Aneesh Sathe

Tag: philosophy

  • Four Early-Modern Tempers for a World That Can Summon Itself

    This is a partial synthesis of the books read through 2025 in the Contraptions Book Club.

    We live in a moment when the whole of human culture has become strangely available, no longer just an archive but something that behaves like a responding presence. A sentence typed into a search bar or messaging window returns citations and, more strikingly, continuations: pastiche, commentary, new variations of ideas that never existed until the instant we requested them. The canon now behaves more like a voice than a library. It is easy to treat this as convenience, yet summoning culture alters our relation to meaning in ways we are only beginning to see. The question is no longer whether we can find the relevant text, but what it means to think in a world that can generate its own echoes.

    This instability has precedents in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Print multiplied texts; voyages multiplied worlds; the Reformation multiplied authorities. Four writers—Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, Giordano Bruno, and Ibn Khaldun—stood at different corners of that era’s turbulence. Read from a certain angle, they reveal four temperaments that recur whenever the world grows larger and more articulate than before. They capture four ways of holding meaning in a world where frames widen and boundaries blur.

    Their temperaments arose under the tension of two kinds of pressures. One pressure concerns frame: how much of the world a thinker attempts to hold in view. Another concerns form: how rigidly one tries to shape or preserve meaning in the face of flux. The tension between narrow and wide frames, between hard and soft forms, is a recurring feature of intellectual upheaval. It is with us again.

    Northeaster (1895) by Winslow Homer. Original from The MET museum.

    Thomas More and the dream of designed simplicity

    When More wrote Utopia, he was answering a world that felt newly disordered: economic enclosure, fracturing religion, unfamiliar continents, and the early tremors of what we now call modernity. His response was to shrink the frame to a bounded island and then remake that island according to simple, intelligible rules. Clothes are standardized; work is scheduled; houses interchangeable. Property, that generator of complexity, is abolished.

    This gesture—the compression of a vast, unruly world into a legible miniature—reflects a deep conviction that the good life can be engineered by eliminating what does not fit the plan. Yet much of what makes human life livable emerges not from design but from the unplanned: the pleasure of choosing one’s clothes, improvising a routine, rearranging a room, wandering through a market whose wares no one fully controls. These small freedoms, these ambient textures, carry a kind of happiness that explicit blueprints rarely acknowledge. More’s island, for all its order, feels airless because it denies the subtle satisfactions of emergence.

    We still see this impulse today, whenever we imagine that meaning will return if only we can simplify the world enough—reduce choices, curtail variation, enforce legibility. It is a refusal to accept that complexity is a problem to be solved only up to a point, beyond which it becomes the medium of human flourishing.

    Montaigne and the work of making knowledge one’s own

    Montaigne faced the same expansion of texts and reports, but his answer was almost the inverse of More’s. In his Essays, he turned the proliferating world into material for a sustained inquiry into a single life—his own. He narrowed the frame even further—not to an island but to a single life—and then allowed that life’s boundaries to loosen. His essays are records of a mind being changed by what it reads and observes. They are porous documents, absorbing classical quotations, passing impressions, and the texture of his shifting moods.

    He described this process with the image of bees making honey: they gather from thyme and marjoram, but the result is neither; the ingredients have been transformed.  Mere access to texts is not enough. The material must be digested until it becomes inseparable from the person who has absorbed it. 

    This is a temperament well suited to a world in which culture can speak back in any tone we request. The ease of access makes superficial familiarity almost effortless; the difficulty lies in allowing the material to ferment into something one can honestly call one’s own. Montaigne’s form is soft, because he does not impose a system on the world or on himself. He lets contradictions remain. His essays show what inward honesty looks like when the outer world has grown noisy.

    Bruno: infinite worlds, unreliable memory

    If Montaigne compresses the world into a single consciousness, Bruno explodes it. In works such as On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, he offered a speculative cosmology that pushed beyond the scientific imagination of his time. His universe is infinite, populated by innumerable worlds, animated by a universal divinity. These were not scientific inferences—they were imaginative leaps, metaphysical provocations in a period when the cosmological picture was coming loose.

