Sam's Digital Forest

Reflections, notes, resources, and ideas on things that currently interest me. Updated monthly: Archive. Last Updated: January 2026.

Things I Am Currently Thinking About

Maximizing Human Flourishing through a New Process for Basic Research and Development I was recently doing a thought experiment about what I would do if I have a large amount of capital I was able to deploy. This is what I came up with (albeit, in a cursory manner). I want to maximize human flourishing by funding high impact research and development. I imagine this is just a function of identifying potentially high impact individuals and their teams and letting them work on whatever they want with little interference The sustainable structure around this is to build a development company that has some profit sharing agreement with the independent research teams that allow us to monetize the research both on short and long term time horizons. This both incentivizes the development phase of research and the sustained goal of funding basic research.
Prediction Markets I originally became interested in prediction markets a number of years ago when I heard about an early Ethereum project called Augur. I then read a good amount Furturachy from Robin Hanson. I am remiss that I think current prediction market implementations do not match the theory -- they might just be a "Sportsbook++". This does not mean, however, that there is not anything interesting there from an intellectual curiosity perspective.

NFL Playoffs The NFL season is winding down, however my New England Patriots have made a somewhat surprise run to the Superbowl!