Partition Summer
A comic memoir of the 1947 Partition of India, as seen through my grandfather’s childhood memories
How does a mind develop?
Projects & essays
How Do We Learn Dec 2025 Aliveline
Doing computational neuroscience research in a month, from scratch
Questions
Why do Alpha School rewards not undermine intrinsic motivation?
What were the effects of TJ's admissions policy change?
How can we better teach metacognition?
What is the future of the university?
What projects make sense to work on if you believe AGI is coming in <5 years?
What will an hour of biokinetic release for a month do to me?
What might a more physical & tactile computing experience look like for kids?
How might we scale high quality education?
How can Montessori principles be used to scaffold kids' introduction to technology?
Do I want to do a PhD?
How can I produce Long Content?
Is Montessori more effective than traditional schooling?
Why am I interested in alt-ed?
What are examples of Slow Science?
How can I have a better rest ethic?
How can I allow my thinking to accrete over time?
How do you avoid a microschool being indistinguishable from a private school?
What do I want to see in the world?
What does it mean to understand the brain?
What makes for a high quality education?
If after death, a deity tells you you didn’t fulfill your life’s purpose that it put you on earth to fulfill, what would that have been?
Hunches
If you already like doing something, receiving external rewards decreases intrinsic motivation
A mind cannot be defined independently of its social environment
Reciprocal teaching appears to have a very large effect size
Metacognition may be the most important skill
Montessori teaches proto-metacognition
Planning is priceless, plans are worthless
Almost all personality traits are heritable, but you can override genetic programming
New ideas require thinking through things yourself before learning what others think
Unpredictable upsides of cognitive offloading
Discovery of something the rest of the world already knows is still a valuable discovery
Ideas are not knowledge until they are tested or experienced
Public schools don't enforce a specific educational culture
Build systems to revisit ideas
Children use age as a proxy for status
Confirmation bias is the one to watch for
Consider the opposite
Focus on what you want to see more of
People are extremely ready to generate beliefs about the world
Take a stand
Techniques to scale an opinionated educational culture
Treat answers as tools
Ways to counteract confirmation bias
Ambitious goals are useful as they illuminate a path that maximizes learning and enjoyment, not as ends in themselves
Concretely describe your utopia
Write about what you read
Doing excellent work takes many iterations
Humans preferentially learn from those we consider high status
Default beliefs about any topic are likely unexamined but still affect behavior
Design your environment as scaffolding towards creating the world you want to see
Develop short feedback loops with reality
Last updated 2026-07-07