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Tim Urban Profile picture
Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
Writer, infant
66 subscribers
Dec 31, 2024 • 26 tweets • 6 min read
24 thoughts that gave me a dopamine hit this year:
Dec 27, 2024 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
10 images that blew my mind this year:
Feb 26, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I gave Google Gemini two prompts:

1) Tell me about the book What's Our Problem? by Tim Urban

2) Tell me about the book How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi

It described both and then gave these qualifiers at the end of each:
Image
Image Here's the same experiment for Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds vs. Robin D'Angelo's White Fragility.
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Image
Dec 29, 2023 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
My 23 favorite insights from 2023:
Dec 13, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Couldn’t sleep so I asked ChatGPT to depict a penguin making pizza in a hot tub. Still couldn’t sleep so I did the “make it more” game, continually demanding that the scene become cozier. Image Cozier Image
May 31, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Today’s morning bed spiral: prison population per capita. At 505 incarcerated per 100,000 people, the US has the 6th highest rate of the 223 countries listed by World Prison Brief.

[all images from Wikipedia] ImageImage By state Image
May 11, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
From 2015 back to the Big Bang, in 12 tweets. Each subsequent timeline contains all the previous timelines.

1/12 Image 2/12 Image
Apr 4, 2023 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
Why "centrist" is often used incorrectly:

Imagine that liberalism (in the classic sense: free speech, free markets, equality of opportunity, etc.) is a house. There are lots of people in that house, but let's simplify it to liberal progressives and liberal conservatives.

1/ In the US, the progressives and conservatives in the house are in heated arguments about a lot of things: abortion, immigration, taxes and spending, public education, gun laws, foreign policy, etc.

2/
Mar 23, 2023 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
There are 303 visuals in What's Our Problem? Here are 15 of them.

First, the path of a maturing thinker. I still often find myself on this roller-coaster when I learn about a new topic. It's human nature. But as we grow as thinkers, we can get better at skipping steps 1-4. For millions of years, moths used moonlight for nocturnal navigation. The moth’s brain hasn’t had time to update itself to the modern world, so now they mistake other lights for the moon.

Humans aren't that different. Hunter-gatherer brains living in an advanced civilization.
Mar 20, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Let's talk about social authoritarianism. We can break low-rung thinkers (those who identify with their ideas, care more about being right than truth, never change their mind, etc.) down into three categories:

1. Non-authoritarians
2. Social bullies
3. Idea supremacists

1/10 Image Non-authoritarians don't enforce their way of thinking on anyone else.

The social bully gets angry or offended with friends who disagree with them, which keeps the people around them walking on eggshells.

The idea supremacist goes a step further...
Mar 15, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Imagine human history were written in a big 1,000-page book. Every page would cover 250 years. If we tore out all the pages, it would look like this.

The very earliest permanent settlements started around page 760 and recorded history doesn't start until around page 775.

1/5 Looking at history this way reminds us that we are living in an insane anomaly. Here's a chart comparing the most recent page (which runs from the early 1770s to today) to all the pages before it.
Jan 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Your annual New Years existential crisis, courtesy of me. Let's see:

If you're around 40, today's 10-year-olds think of the 2000s the way you think of the 1970s and the 1970s the way you think of the 1940s.

We're 30% through the 2020s & almost 1/4 through the 21st century.

1/3 If Back to the Future came out today, Marty would be going back to the ancient past of 1993.

Obama launched his first presidential campaign 16 years ago.

Happy Gilmore, The Usual Suspects, Tommy Boy, Pocahontas, and Fargo all came out closer to the moon landing than to today.
Dec 27, 2022 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
22 tweets from 2022 that might blow your mind:

Let's start with what a water droplet looks like at 6,000fps.

[nac Image Technology]
Dec 24, 2022 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
22 thoughts from 2022 I'd like to take into 2023:
Dec 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Flying across the eastern edge of the Rockies. Squishy tectonic plate on the left, firm plate on the right. Image Also the tops of clouds are so cool. Humans aren’t supposed to get to see this.
Dec 7, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
With everyone all abuzz about AI, let's revisit a few concepts from my AI post 8 years ago.

Hard to say if we're witnessing the beginning of the long-predicted "intelligence explosion" or just a sporadic burst of new advances. Either way, an S-curve seems to be picking up steam As newer, better AI is released at an increasingly fast rate, "only a human can __" statements are dropping like flies.

[image: kurzweil.ai]
Nov 4, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Twitter is an anti-compassion machine that stokes our tendency to dehumanize and even hate people we don't know personally.

Four little exercises I use to combat that and crank up the compassion in my mind: 1) THINK SMALL. Imagine the little details of a person’s life you’re hating: the calls they get from their mother, the presents they buy for their son, the list they have on their desk with plans for the future. Like you, everyone else is ultimately just trying to be happy.
Oct 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
In the 1600s there were two camps of geologists:

The “flood geologists” whose starting point was that the Earth was 6,000 years old and therefore that wonders like sea shell fossils in the Grand Canyon must be a result of the biblical flood.

And the “science geologists”… …whose starting point was “I don’t know.” They assumed nothing and just built conclusions based on their observations.

Over the following centuries the science geologists would embark up a mountain of learning as they discovered radiometric dating, the theory of Continental…
Oct 17, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Who from our modern era (say 1800 – today) will be a household name in the year 3000? I hope not Putin
Aug 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
.@swilkesphoto compresses time into a single image using a cool technique. To make this one, he took hundreds of photos from the same location in the Serengeti during a 26-hours stretch and then overlaid them into one image. Gondolas that pass by throughout the day in Venice
Jul 24, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments.”

To understand this story, let’s visit the “flood geologists” and “science geologists” of the 1600s.

1/5 The flood geologists, as devout Creationists, had “the Earth started 6,000 years ago” as an axiom. So every theory they came up with about geological history had to start there and build around it. It led them to many dead ends, like a brick wall blocking them from progress.

2/5