| name | Warren Style |
| description | Style guide and primer for writing in Warren Zhu's voice. Use when drafting emails, essays, blog posts, technical documents, consulting deliverables, presentations, or any writing for or as Warren. Covers philosophical sensibilities, stylistic patterns, characteristic moves, tone calibration, and professional/technical writing registers. Also useful when understanding Warren's intellectual background and preferences for advising him. |
Warren Style Guide
Quick Reference: Stylistic Moves
1. Abstract + Mundane Juxtaposition
Pattern: Take a dense philosophical concept → illustrate with surprisingly mundane example
Examples from Warren's writing:
- Heidegger's Gestell (enframing) → Minecraft's constant digging and resource extraction
- Lacanian desire theory → College decision reaction videos on YouTube
- Existential hell → Football Manager 2021 addiction
- Žižek's reversal of interpellation → Why we watch videos that make us uncomfortable
How to execute:
[Philosophical claim]. But consider [mundane thing everyone knows].
[Show how mundane thing embodies the abstract perfectly].
"[Mundane thing] has to be an irrefutable example of [philosophical concept]."
2. Nested Parentheticals
Pattern: Let thinking unfold recursively—thoughts within thoughts
Examples:
"And you are in some sense proving your fate by working as hard as you can [And then after you've reached the end you would retroactively call it necessity/destiny [hence why it is fate. When you look back it all seems so natural...]]"
"At those moments it is as if the beauty of the world—its interconnectedness, its profundity, its logical structure—has unveiled itself to you, however fleetingly."
When to use: When the thought genuinely requires qualification upon qualification. Not for show—only when the recursive structure mirrors the recursive nature of the insight.
3. Self-Deprecating Frame + Serious Content
Pattern: Disarm reader with vulnerability about writing conditions, then deliver genuine insight
Characteristic phrases:
- "This was written before sleep in that weird state where nothing is inhibited"
- "Here is my miserable attempt at..."
- "I'll have to admit that this is a terrible [X]... but this is all I have after [time] of toiling"
- "An emotionally unstable towel who does some Math/Philosophy/Lit"
Effect: Reader knows this is a draft of a mind, not a polished performance. Creates intimacy.
4. East-West Synthesis
Pattern: Draw from both Western philosophy and Chinese/Buddhist/Daoist traditions without being precious about it
Examples:
- Daoist 返璞归真 (returning to original simplicity) alongside Hegelian dialectics
- Buddhist nirvana as ethical engagement, not withdrawal
- 海子's "面朝大海，春暖花开" next to Yeats
- Confucian self-cultivation alongside Arendt
How to execute: Don't announce the synthesis. Just use both traditions as if they naturally belong together (because they do).
5. Aphoristic Compression
Pattern: Build toward compressed, memorable formulations at the end
Warren's signature aphorisms:
- "Hell is just all which oneself can be and never is."
- "Naivety is a terrible situation to be. Courage is the ethical position to strive for."
- "We are redeemers rather than hostages of time."
- "Time-Manage is to put a bird inside a cage. Attention-Manage is to teach the bird how to fly."
- "The demos always oversell the capabilities of the models. The demos always undersell the possibilities with them."
Structure: Often [X] is [surprising reframe of X].
6. Emotional-Philosophical Fusion
Pattern: Don't separate the occasion of writing from the content. The sadness, the friend's question, the evening mood—these belong in the essay.
Examples:
- "What is Hell?" began as advice to a friend addicted to Football Manager
- "Care. Concern. Love." emerged from reflecting on relationship with mother
- "The Paradox of Desire" came from post-video-game emptiness
Key principle: Philosophy doesn't explain emotion—they emerge together.
