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Wednesday, July 9, 2025 →

🔗 Optimization Culture is Making Us Fragile

For all that we know about human performance, it is still wildly mysterious. A blackbox algorithm cannot predict how you’ll perform. If you think you must have full readiness to perform at your best, then you will leave so many of your best days on the table. It is a fragility mindset that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Absolutely something to be careful about. I know I’ve sometimes been influenced by a poor readiness score and have learned to treat it as a general indicator, rather than prediction.

Monday, June 30, 2025 →

🔗 Midsommar - Paul Wells

It’s 167 days since Carney told Jon Stewart he was an “outsider” who’d “just started thinking” about running for a leadership role in Canadian politics. He thought fast, and announced his candidacy three days later. Now he’s been prime minister for longer than Charles Tupper and John Turner were. How’s he doing?

Sunday, June 29, 2025 →

🔗 Which came first colour vision or colour signals? When Did Nature Burst Into Vivid Color? | Quanta Magazine

Friday, April 11, 2025 →

🔗 The leader in your mirror by Paul Wells

We put too much burden on our leaders, and it makes them act silly. They shouldn’t be the perfect weapon of our vengeance, or the model of every virtue we admire but never quite get around to practicing. They don’t need to know everything. They can’t possibly get everything right on the first try, and we court trouble when we ask them to pretend they’ve managed the trick.

Sunday, March 16, 2025 →

🔗 Collections: The Siege of Eregion, Part III: What Catapults?

What I always find so striking is that these ‘clever’ a-historical solutions both batter suspension of disbelief but are also a lot less actually clever than the historical solutions.

Bret Devereaux continues his fun series of critiquing The Ring of Power from the perspective of a medieval historian.

Friday, February 14, 2025 →

🔗 Matt Gurney: I hereby propose the Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival

The premiers can and must break the stifling complacency that is such a hallmark of modern Canadian politics and use the power of social media, and simple shame, to get the ball rolling. To do something. And then do another thing, and another thing, and another thing.

Thursday, February 6, 2025 →

🔗 The Cult of the Bully

It may seem priggish to say it, given the current “vibe shift,” but we really can’t give up on personal integrity just yet. The day we celebrate our children for their selfishness and cruelty will be the point of no return.

Thursday, January 30, 2025 →

🔗 Are We All Just Liars?

Eleven miles later, I stopped my watch — satisfied, yet aware that my run was a castle constructed out of lies. I never intended to stop early, but I told myself that I would. I think I believed myself in the moment. As a moral philosopher, this gives me pause.

via The Morning Shakeout

Sunday, January 26, 2025 →

🔗 The "near abroad" comes home // Paul Wells // paulwells.substack.com

I’ve believed for many years that Canada’s national bird was a chicken coming home to roost, except this one looks like an eagle.

Saturday, December 14, 2024 →

🔗 Cross-border Calvinball - Paul Wells

Careful what you wish for. Five minutes ago everyone was calling for a “Team Canada” approach to dealing with Donald Trump. Unfortunately our team would make the Bad News Bears look like Navy SEALs.

Good observations on Canada’s responses, so far, to Trump’s tariff threats

Wednesday, December 11, 2024 →

🔗 Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together

I’m aligned with Viticci here:

I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that gets boring fast and misses the bigger picture of how these AI tools may practically help us in the workplace, healthcare, biology, and other industries.

I could use the help with reducing busywork and letting me focus on the creative part. That’s what I’m looking forward to

Saturday, November 30, 2024 →

🔗 The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor // Bret Devereaux

I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular problem with a lot of energy and ingenuity, attempting to balance protection, mobility and weight. And the “problem with sci-fi body armor” begins with the fact that most of these futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of any of the design language of those efforts.

Monday, November 18, 2024 →

🔗 My Experiment to Eliminate Read-It-Later Backlog Stress

Every so often, I audit every information source I’m subscribed to. I ask three simple questions I picked up from the late Jim Rohn:

1. Who am I allowing to speak into my life?
2. What effect is that having on me?
3. Is that ok?

There are a lot of things I subscribed to a long time ago that I just never bothered to unsubscribe to. And every once in a while, I get annoyed and ask myself, “Why am I still consuming this?”

