michael-dean-k/

Is the Doomsday clock to be trusted? Or is that another form of doomerism? “The 2025 Clock time signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness.” We’re in an interesting boy-cried-wolf environment. There’s so many unwarranted apocalyptic vibes around, that “doomerism” is seen as an optional bad trip, and so that might desensitize people from responding at the point when we get close to actually realizing the doom.

Imagine an essay collection that masterfully rendered 2023 in peak essay form? Compositionally, it fuses memoir and journalist and creative writing, but each essay is anchored in something that is anchored to the year. It has timely topics that tap into timeless themes.

So it might include: our first year with ChatGPT, the 10/7 Gaza attacks on Israel, the Burning Man weather disaster, Barbenheimer, the death of Henry Kissinger, the Brittney Spears / Pope memoirs, the evolution from Twitter to X, the Rome memes, the Titan submersible explosion, the Hollywood writer’s strike, the Hawaiian fires, the collapse of Silicon Valley banks, the Florida book bans, etc.

These are not articles. They have a human at the center, and the current event becomes a microcosm to understand something perennial. It is not reportage, but flash memoirs from the cultural frontline.

[Work smart, not hard] vs. [Work smart and hard] vs. [Work smart and hard for long hours or someone will beat you]. I believe in hard work, but I also think there’s more leverage in working smart. 8 hours a day in the exact right direction will beat 15 hours a day in a direction that’s off by 1 degree a day.

Here's what AI says about the moral decay of the Roaring Twenties:

“The main moral decays of the “Roaring Twenties” included the widespread disregard for Prohibition laws, leading to a rise in organized crime, a loosening of sexual mores with the “flapper” culture, a growing emphasis on consumerism and materialism, and a perceived decline in traditional values like hard work and family stability, often seen as a clash between urban and rural morals, with the cities being viewed as more decadent.”

I’d guess this era was highly formative of the culture that emerged in Post WWII. To bring this into Strauss-Howe theory, similar to how the spiritual revolution phase II comes to maturity in IV, the decay in IV becomes the foundation of the next phase I.

When people talk about techno-accelerationism, they’re often talking about GDP or Moore’s law, but there’s barely consideration in the specific social fabric that might emerge. I also don’t think we have a theory of collective virtue formation in an open market.

Consciousness emerges from matter, and then consciousness reshapes matter, and yet also, the original matter that formed our consciousness was actually shaped by a lower order of consciousness. Maybe consciousness and matter are in a kind of recursive loop where they each use each other to escalate to higher levels. Could this be a both-are-true contradiction?

When trying to block a field goal, why doesn’t the defensive team launch each other into the air like cheerleaders? If football players are too heavy to launch, why not hire male cheerleaders that serve as lightweight, durable projectiles?

"This is a great thought experiment. Let's actually run the numbers. A typical field goal is kicked at ~70 mph (~103 ft/s) at roughly a 40° launch angle from 7 yards behind the line. So at the LOS: Horizontal velocity: 103 × cos(40°) ≈ 79 ft/s; Time to reach LOS (21 ft): 21 ÷ 79 ≈ 0.27 seconds; Ball height at LOS: 66 × 0.27 − ½(32.2)(0.27²) ≈ ~16 feet. Elite basket tosses launch flyers about 18–20 feet (measured at the feet). A 5'6" flyer with arms extended gets their hands to roughly 23–25 feet. That clears the ball's 16-foot crossing height with room to spare. So yes, it works geometrically — a launched cheerleader absolutely reaches the ball. The height math checks out convincingly. The real problems: (1) Timing is brutal. Snap-to-kick is ~1.3 seconds. A basket toss dip-and-launch takes ~1.5 seconds and the flyer peaks ~1 second after release. You'd need to start loading before the snap and guess correctly. Miss the timing by 0.3 seconds and your human projectile is either not airborne yet or already falling. (2) Precision is microscopic. The ball crosses through roughly a 1-foot window at 79 ft/s. The flyer has essentially zero horizontal steering once airborne. (3) And the fatal flaw: it's explicitly illegal. NFL Rule 12, Section 1, Article 5 — no player may use a teammate as leverage to gain additional height to block a kick. The league specifically anticipated creative boosting schemes. 15-yard penalty. So the physics actually supports the concept — the math is surprisingly favorable. The NFL rules committee just got there first."