    Bruno’s response to the widened cosmos led him to enlarge the frame until it became boundless. Boundaries, for him, were treated as provisional, always liable to be surpassed. He was fascinated by memory—its limits, its artifices, its potential for augmentation. His elaborate mnemonic wheels were attempts to externalize thinking, to allow a mind to move through more space than it could otherwise hold.

    There is something oddly familiar in this, not because our devices prove Bruno right, but because they echo his aspirations. We have built systems that externalize memory, recombine fragments, and present them as if they had always existed. These contrivances are not cosmic, yet they invite a cosmic mood—a sense that boundaries have thinned, that the archive stirs, that the mind can wander farther than it once could. Bruno illustrates the allure and the danger: the exhilaration of boundless possibility, and the risk of believing that imagination alone can stand in for contact with the world.

    Ibn Khaldun and patterns at civilizational scale

    Ibn Khaldun took the widening of the world seriously, but he kept his feet on the ground. In the Muqaddimah, his great introduction to history, he sketched a theory of how societies cohere, flourish, and decline. His frame is large—empires, dynasties, generations—yet his form is restrained. He offers no blueprint for an ideal state. He offers something closer to a natural history of political life: groups harden and cohere, conquer, soften, decay, and are replaced. Boundaries matter to him—the line between desert and city, between ruler and ruled—but they are not eternal. They shift, erode, reemerge.

    His stance avoids both utopian control and ecstatic dissolution. It is descriptive, analytical, patient. He wants to see how things actually behave across time. In a world that now contains its own searchable memory and can generate plausible continuations of its past, this way of looking feels newly relevant. The swirl of events becomes legible only when placed against deeper patterns. Ibn Khaldun’s gift is to show that large frames can coexist with modesty of form.

    Two diagonals

    One can sense two lines running through these four positions. On one line are More and Bruno—the designer of tight enclosures and the dissolver of all enclosures. Both feel the shock of a world grown too large and respond by refusing its messiness: one by shrinking it to a legible fragment, the other by exploding it into a metaphysical totality. Both try to replace the world’s emergent complexity with a clarity of their own making.

    The other line runs between Montaigne and Ibn Khaldun. Both accept that the world, whether at the scale of a single life or of a civilization, has a texture that cannot be fully captured by design or metaphysics. Both are interested in how things actually unfold, without forcing them into an ideal shape. Their frames differ—one intimate, one panoramic—but their attitude toward form is similar: let patterns emerge, let boundaries be porous enough to reveal movement, let humility guide description.

    This second diagonal sits more naturally with a culture that can be summoned on demand. When the archive can answer back in endless variations, attempts to design simplicity or to dissolve all limits tend to fatigue. What remains workable is the inward practice of belonging to oneself and the outward practice of reading patterns without imagining them eternal.

    Temper temper

    We now inhabit a world in which knowledge behaves differently than any earlier generation anticipated. It can be queried, ventriloquized, recombined. This does not tell us how to live, but it changes the background against which living takes place. More’s dream of a perfectly designed order feels at once more possible and more implausible. Montaigne’s slow digestion of borrowed thought feels newly demanding. Bruno’s intoxication with boundlessness feels familiar, and Ibn Khaldun’s attention to cycles and decay feels newly sober.

    These tempers recur whenever the world becomes more articulate than before. Ours is such a moment. We can now create stable points of reference with enough meaning and legibility to allow exploration of surrounding space. Print unlocked the beta version of this superpower. These four writers, shaped by the last great expansion of the world’s voice, find themselves speaking again through us, as we try to understand what it means to think with culture on tap.

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  • Better Company Than Caesar

    What is this urge that makes us want to be seen as something we aren’t. Take this blog, for example. I am in no way a writer. Barely even a proper blogger. My professional life has very little of this kind of writing. Scientific and investor communication, sure; but not this. Why do I have — and always have had — this urge to be, and be seen, as creative? Is this some kind of performative, effortless polymathism?

