Visual Manifesto

The World is Nifty

Systematized Flailing

History is a story of leverage (technology) and backpropagation (adaptation). People figure out how to do stuff that gives them greater control.

Leverage

Backprop

The World Has Opinionated Defaults

Hardness

Related to commitment devices and coordination. Ways weakness is strength. - If you don’t know a secret, you can’t give it up; information can be a liability (consider torture on an individual level and data on a corporate level) - Steering wheel chicken - Game theory of, what’s it called, automatic retaliation

Institutions

Autonomous Agents

Physical Objects

Beauty

Tricksters, irreverence, surrealism, nonviolent protest

MacGyvers, bricolage, scrappy underdogs, plucky orphans, heads-up baseball, code golf

Honor, courage, daring, chutzpah

Elegance

Haskell, plaintiveness, Chief Keef

Personal Development

• Agency
• The posterior chain

I’m interested in adaptive forms of hardness: - cryptography - decentralized systems - incentive and mechanism design - game theory - formal verification - hardware - new healthcare systems - media

And the way intelligence happens in the first place, on various scales and various substrates: - interpretability - lindy - symbolic reasoning vs evolution/adaptation - nature vs nurture; pretraining vs fine-tuning - how people can learn better - consciousness (the easy problem) and unconsciousness

I think I’m supposed to be interested in cybernetics, but I still don’t really understand what it is.