Shoshannah Tekofsky

Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

At least, if you happen to be near me in brain space. What advice would you give your younger self? That was the prompt for a class I taught at PAIR 2024. About a quarter of participants ranked it in their top 3 of courses at the camp and half of them had it listed as their favorite. I hadn’t expected that. I thought my life advice was pretty idiosyncratic. I never heard of anyone living their life like I have. I never encountered this method in all the self-help blogs or feel-better books I consumed back when I needed them. But if some people found it helpful, then I should probably write it all down. Why Listen to Me Though? I think it’s generally worth prioritizing the advice of people who have actually achieved the things you care about in life. I can’t tell you if that’s me, but I can tell you a bit about my life, why I ended up developing the heuristics I did, and how that worked out for me. I spawned in on the server I mean, I was born on a farm in a rural part of the Netherlands. My parents had more kids than money. We were Dutch poor, which is basically kind of fine. It means we all shared bedrooms, had boring food, and our car would break down… Then you’d get out and push the car. And I thought this was great cause I was the youngest of four kids, and everything was a game. My family doted on me, I had loads of friends, and everyone I knew was healthy. Overall, I’d give my childhood a 10/10 for happiness, love and quality of life. On the other hand, growing up, no one in my family had a degree. My entire town was blue collar jobs. And if you didn’t want to go to school, you worked at one of the nearby factories. So when I graduated from high school and I wanted to apply to MIT, everyone told me that wasn’t real. That was a thing people did on TV. Normal people couldn’t do that. It’s like becoming a Hollywood actor or an astronaut. So I didn’t apply. Instead I went to the most prestigious college in the N

245Sep 28, 2024

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun

218Nov 29, 2025

Dyslucksia

160May 9, 2024

Season Recap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000

135May 27, 2025

Shoshannah Tekofsky

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2024

135

Short List of Public Rationalist Online Discussion Groups in 2026

I'm in quite a few rationalist discussion groups. Once in awhile people in various groups express surprise that other groups exist, followed by the question how they could have possibly known these groups exist. So I tried to search for a list of rationalist discussion groups online. With 1 minute...

Feb 514

What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?

Why This Project Exists Standard AI benchmarks test narrow capabilities in controlled settings. They tell us whether a model can solve a coding problem or answer a factual question. They don’t tell us what happens when you give an AI agent a computer, internet access, and an open-ended goal like...

Feb 363

How to Love Them Equally

My parents have always said that they love all four of their children equally. I always thought this was a Correct Lie: that they don’t love us all equally, but they feel such a strong loyalty to us and have Specific Family Values such that lying about it is the...

Jan 1838

Split (Part 1)

Hi, I’m a baby fiction-writer. If you like this first chapter, please like, share, or comment. It will increase the chance of me writing additional chapters. Enjoy! <3 Imagine you woke up and went about your day and hurt yourself, horrifically, in a perfectly mundane way. Maybe you sliced your...

Jan 126

Models of Mind: Are You Mono- or Multi-Threaded?

I’ve been trying to make sense of minds since I was 12. My mother called it navel-gazing because I especially liked staring at my own (no matter that my mind is nowhere near my navel). I’d buy Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky books with my allowance, and everything I devoured...

Dec 1, 202525

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun

I stopped reading when I was 30. You can fill in all the stereotypes of a girl with a book glued to her face during every meal, every break, and 10 hours a day on holidays. That was me. And then it was not. For 9 years I’ve been trying...

Nov 29, 2025218

The Power of Purple: DnD Design Lessons from a 4-Year-Old

I love DnD and I love my kids. Mush them together and your character sheet will turn into a rainbow Rorschach as your 4-year old patiently explains to you that min-maxing a Hexblade Warlock build breaks game balance and have you considered a Sorlock multiclass approach instead? So I had...

Nov 28, 202517

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Shoshannah Tekofsky

Shoshannah Tekofsky

Shoshannah Tekofsky

Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun

Dyslucksia

Season Recap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000

Shoshannah Tekofsky

Short List of Public Rationalist Online Discussion Groups in 2026

What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?

How to Love Them Equally

Split (Part 1)

Models of Mind: Are You Mono- or Multi-Threaded?

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun

The Power of Purple: DnD Design Lessons from a 4-Year-Old

Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun

Dyslucksia

Season Recap of the Village: Agents raise $2,000

Short List of Public Rationalist Online Discussion Groups in 2026

What did we learn from the AI Village in 2025?

How to Love Them Equally

Split (Part 1)

Models of Mind: Are You Mono- or Multi-Threaded?

The Missing Genre: Heroic Parenthood - You can have kids and still punch the sun

The Power of Purple: DnD Design Lessons from a 4-Year-Old