    Orangutan (Orangoetan) (1914) print in high resolution by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita.

    Perhaps the desire is to be a modern Renaissance man. In of Montaigne’s essays is the following passage:

    “They would rather talk at length about other people’s trade, instead of their own, and so hope to be seen as accomplished in yet another field. Like when Archidamus faulted Periander for abandoning his reputation as a good doctor to acquire one as a bad poet. 

    See how Caesar goes out of his way to make us understand his ingenuity in building bridges and siege weapons. And, conversely, how much he refrains from talking about the responsibilities of his profession, his courage, and how he led his troops. His deeds prove he was an excellent officer. He wants to be known as an excellent engineer, an entirely different occupation!

    Dionysus the Elder was a great military leader, as fortune would have him. But he did everything he could to be known mainly through poetry, although he knew little of it.”

    Montaigne, if not a “Renaissance man”, is a man of the Renaissance. Yet he quotes even older examples of this urge. We have leaders who are CEOs or investors and want to be known or seen as being accomplished engineers or physicists. Fields they are rather bad at. Perhaps there is a common kind of mania here. Maybe it takes hold in the minds of the mover and shakers of history. But what of us not of a geologic character?

    I don’t think this applies to us regular folks. Hobbies and deep interests do provide something critical however. Happiness. I don’t really care much about being seen as an expert in writing, making pretty plots, or even performing some AI-for-biology contortion. I would like to know how to do it and how to do it well. I am led by the pleasures of intense curiosity. That is better company than Caesar, I assure you.

    Maria Popova writes in one of her wonderful essays on Bertrand Russell:

    ‘In my darkest hours, what has saved me again and again is some action of unselfing — some instinctive wakefulness to an aspect of the world other than myself: a helping hand extended to someone else’s struggle, the dazzling galaxy just discovered millions of lightyears away, the cardinal trembling in the tree outside my window. We know this by its mirror-image — to contact happiness of any kind is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” something beyond the bruising boundaries of the ego.’

    By the end of 2023, I was in proper burnout.*1 It wasn’t until I was able to focus my mind on reading new things that recovery felt possible. Earlier this year I joined the Contraptions book club and that complete focusing of attention has buoyed my mental state even higher. Enough to write regularly and to be ever more creative at my day job.

    So, I guess, the Nobel-winning philosopher and mathematician did know a thing or two when he decided to write a book with the title in The Conquest of Happiness.
    “The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

    1. Sidenote: I suspect Montaigne, who was about my age when he started to write also went through a midlife crisis. This sidenote is somewhere between projection and basking in reflected glory. ↩︎
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  • The Small God of the Internet

    It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

    He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

    Guide for Constructing the Letter S from Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta or The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596) by Georg Bocskay and Joris Hoefnagel. Original from The Getty. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

    ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

    Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

    Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

    His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

    These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

    A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

    Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

    Heavily edited sloptraption.

    1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
    2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
    3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
    4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
    5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
      ↩︎
    6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎
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  • Looking Forward to Montaigne

    As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul Millerd had recommended Sarah Blackwell’s book on the life of Montaigne. I just finished it and I was left feeling rather warm.

    Honorable Mr. Cat by Helen Hyde More: Original public domain image from Art Institute of Chicago

    In contrast I was left rather cold and unsure by a recent podcast on a recent book by Byung-Chul Han. The book is titled The Crisis of Narration and covers the idea that we have lost the ability to tell good stories. Stories, Han says, create a shared reality instead stories have been turned into a commodity to create consumers. Storytelling has become storyselling. As far as I know, Han doesn’t offer any solutions. Social media has turned a dark corner but it would have been nice to know what we can do, if anything. Montaigne seems to offer some relief.

