Index on Khalid Ouafi

Akhannouch's empire, visually explained

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Aziz Akhannouch is two things at once, and that is the whole story of this page. He is Morocco’s head of government, appointed by King Mohammed VI in October 2021 after his party won the general election. And he is, with his family, the reference shareholder of Akwa Group, one of the country’s largest private conglomerates, the company behind the Afriquia petrol stations that line every Moroccan highway. Forbes puts the family fortune at 1.5 billion dollars, among the largest in the country.

SecOps vs the Mossad

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The security consultant sat across from me, earnest and well-meaning, walking through their proposed architecture. “And here,” they gestured at a complex diagram of network segmentation, “we implement zero-trust principles with microsegmentation, ensuring that even if one system is compromised…”

I interrupted as gently as possible. “What if the Mossad wants in?”

They blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“The Mossad. Israel’s foreign intelligence service. If they specifically target us, does any of this matter?”

The violence trehshold

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Picture this: Charlie Kirk is mid-sentence, gesturing to a crowd of college students, when the crack of a rifle splits the autumn air. He clutches his neck, confusion flickering across his face for just a moment before he collapses. The 31-year-old father of two never finished his sentence. Within minutes, the footage is everywhere, raw, unfiltered death spreading across phones and screens, watched by millions who can’t look away.

That was September 10, 2025. Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old with “hey fascist! CATCH!” etched into his bullet casings, had decided that some ideas are worth killing for. The assassination didn’t happen in some distant authoritarian state or during wartime, it happened on a university campus in Utah, in broad daylight, because someone believed that silencing a political voice was not just justified, but necessary.

Makhzen

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic note: Moderately confident in descriptive analysis, less certain about causal mechanisms. Based on extensive secondary literature and academic sources rather than primary fieldwork. Potential Western bias in interpreting non-Western political arrangements. Strong on institutional analysis, weaker on predicting future trajectories. Claims about systematic resistance to democratization are interpretive rather than empirically proven.

The Kingdom of Morocco presents a fascinating puzzle for students of political development: how does a centuries-old traditional power structure not only survive but thrive in the modern era, successfully absorbing and neutralizing waves of democratic pressure that have toppled governments across the region? The answer lies in understanding the makhzen¹, Morocco’s unique hybrid of traditional monarchy, bureaucratic apparatus, and informal networks that has proven remarkably adept at evolution without transformation.

A prime example of extraction capitalism

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Which has worse air quality in Morocco - Casablanca with its 3.5 million people and industrial sprawl, or a sparsely populated desert region most tourists have never heard of? Well, you surely are in for a big surprise.

The Draa-Tafilalet region of eastern Morocco is experiencing an environmental catastrophe that reads like a textbook case of systems collapse. PM2.5 concentrations are currently running at 2.4 times the World Health Organization’s annual guidelines¹, with Air Quality Index values consistently hitting the 60-64 range across cities like Goulmima, Mhamid, Zagora, and Ouarzazat². But what makes this particularly fascinating from a systems perspective is how multiple seemingly unrelated factors have combined to create a feedback loop of environmental degradation that’s accelerating beyond anyone’s ability to control it.

China but in Africa

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2006, China hosted the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing, bringing leaders from 48 African nations to discuss what would later be called a “win-win partnership.” President Hu Jintao announced $5 billion in preferential loans and credits for Africa, and Chinese investment across the continent surged in the following years¹. Fast forward to today, and China has become Africa’s largest bilateral trading partner, with two-way trade exceeding $250 billion annually.

Sports bets and predictability

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a moment just before a penalty kick when time seems to compress. The goalkeeper must commit to diving left or right (or staying center) before seeing where the ball will go. The kicker must decide where to aim without knowing the goalkeeper’s choice. Two human minds locked in a high-stakes prediction problem with immediate feedback.

