Not Losing the Thought

Welcome! This blog is largely a solution to a pet peeve of mine: recalling a day-old shower thought that feels substantive when conceived, but escapes my grasp as I struggle to situate myself in the same mental workspace where the idea made sense.

Attempting to put words to these thoughts as they arise will yield one of two outcomes. Either I manage to crystallize an idea I’m proud of, or I see the mirage for what it is, and I don’t have to waste more time trying to resuscitate something without bite. Sounds like a win-win. At the very least, my writing will improve.

So, what will I write about?

• A consistent and coherent philosophy. Kant was the last great philosopher brave enough to advance a theory of everything: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind, language, logic, math, science, and politics. More territory means more places to be wrong. But it didn’t take a whole lot of physics to explain both fusion in the Sun and transistors on a chip, and I think a philosophical theory of everything that is unified around a few central principles is within our grasp. I’m going to take a stab at that here.
• AI capabilities and alignment research. What timing to be alive during the takeoff. There’s a Doomsday argument waiting to be formulated here. On the capabilities side, I’m interested in self-play RL, byte-level tokenization, architectural primitives to replace attention, hierarchical JEPA, and looped / recurrent transformers. On the alignment side, I’m interested in weak-to-strong generalization + knowledge distillation, meta-models of LLM activations, RSA/CCA.
• Economic + political forecasts and concerns. I’m concerned about malicious AI use in cyber and bioweapons, a US-China race to the bottom, institutional fragility, value lock-in, and coordination failures that outpace our foresight.
• Useful framings of the world. More didactic than exploratory. I hope to write about incentives and understanding agentic interactions through the intentional stance. Selection bias and how to extrapolate to the view from nowhere. Bifurcation theory and how phase transitions show up in all kinds of systems you thought were linear.
• A Tyler Cowen-esque weekly reading list.