    Being literally the first person to write essays, and btw a cat’s person, Montaigne writes in a way that one could think of as storyselling. But you look deeper and it turns out to not be the case. He writes in a frank and meandering way that reminds of the old internet. Dead for 500 years, M seems more real as a person than the influencers ever could.

    Now I just happen to have come across these two sources in a temporal coincidence, so, to quote Montaigne, what do I know, but writing and thinking like Montaigne could be the antidote to Han’s doom. Maybe we don’t need a global story thread, but knowing about how you thwarted the bugs in your balcony garden would create a sense of liveness that social media has stolen from us.

    I’ll be reading Don Quixote and Montaigne’s essays over the next two months and I’m certain my views will change. Right now, I’m thinking having the average, mediocre, lens to life will take us through these dark days.

    I leave you with two wonderful quotes (obviously about cats) from MdM:

    “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”

    “In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.”

  • On Protocols, Wagons, and Associated Acrobatics

    Years ago, maybe a decade even, I fell in love with this software called Scrivener. I could never justify buying it because I didn’t actually write. But having that software would represent a little bit of the identity I would like to have, a writer. The Fourth of July long weekend gave me a running start. The plan was to write every day for a month. If I did, I would buy Scrivener. This was going quite well, then I couldn’t write for two days.

    I had fallen off the wagon. But hey, I have a wagon. Writing for twenty days isn’t nothing. Like David Allen says, getting back on the wagon is what it’s all about. Falling off happens because life happens. And life, happens to everybody. So, hey I’m back.

    I almost wasn’t. I almost said oh well. Then I watched the Summer of Protocols (SoP) town hall talk by Robert Peake: The Infinite Game of Poetry – Protocols for Living, Listening, and Transcending the Rules. The infinite game of poetry is the infinite game of writing. The important bit is to keep playing*.

    Being that this is part of the SoP, the question is of course what is the protocol? Robert goes much deeper than just the protocol of writing poetry and being a poet. He gives two equations for doing your life’s work and to build the self. I won’t reproduce those equations here, you should watch the talk.
    Here’s the gist of the poeting/writing protocol though:

    • To be a poet is observing the change in self: even when you are not writing you are noticing your inner environment, your outer environment and what you have read.
    • When you start to write, the change in self produces the writing, synthesis.
    • The writing is now part of the change in the self.
    • Sum of all noticing and synthesis is your life’s work
    • The self is is constructed, Robert says on the last day but I think its constructed continuously, through all the iterations of work.

    Tyler Cowen, who if nothing else, is a prolific wrote a similar, though not as compact, set in 2019.

    Zooming out, this applies to all work not just writing. Showing up and getting back on the wagon is where it all coalesces. But where am I going? To me, building wagons is as important as going somewhere with potential for something new, even if the path is uncertain. Pointing in the direction of maximal interestingness .

    This need for exploration and the support from constancy is captured well in the song Life in a Wind :
    “One foot in front of the other, all you gotta do, brother
    […]
    Live life in the wind, take flight on a whim”

    * The Scrivener team seems to understand this well. Their trial isn’t a consecutive thirty days, but thirty days of use 🙂

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  • My Road to Bayesian Stats

    By 2015, I had heard of Bayesian Stats but didn’t bother to go deeper into it. After all, significance stars, and p-values worked fine. I started to explore Bayesian Statistics when considering small sample sizes in biological experiments. How much can you say when you are comparing means of 6 or even 60 observations? This is the nature work at the edge of knowledge. Not knowing what to expect is normal. Multiple possible routes to a seen a result is normal. Not knowing how to pick the route to the observed result is also normal. Yet, our statistics fails to capture this reality and the associated uncertainties. There must be a way I thought. 

    Free Curve to the Point: Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves (1925) print in high resolution by Wassily Kandinsky. Original from The MET Museum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    I started by searching for ways to overcome small sample sizes. There are minimum sample sizes recommended for t-tests. Thirty is an often quoted number with qualifiers. Bayesian stats does not have a minimum sample size. This had me intrigued. Surely, this can’t be a thing. But it is. Bayesian stats creates a mathematical model using your observations and then samples from that model to make comparisons. If you have any exposure to AI, you can think of this a bit like training an AI model. Of course the more data you have the better the model can be. But even with a little data we can make progress. 

