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Resident Contrarian

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Hamhanded metaphors and questionably interesting thoughts. Click to read Resident Contrarian, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalSociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
100 from 29 Nov 2020 to 2 Apr 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/feed

2026 1

  1. On returning just to say I'm not returning

2023 14

  1. Good News Update and Bonus Article
  2. Everything Everywhere All At Once, Abuse, and Duty
  3. New post "On Boxer's Confidence" up at Wonderlandrules
  4. He who submits a resume has already lost
  5. Plugpost and Updates
  6. On Malignant Escapism
  7. The Resident Contrarian is Out Of Work
  8. On Being An Unreliable Source of Information For Yourself
  9. Bubble Explainer Article: Housefire Beliefs
  10. Hidden Article: Writing Advice #1
  11. A Limited Interest Article on Employer Value Prop and Hiring
  12. New Writer/New Stuff Plugpost and Open Discussion
  13. Another Semi-Insider Article About Cracked.com
  14. Obligatory Yearly Blog Metrics Post

2022 41

  1. Kinda-Contra Erik Hoel on The Implications of Massive Fraud
  2. Long Holiday Weekend Short Story: "Gross"
  3. Kinda Contra ACX Contra Resident Contrarian
  4. On Emily Oster's Covid Feelings Amnesty
  5. On Unfalsifiable Internal State Claims, Politeness, and Broadly Applied Principles
  6. Discussion thread 10/24
  7. On Short Bursts of Impossible Stress and Depression Caused by Nothing
  8. Bonus Mini-Article: Is Writing a Job?
  9. On Holding Your Own Political Side to Account
  10. The Repugnant Conclusion Bait-and-Switch
  11. I'm trying to figure out why I don't like Effective Altruists
  12. Interactive Non-Fiction: Choose Your Own Morality
  13. Post Interactive-Nonfiction Thoughts With RC
  14. I Swear I'm Not Forgetting The Book Club (Book Club Meeting #1)
  15. On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class
  16. Discussion Thread 8/2
  17. Fake Vulnerability, Risk Aversion and You
  18. So I've Decided To Have A Discussion Thread
  19. The weird world of the kind-of-deontologist
  20. A Biased Article About Finding and Maintaining Love
  21. SMTM's Chemical Hunger III: Scooped!
  22. Interview at Infovores Newsletter
  23. Slowly Parsing SMTM's Lithium Obesity Thing II
  24. What it Takes to Become a Successful Independent Blog Writer: Numbers and Tactics
  25. The Whole Thing With Not Liking David French
  26. Slowly Parsing SMTM's "Lithium is Making Us Fat" Thing
  27. Nobody Will Admit The Best Novel of Our Generation is About Football
  28. What Does "Shitty Job" Mean in The Low-Skill, Low-Pay World?
  29. Do we actually know anything about youth trans suicide rates?
  30. The Indoor Kid's Guide to Choosing a Martial Art
  31. Book Club: The one where we vote on books.
  32. Assessing a Claim: Is San Francisco's Shoplifting Problem Fake?
  33. Sadly, Porn Review III
  34. Help RC Do a Bookclub
  35. Nickelbacking: The Futility of Self-Definition by Exclusion
  36. Conor Friedersdorf: The Perfect Flunky for The Atlantic's Fake Discourse
  37. The Strengths and Weaknesses of Social Predictive Heuristics
  38. Unsolicited Advice on The Institute of Marriage
  39. An Article About a Book About Porn, Pt. 2
  40. RC Advice: 2022 Edition
  41. An Article About a Book About Pornography That Isn't Actually Substantially About Pornography, So Far. (NSFW, Probably?)

2021 32

  1. On The Art of Joke-telling and Writing Prose
  2. On The First Full Substack Year
  3. On the Artist/Craftsman Divide
  4. RC Advice: Christmas Edition (new reader posts go here!)
  5. On Being Alone In an Empty Room For 1000 years
  6. The Left is (Finally) Starting to Lose The War Over Words
  7. On Unbeatable Video Games
  8. Contra Scott Alexander on Literally Everything
  9. Musings on Epsilon
  10. School CRT Bans Aren't Speech Codes - No Matter How Little You Like Them
  11. Decoding Walkability: Digging Through the Layers of a Poorly Defined Movement
  12. RC Access: First Post and Rules
  13. Updates: What's Going on With Every Article Y'all Liked and Some You Didn't
  14. Father's Day
  15. On Being "Antiscience", XKCD Jellybeans, and the Mechanics of Scientific Bias Accumulation
  16. On Christian Culture: A Look Inside the Church Bubble for the Unwashed Heathen
  17. On Incels, Dead Bedrooms and The Hard Problems of Loneliness
  18. A Week Off: Feedback and Idea Request
  19. On Tiger Moms, Scissor Statements, and The Permanence of Shit-List Membership
  20. On Common Core Math, Individual Variation, and Things You Can't Teach
  21. "If Christians Read Their Bible, They'd Vote for X": A Primer For the Non-Religious
  22. Overnight Pizza and The Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines
  23. The FDA Could be Better, But Nobody Will Ever Ask Them to Be
  24. Updates, Housekeeping and Completely Voluntary Monetarization
  25. Changing Values Regarding the Value of Truth
  26. The Book of Numbers and the NYT: On the Competing Priorities of Team Loyalty and Truth
  27. Being Poor-ish Revisited: Reader Questions
  28. On The Experience of Being Poor-ish, For People Who Aren't
  29. The Triumphant Return of Scott Alexander, Overcorrecting Towards Niceness, and Taking Charitability Too Far
  30. Trump's Social Media Bans Just Facilitated a Peaceful Transfer of Power, but With a Catch
  31. It Will Likely Be Years Before We Really Know The Extent of COVID-19's Badness
  32. New Years Weight Loss Edition 2: On Unfounded "Diets Don't Work" Claims, Weird Phrasing, and Science Bubbles

2020 12

  1. New Years Weight Loss Edition Part 1: All The Stuff You Never Knew We Didn't Know About Leptin
  2. Merry Christmas!
  3. On Deaths, Bans, Life and Metaphors
  4. Defeated: Or How I Failed to Substantially Disagree with Zeynep Tufekci
  5. Quick Take Response to Tyler Cowen Re: Libertarian Response to Quarantine
  6. On Alien-Designed Studies, E-Cigarettes And Researchers Who Won't Ask For Help
  7. Matthew Yglesias and Vox On Guns, Bans, and Suicide, Part 2
  8. Matthew Yglesias and Vox On Guns, Bans, and Suicide, Part 1
  9. On The Exciting Subject Of Earwax And Unsupported Medical Arguments
  10. Dumb, Lazy or Lying - A Lowbrow Lewis's Trilemma For The Internet Age
  11. Kendi Vs. McWhorter
  12. Introduction post