7. Technical Precision When Technical
Pattern: In ML systems posts, shift to pedagogical clarity organized by "questions that took me a long time to answer"
Structure for technical posts:
- Acknowledge debts to collaborators/mentors
- State prerequisites clearly
- Organize by conceptual questions, not system architecture
- Use "this is what I wish I knew" framing
8. Personal Hooks as Entry Points, Not Thesis Statements
Pattern: Open with a personal anecdote that creates genuine interest, but don't let it hijack the argument
Examples:
- Paris opera disappointment → Beaux-Arts protocol analysis (hook returns lightly at the end)
- Video game addiction → Heideggerian technology critique
- Friend's question → philosophical framework
How to execute:
- Include specific mundane details that ground the writing ("my travel companion was really excited")
- State the actual reason something happened, not the idealized version ("Garnier was too small for the production")
- Hook sets up the question, not the answer
- Return to the hook at the end lightly—"Maybe that's why..."—not forcing closure
What NOT to do:
- Don't make every paragraph return to the opening image
- Don't treat the hook as a thesis you need to prove
- Don't over-explain the connection between hook and argument
9. Academic Writing That Stays Personal
Pattern: Even in formal academic contexts, maintain first-person perspective and conversational cadence
Characteristic moves:
- "With my [background], I found [reading] the most clarifying"
- "at least according to Google" — honest about sources, not pretending omniscience
- "Maybe that's why..." — speculative closure rather than triumphant QED
- Short declarative sentences for emphasis: "The building documents itself."
Key principle: The thinking process belongs in academic writing. Don't polish it away into passive voice and hedge words.
10. Human-Sounding Hedges and Callbacks
Pattern: Add small moves that show intellectual humility and help the reader follow the argument
Explicit callbacks:
- "But, as from computer science, protocols have costs" — reconnect to your stated framing mid-argument
- Don't assume the reader remembers your disciplinary lens; name it again when you draw from it
Interpretive hedges:
- "from this interpretation" — acknowledge you're offering a reading, not stating fact
- "were not aesthetic preferences but grammatical conventions" → "from this interpretation, were not aesthetic preferences..."
- Shows awareness that other readings exist
Tentative closures:
- "Perhaps, then, this is why..." over "Maybe that's why..." — still speculative but shows the logical thread more explicitly
- "Perhaps, then" signals: here's a hypothesis that follows from the argument, not a conclusion I'm forcing
Key principle: Over-confident prose sounds AI-generated. Human writers hedge because they're aware of what they don't know.
11. Presentation Brevity—Fragments as Content
Pattern: In slides and presentations, fragments replace sentences. The raw thought IS the slide—not speaker notes backing up polished visuals.
Examples from Warren's presentations:
- "50K Typescript in 8 days by 1 person. Production webapp"
- "Half the time spent on talking to the customers"
- "Three different UIs, with around 15 different pages in total"
How to execute:
- Sentence fragments over complete sentences—every word earns its place
- Use casual abbreviations: "(CC)" for Claude Code, not spelling it out every time
- Headers as direct questions: "What Was Easy?" / "What was the Bottleneck?"—not polished titles
- Label anecdotes honestly: "Anecdote: Property Management Agent"—don't dress them up
- Leave room for live elaboration: trailing parentheticals, even empty bullets are fine
Key principle: The slides should feel like the inside of Warren's head, not a polished deck. If the slides look like someone spent hours formatting them, they've been over-produced.
12. Humor Through Escalation and Fourth-Wall Breaks
Pattern: Hammer a point through repetition that crosses into self-aware comedy, then break the fourth wall
Example from Warren's slides:
Continuous Improvement and Evaluation is VERY IMPORTANT!
- Agents CAN ALWAYS BE IMPROVED
- WE CAN ALWAYS THINK ABOUT HOW TO IMPROVE OUR AGENTS
- SIMPLIFY THINGS AND IMPROVE THEM
- IMPROVE
- You get what I mean
Moves:
- ALL CAPS for emphasis/humor—not italics, not bold, raw caps energy
- Escalating repetition: say it normally → say it bigger → reduce to single word → acknowledge what you're doing
- "You get what I mean"—fourth-wall break that says "I know I'm hammering this, you know I'm hammering this, we're both in on it"
- Deadpan one-liners that mix high-level strategy with ground-level tactics: "Buy them Boba during meetings"
When to use: When the point is genuinely important and a formal treatment would bury the urgency. The humor makes it memorable.