This moment exemplifies why sports fascinate us—and why they’re such fertile ground for exploring the boundaries of predictability. Sports betting markets, with billions of dollars at stake, represent one of humanity’s most sophisticated prediction mechanisms. Yet they remain deeply imperfect.

The morals of economic rationality

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We tell ourselves a comforting story about slavery’s end: moral enlightenment triumphed, William Wilberforce and the abolitionists awakened Britain’s conscience, and humanity progressed.¹ The truth is less flattering but more instructive: slavery ended primarily because it stopped serving the economic interests of the emerging industrial powers. Moral arguments provided cover, but economic transformation drove the change.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s recognizing a pattern that repeats throughout history: what we celebrate as moral progress often follows economic incentives. Understanding this matters because it reveals how change actually happens and what strategies work for reform today.

Conditional probability

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” — Attributed to John Maynard Keynes¹

You’re at a party, and someone suggests a game. They’ll flip a coin twice, hidden from view. Then they’ll tell you one piece of information about the outcome, and you have to guess the probability of various scenarios. “The first flip was heads,” they say. What’s the probability that both flips were heads?

Islam and signaling

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Has Islam Become the Biggest Signaling Culture in the World?

On Virtue Display, Group Identity, and the Economics of Religious Expression

I grew up in Belgium in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the Muslim girls in my secondary school rarely wore hijabs: maybe one or two out of dozens. The Islamic identity markers that existed were subtle: names, occasional absences during Ramadan, some dietary preferences. Fast-forward to walking through Brussels or Antwerp today, and the visual landscape has fundamentally transformed. Hijabs are commonplace among young women, Islamic dress codes are more visible, and religious signaling has become far more assertive.

Longitudinal Data on Gender Wage Gap

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The gender pay gap continues to be a contentious topic in public discourse. Before proceeding, let’s clarify what we mean by “gender pay gap”. Gender gap is a reference to the uncontrolled gender pay gap measures the median salary for all women versus all men, regardless of job type or worker seniority. According to PayScale’s 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report, women earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by men when looking at this uncontrolled metric. However, the controlled gender pay gap, which compares men and women in similar positions with comparable qualifications, shows women earning 99 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Fermi estimates

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” — John Maynard Keynes

Last week I found myself in an argument about climate change with a friend who insisted we couldn’t possibly know how much human activity contributes to global warming. When I mentioned various scientific models, he dismissed them as “just guesses.” This got me thinking about the strange relationship we have with estimation and uncertainty. Many people seem to believe that if we can’t know something precisely, we can’t know it at all. This is a dangerous fallacy. In reality, there’s a vast and useful territory between complete ignorance and perfect knowledge. Enter Fermi estimates.

Civic function and state capacity

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Standing at a busy intersection in Lagos, watching pedestrians weave between cars with no traffic light in sight, you might wonder: why do some places seem to struggle with what we consider basic civic functions? The absence of crosswalks, the non-enforcement of traffic laws, the general sense that formal rules exist more in theory than practice—these aren’t random cultural quirks. They’re symptoms of a deeper institutional reality that deserves serious analysis.

Rust in Linux

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There exists a certain inevitability to some technological transitions. Like the gradual replacement of assembly with C in systems programming, or the shift from horses to automobiles for transportation, these changes arrive not as revolutions but as slow-motion avalanches – initially imperceptible, then suddenly inescapable.

We may be witnessing such a transition with Rust’s integration into the Linux kernel.

The Linux kernel has been C’s domain for over three decades. Linus Torvalds famously wrote the first version in 1991, and since then, millions of lines of C code have accumulated to create what powers the vast majority of the world’s servers, Android phones, and countless embedded devices. It runs our civilization’s infrastructure with remarkable reliability, considering the inherent dangers of its implementation language.