The main argument in Joyas Voladoras is “to live fully is to expose yourself to loss/pain.”

There are a few metaphors to support this argument:

• Hummingbirds (living intensely = more heart attacks)
• Whales (biggest hearts, susceptible to loneliness)
• Human examples (opening yourself to love = vulnerability to pain)

It’s a poetic exploration of a single POV, but it doesn’t get into the counter-angles. It uses the tortoise as a counter-point in one example, but dismisses it immediately. It could have covered:

• Living fully doesn’t have to bring pain (a Buddhist perspective)
• It’s better to live cautiously and protect yourself (pragmatism)
• Intensity isn’t worth the cost (conservativism).

Maybe this is a “lyrical essay” and it doesn’t aim to advance our thinking. But something that is an “essay” should be dialectic. It writes through dialectic tensions.

Elon did the Hail Hitler salute. There are so many interpretations, but here’s a middle-ground take: Maybe when a powerful leader is addressing a crowd, it’s almost an archetypal, symbolic gesture to touch your chest and then point it out, to the sky, imagining it like some projectile that extends to the back of the crowd. I don’t know anything about how this came to be associated with Hitler. Perhaps Elon didn’t do this consciously, and perhaps he’s not autistic, but he’s swimming in the same power dynamics that Hitler was. I think that might even be scarier. It’s not a conscious allusion to Hitler, but worse, he independently derived the same gesture.

"Blockchain bunkers in the psychotic AI swamp of the open Internet”

Death of the open Internet (4 phases)

1. slop, ambiguity, more confusion
2. more than 50% is fake; trust flip
3. disturbing distortions (schemes, attacks)
4. a victim, phished, money, humiliated

This could lead people deplatforming themselves. It could be dangerous to have any Internet presence (text, video, social graph). The open Internet could turn into that unsafe darkweb we feared in the 90s. When infinite is leveraged, all the good doesn’t matter, because evil also scales. And so a few bad imaginations without guardrails creates a psychotic social virus. This is already starting to happen (ie: those two kids who generated porn of all the girls in the school). Imagine Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all getting destroyed.

The solution here is identity verification. We already have KYC (know your customer) for financial institutions, and the same might happen for media. There might be new social media sites where you can only post if you’re verified as a human. I think this is more defensive than “watermarks.” If there’s a pollution leak, it’ll be linked back to you and you’ll be banned. So this idea of needing a government ID to use the Internet might actually be necessary. The question is, can we do this without being dystopian/totalitarian? Perhaps the only way to execute this and protect privacy is to use a blockchain. It would create a method to verify citizenship without their details being exposed.

I discovered today that I could write a journal entry that is intentionally illegible to my future self. I’m writing letters, but blending them so loosely that it would be undecipherable to anybody. This means I can write fast and say whatever I want, and nobody will be able to return to this, which opens up a certain kind of confessional/abstract valve. It’s a way to use “writing as thinking” but encrypted in a way so the shadow can come out.

After ordering my chicken roll I felt the impulse to grab my phone and process my email. Instead I let myself look around, bored. I noticed ornate lamps, an old pizzaman statue, the imagined lives of the two disinterested employees, and the multiple silos of spices in glass shakers. Each thing compounded into the next with associations and collisions of meaning, triggering something unsayable that you might call “a feeling.” (Is this what they’re referring to in that Black Eyed Peas song?) This only takes 10 seconds. It feels like I have access to awe-on-command, but often I’m just running background scripts. There’s a slowness and an intention required to see things outside of your preconceived schemas—to bypass your shortcuts of sight, and instead behold all things through twin lenses: of what the thing actually is, and what it might mean. And perhaps when you tap into that flash of mysticism, there’s an added meta-excitement, that you are—for just a moment—outside of yours illusions and ego games, a living being lost in a perceptual jungle-puzzle.

Politics prevents REM work. If you’re tuned into politics throughout day, it changes the depth of your flows. It’s like having a bad cough that prevents you from getting a good sleep. With a clear mind, you can sink into your project for hours and achieve deep levels of concentration. So even if you only read politics as 5 minute breaks throughout your day, 12 times, the difference is 8 hours of deep work for 8 hours of work with running open loops.

