Are academics miserable? Could science help us to be happy? In this conversation about alternative research environments we explore these questions and what sort of a research environment we might want. Pavel is now creating such spaces - like a week-long mindful research retreat this summer.

How immanent existential threat may help us find enlightenment the hard way. Or a personal journey trying to reconcile death with happiness

I’ve often heard of the dichotomy of making decisions with “mind” vs “heart” – which I understood to be roughly equivalent to conscious...

I see a problem with current science. It’s not the reproducibility crisis, nor the toxic work culture, nor the misaligned incentive. But...

At my recent Vipassana retreat, I had a peculiar experience of feeling distinct physical sensations outside of my physical body... O_o

I want to explore a word that seems to be very triggering, and thereby somehow very important, in our culture: the word God. Whether you...

What is a magic trick? Any complex system, such as our world, may be described in terms of its numerous degrees of freedom, each...

Seeing is believing. Before we could accept the germ theory of disease, we had to invent the microscope to directly see the culprits of...

I just did my first substantial donation (informed by Effective Altruism, and my own work on complex social systems). Even though I have...

Is robots taking over the world bad? Some of the AI-risk scenarios I’ve read almost feel like it’s inevitable — and I’ve been wondering...

Are mindfulness practices just attempts to reverse-engineer our brain's compression algorithms?

One of the most important and amazing feats that our brain learns to do in this complex world is to find compressed representations of...

Don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to discover real magic in this world. Recently, I was trying to formulate this desire more...

Just wanted to take a break to sprinkle some magic into this blog ;P Well as it happens, I have always believed in Santa. Perhaps thanks...