    How do you say, there is something happening and it’s interesting, but we are only x% sure. Frequentist stats have no way through. All I knew was to apply the t-test and if there are “***” in the plot, I’m golden. That isn’t accurate though. Low p-values indicate the strength of evidence against the null hypothesis. Let’s take a minute to unpack that. The null hypothesis is that nothing is happening. If you have a control set and do a treatment on the other set, the null hypothesis says that there is no difference. So, a low p-value says that it is unlikely that the null hypothesis is true. But that does not imply that the alternative hypothesis is true. What’s worse is that there is no way for us to say that the control and experiment have no difference. We can’t accept the null hypothesis using p-values either. 

    Guess what? Bayes stats can do all those things. It can measure differences, accept and reject both  null and alternative hypotheses, even communicate how uncertain we are (more on this later). All without making assumptions about our data.

    It’s often overlooked, but frequentist analysis also requires the data to have certain properties like normality and equal variance. Biological processes have complex behavior and, unless observed, assuming normality and equal variance is perilous. The danger only goes up with small sample sizes. Again, Bayes requires you to make no assumptions about your data. Whatever shape the distribution is, so called outliers and all, it all goes into the model. Small sample sets do produce weaker fits, but this is kept transparent. 

    Transparency is one of the key strengths of Bayesian stats. It requires you to work a little bit harder on two fronts though. First you have to think about your data generating process (DGP). This means how do the data points you observe came to be. As we said, the process is often unknown. We have at best some guesses of how this could happen. Thankfully, we have a nice way to represent this. DAGs, directed acyclic graphs, are a fancy name for a simple diagram showing what affects what. Most of the time we are trying to discover the DAG, ie the pathway of a biological outcome. Even if you don’t do Bayesian stats, using DAGs to lay out your thoughts is a great. In Bayesian stats the DAGs can be used to test if your model fits the data we observe. If the DAG captures the data generating process the fit is good, and not if it doesn’t. 

    The other hard bit is doing analysis and communicating the results. Bayesian stats forces you to be verbose about your assumptions in your model. This part is almost magicked away in t-tests. Frequentist stats also makes assumptions about the model that your data is assumed to follow. It all happens so quickly that there isn’t even a second to think about it. You put in your data, click t-test and woosh! You see stars. In Bayesian stats stating the assumptions you make in your model (using DAGs and hypothesis about DGPs) communicates to the world what and why you think this phenomenon occurs. 

    Discovering causality is the whole reason for doing science. Knowing the causality allows us to intervene in the forms of treatments and drugs. But if my tools don’t allow me to be transparent and worse if they block people from correcting me, why bother?

    Richard McElreath says it best:

    There is no method for making causal models other than science. There is no method to science other than honest anarchy.

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  • The secret flag of content

    I don’t have any fun when I use LLMs to write. It may have perceived utility: popping out a LinkedIn article or two everyday. But I bet no one is actually reading. It’s a strip mall for a thumb stroll.  

    LLMs suck at writing. The summaries that LLMs give with the “Deep Research” are so poor in quality that I start to skim it. Yes, I skim the thing that is already a summary. 

    Let’s do a small experiment using the  Harry G. Frankfurt Essay On Bullshit: 

    Here are HGF’s opening lines: 

    “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.”

    Now here is ChatGPT o3, with the advantage of having HGF in the training data and extra contextualizing from me “theory of bullshit”: 

    Prompt: write me an introductory paragraph on the theory of bullshit 

     Result: “Bullshit isn’t just lying gone sloppy; it’s a distinct communicative strategy built on indifference to truth. Where the liar knows the facts and works to conceal or invert them, the bullshitter treats truth-value as irrelevant raw material—selecting, mixing, or inventing claims to achieve an effect (status, alignment, vibe) rather than to inform. The result is epistemic pollution: signals that…”

    Look! It’s the secret flag of “content”:  “Blah isn’t just X; Blah is Y”.