A "stabilizing fiction" is when the controller tells a lie to controlled to maintain order and spirit. Think about XMAS as a stabilizing fiction between parents and kids. Think about democracy as a stabilizing fiction between rulers and the ruled.

The inauguration is ominous, Among American flutes and tubas, Overdubbed with sportscasters, A Sgt. Pepper’s collage of faces, Clinton, Cook, Bezos, Musk, All the world’s wealth, All the power, An ark of 500, And towering tyrant Baron, Surrounded by portraits, Grown, scared children, Like us,

But of leaders leading the chasm’s cross, Who here are the truly kind? And which have killed? You wouldn’t know, If you witnessed Rome, In high-resolution, In reflective eyes of Elon, Ghosts of founding fathers hover the rotunda, Looking down, like us, the tele-spectators, On soap operas of our civic machine, $MELANIA is here, $1.5 billion, Her memoir ghostwritten, And Christopher croons, As the sitting Skeleton marches through, The cryptic colonnade that holds DC,

Afront the hillbilly with sharp tongue, Cameras zoom: wigged men with pens, Documents that failed us, Stretched to shreds with mutations of, Alien culture and titanic force, But all the old books, The furling rules and conventions, Won’t help where we’re going, There are no acolytes on this American path,

“The President elect Donald J. Trump,” He missed the kiss on his wife’s cheek by an inch, The pleasantries can’t hide the tension, I imagine Jill Biden pulling a pistol, I imagine these petty, ancient quarrels will soon be pale, For the valley is pregnant not with fruits, But secret, ripening, superintelligence, The speaker now quotes Bob Dylan, She speaks at 1,000 bits per second, Like an ant, Except ants can’t lie,

The people run our country? It’s the troops who bomb and rig elections? Since when has democracy transcended its dress? And now we pray, And draw comparisons to biblical heroes, As they swear in JD Vance With smiling wife, And daughter sucking thumb, I imagine a horrible assassination, Of trump’s head exploding, From some CIA sniper, On an off-camera balcony,

Cannons fire when it becomes official, Marchers chant hallelujahs, The dawn of the Golden Age of America, Sunlight is pouring over the entire world, Momentum will annihilate the shadows, God bends bullets to save the patriot, Self-declared: “Liberation day,” “The most consequential day in American history,” “A revolution of common sense,” “The spirit of the next great frontier is written in our souls.”

Have we misdefined the word "transgression"? If progress is walking forward and regression is walking backward, then transgression means something like “beyond walking.” A transgression is not a sin, but it’s to walk in a direction that is not aligned with our shared notions of progress. It escapes the spectrum. Maybe that’s a meander, maybe that brings us to hell, or maybe that brings us to our destiny. And isn’t so much high-level success about breaking out of local maxim to find a better current to follow? Isn’t genius about hitting the mark that’s out of view? A transgression is something that escapes black and white morality.

Susan Sontag:

“An essay is not an article, not a meditation, not a book review, not a memoir, not a disquisition, not a diatribe, not a shaggy dog story, not a monologue, not a travel narrative, not a suite of aphorisms, not an elegy, not a piece of reportage—No, an essay can be any or several of the above.”

LLMs function like a camera: the prompt shoots vectors across a map, pulls in numbers/weights, and from there, it can generate one word at a time based on that snapshot. Superintelligence could come from turning that image into a video. For every sentence (or even every token), it can apply a meta-lens to question what it’s just produced and what it wants to do; it can continuously (a) shoot new vectors into the map, and (b) transform the map itself.

Futurism out towards 2025 is one of two extremes: post-scarce utopia, or, within 5 days an ASI creates nanobot swarms that make humanity extinct. Instead, I want to imagine a future where, 1) we survive, 2) things are generally good, 3) there are social, cultural, psychological tensions (as we’ve always had, but elevated). Some general meta-rules of forecasting.