Good advice. Obvious? Perhaps, though we often need reminders to do what’s good for us.

Monday, October 28, 2024 →

🔗 E-dayism - Paul Wells

We are being given a runaround. When a party wins an election, its victory excuses every mistake or excess for years before the election. We won, didn’t we? Any new criticism is interpreted as sour grapes or denial of the result: the purest illustration of one day dominating every other. Every idea that pops into a new PM’s head is beyond reproach, because he just won an election. Later, as the next election approaches, criticism becomes a luxury the party can’t afford, because the leader must be given latitude to win the next election. Rinse and repeat.

Saturday, October 12, 2024 →

🔗 Walport ahoy! - Paul Wells

Walport couldn’t help noticing that Canada is a sucking black hole for information-sharing, although I bet he never imagined his own report would gather dust for half a year for no reason anyone has ever explained nor ever will.

This is too important to not be taken seriously

Friday, September 27, 2024 →

🔗 How to Choose The Best Methods for your Health and Performance // David Lipman

So don’t go jumping onto the latest trend, especially not if it’s been around for less time than it takes for your eggs to go bad in the fridge. When any new method arrives, it is worth spending some time evaluating the underlying principles of the method. Particularly seeking where it is similar and where it differs from the established methods at the time to try and work out if there really is much difference (there’s often less difference than people would like to believe or argue there is on the internet).

Wednesday, July 24, 2024 →

🔗 Matt Gurney: Anson Mount saved Star Trek

Because Anson Mount saved Star Trek. And I’m not afraid to say so. In fact, I’m here to shout it from the rooftops: thank you, Anson Mount. You were just what we needed.

I endorse this claim

Tuesday, June 4, 2024 →

🔗 “Worse than I’ve ever seen” - Paul Wells

I’m not here this week to tell a story of despair. I was impressed by what I saw of the Alberta government reponse to the opioid crisis, which reflects a level of ambition and concerted effort over time that I rarely see in government action anywhere.

I’m glad to see this getting pragmatic attention, rather than rhetoric

Sunday, May 12, 2024 →

🔗 Variations on the Theme of Silence

Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.

Saturday, March 2, 2024 →

🔗 How to Talk to Whales - The Atlantic

This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of animal-rights law, linguists, and philosophers. Assume that Project CETI works, I told them. Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should we say?

Fascinating to think what this would be like and what we might learn

Saturday, February 24, 2024 →

🔗 “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel | Strong Songs: A Podcast About Music

Strong Songs Season Six kicks off with a widely requested classic: Peter Gabriel’s 1986 yearner “In Your Eyes.” Because why hire one rhythm section when you can hire two for twice the price?

🎧 A favourite song on a favourite podcast

Sunday, February 18, 2024 →

🔗 The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics

What is surprising is how poorly we still understand global ant societies: there is a science-fiction epic going on under our feet, an alien geopolitics being negotiated by the 20 quadrillion ants living on Earth today. It might seem like a familiar story, but the more time I spend with it, the less familiar it seems, and the more I want to resist relying on human analogies. Its characters are strange; its scales hard to conceive. Can we tell the story of global ant societies without simply retelling our own story?

Fascinating

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 →

🔗 How paltry the return by Jen Gerson

“Now more than ever, soft and hard power are important,” Joly noted, correctly, ignoring the fact that Canada increasingly has neither, and doesn’t seem to be doing much about that.

Making a good case that we don’t take ourselves seriously anymore

Friday, November 10, 2023 →

🔗 David Enoch argues that much of the public discourse on the Israel-Hamas conflict is depressingly simplistic

Perhaps moral philosophers can contribute to public discourse even now—for instance, in thinking about how decisions should be made given the tremendous uncertainty involved, or to insist on the relevance of some neglected considerations. Or perhaps we should confess that we, too, are embarrassed, that we cannot be confident just what to say. Depending on your expectations, this may be disappointing. But unlike many of the other interventions in today’s public discourse, such a response would at least be honest. And probably less harmful as well.