Essays
See also my Book Reviews.
Energy Practices as Longevity Intervention
March 18th, 2023
Cultivating energy capacity can increase your subjective lifespan.
Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness-as-such
March 17th, 2023
“You are standing in front of the mirror, and all you can see is what appears in the mirror. The mirror simply reflects what is in the room, without changing any of the objects. The brightness of the room is global awareness. The amount of furniture is phenomenal content. Nondual awareness is the mirror, and it contains everything open to your perception.”
*Technology is not inevitable
March 8th, 2023
Claims about the inevitability of any given technology rest on bad foundations and are unhealthy for broader discourse.
Automation and Institutional Friction
February 19th, 2023
In which I argue that technological feasibility is not enough for automation to happen.
Objecting to Decision Theory
February 9th, 2023
A friend and I share our beef with decision theory.
Do what you want to become
January 19th, 2023
A snippet of thought, about careers and ways of being.
*Choosing a therapy
December 8th, 2022
I provide my opinion on a small subset of modalities, informed by two years of (nonprofessional) exploration. Helpful for people trying to navigate therapy or ‘self-healing', or if they are me two years ago.
How Open Source Machine Learning Software Shapes AI
September 27th, 2022
A 4k word blog post version of my thesis.
Dairik Amae on Zen and Practice
September 14th, 2022
A discussion with a former Zen monk turned teamaster.
Governing the Decentralized Commons
December 12th, 2021
Taking an Ostrom-informed digital constitutionalism lens to Web3. This also serves as an introduction to my project with Metagov.
Pruning in Brains and Machines
December 10th, 2021
“At one point, you and I were just a fertilized egg cell inside our mother’s womb. Over the next eight months, we grew a brain. When our mother gave birth to us, we were wet and confused.” A group essay for MIT’s 6.881: Tissue vs Silicon in Machine Learning. Featuring microglia eating synapses, Amdahl’s Law, and the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis.
What is an institution?
October 16th, 2021
First in the series on Ostrom’s work. My attempt to contextualize the importance of ‘institutions’ as a concept and Ostrom’s useful answer to this question.
Elinor Ostrom’s Teachings
October 15th, 2021
A stub for an essay series about the economist Elinor Ostrom and her work on institutions.
Questions about governance
September 27th, 2021
Continuing the exercise of mapping questions as a means of understanding a field, I turned to governance.
Questions about economic growth
September 17th, 2021
As part of an attempt to understand the debate around economic growth, I decided to find the main questions at play.