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Simon Sarris Profile picture
Simon Sarris
@simonsarris
🕯 In labouring to be concise, I become obscure. 🕯 Alchemist, sacred things, making things 🕯 The map is mostly water. 🌜 I make GoJS: https://t.co/7yYIMFfAtd
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Nov 11 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I thought it strange - my parents never really gave me advice growing up. Nothing about career, finance, romance, even small things like what to read or how to dress. It was as if they felt it was not their place.

What I learned since is that this is absurdly common I was an extremely quiet child that went to a very small (8th grade graduating class: 21 people) catholic school. I stayed mostly mute until I went off to college. I grew up, in a way, on the internet. This world was closed to my non-technical parents.
Nov 6 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It's actually mysterious how many smart single people there are that cannot find a partner.

So many people want a well-defined thing, and that thing exists in droves, and they cannot find it. Also it's each-other. On paper it seems like smart people should have the easiest time of all with (social) assortative mating.

The numbers are low, but you have the most signals and avenues to find each-other, the most resources, ostensibly the best coordination mechanisms etc etc etc

and yet
Nov 1 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"only net taxpayers voting" is how nearly all democracy was originally conceived

people have a hard time because philosophically there is an enormous gulf between "voting is a reasonable way to achieve good governance" and "voting is about fairness" yet we switched from "good governance" to "fairness"

reminder: Senators used to be appointed. We stopped doing this and switched to popular election (1913) not bc we wanted super extra more fairness but bc ostensibly appointments caused more cronyism than good governance.
Oct 2 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The zero-interest-rate era is going to become lost history because people want to make up a narrative around AI. The white collar bloodbath didn't happen because of a chat app release, it happened because of the end of ZIRP which occurred rapidly in 2022. Image the extreme over-hiring and then bloodbath is visible from space. Also visible from indeed dot com data, indexed to 100 pre-covid.

The AI post-hoc story is doggedly self insistent but its completely false. Image
Sep 11 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I think the obsession with randomized controlled trials as the default of "doing science" has probably set us back a few decades
Aug 25 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Why *did* so many western nations seem to decide on a policy of infinity migration so suddenly, with seemingly no fanfare or public debate or even mention about it prior to backlash? for example the change in Canada here from 2015-2019 looks genuinely crazy. Huge change to a previously conservative system, more than doubled. Possibly it made local news but not in the US.

But then the post 2020 change blows *that* out of the water Image
Aug 24 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
big % of the loneliness epidemic and fertility crisis is downstream of the fact that men now pursue a girl for 2-10 seconds total and if it doesn't work go "oh well"

women probably also reject far too quickly but that just means not giving up matters even more there seem to be many different shades of "no desire" at play. If you really like someone you should probably try harder before giving up. But second if you like someone and they reject you you should be learn from that. Actually consider how you can be more likeable
Aug 21 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
simon civilization scale

A: You can leave keys in your car
B: You can leave car unlocked
C: You have to lock car
D: You have to lock car and conceal any valuables
E: You cannot keep anything in your car
F: E + and you have to leave it unlocked so they don't smash the window This is much more actionable than the sci-fi weeb stuff. We have a lot of work to do. There are not many A-grade civilizations.
Aug 18 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
IMO just buy Siggis 4% yogurt and cut up small pieces of what you already eat to feed them

3 babies in: We have never made a puree, never bought "baby food", and the only baby-specific thing we've made is roasting sweet potato cubes, which we mostly stopped doing buying bags of frozen peas and corn is much less messy than a puree, and they can self direct eating

babies love any cold meat chopped up long before they even get teeth, almost zero mess (compared to purees), even with hamburger
Jul 6 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
there's people that actually do things and then there's "who's joining me?" and there's basically zero overlap between the two

Never wait for others. Even if you want them to come. Image I realized years ago when hiking or night swimming or making plans generally, trying to get people to go with you, "scheduling", all that, its crap

instead just say "I'm climbing Mt. Moose, if you want to come be at the parking lot of Yam cafe at 6am Sunday"
Jul 2 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
There are a lot of things that just don't compute with respect to relationships. Beyond dating too, like male loneliness crisis. Everyone has more avenues than ever before to resolve loneliness, they don't seem to want to. Or are unwilling to lift a finger. People have more windows to peek into societies than ever before.

One explanation for large scale dating or friendship woes is that people are just not very good at rating their own place in that larger system that they now have a view into.
May 20 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
one long thought that's difficult to justify concisely is that almost all housing cost issues are downstream of crime and social disorder people claim things like "house prices are high because owners vote and they want to keep their property values high" but this is glib and partly begs the question. They don't want to all price their own kids out. But maybe they feel they have to.
Apr 9 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
I'm honestly shocked how many people still think this tariff plan is a good idea. Not the utility of tariffs in general, but this specific plan. Any company that has complex inputs to make an even more complex outputs, which is most of the high value manufacturing, is going to be in the gutter.

Mar 10 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
why did so much of the best food in the world come from this circle Image a lot of the best food in the world comes from this circle but that has more explanations (silk road + hellespont) Image
Feb 10 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Wealth is good. Prosperity is wholesome. If you are privileged what you should feel is gratitude, not shame, and you should be thinking of how you can employ and pass on this prosperity.

& I think one should feel a duty to build wealth for their family. It is very sad that a lot of the people who talk about intergenerational poverty also try to slam wealth.
Jan 17 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
pretty much all the arguing about careers and making a living is really due to cost of living which is due to this graph, and almost nothing else.

The red area is housing that doesn't exist. It's what 2008 caused us not to build. Solve this and you solve everything. Image From 1960 to 2005 we built 2x the number of houses per person that we build today. It's still cratered.

That's why the 2008 crisis failed to crash housing prices for more than a couple years. The "bubble" was over, but we stopped building houses, so they got scarce instead.
Jan 12 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
even my haters cannot stop gushing about my nice photos if I do another gallery show "The lighting is absolutely perfect - because of course it is." is going in the artist description
Dec 26, 2024 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
The only thing I'll say about the job discourse is that I run a very small tech company in New Hampshire and we hire literal high school interns from AP CS classes and train them and it works really really well.

*All* hires since the founders were interns out of high school. now,

1. This cannot scale indefinitely, and not everyone needs junior talent

2. NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT?
Dec 18, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
When we first bought the land we had no landscaping budget but our own time. We started cutting down trees and brush all over, planning ideas for everywhere (orchard here, grove here, clear this field, etc)

We found it was unsustainable There's simply too much for two people to do (at least two people who aren't retired)

So we took a step back and decided to work from the house outwards. Make the immediate lawn look nice and pull out all poison ivy. Plant a couple trees we really like (magnolia, sugar maple)
Nov 21, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The simplest conclusion from looking at "seed oils" for ten seconds is that the burden of proof is on them. Never before did we eat this much Linoleic Acid (LA). Never before did we muck with fat composition at this scale.

You don't need "proof" to decide to avoid them. Image
Image if fat composition explosively changes and everyone gets obese you don't need to do a bunch of studies. You can just not eat them and eat saturated animal fats instead and not get fat yourself and feel great.

You don't have to prove anything to anyone. Image
Nov 14, 2024 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I avoided answering this one because I wanted to think about it for longer. But I still don't have a great answer that isn't rambling personal philosophy which probably won't translate well.

A few general things though. I did make a thread of advice on finding a wife, which is not exactly finding a husband. But there is some overlap.

Some people asked me to write a husband version, but I found it difficult to say much with confidence