Justin Murphy

The internet is breeding entirely new species through a kind of decentralized, memetic gain-of-function research on human types. The men who signup for this show have studied a fair amount of data, which they've memorized reasonably well. They spent their formative years watching…

The thing with writing is you really ought to be in a disinterested, childlike state of mind. If you have a workplace mentality, any of the various tensions of social striving, or any kind of instrumental fixation at all really, you may be productive and produce fine work, but…

I'm bullish on voice-only computing. Every month since AI has become usable, I feel increasing pain at having to use screens at all. With LLMs it now feels like a huge waste of time to do things like "click" and move between "tabs." When I look at the improvement rate of agents…

Wife took 3yo son to a magic show at the library. The magician started by saying that magic isn't real. Before telling me about the tricks, my son gave me the same preface. What? How sad. Perhaps the problem is not screens so much as the disenchantment of the world by adults.

The first time I saw him, I thought “great, they didn’t flood those kids.” The 8th time I saw him, I thought “Wow they really must have flooded those kids!” Tbc I believe him when he says they had no effect, but the only case study here is how to look guilty via over-exposure.

So is Grok 4 Heavy better than o3-pro?

I'm really torn on the White House social media. I am somewhat saddened to see our highest office so vulgarized, but on the other hand it is precisely the most respectable and dignified members of the ruling class who are most responsible for everything that has brought us to…

As a nobleman, Montaigne could hope to attain high political office, perhaps becoming a royal steward or ambassador. But Montaigne's political career was a failure, which is how he became one of the most successful independent writers in history. He rose to the municipal level…

I'm incredibly powerful but have dodged every attempted blackmail. It's not hard. You can just not do things.

Weirdest thing about the Epstein situation is that there must be something they could share. Maybe there’s no “client list,” but surely there’s some kind of dossier lying around. So share that. Even if it was redacted and people protested that, it would at least be believable.…

Ancient Greek thought took place in a decentralized cultural economy with no modern institutions, so it's surprisingly similar to our digitally decentralized cultural economy at the end of modern institutions. If you understand how Plato was so absurdly successful, you'll be…

As a political scientist I know all the problems in Elon’s initial framing, but I would not dismiss him—for two reasons. 1) The electoral and party systems are far more norm-based than hard-wired, so the status quo persists in large part because third-party challengers like…