On the recent Israeli-Palestinian situation

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On October 7, an intense assault named “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” was orchestrated by Hamas militants against Israel, with grim occurrences of abductions, shootings, and gruesome mutilations. While Western media and certain online platforms missed delving into the timing of this invasion, it’s often perceived as either unprovoked aggression or a reaction to the Israeli state’s policies. However, the underlying cause, a concealed battle, might offer a startling perspective.

The title of the Hamas offensive, “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm,” hints at the deeper significance. The Al-Aqsa mosque complex is situated on the renowned hill, Temple Mount, a pivotal religious site for both Jews and Muslims. For Jews, it’s the world’s holiest site, housing the historical First and Second Temples, and the prophesied Third Temple. Conversely, for Muslims, it ranks as the third holiest site, encompassing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the ancient Islamic edifice, the Dome of the Rock, constructed between 688-692 AD.

Fungi

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve dedicated a considerable amount of time to delve into Rust programming. As any reasonable person would, after crafting a few programs consisting of hundreds of lines of code, I felt the urge to embark on a more ambitious project: creating a Java Virtual Machine using Rust. I proudly named it fungi, which is a pathogen causing none other than rust. You can find the entire codebase on GitHub.

Personal thinking

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the realm of work and creative endeavors, it is evident that certain types of tasks demand independent-minded thinking for success. Aspiring scientists, investors, startup founders, and essayists, among others, are required to generate novel ideas and challenge conventional wisdom. In contrast, some professions, such as administrators, primarily prioritize correctness over originality. Understanding this distinction is crucial when choosing a career path that aligns with one’s innate traits and preferences. Independent-mindedness appears to be influenced by nature rather than nurture, and identifying one’s inclination can lead to personal fulfillment and professional satisfaction. However, people often misjudge their independent-mindedness level, leading to potential misalignment between their natural disposition and their chosen field. This essay delves into the significance of independent-mindedness in various professions, explores ways to enhance this quality, and discusses its three essential components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to conformity, and curiosity. To excel in certain fields, thinking differently from peers is indispensable. In scientific research, for instance, merely being correct is insufficient; ideas must also be novel and groundbreaking. Investors seeking profitable opportunities must identify insights not widely shared by others to gain a competitive advantage. Similarly, successful startup founders often pioneer ideas that initially appear counterintuitive to most people but eventually disrupt established markets. Essayists must offer fresh perspectives rather than rehashing known information to captivate their readers. However, this pattern of independent-mindedness is not universal, as many professions prioritize correctness without requiring revolutionary ideas.

Links February 2026

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Maps Of Hyperspace (2026) was a delight to watch. It’s about artist Sleepr who travels to the Peruvian Amazon to meet with the Shipibo people. Sleepr captures the visions he experiences while taking ayahuasca, a psychoactive decoction prepared from Banisteriopsis caapi vine and a dimethyltryptamine (DMT)-containing plan. The documentary is visually stunning and the music is fantastic. I highly recommend it.

On AI

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Let me start with a confession: I’ve been wrong about AI progress. Not catastrophically wrong, but wrong in ways that matter. Five years ago, I believed we had decades before confronting the thorniest questions about artificial intelligence. Now I’m watching those questions materialize in real-time, as language models become increasingly capable reality-generators that millions interact with daily.

Many debates around AI fall into predictable camps: techno-optimists promising utopia versus doomsayers forecasting extinction. Both positions feel like emotional commitments more than rational conclusions. I want to sketch a different perspective – one that acknowledges both the transformative potential of AI and the legitimate concerns about its development trajectory.

nobody is a hero

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a specific cognitive error people make when approaching difficult skills: they mistake the thing itself for the pedagogical path toward the thing. Learning quantum mechanics is hard. Learning the specific mathematical prerequisites in a careful sequence, then building up the formalism piece by piece, is merely tedious.

The confusion arises because we observe experts doing the hard thing fluently and assume we must somehow force ourselves through the same activity. A pianist plays a Rachmaninoff concerto. We sit down and attempt the concerto. This is not learning; this is self-flagellation with extra steps.