1. Flashpoints: Local flashpoints will usher in global preparation and avoidance, ie: small scale disasters will lead to regulations and counter-measures.
2. Escalating p(doom): each year, we become more of our potential for self-extermination, and that triggers reactions & protections.
3. Temporary asymmetries: there will be 3-10 year gaps where people can access the future if they put in time, skill, or resources. So for examples, maybe we eventually all have anti-aging drugs, but there might be a temporary gap where only the rich can access it.
4. Adaptation: we can barely conceive how weird 10 years into the future might look like (consider Tim Urban’s die-progress-units). But from 2036, 2035 will be completely normal, if not even slightly boring and dated.
5. Fractures: for every new trend, there will be counter-forces. The stronger that trend, the more likely the reaction. This creates schisms across many dimensions.
6. Paradoxes: new technology enables new governing orders of a complexity that seems paradoxical to our current time. Ie: In order for us to have a functioning internet, we need government IDs to access it, but it’s all on a blockchain, so we have mix of complete surveillance and pseudonymous privacy (more privacy than today).

Prophets are defined by their vision; Heroes are defined by their effort; Heralds are defined by their impact;

You don’t have to be “the” chosen prophet, but you can still have a vision on how to align humanity towards progress. I think I’m more prophetic than heroic (more fearless in my vision-making than in my action-taking), and it’s probably not a good idea to think heraldic (to become too concerned with outcomes).

Marketing emails from software comes across to me like polite begging. The desperation is veiled. They speak in modern idioms, wishing my family well while using exclamation points. Email broadcasting is already unnatural, and so instead of pretending to masses with the pleasantries of a 1:1 coffee date, have the courage to be yourself.

And isn’t “being yourself,” the thing a company can’t be? It’s inherently not a self, but a conglomerate. Who is speaking? Who is “team”? A more honest way is to “share the process,” to give people the glimpse of what it’s like in a company. But still, I think there’s something corrupting about letting a market dictate your decisions.

Of course, that’s what venture requires. But we’re entering a paradigm where software can be so easily made, that all of our ratios can flip. Someone can make tools for themself. If I’m making a tool for myself, I can not only show you the process of making tool, but the things my tool makes. That’s the ultimate proof. I don’t want to just share screenshots of text-editor features and shill you benefits; I just want to share the fruits.

If the founder isn’t actively engaged in the product, then why should we believe them? And so, that might be how to make a niche products long-term sustainable. Serve yourself, and let the small selection of overlapping others have access to it.

On conceptual vs. syntactical ambiguity: it’s okay or a concept to have multiple interpretations (that’s adds layers of meaning), but rarely do you want your syntax to be ambiguous (not sure of what the writer means because of clumsy syntax). The best case is: “I know what you mean, but I’m temporarily unsure of the implications.”

As I'm working on some Essay Architecture wiki pages, I’ve caught myself saying ‘this causes reader’s trance’ in a few different spots. I used to think it needed to have a single source, but now my latest thinking is it’s a combination of these three:

• Tension (story/subtext): which is about having something slightly in the future that drives you forward. This is like a personal sense of stakes/curiosity where you’re invested in what happens. (ethos)

• Flow: which is about the actual smoothness of your syntax. It’s the ability to a complex soup of ideas and create a tight linear rail where the reader can process a lot without friction. (Even if you build tension, the trance is broken if it’s hard to wade through paragraphs. (logos).

• Sight/Sound: When your prose is laced with imagery & sonic devices (rhythm, rhyme, repetition), it hits us in our two primary senses. I feel like part of reader’s trance is when you can actually see/hear/feel it (it’s more like a hallucination than something abstract).

So together: tension moves you forward, flow keeps you moving, and sight/sound activates the imagination as you’re in motion. (And side note: I think paragraph transitions are the most likely places where reader’s trance gets broken; it’s like dropping the baton in a relay race).

Just did some quick math on it.. Yesterday I spent 4-5 hours writing 1,700 words. Really happy with how it came out so far. If AI did this kind of recursion (see below), where after every sentence it reviewed and rewrote all of its work, it would write 100,000 words over 45 minutes and cost $11.25. (To produce a polished 1,700 words).

And then if you throw the Essay Architecture prompt logic into it (120 prompts per every recursion lol). It’s an additional $32.40 … Still… that’s $43.65 for 45 minutes of work. Relatively affordable.

