Classically, according to the Abrahamic religions, God is a man.

According to some more recent depictions, God is a woman. Which is a nice subversion.

But like, y’all are both a bit crazy. If there is an omnipotent Creator of the universe, then it definitely doesn’t have a gender.

When people call God “he” or “she”, this is what they’re saying happened:

1. Life evolved over billions of years through a process of mutation, reproduction, and natural selection.
2. Originally, all organisms reproduced by copying themselves. But some organisms evolved the abiity to reproduce by combining the genes of two different individuals. This let genes mix more and allowed good genes to spread more readily. In some environments, organisms that could reproduce sexually outcompeted those who couldn’t.
3. Organisms evolved two distinct sexes because it makes evolutionary sense to have two different types of reproductive material (eggs and sperm).
4. Different animals evolved different characteristics in males vs. females. Sometimes one is larger, sometimes one does more of the work getting food, one does more of the child rearing, etc. These characteristics differ a lot depending on the species.
5. In one particular species, namely humans, females physically bear children and do most of the child rearing, while males are physically larger and do most of the hunting. Many other animals (especially mammals) use this same division of labor, but many times certain characteristics are reversed. For example, in many species, the female is bigger and stronger than the male; in some (rare) cases, the male does most of the child rearing.
6. These sexual differences also led to personality differences, which arose due to contingent evolutionary pressures and quirks of the environment.
7. God, the omnipotent being who created the universe, has personality characteristics that are consistent with the personality of one side of a contingent dichotomous evolutionary strategy in one particular species.
8. You might think that one particular species would be sharks, because sharks have been swimming the seas for 439 million years. But no, God has the personality traits that are associated with one sex of a species of hairless mammal that only evolved about 100,000 years ago.

(Alternatively, they’re saying that evolution is a lie and the earth is 6,000 years old or whatever, which somehow makes more sense.)

God does not reproduce sexually. God is the eternal Creator of the universe, not the tip of one branch at the end of billions of years of natural selection.

In fact, why would God have a personality at all? A personality is a thing that emerges in social beings and describes their social interactions. God doesn’t have a social life, it’s not like It spends Its day hanging out with the other creators of the universe.

Religions’ lack of imagination kind of bugs me. God is supposed to be this omnipotent, omniscient, incomprehensible being. But if you read religious texts, God just acts like some guy.

(H. P. Lovecraft did a much better job of writing Gods that act like Gods. Or at least I assume he did—I haven’t actually read any of his books.)

Posted on Nov 18, 2025

An investor is considering putting her money into a mutual fund. “I will just invest some money for the next six months,” she says, “and see how it goes.”

A philanthropist is considering donating to a charity. “I will donate some money and see how it goes.”

Harvard University is considering whether SAT scores are all that important for admissions. “Let’s make SAT scores optional and see what happens.”

A child climbs to the top of a slide and is about to jump off the edge. “Don’t jump off of that,” his mom says, “you’ll get hurt.” He jumps off the slide. He gets hurt.

Not-invented-here syndrome is when an organization unnecessarily re-invents products or tools that already exist elsewhere. The cousin of this phemonenon is not-discovered-here syndrome, in which people refuse to consider evidence unless they’ve collected it themselves.

“A wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.” Not-discovered-here syndrome is what happens when you insist on making mistakes for yourself.

One day, I was at my grandma’s house reading the Sunday funny pages, when I suddenly felt myself getting sucked into a Garfield comic.

If we are correct about the laws of physics, then ghosts can’t exist. But some people are insistent that they’ve directly interacted with ghosts. Is there a way ghosts could exist if we modified the laws of physics a bit?

(Here is the same clip in HD, but that 2010 YouTube vibe is part of the fun)

This clip is in the running for most-mocked scene of all time, but I think it’s good, actually.

First, let’s get some things out of the way:

1. The writers of NCIS know how keyboards work. (They probably used keyboards to write this scene, even.)
2. The director of this episode knows how keyboards work.
3. I’m going to go out on a limb and say >90% of this show’s audience knows how keyboards work.

This scene was not written this way because the writers think their audience is dumb and doesn’t know how a keyboard works. It was written this way because of the Rule of Cool.

The Rule of Cool states: an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief is proportional to how cool a scene is.

Political advocacy is an important lever for reducing existential risk. One way to make political change happen is to support candidates for Congress.

In October, Eric Neyman wrote Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act. He created a cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate how donations to Bores’s campaign change his probability of winning the election. It’s excellent that he did that—it’s exactly the sort of thing that we need people to be doing.

We also need more people to check other people’s cost-effectiveness estimates. To that end, in this post I will check Eric’s work.

I’m not going to talk about who Alex Bores is, why you might want to donate to his campaign, or who might not want to donate. For that, see Eric’s post.

Nearly nine years after part 1, I bring three new short ideas.

1. Keep in mind that scientific fraud happens sometimes
2. Clichés are good, actually
3. You must put unnecessary decoration on your useful items, or else you’re a weirdo

This post contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy.

Investors often say that standard deviation is a bad way to measure investment risk because it penalizes upside volatility as well as downside. I agree that standard deviation isn’t a great measure of risk, but that’s not the reason. A good risk measure should penalize upside volatility, because upside volatility is bad.

Is it a good use of time to call or write your representatives to advocate for issues you care about? I did some research, and my current (weakly-to-moderately-held) belief is that messaging campaigns are very cost-effective.

In this post:

• I look at evidence from randomized experiments, surveys of legislators’ opinions, and observational evidence. All lines of evidence suggest that messaging campaigns are effective, but none of the evidence is strong.
• I write an estimate of how many messages it takes to get a bill to pass in expectation, and how much that costs. According to my model, changing a vote outcome takes 17,000 messages for the Michigan state legislature and 2.2 million messages for US Congress.
• I provide links to resources on how to participate in messaging campaigns for animal welfare, AI safety, and global poverty.