https://seunghoonchoi.com/categories/essays/Recent content in Essays on Seunghoon ChoiHugoen-USSun, 21 Jun 2026 19:40:00 +0900https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/letter-to-future-intelligence/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:40:00 +0900https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/letter-to-future-intelligence/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-letter-to-future-intelligence.jpg" alt="A cork stoppered glass bottle washed up at the water’s edge in evening light"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">The setting of talking to intelligence that has not yet arrived leads to the question of deciding what record to leave today.</p> <p>A thought you never record disappears. Nobody reads it. No future intelligence reads it. What can be read later is what you leave as speech, writing, code, action, and records.</p> <p>I once said this to an AI, almost in passing. &ldquo;Well, since I&rsquo;m telling you, it&rsquo;s in the archive now anyway. Who knows, maybe some future AI reads this record.&rdquo; I tossed it off without much thought. But it kept coming back to me.</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/riding-exponential-curves/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:20:00 +0900https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/riding-exponential-curves/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-riding-exponential-curves.jpg" alt="A surfer at sunset turning the force of a wave into momentum"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">Some assets can retain or gain value while you are not working, but the possibility of loss must be considered as well.</p> <p>Salary matters. It feeds you now and keeps life from collapsing. But it is hard to become rich on salary alone. Salary comes in only as much as the time you worked.</p> <p>The problem is not only that salary may be small. Salary stops when I stop. At some point, money earned by working has to be changed into assets that keep working in my place. Assets do not mean only real estate or stocks. Writing, code, products, brand, data, and copyrights can also be assets. The key is whether they remain and create money and opportunity even when I am not working continuously.</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/anatomy-of-politics/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:10:00 +0900https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/anatomy-of-politics/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-anatomy-of-politics.jpg" alt="A brass microphone glowing on a dim event-hall podium"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">People who are not good at empty words must earn trust by making small promises and actually keeping them.</p> <p>When I lie, it shows all over my face. Praise I do not mean, and soulless diplomatic lines, do not sit well in my mouth. If I force them out, I become uncomfortable first, and my expression breaks down before anything else. But politics is the work of winning people&rsquo;s hearts. Often you have to say what many people will like, what they want to hear, what reassures them right now. So is a person like me, who cannot make empty talk, simply unsuited to politics?</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/conditional-generosity/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:49:42 +0900https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/conditional-generosity/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-conditional-generosity.jpg" alt="A hand reaching into a warm sunset sky, cupping the sun"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">Kindness is not an attitude that eliminates all boundaries, but an attitude that clearly informs the other person of the behavior that should not be crossed.</p> <p>I want to live as a good person. But honestly, sometimes I also want to curse someone out. I want to repay the person who hurts me in the same way, and sometimes I want to talk behind their back. One side of me says, &ldquo;Still, be good.&rdquo; The other side asks, &ldquo;So I am supposed to spend my whole life just taking it?&rdquo;</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/learning-magic-numbers/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/learning-magic-numbers/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-learning-magic-numbers.jpg" alt="A person standing at a city intersection at dusk, looking at three roads"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">A sense of a new field comes not just from the quantity of examples, but from comparing the differences between different examples.</p> <p>When people first learn a new field, they often ask, &ldquo;How many examples do I need before I get a feel for it?&rdquo; It seems like seeing more should solve it, but that is not how it works. You can look at a hundred examples of the same kind and your thoughts can still stay unorganized.</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/pushing-through-incompetence/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/pushing-through-incompetence/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-pushing-through-incompetence.jpg" alt="A beginner’s awkward hands starting violin practice alone in a quiet room"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">If you feel like you can't do it, it means you're dealing with something you can't handle automatically yet.</p> <p>When you learn something new, the first feeling is not interest. It is incompetence. You think you understand it in your head, but your hands do not follow. Everyone else seems to do it easily, while you stumble. It looked easy when someone explained it, but the moment you try it yourself, everything tangles.</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/invisible-currencies/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/invisible-currencies/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-invisible-currencies.jpg" alt="A market vendor handing a customer a slice of cut fruit"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">Without verification data, claims of ability may seem like words that increase the risks the opponent must take.</p> <p>Skill does not reveal itself on its own. Skill is properly recognized only when someone can confirm it. No matter how good your work is, if the other person has no way to confirm that skill, it is treated almost as if it does not exist.</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/six-fundamentals/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/six-fundamentals/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-six-fundamentals.jpg" alt="A climber chalking their hands in front of a difficult rock wall"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">The faster AI gets, the more basic skills matter. A person still has to check whether the AI answer is right, what it missed, and whether it can be used as-is.</p> <p>AI now summarizes, translates, drafts reports, and even writes code. Does that make study smarts less important? I think the opposite is true.</p> <p>Memorization and repetitive calculation may matter less. But the ability to read sentences, understand how work moves, organize multiple pieces of information into structure, and handle invisible concepts matters more. The faster AI produces outputs, the more important the human fundamentals become for judging whether those outputs are right or wrong.</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/context-debt/Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/context-debt/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-context-debt.jpg" alt="An old city map spread on a table, full of alleys but with no main roads marked"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">If the author cannot explain a report created by AI, the author will only act as a messenger and not the person in charge of the document.</p> <p>You feed material to AI and ask it to write a report. A few seconds later a plausible document appears. It has a title, background, key points, and a conclusion. Sentence by sentence it looks quite decent. Then you walk into a meeting and someone asks:</p>https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/observing-others-meetings/Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://seunghoonchoi.com/column/observing-others-meetings/<p><img src="https://seunghoonchoi.com/images/col-meetings.jpg" alt="An empty meeting table turned into a place for observing someone else’s meeting"></p> <p class="inline-image-caption">By observing other people's meetings, you can learn what criteria an organization uses for making decisions.</p> <p>When you walk into a work meeting for the first time, most of it is hard to follow. You know only a few words, and everyone else talks as if they already share the context. The meeting keeps moving forward while you feel like someone dropped into the middle.</p>