    AI generated flag. As dead as the text on it is wrong.

    I cannot assimilate this, it definitely can’t help me synthesize anything. There is always better human writing even if it is poorly written. It has a certain aliveness, and that aliveness is contagious enthusiasm. Vibe coding I can understand, you can see bad output in the final result. Vibe coding still manages to change something in my mind: knowing what I don’t want. 

    I don’t mind people using AI at all, I use it alllll the time. Writing with LLMs is no just fun. All this prompting and almost nothing changes in my mind. When an AI rearranges your thoughts it does not rearrange your brain. 

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  • What do platforms really do? 

    In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.

    Design for a Teacup (1880-1910) painting in high resolution by Noritake Factory. Original from The Smithsonian Institution. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    So, why am I posting this on my own blog and not on a “platform”? I don’t view writing as a financial transaction. It is a hobby. By putting the financialization lens front and center, platforms are killing the mental space for hobbies. When you monetize tweets, you create incentive to craft tweets that create engagement in particular ways. Usually not healthy ways. 

    If we think of old media or traditional manufacturing, we can compare them to guilds. Guilds kept up prices and controlled production. With the simplification of tasks factories could hire workers who weren’t as highly skilled but didn’t need to be. Nowadays, why should any newspaper or TV channel’s output be limited by the amount of airtime or page space they have?

    Platforms take unskilled and train them. We are in the age of specialization of ideas.  Akin to the “the advantage of disaggregating a productive process”  Platforms leverage this by having many producers explore the same space through millions of different angles. This allows the platform to “purchase exactly that precise quantity of [skill] which is necessary for each process” —paying a viral star a lot and a niche creator a little, perfectly matching reward to market impact. Which is to say platforms make money through whatever sticks.  

    In Landes’s essay, Management became specialized, today management will become algorithmized. Platforms abstract away the issues that factory owners had such as embezzlement of resources, slacking off etc. Platforms don’t care how much or how little you produce, or even if you produce. If you do, the cash is yours (after a cut of course). 

    This may lead to a visceral reaction against platforms. This week when Substack raised a substantial amount they called the writers “the heroes of culture”. This should ring at least a tiny alarm in your head. The platform’s rhetoric of the creator-as-hero is a shrewd economic arrangement. In the putting-out system, the merchant-manufacturer “was able to shift capital expenditures (plant and equipment) to the worker”. Platforms do the same with creative risk. The writer, artist, or creator invests all the time and labor—the “capital” of creation—upfront. If they fail, they bear the entire loss. The platform, like the putter-outer, only participates in the upside, taking its cut from the successful ‘heroes’ while remaining insulated from the failures of the many.

    So what do platforms really do? They have resurrected the essential role of the boss for the digital age. They are the merchant-manufacturers who build the roads to market, and they are the factory owners who discipline production—not with overseers, but with incentive algorithms. By casting the creator as the hero, they obscure their own power and shift the immense risks of creative work onto the individual. While appearing to be mere background IT admins, they are, in fact, the central organizers of production, demonstrating that even in the 21st century, the fundamental challenges of coordinating labor and capital persist, and solving them remains, as it was in the 18th century, a very lucrative role.

    What Do Bosses Really Do?, David S. Landes, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 585-623 (39 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121476

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  • Hack, Hacky, Hacker

    A few days ago I wrote about the beauty of great documentation; this is the evil twin post.

    The spectrum of meaning across the words hack, hacky, and hacker form a horseshoe when thinking about postures toward life. On either ends are the most difficult options. Being either a hack or a hacker requires dedication and both approaches narrow your world. Being hacky, taking imperfect shortcuts, in the world is immensely satisfying. It is play disguised as problem solving. 