FWIW, to clarify my stance. I still believe in the intrinsic reward of human writing. Simultaneously, I am interested in a “Montaigne in a vat” experiment (more of a digital art project than a commercial tool).

I wonder if AI sucks at writing, not because our LLMs aren’t big enough or trained enough, but because engineers don’t actually understand what writing is. Even someone who has spent 1,000s of hours writing prose will still have difficulty telling you how it’s done. It’s not a logical process you can understand or recreate. Paragraphs come together, accidentally, often without method. Every person is different, and every essay is different; maybe that’s because the Idea is what’s really in control, and the writer is merely the vessel, deploying all its varied skills, unconsciously, to take form.

While I’m very confident in how to analyze finished writing, I have no system for producing it. But as I was making coffee this morning, something clicked. While there is definitely a high degree of randomness and unpredictability, there’s still a “mode” of writing that can be emulated, and it’s very different from how our chatbots work.

Human writers pause, back track, delete, and redefine their goal. Every sentence is a reflection point, where they consciously and unconsciously make decisions. Of the 100s of possible lenses, they might be consciously beholding 3, and have another 15 unconsciously operating.

A great writer is nothing but a master of recursion. They understand, at any given instance, which decision lenses need to turn on and off. Even a writer with no plan, no goal, can produce something great in a session if they’re good at recursion.

AI doesn’t do this. It (1) thinks really hard for one second to understand the assignment (by mapping what you’re asking it onto everything it’s ever seen, using vector calculus), and then (2) barrels forward at an unrelenting pace, making decisions that are dimensionally narrow—one letter at a time.

The innovations of o1, o2, o3, o4 are weird solutions, they’re saying: instead of letting it think for 1 second, let’s let it think for 10 or 100 seconds or more. Regardless of how much it can cram, it still moves forward like a handless idiot with no ability for recursion.

What if we could build a sophisticated writer with GPT-4, simply by building a writing app that re-prompts itself after every sentence? It would write one sentence, re-read from the top and scan all 81 patterns, re-configure its goals, and then decide to add, edit, delete, or start over. It would be expensive and take as long as a human (1 hour, not 1 minute), but it might be great.

In Latin, "materia" means the usable wood of a tree. This maps to the idea that a writer’s Material is not the Experience/Source itself (the full, standing tree), but the lumber that’s produced from it.

If you think LLMs suck at coding, you might have miscalibrated expectations. AI coding is really more of a two-way spatial language puzzle than a master-slave relationship. Yelling at it in ALL CAPS will not give you the right answer. Some thoughts:

1. It will always follow your commands, and so before you let it loose on your code, you should ask it to summarize its goal and to ask you follow-up question to clarify implementation.

2. Implementing even a basic feature is often a chain of 5-10 simpler events. The more ambitious the feature, the more likely it is to mess up. It will attempt any scope you give it, from layups to Hail Marys. It’s best to have it understand the larger feature, but to implement in micro steps.

3. AI will make mistakes if the context provided isn’t clear. Do you give it no reference, 1 file, all files, and handful of files? Depending on the situation, the answer is always different.

4. Even as AI gets better at coding, humans will benefit from understanding the larger architecture of their code base.

5. Take responsibility. When it gives you wrong code, it’s not because the LLM sucks, it’s because you haven’t given it the right directions. You need patience, the ability to troubleshoot and problem solve.

Considering it’s quite an active process, why do it? If you’re a code ninja, then you probably shouldn’t. If you’re not completely fluent, it makes sense. There’s a tradeoff, you get quick results, but you also lose the reps to build fluency. Is the ability to quickly write a file of code from scratch w/o AI important?

I think code has two parts to it: syntax and structure. I believe structure is the more valuable thing to learn (ie: how does a full-stack operate?). As LLMs get better, the syntax will be more accurate, enabling more people to build apps, but only if they understand the structure of the app (I think it’s harder for LLMs to grasp structure, especially as codebases get more complex).

What makes AI coding different from AI writing? In writing, the syntax IS the experience, so it’s not something you want to automate.

Traits have finer nuances. Someone can’t just be “high in openness.” There’s a massive range in contexts, and they might be incredibly open in some (abstract thinking) and quite reserved in others (parties with strangers). I do think that openness in general breeds the conditions for someone to suggest: why can’t I be open in this context too? It’s equally critical to ask: where should I not be open? (If you’re completely open, your mind falls out.)