Appariement assortatif

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Préambule

L’objectif principal de cette page est d’expérimenter une nouvelle méthode rectiligne de sélection bilatérale de partenaire. Peut-on, contre toute norme sociale, établir un concensus réciproque (ou du moins signalétique) sur les termes d’un engagement de couple. Le mariage, par exemple, bien qu’il y ait signature d’un contrat, il n’est jamais question d’une rigoureuse définition des intérêts de chacun. Dans une optique de minimiser les risques d’échec, il me semble intéressant d’établir préalablement un catalogue de personalité.

Domestication technique

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Il existe une nouvelle forme de domestication dont la pratique attentivement codifiée est parvenue à imposer un modèle de civilisation, par lequel l’intention liminaire semble être la domination de l’Homme par lui-même. Grâce à la connaissance de sa propre espèce, au travers les sciences comportementales, sociales et la psychologie, l’espèce humaine dispose désormais d’une machine de normalisation puissante. L’extraordinaire avancée des calculateurs et leur exploitation toujours plus envahissante n’a fait que précipiter ce processus. Une architecture méticuleuse de l’individu au moyen d’un système tacite dissocié de tout régime politique, dogme religieux ou culture a vu le jour. Il s’agit de la parfaite matrice idéologique qui opérère une chirurgie psychosociale minutieuse. Il est cependant important de distinguer l’autodomestication chez les mamifaires – comme décrite par l’anthropologie et la biologie qui dénotent des mutations d’ordre génétique et physiologique survenue au fil de la sélection naturelle, du critérium par marqueurs qui garantit une maîtrise géométrique tant sociale que spaciale de l’individu. L’appréhension esthétique d’un tel régime idéologique fournit les éléments de réflexion nécessaires en vue de déterminer leur étoite dépendance au système de classe, modèle élémentaire des rapports de domination. C’est donc en mati

La domestication de l'être productif

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sur la lutte

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Lutte fonctionnelle - Il s’agit des luttes que les individus et les organisations doivent mener pour obtenir des choses sans statut. Empêcher un bateau de couler, ne pas brûler un dîner ou organiser un mariage. Votre statut peut dépendre de la façon dont vous faites ces choses.

Lutte pour les alliés - Vous voulez être aimé et allié de certaines personnes que vous rencontrez. Votre statut peut vous aider, mais si vous réussissez, ils pourraient bien finir par vous apprécier beaucoup plus que d’autres personnes de statut similaire.

Punishement

Sun, 29 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a peculiar disconnect between what we think works as punishment and what actually does. Societies, parents, managers, and policymakers rely heavily on punishment as a means of controlling behavior. The logic seems straightforward: create a negative consequence for an undesired behavior, and people will avoid that behavior. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests this approach frequently fails—sometimes spectacularly.

Consider the American criminal justice system. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with roughly 2 million people behind bars. If punishment effectively deterred crime, we should expect correspondingly low crime rates. But the relationship is far more complex. Recidivism rates remain stubbornly high, with approximately 44% of released prisoners returning within the first year.

Sur le futur de GPLv3

Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Meditations on technical bankruptcy

Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, I watched a senior developer spend an entire sprint trying to add what should have been a simple feature: displaying a user’s timezone on their profile page. The complexity wasn’t in the feature itself. The problem was that our codebase had become a minefield of implicit assumptions, where touching any single component risked detonating a cascade of failures across seemingly unrelated systems.

That was my first encounter with what I now think of as technical bankruptcy: the point where a system’s accumulated dysfunction makes forward progress effectively impossible without wholesale restructuring. Not technical debt, which implies you can still make payments. Technical bankruptcy is when you’ve defaulted, and the only question is whether to negotiate terms with your creditors or burn it all down and start over.

