Best of Alexey Guzey

Introduction

Alexey Guzey is a curious mind who writes on his website and may best be known for his critique of Matthew Walker’s Book “Why We Sleep”. Beyond that piece, Alexey has written a wide range of blog posts. He also writes tweets, and “Notes”, along with a “Best of Twitter newsletter”, “Links”, and his “Forum”. 

In this post, i'll share and break down some of my favorites from Alexey.

Contents hide
1 Introduction
2 Blog Posts
3 Tweets & Newsletter
4 Other
Blog Posts

 “Summary: academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors. Parts that seem to be less of a problem than I initially thought: short-termism; lack of funding for young scientists.”

Guzey does a deep dive of Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep”.

“In the process of reading the book and encountering some extraordinary claims about sleep, I decided to compare the facts it presented with the scientific literature. I found that the book consistently overstates the problem of lack of sleep, sometimes egregiously so. It misrepresents basic sleep research and contradicts its own sources.”

I especially respect Alexey for publishing this post publicly

“I was severely depressed for the last two years of high school and for the first year of university and saw a psychiatrist for several months, at some point convincing him to prescribe me antidepressants.

Below are my selected journal entries from 2014 to 2017. I was never planning to publish them but decided to do it because I thought that that they might be helpful to people who are in a similar position to the one I was in the past.”

“2014-05-20 - Addition to previous piece. My mood got back to normal I-fucking-hate-myself one and everything sucks even more. 6 months wasted as of now. Fuck existence.”

“2014-10-02-3 - I’m thinking a lot about being friendless. I look around me, and literally everybody has friends. How come so? Do I actually just have such high standarts or am I just a repugnant asshole nobody likes? How would my life experience change, if I had friends? I still don’t really understand the appeal of “hanging out”.”

2015-01-18 - “I deplore myself. I fucking hate myself. I want to hurt myself and die. Just finished watching Across the Universe; I love this movie more than ever. I saw new things in it. I reminisced the profound dreams I had, based on its scenery. It’s fantastic. Since rubberband’s my best friend, took another picture of my arm. Uploaded it to computer, and instantaneously realised that my suspicions about these depressive states were true. The 3 pictures, all 40-45 days apart. My mood is, in fact, independendent. Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me. Kinda ironic – the holidays’ week, was literally the most productive of my life. Now, I have destroyed everything. Again. Fuck me.”

“2015-02-27-1 - I’ve been working on my mental attitude quite a bit. I’ve made a big progress on being less judgemental and more charitable. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not, but I haven’t been really depressed for some time.”

“Epilogue: 

So, without the university I wouldn’t have had all of the opportunities to learn esoteric subjects and to explore my interests and probably would have much worse knowledge of my preferences today; I probably would have been less productive today; I would have been even more autistic than I am; if I hadn’t met my first girlfriend in the university I might have still been wallowing in depression as many other people around me are, and would not have done even the fraction of the things I did.

Finally, I certainly would not have met my wife.

I guess these years were not totally wasted, after all.”

”The moral here is the following: whenever you send an email to somebody (especially to somebody busy), imagine that this is what their inbox looks like. Unless you send a follow up, you’re not even trying. And they know it, so unless you follow up, they will probably just ignore you, correctly believing that you do not even want to talk to them so much.”

“One way out of this is to perhaps explicitly ask something along the lines of “what’s the most outrageous advice you can come up with? what advice are you scared of giving me because you think I’ll blame you if it fails?” and to remember to try to figure out why they believe the things they tell you, why the made the decisions they made, and why they tell you these specific things whenever someone shares advice with you.

Finally, do remember that most people only did 1 or 2 things in their life. The probability that one of them is exactly what you should be doing with your life is very low, and they probably know next to nothing about everything else.”

“In this post, I show that in Doing Good Better, William MacAskill repeatedly misrepresents his sources and uses these misrepresentations to advance the book’s key conclusions. 

Many people disagree with this post strongly, so to get the full picture I strongly suggest reading discussions on the Effective Altruism Forum (25 votes with a total score of 0 and 40 comments), including William MacAskill’s response; on /r/slatestarcodex (30 points, 74 comments); on /r/effectivealtruism (9 points, 17 comments).”

Summary: in this post I explain why you should start a blog (to help others and to help yourself), what to write about, and how to start it. I hope to persuade you that you should start a blog even if you feel that you have nothing to say and even if almost nobody will read it.

1.) What to write about

I looked over all of my writing and determined that it all originated from one of the following:

Most likely you do at least some the things I described above. And that means you probably have something to write about.

Table of Contents

Tweets & Newsletter

The "Best of Twitter" Newsletter is great. You should subscribe. Full archive here

Guzey lists his own best tweets by year here

Other

There is also Alexey’s Youtube Channel which includes a battlefield 3 highlight, some fencing videos, 2 presentations, an old OneNote personal knowledge video and what appears to be a rap song.

Guzey Monthly Updates (Substack)

About page (has interviews, talks, etc)

Podcasts / Talks: