an online book by David Gurteen
Wait But Why (WBW) is a website founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog. Typical posts involve long-form discussions of various topics, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and procrastination, using a combination of prose and rough illustrations.
On May 21, 2014, Urban posted "The Fermi Paradox", a post that became extremely popular. A 2016 Ted Talk by Urban on procrastination, based on concepts from the blog, had garnered over 70 million views by March 2024. A post on the blog about Elon Musk and Neuralink was produced with involvement from Musk himself.
In 2019, Marie Boran of The Irish Times summarized the website as a collection of "lengthy, thoughtful and well-written blog posts", praising them for being an "accessible and entertaining primer on human nature".
In 2023, Urban published What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies, analyzing what Urban sees as the major problems with politics as a whole. The book was endorsed by Elon Musk on Twitter.
Credit: Wikipedia - Tim_Urban_(blogger)The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to … Continue reading The Liberal Democracy Is an Artificial Environment Tim Urban
