One of the most underappreciated ideas in all of science is the idea of abstraction. Abstraction serves as a practical tool for understanding, building, and communicating (see also Why Do We Abstract?). The history of computer science is arguably the history of abstraction. And right now, with the rise of AI coding tools, that history is more relevant than ever.
I have become more interested in bioethics and AI governance recently, because it has become clear that these potentially present the biggest challenge to digital mental health transformation. I have come to believe that traditional bioethical frameworks like compassionate use are inadequate for digital mental health. This essay examines why existing frameworks fail and identifies key questions that new approaches must address.
Other people often seem to make irrational decisions. But, as it turns out, these decisions are often rational in their frame of reference. This essay discusses this rationality in the context of economics and AI friends for loneliness.
This is more of a personal essay. I have become increasingly aware over the years that I grew up in a Calvinistic society, whose values influence the way I see the world. However, without any religious education or upbringing, I have been unable to understand the roots of these values. This causes a certain disconnect. This essay is for secular people like myself, who wish to understand themselves and their heritage better.
Most hospitals are organized as a set of verticals: cardiology, oncology, endocrinology, neurology, primary care, each running its own clinic, its own team, its own referral pathway. Mental health usually gets slotted in as one more vertical on that list, a department a patient is sent to if someone happens to notice they need it. This essay argues that this placement is a structural mistake, because the thing mental health actually touches, motivation and belief, is not one organ system among others. It runs underneath all of them.
This essay discusses the cognitive tool of thinking in spectra and extremes.
This essay discusses the mental concept of thinking in limits. It’s an incredibly powerful mental tool for analyzing a wide range of situations. Its utility is demonstrated in a situation where humans have poor intuition.
Most money spent on mental health goes toward treating adults who are already unwell. Yet a growing share of prevention funding, screening effort, and research attention is being redirected toward children and adolescents, years before most of them show any sign of a problem. This is not a fad or a marketing angle for a new generation of apps. It actually makes sense. It is a response to three separate lines of evidence that converge on the same conclusion: childhood and adolescence are the period in which most of the lifetime burden of mental illness is either created or headed off, and the expected return on intervening early is structurally different from the return on intervening later.
This essay introduces the concept of something I like to call the “cognitive unit tests”.
Some years ago I read this blog post by Tim Urban about Neuralink. You should probably go and read it first, he is a great story teller. The main image for this article’s context is the following.
Karen Horney believed that ordinary people, under the right conditions, could do a meaningful version of what analysts do in a consulting room. This was a controversial claim in 1942, when she published Self-Analysis, and it remains a provocative one today. This essay examines what she actually meant, how credible her case is, and why the idea feels newly relevant in an era of digital self-reflection tools.
There is a piece of advice that gets recycled endlessly in startup culture: build something simple that anyone can use. Ship the minimum viable product. Talk to your users. Remove friction. Design for the person who has never heard of you and never wants to think about your product for more than thirty seconds. Go for the large user base.
I took this great course on behavioral science as a robust discipline by Amy Orben at the University of Cambridge during my PhD. It has since greatly influenced how I see the fields of psychology and neuroscience, but also science in general. In fact, Samuel Bell and I wrote a short paper on what the field of machine learning research could learn from the reproducibility crisis in psychology.
Mental health and mental performance exist on a continuum, not as binary states. Like most natural processes in the world, if we plotted the population’s mental functioning (as a rough concept), we’d see a normal distribution from those struggling significantly on one end, through the average majority in the middle, to high performers on the other. The people at the left side of the spectrum suffer tremendously and are typically incapable of functioning in society, whereas the people on the right side are thriving. Commonly used mental health questionnaires such as the PHQ-9 assign individuals to a category of “severity”, such as “mild” or “severe”.
The concept of abstraction is one of the building blocks to advanced understanding of our world.
I’ve decided to start publishing occasional essays—short pieces on things I’m thinking about, exploring, or trying to understand better. These won’t be polished takes or final conclusions (those are more reserved for peer-reviewed publications). Instead, I’ll treat them as living documents: open to revision, correction, and rethinking.