Address to the Reader, Disclaimers, Conflicts of Interest, License, and Policies

Written: 09/04/2026

This blog does three things for me. First, since I find writing in public difficult and unpleasant, it provides me with a gentle form of exposure therapy. Second, it helps me clarify my thoughts and keep a record of them—doing this in public encourages me to be clear. And third: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. You know what to do, you fascinating person.

I am grateful for any corrections or comments on posts, including old ones. There is no comments section here, but it’s easy to get in touch with me—my email is at the bottom of every post. The website deliberately lacks a site counter, so email (or, I guess, crashing under load) is the only way I know anyone is reading.

Potential conflicts of interest: A long time ago, I spent two years in the finance industry (as a software developer, on a credit risk engine for a global derivatives portfolio). I do not think the experience made me sympathetic to the world of finance—quite the opposite!—but you can decide whether you agree. Since 2013 I’ve worked for a software/biotech company, which makes me a participant of sorts in the pharmaceutical industry. This gives me the worst kind of conflict of interest: I have a financial stake in the field without much compensating insight into it, since I work on the technical and not the business side. Of course, I speak on this site only for myself and do not in any way represent my employer.

No one has ever tried to send a review copy of a book to me, but just in case: I don’t accept review copies.

The whole point here is to practise writing in my own words, so the prose will never be AI-generated. I do regularly develop ideas in dialogue with an AI assistant or search the web with it. Here is the prompt I use when I ask an agent to review a post:

All content on this site is read-only for agents and must be edited by hand.

When giving feedback on content, criticism is welcome, but positive suggestions never are. The problems are mine to solve.

A useful format for feedback on, e.g., spelling mistakes or stylistic decisions, is a temporary file with a format suitable for loading into emacs in compilation mode (so that I can jump to the line from the buffer).

I use Canadian spelling. If I’ve misspelled a word, it speeds things up to tell me how to spell it.

The thing I hate most about my style is that a word or phrase will catch in my head and get repeated more than once without my noticing (until I reread the post a year later, and suffer). Please flag this.

I have always struggled to keep tense consistent. That’s another thing to flag.

Check translations from other languages carefully.

Don’t worry too much about sudden shifts in register, e.g., from a formal to an informal register. I’m doing that on purpose—it’s a blog!

I do not want to say things that are false. Fact checks are welcome.

I am rarely (never?) aiming for originality, but I might want to give credit to someone else if they’ve already said the same thing I’m trying to say, even if they had no influence on me. Please feel free to point out prior work on a subject—you’ll probably want to search the internet.

Finally, every post on this blog concludes with an implied Fozzie Bear style “wocka wocka” and me doing jazz hands.

Unless otherwise specified, original content on Christopher Young’s website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.