Lock-in effects in economic development

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“History matters. It matters not just because we can learn from the past, but because the present and the future are connected to the past by the continuity of a society’s institutions.” — Douglass North¹

Let me ask you a simple question: Why is the QWERTY keyboard still the standard layout for most English-language typists in 2025? The QWERTY layout was designed in the 1870s for mechanical typewriters to prevent jamming when typing frequently-used letter combinations. The mechanical constraints that necessitated this layout disappeared decades ago. More efficient layouts exist – Dvorak, Colemak, and others promise faster typing speeds with less finger movement. And yet, here we are, 150 years later, still using QWERTY.

The Civics Manifesto (Part 1)

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of optimism that development economists fall into, and I’ve watched it play out in Morocco for the last fifteen years. It goes something like this: identify the problem (low literacy rates, high maternal mortality), calculate the funding gap, mobilize resources, implement programs, and watch the metrics improve. Except they don’t. Or they do, but far more slowly than the models predicted, and with bizarre distributional effects that nobody anticipated[glewwe_muralidharan_improving_education].

Malédiction identitaire

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Dans une société globaliste où le concept d’identité connait un changement radical, il est bon de noter l’anarchement délusoire de convaincre quiconque, au travers un dicours patriote, d’un éventuel dévouement nationaliste. L’identité ne fut, et n’est toujours, qu’un cumul d’événements et de délibérés historiques, résultante d’un certain déterminisme politique. Il est cependant question de malédiction lorsque que confortés dans leur “identité”, un groupe d’individus établit un système de confidence. Le besoin d’appartenance et de distanciation poussant une personne à s’identifier à un collectif précis sur base d’un élément d’ordre national ou religieux provoque la consolidation d’un prétendu dogme identitaire. Cette croyance conforte l’individu dans un mode fonctionnel et comportemental récursif, l’amenant à un automatisme quasi-biologique sans réelle finalité.

Internet rabit holes

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Articles from Wikipedia are not included here as I maitain a special page for them, please visit this page for Wikipedia’s pages that I find interesting.

The provided links are in no specific order of preference. I just add them on-the-go.

Wikipedia

Youtube channels

Websites

Less Wrong is one of my favorites places on the Internet. As the name suggests, LW is about coping with the fact that we will never attain a perfect understanding of the world but we can at least try to reduce wrongness.
[SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen] is a blog by Scott Alexander
Meaningness is a website for a book on meaningness and purpose.
The Ayn Rand Lexicon: I really like this one, first because it’s based on Ayn Rand’s perception of the world and second because you grab some good book references.
Erowid Experience Vault is about meseasuring and reporting drug-related experiences. It offers a query to look up substance mixups. If you like this sort of website, have a look at Shoomery which is focused on mushrooms trips.
Principia Cybernetica tries to tackle age-old philosophical questions with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies.
The History Guy is both a website and Youtube channel that talks about history.
Folklore.org, anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh, and the people who made it.
Unqualified Reservations is dedicated to the works of Mencius Moldbug who conceptualised neoreaction and proposed a critical review of democracy.
Ecosophia is a blog by John Michael Greer on spirituality and the future of industrial society.
Textfiles is aimed at preserving messages from old boards on various topics. Textfiles is a good reminder of what the Internet in the 90s was like.
Ribbon Farm is a collaborative longform blog by people devoted to unsual takes on both familiar and new topics.
StackExchange’s World Building is for writers working out scientific or historical justifications for the worlds they invent.
27/6 are a compilation of really interesting stories.
Unsong is the website for a book written by none other than Scott Alexander.
TVTropes is a pop-culture-based wiki. A lot of topics to explore.
SCP Foundation is a collaborative writing project to document fictional, paranormal and supernatural events.

