interesting perspective but there’s nothing high-agency about choosing hard mode for its own sake you move to nyc/london cuz you understand your environment is leverage you don’t prove agency by refusing leverage

a world where everyone has a perfectly rational, tireless optimizer working on their behalf is much more adversarial than people realize. a lot of our existing infrastructure will not survive this transition.

After this weekend, this is roughly how I expect a lot of my future non-implementation work to look. 1. Start with a frontier model and use it to really open up the problem. 2. Make those explanations explicit hypotheses. Then work out what would actually distinguish them. If two hypotheses imply the same observations, they are not yet useful. 3. Take those discriminating questions and run them against the raw evidence with a probabilistic semantic model like Jev. 4. Keep the result as state rather than turning it straight back into prose. 5. Look at what is still unresolved and ask which missing observation would do the most to separate the remaining hypotheses. The ontology underneath this is a graph. You have hypotheses, evidence, etc etc. interlinked. they store both relations and probabilities. Technically, though, if the graph contains all the information needed for the next update, then you can define the graph itself as the state and make the update process Markovian. This really isn't anything new to be fair. Hypothesis generation is basically an abductive problem and choosing the next observation is Bayesian experimental design. The key thing here is looking a set of tools so that they don't dogfood themselves, i.e. judging their own homework in the same transcript, which tends to bork the quality of reasoning. Very bullish on my future extended mind.

there has never been a greater need for a better philosophy than whatever half-baked garbage this is specifically, it needs to coherently articulate exactly why human lives >> insect lives without weakening the fact that human lives are also >>> AI "lives"

my game was eve online. learned how to make simple trading scripts back in middle school, so I could fund more PLEX for my alts, but generally agree with the thesis. hence why I wrote this

A kid who knows how to raid in WoW is unironically a better hire than 99% of non gamers. They develop team skills, coordination, leadership, how to master the respect of 40 people, how to share loot, maintaining a raid schedule, showing up on time, clear direct communication, how to get along with unique personalities, creating and executing on strategies, failing and trying again (perseverance), delayed gratification, etc. Invaluable skills are developed during raiding that are transferrable to the real world.

Not Founder-Philosopher But a Forward Deployed Philosopher (FDP) I said it was going to happen. Made @FortuneMagazine say it too. Even if they got my last name wrong.

Introducing Statebook: Markets for All States of the World. For the past few months, I’ve been exploring a simple market-design question: What becomes possible if we start with the exposure someone needs, rather than the contract an exchange happens to list? This question is becoming increasingly relevant as @HyperliquidX, @Kalshi, @Polymarket, and vertically specialized exchanges such as @Architect_Fi expand the universe of tradable underliers, and the boundaries between perpetuals, options, and event contracts begin to blur. My answer: structured-product heaven. The working paper and interactive research interface are below. Thank you to @0xsmac, @0xfishylosopher, and Chris Saunders for reviewing and contributing to the initial draft.