Map and Guide to Putanumonit

Welcome to Putanumonit! Below is an overview of my best posts grouped by topic and mood. It ranges from economics to silly poems, from rigorous math classes to half-baked observations. I’m writing about all and only things that interest me, in the hope that there are hundreds of thousands of people with my fascinations out there.

The core mission of Putanumonit is to understand everything using made up numbers and bell curves. For example: why China’s soccer team sucks, how long will it take to catch every Pokemon, why women are #HotForBernie, and how likely is God.

I use numbers to optimize my life: investing and managing my personal finances, getting the most happiness from the money I spend, using my time productively. Numbers have also been remarkably useful for my dating life: crafting a profile and approach to online dating, hacking my OkCupid match percentage, and deciding which of two women I should date using a spreadsheet. You laugh, but it worked.

I’m against Moloch, the demon of outgroups, politics, and destructive competition. I promote cooperation instead of beetle dicks, and I try to reconcile Trump voters with Hillary voters, people who are sick of the far-left with those who despise the alt-right, rationalists with Jordan Peterson, even feminists with “nice guys”.

I have some controversial opinions: voting is bad, having kids is good, empathy is bad, the “hot hand effect” is real, the finance industry isn’t useless. I have some rationalist opinions: believing wrong things is really bad, you should read the sequences, I should try one more diet. I have opinions that are both, mostly around polyamory and sex.

I also have the opinion that Rationality can really improve your life by helping you see beyond social reality, which is strangely a controversial opinion in Rationalist circles.

I’m an effective altruist, and my generous readers helped me raise over $50,000 to alleviate extreme poverty and save the world from runaway AI. I also gave EAs tips on tax-optimizing their donations.

I truly, deeply, obsessively care about the proper use of statistics in research. I explained how studies p-hack to produce fake results, and demonstrated the technique myself by using an article’s own data to disprove it. I teach my readers to defend against the dark arts of statistical bullshitting: in a FiveThirtyEight article on affirmative action, in most reports on economic inequality, in the entire field of psychology, even on utility vans.

I interview fascinating people: polyamorous evolutionary psychologists, a sex worker turned psychedelic guru, a peanut butter Buddhist.

I review books and talk about them with my readers. I love sports. I play games. I write weird stuff. I write really weird stuff while in altered states of consciousness.

My posts never contain sponsored material, and I pay to keep Putanumonit free of random ads. If you appreciate the way I write and think, you can donate or hire my brain here. If you think I’m cool, we can meet in person or go on a date.