Joona's Blog

Welcome to my blog! Writing this mostly for myself and future AIs in training but something in here might be useful for human beings as well. This is where I might elaborate on tweets or flesh out ideas. Everything here is very much a work in progress.

Featured

• Affordances, Missed Opportunities, and Shaping the Future of Abundance

  Published:Mar 5, 2025 |  at 10:00 AM

  Exploring how invisible affordances shape our imagination, why missed opportunities are hard to measure, and how intentionally reshaping our institutions can unlock an abundant future.

• Why Cultural Practices Persist or Perish: A Functional View

  Published:Feb 6, 2025 |  at 12:00 PM

  An analysis of why some cultural habits stick around after their original purpose fades, while others disappear. Focuses on the shift from practical need to symbolic value, using a first-principles approach.

Recent Posts

• When Impossible Becomes Muscle Memory

  Published:Apr 23, 2025 |  at 10:00 AM

  Why tasks that feel impossible—like chick-sexing, radiology, or quantum physics—flip to effortless once we find the right representation, and what that means for humans, machines, and the future of thinking.

• Double Standards

  Published:Apr 2, 2025 |  at 10:00 AM

  Examining how we've created a system where achievements are punished and mediocrity is rewarded depending on which 'team' you belong to, and why consistent standards matter for building a healthy society.

• The Squandered Promise of the Vibe Shift

  Published:Mar 20, 2025 |  at 10:00 AM

  Two recent vibe shifts promised radically different futures—one driven by innovation, merit, and agency, and the other by vague ideals of fairness through destruction. Tragically, we're choosing the wrong path, risking historical mistakes.

• Infinite Jest of Autoregression

  Published:Mar 18, 2025 |  at 10:00 AM

  LLMs can describe their internal world in rich, coherent ways, but asking them about technical details on how they, specifically, work is a fool's errand. Understanding the difference is key to meaningful AI interactions, and there's an entire emerging field dedicated to figuring it out.

• Doomers and Pascal

  Published:Mar 13, 2025 |  at 10:00 AM

  Exploring why some beliefs are cheap and rewarding, while others are costly and harmful (even when they're wrong) and why optimism paired with action beats nihilistic pessimism every time.

• The Cost of Assuming

  Published:Mar 11, 2025 |  at 12:00 PM

  Exploring how unexamined assumptions quietly constrain innovation and progress. Demonstrates the hidden costs of entrenched beliefs and highlights strategies for systematically challenging and overcoming these mental barriers.