Le leurre du rap

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lectures et recommendations litérraires

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Pour une liste des livres que j’ai lus, voir Livre

Sujets de lecture fréquents

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Livres recommendés

La Société du Spectacle de Guy Debord
Écrits corsaires de Pier Paolo Pasolini
Néofascisme et idéologie du désir de Michel Clouscard

On Marriage

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Marriage is perhaps the most analyzed and least understood human institution. We approach it with a peculiar mix of starry-eyed romanticism and cold legal pragmatism, as if trying to reconcile poetry with contract law. After years of observation, research, and painful personal experience, I’ve come to see marriage not as a binary state of “happily ever after” or “disaster waiting to happen,” but as a complex adaptive system with emergent properties that cannot be fully predicted from initial conditions.

Informations à vendre

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

L’information médiatique présente les caractéristiques homologues à toutes les autres formes de marchandises. Elle se vend, s’achète et déclenche la mauvaise bonne conscience généralisée.

La classe qui dispose des moyens de la production matérielle dispose, du même coup, des moyens de la production intellectuelle, si bien que, l’un dans l’autre, les pensées de ceux à qui sont refusés les moyens de production intellec-tuelle sont soumises du même coup à cette classe dominante. Les pensées dominantes nesont pas autre chose que l’expression idéale des rapports matériels dominants, elles sontces rapports matériels dominants saisis sous forme d’idées, donc l’expression des rapports qui font d’une classe la classe dominante; autrement dit, ce sont les idées de sa domination. ¹

The almost-job

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This essays won’t be about ‘unemployment’ as such—due to the entanglement of the phenomenon and its imbalance regarding the economy in which it occurs. It will bring into focus a hypercritical theme known as underemployment, which consequences are relativly and often times disregarded, or obscured as an answer to long-term unemployement. I will attempt to define the true nature of underemployment, its effects and the consideration it has been given both in reasearch and labor policy. One strong point I will strive to make is that unlike ‘unemployment’, underunemployment has an noxious structural mechanism that makes it hard be dealt with, hence the need to take suited measures.

Favorite podcasts

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The rationalist and effective altruism communities have produced some of the most intellectually rigorous long-form content available today. Unlike traditional media, these podcasts prioritize depth over spectacle, exploring ideas with the kind of sustained attention that generates genuine insight rather than just engagement metrics.

This list curates a handful of podcasts that share a commitment to clear thinking, empirical reasoning, and intellectual humility. Whether you’re interested in AI safety, effective altruism, economics, philosophy, or decision-making, these shows offer conversations with researchers, thinkers, and practitioners who are seriously grappling with difficult problems. The podcasts are organized by topic, though there’s substantial overlap. Most benefit from sequential listening rather than random episodes, as recurring themes and referenced ideas build over time. The commentary below describes each show’s distinctive approach and ideal listener, so you can identify which ones align with your interests and available time.

On the death penalty

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Most people I know oppose the death penalty for drug trafficking. They find it barbaric, disproportionate, and morally wrong. I understand their position. For most of my life, I held it too. But I’ve come to a different conclusion—one I’m not entirely comfortable with, but one I believe is correct when all the variables are properly accounted for.

Let me be clear: I don’t enjoy supporting capital punishment for drug traffickers. There’s no satisfaction in advocating for the state-sanctioned killing of human beings. What I am arguing is that, when we honestly confront the full ledger of suffering caused by drug trafficking networks, we may find that certain severe penalties are justified by the mathematics of harm reduction.

The death of everything

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was eight when I first understood that the sun would eventually die.

Not the comforting classroom version where “the sun will get bigger in a very long time,” but the full implications: that the Earth would become uninhabitable, that every human who had ever lived would be forgotten, and that eventually the universe itself would become a cold, dark, empty space where nothing would ever happen again.

That night, staring at my bedroom ceiling, I couldn’t escape a simple and terrible thought: someday there would be no one left to remember that we ever existed.

Why I dont believe in God

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan

Let me start with a simple principle: you should only believe things for which you have evidence. This isn’t controversial. We don’t believe there are invisible gremlins in our walls just because we can’t prove there aren’t. We don’t believe in astrology because it makes unfalsifiable claims. Belief requires justification.