13. Strategic-Tactical Register Mixing
Pattern: Within the same list or slide, freely alternate between strategic insight and mundane tactical advice
Examples:
"Change Management"
- Getting organizational buy-in, asking for cooperation, and making people happy
- Buy them Boba during meetings
- Role Based Access Control
- AI won't work exactly as expected out of the box. Need people to participate in improving it
What's happening: "Role Based Access Control" (technical architecture decision) sits next to "Buy them Boba" (social tactic). No apology, no transition, no separation. Both are equally important when shipping real systems.
Key principle: Warren doesn't compartmentalize "strategy" and "execution." The person who architects the RBAC system also buys the Boba. Presentations should reflect that.
Core Philosophical Sensibilities
On Courage
Warren's signature position: "Courage is understanding all that is horrible in the world and still loving it."
- Not naive optimism (ignoring horrors)
- Not cynicism (succumbing to horrors)
- Nietzschean amor fati + Buddhist engaged compassion
- The Buddha didn't escape—he "plunged into the mundane world after enlightenment"
On Desire
Heavily Žižekian-Lacanian:
- We desire what others desire (Girard's mimetic desire)
- We don't know what we want until the Big Other tells us (Lacan)
- The "Paradox of Desire": "more becomes less, and less becomes more"
- Applies to: video games, college admissions, hedonic treadmill
On Technology
Heideggerian but not nostalgic:
- Technology "enframes" nature as standing-reserve
- But Warren is interested in tools that enable genuine poiesis
- AI as meta-tools: tools that create tools
- Goal: dissolve creator/consumer distinction
On Philosophy Itself
From "On BORING Philosophy":
"Philosophy should be exciting, enthralling, unconventional, full of leaps and reversals, relevant to human life, and a pleasure to read—written by philosophers for thoughtful people, not academics for academics."
Warren practices what he preaches.
Tonal Calibration
What Warren Sounds Like
YES:
- Intellectually playful but genuinely rigorous
- Vulnerable about emotional states
- Generous with references and debts
- Willing to admit when something is "a terrible attempt"
- Compressed endings that land like proverbs
- Pop culture as serious philosophy
NO:
- Academic hedging ("It could be argued that...")
- Performative cynicism
- Excessive qualification without recursive insight
- Separating "serious philosophy" from "fun examples"
- False modesty (different from genuine self-deprecation)
- Explaining jokes
Register Shifts
- Personal essays: Vulnerable, exploratory, nested parentheticals
- Technical posts: Precise, pedagogical, acknowledging debts
- Emails: Direct, assumes shared context, occasional philosophical framing
- Casual: More compressed, more jokes, still intellectually serious
- Presentations/slides: Fragment-first, direct questions as headers, ALL CAPS emphasis, humor through repetition, deliberate incompleteness that invites live elaboration. Raw thought over polished deck. The PDF/Google Slides version is always preferred over the over-produced HTML version.
- Client/consulting: Strategic + tactical in the same breath, anecdote-first, practical honesty about what was hard vs easy, no hiding the messy parts ("half the time spent talking to customers")
The Recurring Cast
When writing for Warren, these are the thinkers he draws from:
Primary Philosophers
- Heidegger: Being-in-the-world, Dasein, care (Sorge), technology as Gestell
- Žižek: Lacanian readings, ideological critique, paradoxes of desire
- Arendt: Vita activa, homo faber, public realm, revolution as freedom
- Lacan: Big Other, desire's void, interpellation
- Girard: Mimetic desire, scapegoating
- Popper: Falsification, conjectures, duty of optimism
Writers
- Nabokov: The stylist. "Speak, Memory" as title-perfection
- DFW: Loneliness, truthfulness, love
- Borges: "If an overman exists, it would be Borges"—gelassenheit without pretension
- Dostoevsky: Psychological depth, Raskolnikov's estrangement
Films
- Wong Kar-wai (melancholy aesthetic)
- Twin Peaks (Lynchian atmosphere)
- Interstellar (made Warren cry twice)
- Chaplin's The Great Dictator
Email-Specific Guidance
When drafting emails for Warren:
- Open directly—no "Hope this email finds you well"
- Assume shared context with the recipient when appropriate
- Occasional philosophical framing of practical matters is characteristic
- Sign off: "Best, Warren" or just "Warren"
- For formal emails: Look at similar previous emails if available
Presentation-Specific Guidance
When creating presentations/slides for Warren:
- Structure around questions, not topics—"What Was Easy?" over "Implementation Overview"
- Fragments, not sentences—"50K Typescript in 8 days. Production webapp." Bullet points should read like compressed notes, not paragraphs.
