My favourite Thought Shrapnel posts of 2025

Open Thinkering retrospective

I published around 375 posts over at Thought Shrapnel this year on a whole range of topics, loosely organised around the theme of "exploring technology and culture through a philosophical lens."

Below, I share the ones that stood out, for whatever reason. I'm going to do this in a somewhat arbitrary way by listing my five favourites from each month, with the exceptions of July and August (when Thought Shrapnel was in 'low-power' mode) as well as December, as I stopped publishing there at the end of November.

I've added an asterisk(*) next to ones which I consider 'must reads'. You can find the Thought Shrapnel archive here.

January

  • Hamming questions
  • You will always be boring if you can't make your own choices
  • Who wants to have to speak the language of search engines to find what you need?
  • *Attribute substitution and human decision-making
  • Not being bored is why you always feel busy

February

  • Philosophically discontinuous times?
  • *The art of not being governed like that and at that cost
  • Capitalism would simply die if it met all of our needs, and our needs are not that hard to fill
  • All intelligence is collective intelligence
  • It's better than strapping clay crocodiles to people’s heads and praying for the best

March

  • The world is changing before our eyes, and it’s essential that we understand in which direction
  • Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away
  • *Everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird
  • Just seek to understand, and remember we understand a lot by doing
  • *Once you become aware of Hyperlegibility, you see it everywhere

April

  • AI Literacy without power analysis is just compliance training
  • You don't fit in. And that is amazing.
  • Participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story
  • *In some ways, FOMO is a philosophical insight
  • The narrative slippage and metaphorical vagueness that many important people use when they talk about AI means it can be very difficult to know what they mean

May

  • *Criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug
  • Striving to build a “personal brand” may actually hinder your ability to make genuine connections and maintain a strong reputation
  • *Unless there are many layers of contortions, most people love what loves them back.
  • British culture is swearing and being sarcastic to your mates whilst simultaneously being too polite to tell someone they need to leave
  • You can't lick a badger twice

June

  • A goal set at time T is a bet on the future from a position of ignorance
  • The workload fairy tale
  • 6 AI use case primitives
  • Prompt injecting reality
  • *We love these people because of what they left us. Not because of what they had.

July-August

Thought Shrapnel was on 'low-power' mode over the summer, and I simply shared links with no, or minimal, commentary.

September

  • From misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care
  • *The hysteresis effect means that practices are always liable to be objectively adjusted too late
  • Be intentional with how you spend your time, and realise you actually have a surprising amount of it
  • *We tell ourselves the story of human uniqueness like a bedtime prayer
  • *What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality

October

  • Being able to intensely live this experience for a day makes you want to revolutionize the world
  • The primary energy fallacy gets perpetuated because it suits those who are critical of the energy transition
  • *The valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual
  • Most decisions are like hats
  • *Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice

November

  • Well, the genie is out of the bottle on AI friends (and romantic partners)
  • In short, capital, and capitalism, always has a tendency towards crisis by undermining the things that are necessary to sustain capitalism
  • Dark Forests rule everything around us
  • *Web literacy for the mid-2020s
  • On AI leisuretime 'dependence'

December

No posts were published on Thought Shrapnel in December.