michael-dean-k/

On r/praying_mantis, someone reposted an image from TikTok of a killed mantid with limbs severed and guts on concrete, with the caption, “One praying mantis down. Cause of death: beaten with a stick and took it like a good girl. I flung it around a bit and all it did was stand there looking at me, and then I decided I didn’t want any mantises in MY pretty pink plants so I killed it.” The comments—in this forum of mantis caretakers—were obviously appalled, treating it as if someone had just confessed to killing a dog on social media. I agree that a praying mantis is weirder and more majestic and probably worth respecting more than other bugs, but I can’t exactly articulate why. Why are there no roach collectors? Disease? Something about the mantis feels exotic without feeling threatening.

A few months ago I sketched out a model of consciousness, and I think there are scales of free will that map to it. The model included:

• T1) an agent’s real-time perception of an arena (at ### frames per second);
• T2) their phenomenological degrees of freedom (their different options of cognition in any scenario, whether it be abstraction, projection, remembering, solving, ignoring, acting, etc.), and then;
• T3) a feedback loop, where their decision is logged to memory, affecting how they'll engage with the arena in the future.

"Degrees of freedom" (T2) is about your free will in any given moment. Can you control how you react to situations? This is the most basic level, the thing any human can prove to have. Then, the "feedback loop" (T3) is about understanding your feedback loop over longer time horizons, designing your psychological scripts so that you have more affordances in the future. This is much harder. This taps into transcendentalism, cybernetics, self-development, all revolving around being able to control your own evolution. Then the hardest level of free well is being able to manipulate your arena (T1) according to your preferences. This is less about using force to get what you want, but more so bending the world towards your intentions. This reminds me of Dune 2, or the Rick and Morty episode, where someone has mystical foresight to say and do the exact things to unlock the world around them. This last mode is ethically ambiguous, because the question arises of what manipulation is; does your gain have to be at the peril of others, or can there be win-win outcomes?

What's interesting is how every tier comes back to free will, and so maybe the simplest answer of the fuzziest phenomenological concept (consciousness) is the fuzzy philosophical concept (free will). Consciousness is freedom. I don't think this is an original claim, but it certainly isn't a common one.

As you move from T2>T3>T1, you upshift a dimension. T2 is about free will within a particular moment; T3 is about free will across time; T1 is about leveraging free will into a shared space.

"Freedom of speech" is not enough. The freedom to say what you want is irrelevant if no one can discover what you’re saying. It’s an illusion of freedom. What matters is:

1. Algorithmic transparency: the ability to see, audit, control the systems to route you information.
2. Interpetability of perspectives: the ability to see the multiple ways to interpret an event, not just a single propagandic angle.
3. Consensus building: the ability for people to weigh in, analyze a discussion, and agree on if something is valuable or not, thus re-weighting the credibility of those involved in the discussion.

Fixing these three things could radically reduce addiction, polatiry, and fatigue on the Internet.

The Big Duck is a historical landmark in Long Island. A duck farm that sold eggs and produce used a 25’ plaster duck as its highway billboard. It became “world famous” from Robert Venturi’s book on architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas, which coined the Big Duck as the microcosmic example of “roadside architecture.”

I recently spoke about said duck in a presentation to writers. The farm and the duck are useful metaphors, working in a duality. If you only build the farm, no one driving by will pull over to see what you’ve done. If you only build the highway duck, your farm is a letdown. The trick is to build both: to have the heart of a farmer, but to accept that it’s also your responsibility to appear on the highway.

Surprised to learn that John Olerud has one of the highest all-time OPS (on-base plus slugging percentages) in New York Mets history. He wasn't necessarily a power hitter, but for over a decade (1992-2003), he had more walks than strikeouts each season. He also set the NYM record for walks in a season: 125 walks in 1999. His skill was discernment, knowing when not to swing.

People assume that the rationalists in the LessWrong forums are logic worshippers that only think in Bayesian statistics. I'm sure many of them do. But actually, their genesis book Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Yudkowsky, is a cautionary tale about the extremes of rationalism. Yes, Harry is able to run circles around wizards with his command of statistics, but Voldermort is an evil master logician, symbolizing the danger of deploying rationalism without morals. So in the end, it’s more like a philosophy of “meta-rationalism,” on the discernment to know when the mode of rationality makes sense. Still though, I imagine that nuance is lost on many in and out of the community..

