Work or Play? Ludic Feedback Loops

In his substack post today, Venkatesh Rao wrote about reading and writing in the age of LLMs as playing and making toys respectively. In one part he writes about how the dopamine feedback loop from writing drove his switch from engineering to writing. For him, writing has ludic, play-like, qualities.

I have made almost all my “career” decisions as a function of play. I originally started off with a deep love of plants, how to grow them and their impact on the world. I was convinced I was going to have a lot of fun. I did have some. My wonderful undergrad professor literally hand held me through my first experiments growing tobacco plants from seeds. But that was about it. My next experiment was with woody plants and growing the seeds alone took 6 months, and by the end I had 4 measly leaves to experiment with. I quickly switched to cell biology.

This one went a bit better and I stayed with the medium through PhD. Although I was having sufficient aha moments, I knew in the first year that it was still a bit slow. What rescued me was my refusal to do manual analysis. I loved biology but I refused to sit and do analysis manually. Luckily, I had picked up sufficient programming skills.

I could reasonably automate, the analysis workflow. It was difficult at first but the error messages came at the rate I needed them to. I found new errors viscerally rewarding, it was now in game territory. The analysis still held meaning, it wasn’t for some random A/B testing or some Leet code thing. No, this mattered.

Machine learning, deep learning, LLMs, and their applications in bio continue to enchant me. I can explore even more with the same effort and time. I interact with biology at the rate of dopamine feedback I need. I have found my ludic frequency.