I’m Chas. I follow in the venerable traditionSpecific inspiration: the excellent Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten and formerly Slate Star Codex. of naming your blog after an anagram of your own name. The words otherwise have no significance beyond being fun to say.
The blog will cover whatever interests me. These days, that’s philosophy, politics, law, artificial intelligence, good books, and Australian football.
Why have a blog? On one level, the answer is brute: I like writing, it’s a hobby, I want to. But on reflection, I have several distinct motivations which have banded and swelled together into something strong enough to escape my head.
The first comes from learning an unpleasant lesson: we play self-serving tricks on ourselves when we merely think about how much we understand about things. It’s so easy to think you know a lot about a certain subject – macroeconomics, particle physics, fungal biology, whatever – but when trying to write things down in words, you feel inexplicably blocked. Your knowledge feels stuck inside your head somewhere, unretrievable.
Unfortunately, much more often than not, this is an illusion. You think you know more than you actually know. It is only once you write about something that you actually know what you understand about that thing. No, more than that: writing about something is the way to construct your understanding of that thing. Even for things you have spent a lot of time reading about or studying – things you feel like you “should know”, and other people perceive you as knowing. Possibly it even applies especially to such things.
Writing a blog is a way to defend yourself against this illusion.
A second unpleasant lesson, related: it’s possible, even easy, to walk around thinking through interesting ideas for years, feeling fruitful, but having nothing. Again, your brain tricks you into thinking your ideas are more well-formed than they are. The trick is only revealed when you actually try to follow through and create the idea.
Writing a blog forces half-formed ideas out from your head and presses you to finish their form in a timely manner.
Some more of my motivations come from the rise of artificial intelligence. Now, to head off the obvious concern – no, this blog is not written by a large language model. The words I post here are produced by me, physically hitting keys with my fingers.dynomight’s guarantee.
Having said that, there’s lots of cool things you can do with today’s AIs. They’re astoundingly good at programming based on natural-language prompts, capable of working independently for hours on complicated projects and getting excellent results, first try. I’ve tasked themSpecifically: I began with a vague design idea. I had GPT 5.5 interview me to flesh out a specific creative vision. We constructed and passed on a prompt to Claude Fable 5, which did the bulk of the initial setup work. Claude Opus 5 helped with some smaller tasks. with handling the blog’s technical aspects and creating some images.I got the idea of AI-generated lead images with a consistent mascot from Philosophy bear and I’m surprised I don’t see it more often. I use GPT Image 2. I plan to explore their creative capacities further.
I worry there’s been a cultural overreaction to AI slop. Many now have a perception that any AI use in a creative project is impure, as if it were a contaminant. But I believe the underlying thing generating this reaction is often when AI work is tasteless or passed off as human: so long as that’s avoided, there’s some exciting possibilities to mess with.
There’s some other minor AI-related motivations. For example, I’m intrigued by the idea of writing for the AIs – making more information publicly available on the internet so models can use it.But cf. Tyler Cowen’s and Gwern’s more ambitious conceptions. But the last such motivation is large. Given how rapidly AI capabilities are developing, there’s a real chance something big and fast will go down over the next decade.I cut lots of AI-takeoff gibbering from this section because it won’t match the blog’s tone. I’ll probably have a dedicated gibbering post. If so, it will be interesting to record how it goes.
Finally, there’s topic-specific motivations. I get obscene quantities of free or discounted books through my casual bookstore work – having a place to review them seems like a good idea. And while there’s already a lot of excellent internet material on Australian football, including some sharp independent analysis and historical work, there’s still a lot more that can be done.
You only live once - you should try to spend as much time on the computer as possible. After you die, you won’t have access to it any more
Some housekeeping
- The tentative plan is to organise content into ephemeral Notes, longer-form Essays, and ambitious Projects to be maintained over time.
- There’s currently no comments section. I might try rigging up crossposts to Substack or something.
- To the extent I am able, this blog’s content is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. You can freely use it without my permission, so long as you attribute me. Emphasis on “to the extent I am able”, the blog may contain content that I cannot license.