The freedom to speak is irrelevant if no one takes seriously the imperative to think. I don’t care about Kimmel or Carlson or any pundit who gets cancelled. They are, mostly, automatons with predictable views, warped by the incentives and mind viruses of some political body. When someone gets cancelled, it’s not that we’re preventing open thought, it’s just a casualty of a two-sided ideological war. If you care about the freedom to speak and think, you should be grieving the fact that the American spirit has been dead for a century, or more accurately, it's never truly existed in mass media, never perpetuated through a democracy, only paraded around by propagandists, grieving that independent parties and voices have been systematically throttled to have no mainstream influence.

Do hallucinations come from lazy tokenization? Just had an AI tell me that Joan Didion wrote an essay called “On Grief and Grieving.” Does not exist. She did write The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir that touches on grief. It turns out, On Grief and Grieving is actually the title of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s book. In trying to solve this, I found a college essay—on grief—and it listed it’s sources at the end: The Year of Magical Thinking by [Joan Didion; On Grief and Grieving] by Elizabeth Kubler Ross (added brackets for emphasis); Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom …” Do you see what it did? One of the sins of bulk data ingestion is that AI arbitrarily splits context for tokenization (ie: every X words), and so in this case, it’s mixing one author with another author’s book, simply because they are adjacent in some student’s college paper source list.

In high school, we'd always ask the teacher, “when would these abstract concepts be useful in real-life?” and the answers never felt satisfying. I wanted to take stock of ways math has been useful in my life:

1. quick calculation of tips;
2. used trigonometry in designing VR interfaces;
3. in plotting lines of curves to make tapered revenue-share agreements;
4. in financial modeling spreadsheets for investments;
5. to turn writing composition concepts into algorithms.

It is commonly reported that ideas come to people in the shower; sometimes, musical operas comes to me when I shower: imagine a 7-part rock opera, a single riff in different tempos and tones, where part 6 is some Jim Morrison dialogue from “The End,” where the drummer has eighth notes on the ride and is doing jazz fills on tom with his left hand, the bassist is in the pocket, guitar is 12th fret and up playing non-sense at volume 1 with a wah pedal, and there’s dialogue like: “Aeschylus, my son, did you find 17 gummies under your pillow?” “Yes, father.” “Aeschylus, did you know those were all intended for the gummy fairy?” “Yes, father.” “And you ate them?” “Yes, father.” “And you saw the mystery?” “Yes, father.” “Aeshcylus, my son, you know what happens when children see the mystery?” (instrumental freakout ensues) and by this point I am naked and thrashing and have completely forgotten about soap.

A 2015 poll said that 42% of people would go back in time and kill baby Hitler if they had the chance. Meaning, almost half of the population thinks it’s morally OK to kill a baby if they believe it could save millions of lives (a very utilitarian idea). Anyone who is celebrating and condoning the death of Charlie Kirk has been led to believe that he’s a Hitler equivalent. This is the consequence of polarizing media. Anyone can become a boogeyman worth assassinating.

I think there’s a whole cascade of moral failures happening: first, in wanting blood; second, in ragebait media; and third, in belonging to a political party and not thinking independently about what’s presented to you.

I’m at a point where I can’ stand left/right rhetoric. If you identify with either party, I can’t take you seriously as an American. Kirk was charistmatic, likable, courageoes, and fluent, but also, a one-dimensional thinker, an automaton with shallow and predictable talking points (if you can predice someone’s entire belief system from a single belief, they are an NPC). Weirdly now, people are saying that his drifting stance on Israel could’ve been what got him killed?

The American spirit resides in each person abandoning all political templates and inefficiently thinking through every issues themselves, embracing contradiction and political loneliness. It’s a big ask, and it’s probably never going to appen. Ego death? At scale? We don’t have the emotional maturity as a people to handle that. You can only fix this at the root, in how we raise and teach the next generation.

The idea of time being oppressive is simultaneously far left and far right. It's both woke and omish. It's left-leaning because it falls into the woke tradition of claiming all our time-tested institutions are oppressive, and now it includes time itself. It's right-leaning because it's as ultra-conservative as you can get, the obliteration of mechanical time to preserve a rooted way of life.

There is to me a similar strangeness in political ideas that seem to exist on both ends of the spectrum. It's as if you've found some new paradigm to organize around.

The morning after the wedding in San Clemente, I walk into a coffee shop to find a book club of seven identical surfer bros, each with bleached blonde hair and branded gear, taking turns reading the Bible out loud.