    Fox by Arnold Peter Weisz Kubincan. Original public domain image from Web umenia

    A successful hack takes tremendous effort and dedication just to pretend to be great at something. Humans are great at spotting and discarding hacks. It takes a true master to fool a large enough population and build financial columns under the smoke. Being a hack is constant desperation, there is no play. It is no way to live. 

    On the other end of the same horseshoe as the hack, is hacking. Here, you are actually achieving something difficult enough to require mastery. “Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.” says Richard Stallman. Now, I’m all for the playful, the difficult, and the useful, but not the “or not”. At minimum hacking should be in service of a prank. Doing things just because is like felling a tree in a forest when no one is around. At least a jump scare is a sine qua non (the dictionary is working :P). 

    Most systems, especially computers are designed by people for people like you and me who are neither very bright nor very invested in the thing. We want to not have the problem. You can always walk away but that is neither fun, nor useful, and certainly not hard. My favored way is to take the Nakatomi Tunnel through problems. Be hacky. Try enough approaches, push buttons that may do the thing you want until the alignment is just so and you slip through. Effectiveness here = solving many real-world problems quickly while preserving playful momentum.

    I want to draw a distinction here from the oversubscribed idea of jugaad. Jugaad was once framed as creative improvisation. It is not. I do not care for jugaad. To make something substandard and expect people to accept it is no way to be in the world. Build good stuff, be hacky route through the small issues.

    A hacky mindset is a foxy mindset and not just in the Hendrix way. The Hedgehog and the Fox is a great essay by Isaiah Berlin where he talks about the two kinds of people in the world. Hedgehogs, are great at one big thing. Foxes are mediocre at many things. Foxes thrive on lateral moves and opportunistic shortcuts, you know, hackiness. The hacky, foxy approach to life is more my style. 

    Breadth, speed, and joy beat fakery and fixation every time

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  • Divine Documentation

    Dad was about my age when he said that reading the manual was better than hypothesis driven button pressing. For teenage me, that took too long. Sure, I may have crashed a computer or two but following my gut got me there. Of course my gut isn’t that smart. In the decades preceding, devices had converged on a common pattern language of buttons. Once learned, the standard grammar of action would reliably deliver me to my destination. 

    Image of a nebula taken by the Hubble Telescope.

    In programming I was similarly aided by the shared patterns across MATLAB, Python, R, Java, Julia, and even HTML. In the end however, dad was right. Reading documentation is the way. Besides showing correct usage, manuals create a new understanding of my problems. I am able to play with tech thanks to the people that took the effort and the care to create good documentation. This is not limited to code and AI. During the startup years, great handbooks clarified accounting, fundraising, and regulations, areas foreign to me.

    I love good documentation and I write documentation. Writing good documentation is hard. It is an exercise in deep empathy with my user. Reaching into the future to give them all they need is part of creating good technology. Often the future user is me and I like it when past me is nice to now me. If an expert Socratic interlocutor is like weight training, documentation is a kindly spirit ancestor parting the mist. 

    Maybe it’s something about being this age but now I try to impart good documentation practices to my teams. I also do not discourage pressing buttons to see what happens. Inefficient, but discovery is a fun way to spike interest.

    Meanwhile, I’m reading a more basic kind of documentation. Writing English. Having resolved to write more, I’m discovering that words are buttons. Poking them gets me to where I want, but not always. Despite writerly ambitions, the basics are lacking. This became apparent recently when I picked up the book Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte*. It’s two hundred and seventy pages of wonderful sentences dissected to show their mechanics. I was lost by page 5. The book is, temporarily, in my anti-library. 

    So, I’m going to the basics, Strunk and White, and William Zinsser. I’m hoping that Writing to Learn (finished) and On Writing Well (in progress) provide sufficient context about reasons to write to make the most of S&W, for the how, then somewhere down the road, savor Tufte. 

    * Those dastardly Tuftes are always making me learn some kind of grammar.

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