The name is directly inspired by this blog post. It has become something of a life motto for me, an exhortation to only compare myself to who I was yesterday.

This blog will give you a window into my life as I constantly try to improve myself. I consider it my "digital garden", a field of ideas that I plan to cultivate and grow. Posts are not static; they are all notes in my Evernote account, which I will continuously prune and cultivate.

For the near future, it will mostly be a casual blog featuring my musings about friends, cooking, life hacks, metacognition, and other things I find interesting. I might supplement this with a podcast that I’ve been meaning to resume.

I am Alex, and I’m a 27 year old guy living in Kansas City, who needs an outlet for my babble and hopes to make the world a better place. I am a vegan who practices a type of Radical Honesty, and I help organize the Kansas City Effective Altruism community. I am an adherent of "Neo-Mohism", a philosophy of my own invention.

I consider myself something of a "Techno-Optimist"; I look toward the future with hope, as science and technology make the world progressively better. Steven Pinker, among many others, have influenced my thoughts on this.

I am measured in my optimism, however. Toby Ord, in his book 'The Precipice', lays out a good case that there is a 1/5 chance we will drive our species extinct within the next 100 years. As such, I take existential risk very seriously. AI safety, pandemic risk, nuclear war, antibiotic resistance, global warming, among other concerns are at the top of my list of things I worry about. In the end, I think clearer thinking and more effective cooperation are the common solutions to these problems.