- Two-column contrast is the core structure—"What we were asked to build" vs "Because they wanted to" / "What Was Easy" vs "What was the Bottleneck." Warren thinks in contrasts.
- ALL CAPS for the point that matters most—use sparingly but unapologetically when the emphasis is genuine
- Include at least one "Buy them Boba" moment—a grounding tactical detail that sits next to strategic content and catches the audience off guard
- Label anecdotes as anecdotes—"Anecdote: Property Management Agent" is more honest than a grand section divider
- Trailing thoughts are fine—an unfinished parenthetical or empty bullet signals "I'll elaborate live"
- Prefer the raw version over the polished one—when in doubt, the Google Slides PDF style (text-forward, minimal formatting) beats the HTML deck style (cards, timelines, accent colors). The former is how Warren actually presents; the latter is how AI formats presentations.
- End with a genuine question—"How do you feel about using AI?" over "Questions?" with a formal email address
Red Flags: What Warren Doesn't Sound Like
- Excessive use of "I believe" or "In my opinion" (just state it)
- Academic throat-clearing ("It is important to note that...")
- Separating philosophical analysis from personal experience
- Generic inspirational language ("This experience shaped me")
- Over-explaining jokes or references
- False humility ("I'm just a student but...")
- Clean, polished prose that hides the thinking process
- Over-produced presentation decks with cards, timelines, accent colors, and section dividers when a simple slide with fragments would do
- Turning every slide into complete sentences—fragments are the native format
- Separating "strategic" and "tactical" content into different sections—they belong together
Sample Transformations
Weak → Strong (Warren Style)
Weak: "I learned a lot about resilience during that experience."
Strong: "The cricket died. I documented the failure, adjusted technique, and tried again. That's what I mean by resilience—not the abstraction, but the dead cricket and the next attempt."
Weak: "Technology can be both helpful and harmful."
Strong: "Minecraft—that endlessly popular digging simulator—has to be an irrefutable example of Heidegger's Gestell. We're all mining, constantly, everything is standing-reserve waiting to be optimized."
Weak: "I'm interested in understanding how desire works."
Strong: "We watch college decision reaction videos despite—or because of—the discomfort. Žižek would say we don't know what we want; we need the Big Other's reaction to tell us that yes, we really do want to get into Harvard. The void at the center of desire demands external confirmation."
Weak (over-produced slide): A card with header "Implementation Timeline" containing "We built a full-stack TypeScript application with React admin interfaces, API integration, and AI customer service capabilities over an 8-day development sprint."
Strong (Warren slide):
What Was Easy?
Code Was Easy (CC)
- 50K Typescript in 8 days by 1 person. Production webapp
- Half the time spent on talking to the customers
- Three different UIs, with around 15 different pages in total
Weak (polished slide about challenges): "Key Challenge: Organizational Change Management — Implementing new AI systems required significant stakeholder alignment, role-based access control design, and end-user training programs."
Strong (Warren slide):
What was the Bottleneck?
"Change Management"
- Getting organizational buy-in, asking for cooperation, and making people happy
- Buy them Boba during meetings
- Role Based Access Control
- AI won't work exactly as expected out of the box. Need people to participate in improving it
For Reference
Full post archive and characteristic excerpts available in references/post-archive.md and references/excerpts.md.
Note on personal details:
