Digest | Jan/Feb 2026

may korea live long in my heart and mind. digest contents expand.

the georgist roots of american libertarianism. descent of species. julia (this one is so grand). the garden of forking paths. secular shrine theory. maybe one of these days i will write up an essay about shinto-judaism but i’m hoping to try practicing it first. sarnaism. policy tensor on gender equality and gdp, with some wriggly acts of statistics. i believe that mena immiserated itself because they forgot to be nice to their women, and i suppose korea will be paying some very expensive dues though through a different mechanism as at the moment the korean stock market is a wonder

moltbook roundup, no surprises with that thing given my insider view though. laura deming with some soulfulness. my friend sophia is very cool, she wrote about chess engines.

one of the many things i dream of doing is learning languages to read texts in their original language. foucault est peut-être abordable, but i’ve given up on all the soulful soviet content and chinese texts. a new contender is the memoirs of lady hyegyŏng which is enticing both in content and in the fact that i have principles against learning japanese because of the hell of learning it and hangeul is a masterpiece.

Bill Joy, Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us. This is one of the more prescient pieces written about AI risk (2000). While I have reasonably high numbers for P(doom) and great respect for tail risks and buy into the great personal responsibility of people responsible for the technology, I do resent the luddite framing. For more luddism, there’s this piece from Now-Time featuring William Blake. May God us keep, from single vision and Newton’s sleep.

welcome to 2026! here’s the Dan Wang letter! Dan Wang is one of the most epistemically clean people I know of and it’s been a bit of an inspiration. As a LessWrong Rationalist, my practice is the Truth, but in the past couple years I’ve deviated a lot and had more fun with ideas in a manner where artists might paint still life before doing working in the abstract — but I’ve started to head back a bit. The world as we know it is ending soon (maybe for something worse, maybe for something better) but I’d like to pay my respects through understanding.

im mad about the tasteless

usually when i think about taste it’s in the context of research taste, but the nature of taste generalises pretty well, including to food. there’s some skill in developing taste and you need samples and time — but those are reasons to have no taste, not bad taste. to have bad taste you have to have fallen to a taste serpent. there are generic ones like ego, but there are also more specialised ones. in research it often takes the form of a nerdsnipe, and in food it’s often virality.

i want to tell you about two korean spots in san francisco. sohn (usually styled in all-caps) is disgusting. line out the wazoo, poorly seasoned stale fried chicken and fried rice that is impressively inedible. don’t let the reviews fool you. the serpent has captured those of poor taste. no one i know enjoyed it, not even the tasteless.

on my bedroom wall i hang a menu from a restaurant that now feels like a dream: joodang. fantastic cocktails. creamy seafood kimchi udon. miso crab. the best grilled eel in san francisco somehow. after discovering it i went weekly, to their empty restaurant in the tenderloin. on the fourth week they told me it was their last night.

i hope taste-jesus returns and separates the taste-sheep and the taste-goats. i hope he slays the taste-serpents. i hope joodang is enjoying eternal life with the heavenly taste-father.

marty supreme

i think this movie ought to be able to cure anti-semitism. it was a bit cheap with the anxiety-scenes but the dialogue and charisma in that movie is unmatched. chalamet can’t act as anyone but himself but that is alright. he is obsessive, neurotic, volatility seeking and anhedonic in all the most beautiful and most jewish ways. though it’d be very male of him to fail in grandeur and embrace fatherhood as a backup, i know in my heart he’s abandoning that baby (also very male of him).

no other choice

every time i think i will stop being obsessed with korea they deliver on something new. yes all the big korean movies are about capitalism, which to americans can feel cheap but they do it so much better and deeper (just like they did the zombie movie) in large part due to the fact that they also do capitalism harder in real life. no other choice has absurdist elements and comedy that are familiar from parasite, and the same lack of cheap anti-rich sentiment that americans have caricaturised themselves into. it does a fantastic job at balancing the virtue of a man who cares so much that he will do anything it takes (no other choice) with the nihilism of the whole situation.

internalised fear of pedophilia

Epstein. What a horrible situation, what an exciting release of documentation. If you haven’t already seen jmail.world, I highly recommend it.

I think it was always probable that a nontrivial slice of the population would, given the chance, enjoy the island. As dramatically immoral as Epstein was, the more unusual and the notably dangerous thing about him was the unadulterated grit and obsessive power hungry behaviour. This became apparent in the sheer number of emails he sent.

The fact that pedophilia is so widely regarded as one of the most vile things someone can do is a strange attribute of human morality. It was a relatively recent development, didn’t require any sort of “movement” and perhaps one of the most bipartisan issues. I think we got here in large part through sexual shame — the same self-watching, pre-emptive kind that was used to produce internalized homophobia. The internalised hatred for pedophilia has very positive externalities even though I think its not unusual nor indication of bad character to have pedophilic desires. On net, and even if i’m wrong, I think the fact that we’ve really condemned pedophilia is beautiful achievement for human morality.