Poetry and logging have a lot of similar ideas. When I’m logging, I’m on my phone, and it’s harder to write prose, and so I’m often just writing a free-association stream of words, images, and reference phrases, without really connecting them through syntax. It’s not about crafting legible prose, but generating a word cloud for my future self. The idea is, from this cloud, you have the material to weave into a different format, whether prose or poetry.

I think there’s value in writing in full sentences at the point of thought (it helps make prose automatic), but I also think there’s a frontier to explore in writing pages of gook.

From all cosmologies, know thy quest; From stagnant phenomes, slant through fresh; Of mechanical order, keep it light; Of creative angles, enter right; On abstract virtues, live this hour; Upon third doors, do not cower; In voids of nothing, wait and perch; In cities of noise, build a church.

We should start to think of social media regulation like we think about drug regulation. It would be insane to ban or legalize all drugs. Instead, we measure specific properties, understand the LD-50, and make case-by-case recommendations and rubrics. Social media is tremendously new, and it’s not surprising we haven’t gotten this right (consider how Victorian times used opium to treat a cough).

I think what we need for social media is:

1. Age verifications.
2. Specifications for algorithms / features / interfaces.
3. Proper gating.

I think it’s wrong to say that anyone under 16 shouldn’t use social media as a whole. I’d let a 9-year use Facebook circa 2005 (pre-feed), but I wouldn’t want a 20-year old using Instagram today (vertical-swipe predatory algorithms).

If Feeds and Likes create a digital popularity app that fuels the already intense middle school experience, then maybe kids should have a version of social media with different functionality.

I've been reading through modern writing classics, and I realize that essays aren’t a great way to teach essay writing. Take the book Draft No. 4 by John McPhee. I sense that, naturally, writers care more about their writing than teaching. These craft essays take on the form of short memoirs with beautiful literary voice, but the theory is vague, peppered in, without nuance, and dislocated from related concepts.

I've caught myself and others with the following logic around AI use cases: “Sure, it can do X, but sucks at Y, and will never do Z.” Then a new update comes and it can do Y a bit better and Z looks within range, and you get nauseous and defensive. Instead, you should assume that it won’t just do Z, but Z to a degree beyond your imagination.

64 rare words from a single Kathleen Alcott essay: vertiginous, alight, glistering, totemic, succored, beatific, menace, pestilence, dictaphones, hatboxes, ossifying, operatic, repudiate, monomaniacal, haughtily, vain, balaclavas, moxibusion, ministered, lancing, auricular, constituent, disavowal, repertory, ghoul, transfigure, Dalmatian, imperious, polyphonic, winklepickers, chenille, revanchism, blush, mantel, cherub, Meisner technique, vainglorious, tidily, sorry end, waspy, sequins, garrulous, irredentism, tines, contiguous, relishing, skein, adipose, suppurating, banality, sniping, blithe, casuist, pirouette, befouled, comity, littoral, susurrus, copses, bawled, meager, rejoinder, dolorous, rufous.

On the year's opening day, I came across mental illness twice on route to get coffee.

The first was someone in the cafe who was talking out loudly about a range of issues (including both her wide range of scientific research, and, suing Amanda Bynes); she’d talk into her phone, AI would respond, and she’d immediately cut it off into the next step of the conspiracy.

The second was an elderly woman, on a walker being guided, and she started waving to me like the Queen of England as I walked by, singing, “happy new year to you, happy new year to you, happy new year to you, happy new year to you” to the melody of the Happy Birthday song. Then she changed tone, almost like Sméagol to Gollum, and said, “don’t you fucking put that on Facebook.” I assured her I wouldn’t.

Neither of these things are that atypical in the privacy of your own mind (at least in mine—I think weirder things than suing Amanda Bynes, and will also loop absurd jingles and make abrupt persona switches), it’s just surprising when a stranger breaks a convention of normalcy in public. And what’s wrong with that? “Illness” is actually a terrible catch-all word for divergence, deviation, eccentricity. Of course, extreme mental variation can lead to illness (suffering), but it’s an assumption.