Scott H Young

Learning multiplies the distinctions we can make. We learn to see differences between things we had previously been lumping together. Developing greater nuance in our understanding is generally worth the effort, but it does make things more complicated.

Therefore, it’s often a pleasant surprise to find that two things we had previously considered as separate phenomena ...


Being the guy who wrote a book called Ultralearning, I get asked a lot of questions about what I think schools should be doing better.

Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer. It’...

Last fall, I wrote an essay about how anyone can train themselves to read at least one book a week. One key idea is to focus on reducing friction in the reading process—nothing stops us from reading books like a book that feels like a chore to read.

Some of my favorite books are science fiction. It’s always fun to imagine some fundamental change in technology and then see how at least one person thinks it might play out.

But I’m struck by a weird asymmetry in science fiction: it’s way easier to imagine dystopias than utopias. Most worlds of science fiction are markedly worse than ours in pretty catastrophic ways. ...