#media

• The Tyranny of Taste

  • self-optimization
  • media

  September 20, 2025

  19 min read

  Vol. 5 of becoming uncringe (1, 4)

  tl;dr

  your taste in careers and media is an underrated form of privilege. when you have the right tastes, you open doors that are otherwise shut and get rewarded socially and economically. there may be a way to intentionally bestow upon yourself or your children some advantageous tastes.

  don't you feel a little guilty enjoying pop music

• Advantageous Trades Vastly Outnumber Strict Upgrades

  • self-optimization
  • media
  • epistemology

  August 5, 2025

  13 min read

  Vol. 4 of becoming uncringe (1, 5)

  tl;dr

  political messaging and narrative media encourage us to treat most problems as straightforward when in fact most problems are very challenging dilemmas with uncomfortably slim margins between costs and benefits. even when you accept that most choices incur a cost, there are some personal interventions you can deploy right now that are a relatively low cost with a rather outsized upside

  maybe this is obvious

• Survivorship By Us

  • self-optimization
  • media
  • epistemology

  April 5, 2025

  18 min read

  Vol. 1 of becoming uncringe (4, 5)

  tl;dr

  all information that ever reaches you is subject to some level of survivorship bias because information undergoes a darwinian selection process to get to your eyeballs. this means your world model is quite inaccurate, and reading more information won't really make it more accurate unless you are strategic about how acquire this information to purposefully defang the selection pressures. also your own personal experience can give you insights that are useful to your own life and nobody else.

  anti-media media