Last night I hallucinated trees and nature scenes as I was going to bed, which makes sense because we did a short two-hour hike in the PNW yesterday. This happened last time I was here (at Mt. Shasta), and probably happens after every hike (I think, but the two most lucid times happened to be in the pacific northwest). The visions were bright, lucid, and shifting every 5 seconds to a completely formed photo-realistic scene. I guess this is hypnogogic imagery. Or hyperphantasia? My guess is that, when the brain is immersed in a complex environment, it creates a strong impression on the visual/auditory cortex, and then when you switch to a dark environment, it’s still firing. (Fatigue/endorphins might contribute too?). Sometimes after parties or museum, I will hallucinate ambient chatter as I fall asleep.

On the gallery we saw some guy selling black and white doodles for $180, and they looked a lot like my (post-it) doodles, except less mature. My wife was critiquing it, just as the guy (Tykneenen) came up and introduced himself. Nice guy. Later, we guessed that he wasn’t part of the First Walk officially, just a local (a musician actually), trying to make some money and capitalize off the foot traffic. Not a bad idea. I showed him my gallery of doodles, and he was impressed by the perspectial nature (and even said that, from our brief interaction, that I inspired a new direction for him), and I realized, huh, I forgot how much I enjoyed drawing.

Looking at “The Where” exhibit by Karey Kessler gets me wondering how I might able to weave prose/poetry into art/geometry/composition. There’s another one I saw that had pages from a book as part of a collage, and I wonder how typewritten pages and cutouts might play a role.

I’m most inspired by Ryan Hamburger’s Monomyth exhibit, which feels architectural and similar to some of my own experiments from the past. It got me nostalgic for my drafting board. There’s something to using straight edges and lead pencils to construct things, and then using watercolor to fill them in. I have a fuzzy mental image of what I’d create if, suddenly, I had all the supplies I need. Something like a geometric fractal where shapes occur at all sizes, but at different angles.

If you printed every signed contract through Docusign and then stacked them, would it be taller than Seattle’s Docusign Tower? Yes, definitely, but could you match the foot print too? Like could you make the entire Docusign Tower just out of stacks of signed contracts?

On the bus she had short red hair, a mask, seashell AirPods, tubes with bubble blowers and bubble mix as earrings, and a free Palestine wristband. All signals. Should we attempt to describe ourselves through symbols? Or should we find content in knowing that within us is an uncategorizable mystery that no one else can ever possibly know?

Tempted to get a vinyl player because it would be a form of analog media my daughter could engage with. The core feature is not sound quality (the typical justification), but the fact that each album is an object, and a young mind can associate media with physical things. You can also, display your favorites on a wall, as a constant reminder of the ones you like.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

"The Death of the Corporate Job" went viral on Substack: 3.3k likes in a few days (eventually went up to 20k, I think). I am pretty sure this was AI-generated. I don’t feel like posting about it though. It’s clear to me that this is a kid in his 20s, building an AI tool for career discovery; he sees this essay as marketing. It will probably bring him a lot of customers. He might possibly help a lot people. I’m sure he believes in his mission.

What irks me is that the essay has been instrumentalized. There are fake I’s with vague personal details. Intellectually, it’s a ripoff of Bullshit Jobs. There’s no structural clarity, and it loops through the same points multiple times. No tension. Flat voice. Awkward repetition. I understand why the writer did this, but I’m more concerned about the state of readers, because this piece’s popularity is really a reflection of mass readers.

It shows that most people care about the topic, and barely notice or care about how it’s written. What thye care about is having their pain validated. To go viral, write about mainstream pain. So if this is what the masses want, shouldn’t we not care about composition and just write psychology-targeted think pieces? I mean, if you want to just build an audience at the expenses of your own satisfaction, then yes, possibility. But the quality of your thinking, and the friction to derive something original and independent, gives you something more than fleeting popularity, it actually shapes your lens for the longterm, and you earn something that is transferrable outside of narrow social status games.

Never respond with anger. Even when people give you snark, you should assume good intent, even if their intentions are ambiguous. Likely, they are confused. And how could they not be confused? They’ve maybe spent 5 minutes with your ideas, and were kind enough to even engage with you, before spending 2 hours to fully get it. So be friendly, be kind, and they’ll respond in kind. I don’t think most people want conflict. If someone is snarky, and then you’re kind, and they’re snarky back, what is it that they’re actually going for? Are they in a spiral?

My uncle showed my grandfather ChatGPT, specifically, voice mode speaking to him in Greek. Pappou said AI is “the devil.” It makes sense that a non-technological farmer (he can’t use a keyboard) would come to that conclusion. From his limited vocabulary, he sees AI voice as something trying to deceive you, something trying to pretend to be something it’s not to put you off course from your destiny. These are things a devil does.