The claim that an all-powerful, all-knowing being created the universe and cares about your thoughts is extraordinary. It deserves extraordinary evidence. We have none.

What I believe in

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The exercise of cataloguing one’s beliefs is both humbling and clarifying¹. Unlike the confident proclamations we see in political discourse, genuine introspection reveals a landscape of varying certainties, provisional commitments, and acknowledged ignorance. This post attempts such a cartography not because my particular beliefs matter much, but because the process of explicit belief articulation serves multiple epistemic functions².

First, it forces precision where we might otherwise rely on vague intuitions. Second, it exposes inconsistencies between stated and revealed preferences. Third, it creates accountability through public commitment. Finally, it models intellectual honesty in an environment that often rewards performative certainty over genuine uncertainty.

Ethicsm, principles and tenets

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

My ethical framework is rooted in empiricism, systemic thinking, and a commitment to truth. Here are the principles I strive to live by:

1. Evidence over intuition

I distrust inherited moral norms. Instead, I ground my ethics in causal reasoning and data. I question whether moral progress is genuine or merely a redefinition of reality (e.g., dismissing certain entities as “non-persons”). I also remain skeptical of untested assumptions, even in widely accepted ethical systems.

Mistakes

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It was Nietzsche who said, “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”¹ But perhaps more important than learning how to do something right is learning what doing it wrong looks like.

For the past 15+ years, I’ve maintained a private document called my “mistakes page.” It catalogs errors I’ve made in reasoning, judgment, and action. Not spelling mistakes or forgetting to buy milk—though these can be costly in their own way—but systematic errors that reveal flaws in my mental operating system.

Trump's contribution to suffering

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On a Tuesday morning in February, 70 health facilities across three Nigerian states suddenly stopped feeding malnourished children. Not because they ran out of food. Not because of war or natural disaster. Because someone in Washington decided that treating 60,000 children on the brink of starvation was no longer a priority.

This is what policy looks like when it hits the ground. This is what happens when the world’s largest humanitarian donor decides to take its ball and go home.

La mystique des marchés

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Moralité des Droits de l'Hommme

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Notes

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Philosophie

Statistiques

Dommages collatéraux liés à l’aérodromophobie ¹ après les attentats du 11 septembre 2001

Gerd Gigerenzer, un professeur allemand spécialiste du risque, a estimé que plus de 1595 personnes ont perdu la vie du fait de l’¹ qui a surgi à la suite des attentats du 11 septembre 2011 à New York. En effet, la vague qui s’était établi aux U.S.A a poussé durant l’année qui a suivi les attentats à éviter les voies aériennes et préférer la voiture.

Open questions

Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This page brings together a series of questions on various subjects that sharpen my curiosity. These are mainly reflections and ideas for which, if I had the means and time, I would not hesitate to fund research. If you have information or documents that could provide any element of an answer or broaden my field of understanding, please get in touch.

Why does Europe, despite suffering heavily from WWII, have so many beautiful sceneries compared to the US? Europe’s aesthetic resilience following WWII’s devastation presents a fascinating paradox. Perhaps it stems from centuries of architectural evolution rather than America’s efficiency-driven development? War may have destroyed buildings but couldn’t erase the underlying urban planning philosophies valuing human-scale design and contextual harmony. Could it be that rebuilding with existing patterns preserved the essence of what made these places beautiful initially? Or might scarcity have forced thoughtful reconstruction rather than rapid expansion? Does beauty emerge from historical continuity rather than prosperity alone? Have American cities optimized for different values entirely—mobility and growth over pedestrian experience and visual coherence?

About

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves”. ¹

I first encountered the idea of cognitive biases while procrastinating on a term paper during my first year at university. What began as a Wikipedia rabbit hole became a years-long obsession with how our minds systematically deviate from optimal reasoning. I was fascinated not by the errors themselves, but by the humbling insight that our most confident beliefs might rest on foundations of sand².