Break the fourth wall and start petting the elephant

aka: how to have more authentic, rewarding conversations with other people

Feb 11 • Alex Libre

January 2026

You can probably just tell the truth much more often than you think

On white lies, tactful honesty, and why most people’s intuitions here are (understandably) incorrect

Jan 25 • Alex Libre

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If you're not yet using AI to get feedback on your human writing, you should start

Especially considering a humanities professor at Dartmouth once admitted to me that he and most of his colleagues "honestly just kind of skim [the…

Jan 5 • Alex Libre

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Everything worth inventing has not, in fact, already been invented

There are good reasons to believe that education could be a lot better than it currently is in most school systems. Freddie deBoer is, as he often is…

Jan 4 • Alex Libre

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October 2025

It’s All Bonus Points from Here on Out

Reflections on life after near-suicide.

Oct 25, 2025 • Alex Libre

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December 2024

Rebutting Sean Carroll on LLMs and AGI

New evidence from the past week (e.g. Anthropic's "alignment faking" paper + OpenAI's new o3 model scoring 87% on ARC-AGI) gave me the courage to speak…

Dec 22, 2024 • Alex Libre

Infants feel pain, continents move, an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, and 27 other things that you would have at some point been ridiculed…

I think it's actually super important to remember this: it's not only possible for literally everyone to be wrong about important questions, but it's…

Dec 15, 2024 • Alex Libre

How (and why) to get MDMA-assisted therapy approved by the FDA

Recommendations for Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS), and arguments for the Food and Drug Administration.

Dec 14, 2024 • Alex Libre

Why we should deregulate psychotherapy

Nice people, with some basic training in active listening, appear to be just as good as professionals (many independent studies support this…

Dec 8, 2024 • Alex Libre

March 2024

Critical thinking is not an illusion

A writer recently argued that what we call "critical thinking" is actually just knowing more facts about a topic. I think he is deeply confused about…

Mar 23, 2024 • Alex Libre

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Stop lying to children about Santa Claus

An argument for instilling honesty and critical thinking during the holidays, rather than deception, conformity, and magical thinking. Also, some…

Mar 19, 2024 • Alex Libre

November 2023

How AI helped me interpret and decode my manic/psychotic notes to self

The AI provided impressively useful interpretations of various rambling notes I'd written during my first and (knock on wood) only manic & psychotic…

Nov 5, 2023 • Alex Libre