About

About the blog:


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.

My Ethos and Projects:


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.
*The colorful nodes are my core interests, the uncolored nodes are instrumental or ancillary to the core interests. The connections indicate relations between the interests, helping me to identify overlap.

Projects

  • Attend 'Building a Second Brain' course
    • Complete! Will post a writeup soon.
  • Achieve an 800 credit score
    • Mostly just waiting on my accounts to age
  • Pass 'Intro to Psychology/Sociology' CLEPP tests
    • Slowly but surely working my way through the material.
  • Finish drafting the plot for a Harry Potter Tabletop campaign
  • Establish some kind of routine with my girlfriend such as exercise or meditation