The writing
Essays & explanations
Essays on AI, economics, epistemology, and personhood. Plain Markdown, readable by people and machines alike, and meant to be built on and argued with.
-
Final
Practical Metaphysics
Why metaphysics is practical: it steers where we search, even for those who dismiss it. Why an infinite reality meeting finite minds is a rational starting point, and the views I currently find attractive.
-
Final
Thinking About Thinking
A small failure at a climbing gym, and what it taught me about thinking. Fast and slow thinking, the galaxy-brain trap that catches trained minds, and why the best guard for a powerful mind is the belief that we're all fallible.
-
Final
More Better: Modeling and the Frame Problem
Every thought is a model, and every model leaves something out. Most failures come not from bad reasoning inside a model but from what never made it in: the frame problem. A story about my daughter's first car, clocks and clouds, and why being wrong is the light that leads to a life of discovery.
-
Final
A Return to Meaning
Modern science leans hard on formalism, and it works. But language came before mathematics for a reason. Why meaning, emergence, and abduction are coming back, not in place of formalism but after it.
-
Final
In Search of the Modeling Process
A search for the computational process behind model creation: how observations, purposes, values, and abstractions become reusable reasoning programs—and perhaps the primitive underlying creativity itself.
-
Final
The Moving Line
Work lies on one timeline: what AI does, what AI can do but humans still do, what only humans can do, and the unbounded frontier beyond. Three boundaries move across it at diffusion, research, and frontier rates. This essay models who gets repriced, who evaporates, and who captures what opens next.
-
Final
State of AI
Serious people read the same AI data and reach opposite forecasts because they use different lenses. Three lenses, why I think the information lens is right, and what it predicts: pipeline recursive self-improvement around 2027, continual learning, open-ended machine creativity, automated AGI, and work moving from Hands to Heads to Hearts.
-
Final
The Metrics That Contain Their Causes
Why Ray Kurzweil could forecast computing for decades while missing the specific inventions. Generalizes his method into the Success Compression Metric — a variable whose value certifies that many causal dependencies were already satisfied.
-
Final
Living Above the Models
A fallibilist's posture toward inherited authority. Three postures — Orthodox, Explorer, Unbounded — and a defense of the Explorer: use the map, test it, redraw it, and keep walking.
-
Final
Computation Conjecture
A bolder conjecture built on What Is a Computer?: computation reaches further than physicalism, explaining why a world's rules feel necessary and closed to the observers inside it, whether or not that world is fundamental.
-
Final
What Is a Computer?
A computer is any physical system that can run universal logic, not just a silicon machine. If our world could be running inside a larger one, the physics we see is local, and treating it as the bottom layer may be a mistake.
-
Final
Computer People
A synthesis of two years of research on AGI. LLMs already create knowledge inside a frame, and with humans in the loop we already have AGI. Automated AGI needs online learning and self-improvement, and AGI with a self is a person.
-
Final
Why Explanation Comes in Layers
Against reductionism: higher-level explanations are often the only forms in which reality becomes intelligible to finite minds. Compression and connectedness are why the explanatory hierarchy cannot be collapsed.
-
Final
Structural Convergence Thesis
What kinds of relationships let minds keep existing? I test the orthogonality thesis against the limits real minds face and argue that persistent minds are pushed toward a middle ground between conflict and cooperation. AI safety depends on maturation, not just control.
-
Final
Metaprogramming Framework To Classify Personhood
What must a system be able to do with information to become someone rather than something? A person retains information about itself and can reach its own reasoning, on any substrate; above that threshold, persons differ in maturity, not kind.
-
Final
Current AI Causes Societal Phase Change
Why AI is a phase change, not just another point on a continuum. Three questions people keep mixing up (speed, granularity, and whether the rules change), and the map-territory trap that lets people hide from what's already happening.
-
Final
Economics in the Intelligence Age
A layered model of economics, built from the ground up: scarcity, prices, externalities, public goods, political power, and what AI changes about each.
-
Final
Why Hypotheticals Matter
Hypotheticals can feel like a dodge. A conversation about weight loss shows how they strip away today's noise so we can see the causes underneath.
-
Final
Technohumanism
Why abundance so often feels bad. Technology turns scarcity into abundance, abundance puts our environment out of step with our biology, and the lasting fix points toward transhumanism.
-
Final
Utility of Truth
Why minds resist change. Evolution shaped us to track what works, not what's true, and that tells us how to plant seeds that can grow into changed minds.
-
Final
Cyclic Rationality
Prediction only works on possibilities we've already imagined. A method for recovering imagination before verification: dream, then test.
-
Final
A Primer on Logic
A letter to my children on reasoning well. Why truth is hard to see, the road from reality to words, the kinds of reasoning, and the character of a rational mind.