would want to read it, if you know where it can be found.
No idea. The handwriting was not great.
Dug through his 2011 archive a bit. It’s got to be The Abusive Boyfriend, right?